Climbing trees at night was generally considered to be a pretty terrible idea, but there were no other options for the time being if Oliver wanted to see the night sky, and it was imperative that he establish his location.

He got to the top of the tree without incident. The crown of the tree was made up of branches too thin to support his weight, so he pulled himself up on the trunk, getting his head just past the leaves for a clear view of the night sky.

The stars above him were not of Earth. The constellations were like nothing he'd ever seen, dense and bright, so bright. This world knew little of light pollution and its atmosphere was clear and clean. He took a deep breath in unthinking awe. The crisp night air above the humidity trapped by the trees was cool and stung slightly as he inhaled. He'd put it at late summer or perhaps early fall, if…

…if this planet had a summer or fall at all.

For it truly was another planet he was on. There could be no doubt of it. His father, an amateur astronomer, had spent many long hours teaching him the constellations visible around the world… and of the ones he knew, none of them were here. Polaris, the North Star, was not there. The Big Dipper, Orion's Belt, Andromeda — none of the familiar sights of the night sky were there.

He looked around him. He appeared to be on the side of a low, rolling series of mountain. Behind him, it continued upwards; in front of him, it dipped into a low valley, illuminated by a sallow moon hung low in the sky. In the distance, lights twinkled, clustered together and looking for all the world like a city by night.

And then his heart leapt into his mouth. Lights could only mean one thing: civilization. And not only that, but civilization of a sort that relied on light, and light in the wavelengths visible to humans. Whoever the inhabitants of this planet were, they had at least that much in common with him.

Oliver knew full well that it had been chance that had led him to climb a tree in the middle of the night to look at the sky, the only time the village, perhaps city, would be visible. Luck rode with him.

He descended the tree methodically, taking nearly twice the time he'd spent climbing it. The fire was burning well now, bright coals in the bottom. He banked the fire, heaping it high with sticks he'd collected from the forest around him.

With that done, he looked around for some way to boil water. The village, safety, might've been within a day's walk, but even that would be a stretch on no water, and he wasn't prepared to take his chances on drinking it straight. The Aztec peoples had died in droves when the Spanish brought unfamiliar diseases into their land with them, and those were human diseases, going from one people to another. On another planet? Forget it.

So he would purify the water. He banked the fire high with sticks, testing them for hardness and taking the hardest ones he could. There were thin branches and twigs — the forest was altogether familiar, a fact which baffled him to no end, oughtn't the alien forest to be, well, alien? Yet it wasn't.

After a few hours the fire was burning well and hot, a large pile maybe four feet across and white, angry hot in the center. The next step was to smother the fire. It wouldn't be perfect, but suffocating the superheated, burning wood would create activated charcoal.

The problem was, Oliver had nothing to dig with, and the fatigue was beginning to set in. He wanted nothing more than to sit down by the fire and have a nice nap. But if he did that then he'd have nothing to drink in the morning, and the fire would've gone out, and he would have to start all over again.

So using his phone flashlight, sparingly, he searched until he found a piece of bark which he was able to pull free from a fallen tree. It was wide enough to serve as a shovel. Oliver took it back to the fire and, getting on his hands and knees, broke up a chunk of the ground with another stick.

Staying back from the fire, he used the bark to fling the loose dirt onto the center of it. It was slow going, backbreaking work, but after a while he'd managed to smother the fire completely, digging up a sizable chunk of the forest next to his fire in the process.

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That would have to do for now. It was growing quiet late, and the sounds of the forest had descended into a somewhat haunting silence. Back home, the forest never grew quiet, so it was cause for concern. The stillness reminded him that as much as he might feel at home out in these woods, they were not the backwoods of New Hampshire. He was somewhere else, far away. Overhead shone stars of a different sky.

With that thought to cheer him, he retreated into the false cave formed by the leaning tree and its matted roots twined through with trailing plants and dirt. The water trickled peacefully down beside him as he settled with his back against the large boulder that formed the wall of the cave.

He settled down, shrugging his shoulders into a somewhat comfortable position. Beneath him was rock and root and dirt, pokey and gritty and damp, but there was nothing for it, at least not tonight. It was too late to do more. Best now to rest and wait for dawn to come.

Oliver settled down, eyes fixed on the entrance, and allowed himself to slip into the watchful trance of night watchman and the new parent.

Dozing overtook him soon, not really sleeping but not fully awake either. Once that night his half-conscious brain half-saw, half-imagined a looming shadow approach the entrance to the cave. He jolted awake, instantly crouching, his hand going to where his belt knife would have been if he'd been wearing it. But blinking sleep-gritty eyes he saw that there was nothing outside, the weak and watery moonlight filtering through the trees revealing that his little camp was as he'd left it.

The night seemed to last a long time, and when finally the warm light of dawn began to come he was even more exhausted than he'd been the night before. He hadn't slept more than a couple of consecutive minutes.

Digging into the dirt pile where the fire had been revealed that his attempt at creating activated charcoal had failed miserably. Instead of the dry, black charcoal lumps he'd needed, what he found was a still-warm pile of thoroughly burned out ashes and blackened remains of branches that hadn't fully burned through.

Whether he'd stopped the fire too soon or hadn't got it hot enough or simply hadn't smothered it quickly enough because of his poor makeshift shovel he did not have activated charcoal. And without activated charcoal, he had no way to really filter the water. He could try boiling it, assuming he found something to boil the water in — perhaps the metal guard of his weed whacker would serve — but that wouldn't remove foreign contaminants besides life forms.

To make matters worse, the thirst was beginning to move to the front of his mind. He hadn't had a sip of water in the last eighteen hours, hadn't dared to.

He was now faced with a choice. Either he could stay here and attempt to come up with a system of adequately purifying water for his purposes, perhaps trying the fire again, or he could set off for the lights he'd seen the night before. By day, he couldn't rely on the lights to guide him, but he'd memorized roughly where they were in relation to him — perhaps a day's walk, maybe a little more — and was confident he could proceed in the right direction down the slope of the mountain on which he currently was until nighttime fell again, at which time he'd be able to locate the village again and course-correct.

On the downside, though, he'd be weak, exhausted, and very thirsty by the time he arrived, which would leave him in a very poor position to deal with any natives, should they prove to be hostile. Not that there was much he could do if that was the case, even fully armed, rested, and clothed.

He examined his situation once more in the morning light, struggling to arrive at a decision. He had with him his lawn care clothes, gloves, weed whacker, and earmuffs. Long paints, boots, knee-high socks, and utility pants. No knife, and the weed whacker couldn't be used as a weapon, though it was constructed of sturdy metal. About a third of its tank of gas remained, and the lighting system was still partially dismantled from where he'd used it to get the fire going.

Midway through reassembling the ignition system he froze; on the ground was something which had escaped his notice until now. The trail of what seemed to be a giant lizard of some kind, a three-toed foot ending in sharp talons. The pattern indicated it was four-legged and walked fairly slowly. However large it was, it was heavy; his own footprints did not sink as deeply down into the slightly soggy, sandy ground beside the stream.

So, it had been no shadow or imagined dream he'd seen last night; there had been something out there. And more scary than that, it had been _silent_, so quiet that not even while fully watching could he hear it approach and then depart.

He felt a tingling on the back of his scalp, as if he was being watched, and he suddenly felt acutely aware of his unfamiliarity with the flora and fauna of this place. He was inexperienced, in an environment which, for all its deceptive familiarity, was no doubt hostile.

And it was that last thought that settled it for him. The trail was that of a predator, and he had no way to defend himself. The best option was to find intelligent life. At least he might reason with them.

Besides, it was hard not to freak out over what was basically a dinosaur footprint.