Before

I cut down towards the forest line, trying to take a route that uses outcroppings to block the view of me from the sky as much as possible, and provide shelter from a rock-bearing bird if necessary. When I reach the start of the trees – fortunately with no incident – I start walking along it, at right angles to the way I had been walking before. Why? My reasoning is that I need to find fresh water as a priority and this is most likely to come from the mountain: with any luck, I’ll come across a stream bubbling into the forest. If that doesn’t work, I’ve got a few more ideas to try, but this is the easiest one.

As I walk, I try to plan a bit for the future. There are lots of things that need doing, that’s for sure, more than I would have ever thought of before absorbing the wilderness survival knowledge stone. Nicholas gave me a knife, which, when I consider what I would have to use otherwise, is a godsend. A knife is an essential tool, as well as a useful weapon for all its lack of reach, and having a metal one will make a lot of difference.

The one Nicholas has given me is practical: a single-sided straight blade about twenty centimetres long with a slightly curved tip – rather similar to a bowie knife. It even has a serrated section on the section of its spine closest to the tang, or handle which will come in useful for sawing through smaller pieces of wood. Fortunately, it also comes with a protective sheath otherwise I’d probably have stabbed myself with it already.

Still, I’m going to need a good number of other tools too, and those I’m going to have to make. Not having either blacksmithing equipment or expertise, I’m going to have to go right back to basics and make them from flint. If I can find any, that is.

That’s another reason to find a stream. If I’m lucky, there’s flint below this mountain or forest and a stream will have cut deep enough into the layers of sediment and will have unearthed some nodules for me. If not...well, at least I still have my knife. I can use other rock types to make blunt instruments, but flint is truly the best – that my newly absorbed wilderness survival knowledge knows about, at least.

So, I need to make tools. I also need to sort out my food supply a bit. I have the dead bird in my Inventory, which is a start. While it’s possible that the bird will be inedible for me – I am in a different world, after all – my newly-gained instincts say that it will most likely be fine.

Generally, animal flesh is safe to eat, though should really be cooked to avoid harmful bacteria as much as possible. There are some animals which have levels of vitamins or toxins in their bodies which are unsafe for human consumption, but usually those have been a result of evolution to adapt to a particular environment, or ward off predators, often in that case accompanied by bright, warning colours. Carrion eaters can have levels of parasites that render their meat inedible too, but given that this bird dropped a stone on my head, I have to assume that it’s a hunter, not a carrion eater.

Perhaps an inaccurate assumption, but I may have to take that risk. It seems likely, then, that the bird’s flesh will be safe to eat. Being in a different world might make a difference to my theory, but the fact that I can breathe the atmosphere with no problems and its temperature is mild to me indicates to me that the natural balance of the world is not that different from what I’m used to.

More affected by being in a different world is my knowledge of safe plants to eat. I’ve been looking around while walking, and have discovered to my dismay that I don’t recognise anything. If I’d been relying on my personal knowledge of plants, that wouldn’t mean much. After all, I could name the fruit, vegetables, and leaves which feature in your average British supermarket, and I could probably recognise a number of trees and plants which I regularly walked past in gardens or woods – though that didn’t mean I’d know if they were edible or not – but that was it. I’d absorbed the wilderness survival knowledge stone, however, and that is a wealth of information. Unfortunately, it was information about a world that was neither Earth, nor this one.

I haven’t recognised any plants so far and have to conclude that I’m unlikely to. In fact, it’s been somewhat disorientating: I’ll see a plant with leaves of a certain shape that spark recognition in my mind, and then realise that the colour is completely wrong, or that it’s a bush instead of a tree, or a flowering plant where it should be a fern-type. In short, there’s no way I can rely on the encyclopedia of plants in my head to choose what to eat and what not to.

Fortunately, my new knowledge also comes with instructions on how to test for if a plant is edible or not; the downside is that it takes a long time. I can’t just shove something in my mouth and hope for the best. No, I’ll have to first choose a plant, then separate it into its individual parts: leaves, stem, fruit or flower, roots etc. Next I’ll have to test one part for irritation on contact, then try eating a small amount, then try eating a larger amount.

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The problem with this is that I have to allow enough time for symptoms to emerge – about eight hours for each test. Plus, in order to be certain whether I am or am not reacting to the plant itself, I’ll have to avoid eating or drinking anything but clean water during each period. So, either I’ll have to go without eating anything else for a whole twenty-four hour period, or I’ll have to spend three days testing each part, using my sleeping period as the necessary fast. Did I mention that I have to test each part of the plant separately? At the same time, I’ll have to be working hard to create the tools and shelter I need….

I can’t help but feel a bit overwhelmed. Who knew that it took so much just to survive? Or at least, to survive without access to a supermarket and money to buy the things in it. Perhaps I should be grateful that I’m in a place where there’s probably abundant food available, just requiring me to work out what I can eat: there are many on Earth who are in just as poor a situation and can’t say the same about their environment.

I hope that the Inventory stops items from deteriorating – it will make things much easier if I have access to an effective refrigerator. Of course, that will probably lead to its own limitations in terms of what I can put in it, but I’d take the refrigerator over a live-animal pen, if I’m honest. Actually, didn’t the instructions say that I couldn’t put live things in the Inventory anyway?

Of course, before I can even consider any of that, I need to find water and a shelter, which brings me right around to my first aim. I sigh and just continue trudging on, my feet and legs already aching, my eyes squinting as they search for the glint of water.

*****

Finding water ends up taking a long time. Much longer than I’d anticipated. Apparently all those films where a person is lost in the wilderness and basically just has to go through a few trees to find a stream are a lie. Who knew? At least I don’t end up falling into one at the moment I least expect it like in one program I saw.

After a while of trudging fruitlessly, I suddenly pause, once more something from the messages I read occurring to me. So, apparently I have access to both an Inventory...and a Map. If that could show me where to find water, it would save a lot of time.

“Map,” I say, trying not to be too hopeful. Despite my attempts to keep my expectations reasonable, it turns out that I am disappointed anyway. The Map appears in front of me, once more a misty screen as the background to what looks like a simplistic drawing that is mostly blank. There are two-sided triangle shapes in a ring around the edges of my Map which I have to guess are mountains. In the space between the mountains, there are many drawings of trees – the forest, I guess.

There’s also a blinking dot at the edge of the forest – ‘you are here’, I guess. Actually, that’s a good feature as working out my position in comparison to everything around tends to be my biggest problem when reading maps generally. Further up the mountain side near the dot is an X shape next to what looks like a line drawing of a boulder – where I started, I have to conclude. Apart from that, nothing is recorded. No rivers, no streams, nothing. So either they don’t exist – which I doubt – or I have to discover them to add them to my Map.

Sighing, I close the screen and start walking again. It would have been nice for things to be that easy, but it’s not surprising that they aren’t. The Map should come in handy once I’ve discovered some useful spots, but right now it’s fairly useless.

In the end, the sun is starting to dip towards the horizon by the time my ears catch the faint trickle of a small stream, obvious in the quiet peace of the woods. I’m lucky – I had actually gone a bit further under the tree cover than previously because I’d seen a big bird circling high above. It’s worked out well for me, fortunately.

The stream is really just a trickle, emerging from a crack between the rocks, but unless it disappears underground at some point, it should lead me to something bigger. In the meantime, I use my cupped hand to scoop some of the life-giving liquid to my dry lips: the water skin really didn’t last for long, it turned out.

Filling the skin up again, I breathe out a sigh of relief. Maybe I’m celebrating too soon, but I have a good feeling about this.

Following the stream, my good feeling turns out to be right: after a while, the stream gathers tributaries and widens. Eventually, long enough that the light is starting to dim, it reaches a body of water that might even be wide enough to be considered a rivulet. Or maybe it’s just a large stream – I’m not planning on measuring it to make sure.

I have a hard choice to make. Several, in fact.

First, I can either stop or walk in the dark. Frankly, the thought of doing the latter makes my bowels turn to water – if a bird could almost kill me in the middle of the day, how much more vulnerable would I be at night, either blind in the dark, or half-blinded by the light if I carried a torch? OK, decision made – I’m not going anywhere.

So, that leads me to the second choice – where to make camp. And how. Should I make a fire? Depending on the creatures, they could either be scared away from it, or attracted to it. Actually, thinking through that, if it’s as uncivilised a place as Nicholas indicated, the experience of the forest animals with fire should be purely forest fires, so it should be more scary than attractive, but am I willing to potentially stake my life on that?