CH 14
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Day 11
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Once I wake up my stomach feels like caving in on itself from hunger. I look towards the frost rabbit. Well I would have if it was there.
“AHHH! Those mutts. They took my meat.”
Where the dead frost rabbit had been laid there is now a faint trail in the snow that lead of into the woods.
Oh, I’m going to get those mutts for taking my food.
Latter though, right now I’m too weak to fight anything. But that doesn’t mean I can’t track them and find out where they live.
But first, food.
And a fire for that matter.
I take some cloth and some sticks and bundle them up together. Then I grab one of the shiny rocks I have and start to strike my dagger against it.
“Chenk Chenk fwuosh.”
The fire started relatively easy compared to the other times I’ve started them. Maybe I’m getting the hang of it.
Now it’s time to get some food. I look at the dead night wolf and hope that it hasn’t rotted any. But with this cold weather it shouldn’t have. I really hope its ok to eat it.
I walk over to the night wolf and skin it. Then I cut some chunks out of it and put it into my pot. Then I fill my pot with snow and set it into the fire to cook. Hopefully this will make the meat safe enough to eat. Man, mother would kill me if she saw me eat this meat.
As I wait for the meat to cook I decide to remove the bandages from my wounds. Now that I think of it I should have used those to start the fire. Oh well. My shoulder is still raw to the touch, but it isn’t bleeding anymore so I’m not going to place a new bandage on it. But my forearm is the real problem. As of now I can barely feel it at all. From what I tell I didn’t break anything. But I can’t move it well and when I do it hurts like crazy. All I can do for my arm is put it back into the sling I made and hope it fixes itself. But just to be safe I make another sling and put it on for extra support.
Once I finish treating my wounds I look into my pot. From what I can tell the meat looks like it’s been sufficiently cooked. So I grab the pot and drink everything in it. It’s still scalding but I don’t care anymore.
I’m still hungry.
I gather some more snow and place it into the pot to let it melt. Then I walk over to the wolf and cut another chunk of meat out of it. I put the meat on top of the melting snow that’s in the pot. Then I take the wolf’s pelt and bring it back to the shelter. I don’t know what to do with this yet so I’ll just toss it into the shelter for now.
The sun has already started falling from the sky. I must be moving really slowly whale I’m doing things with only one arm. But I can’t help it. That’s just the situation I have to deal with right now.
“Huuuu haaaa”
What to do what to do.
Actually, I need to go find my spear, well what’s left of it anyway. I get up and start to look around the area for the remains of my spear. I find the front half fairly easily. But no matter how much I look I can’t seem to find the other half. Oh well, I only really cared about the spearhead.
I get back to the fire and see that the meat is done cooking. I grab the pot again and chug down its contents. Awww, that hits the spot. It wasn’t as good as the frost rabbit but it will do for now.
Haha, like I actually have a choice.
That’s kind of sad to think about.
Well on that happy note and the fact that the sun is setting, I guess I’ll go to sleep now.
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Day 12
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“Awwww”
Another wonderful day.
The sun is up. There is beautiful white snow every ware…
Ok. Check that. Most of it is still red.
But other than that everything is fine.
Sure it’s really cold. And my arm is busted up.
But I’m alive. That’s good…
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It sucks out here.
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But I’m not dead.
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Yet
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And on that wonderful note time to do something other than think about how bad my situation is. First things first though, replacing bandages. While I don’t think replacing the sling for my arm will help much, since it’s not bleeding, I know that mother would break my other arm for not doing anything to help it heal.
I slip my arm out of the sling and lay it down to see if I need to adjust anything. Luckily I don’t, I think. But before I put everything back into place for the day I should try moving my arm around to see if it’s gotten any better. First let’s gently straighten it out. As soon as my arm is fully extended I feel a jolt of intense pain shout through my arm, causing me to feel light headed. Thankfully I haven’t eaten yet, otherwise I would have vomited all that I had eaten that instant.
My arm hurt for a few seconds then dissipated into a fuzzy feeling. I guess that’s an improvement to barely feeling anything at all. I just hope that means I’ll be able to use it in a few days.
I put my arm back into the sling. My arm still feels tingle and when I moved it back into place I felt some pain shoot through me every once and a while.
“Ok, what to do now?”
“Grumble.”
Well that answers that question.
It’s time to eat. I get up grab my dagger and walk to the night wolf. A few pars of it aren’t as red as the rest of it. It’s probably starting to rot. I’ll have to harvest the rest of the unspoiled meat off of the night wolf’s corpse before it all goes bad.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. First I have to eat. I cut some chunks of meat off of the night wolf that don’t appear to be spoiling and put them into my pot with some snow. Then set the pot into my fire like I had done the night before.
While that cooks I’ll harvest the rest of the unspoiled meat off of the night wolf’s corpse. But how should I store it so that it will last. The frost rabbit didn’t spoil. So why did the night wolf?
The only thing I can think of is that it was a little colder when the frost rabbit was laying dead out here then when the night wolf was. I guess I can try that since I can’t think of anything else. Who knows that might have been the case. But how will I keep the meat cold?
I mean it can’t tell me it’s cold. So what can I do?
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Oh, I got it. The snow feels colder then the meat does when I touch it. And if it feels colder then the meat does, that means if I beery the meat in the snow it will get colder. First I’ll divide the meat up into piles with portions that will last me a whole day each. I dig five holes in the snow for each pile of meat, along the side of the bolder. Now I cover them up in lots of snow so that I can’t see any meat peaking through. And just to be sure that I don’t forget where I put them, I place a few rocks on top of each piles of snow in the shape of an “X”.
The meat should be ready now. And my stomach is just begging to be fed, from all the noise it’s been making. I take a seat by the fire and grab onto the pot full of meat and water. I slowly drink it all down as I take a look at the area around me.
It’s pretty calm out here, now that nothing bad is happening. There is an absurd amount of blood dyed snow a little ways from my shelter but other than that everything looks like it’s in the right place.
I wonder how mother and father are doing. I remember that when Jager came home they became much happier. Now I know why and it is amazing that he came home in one piece. I wonder if father had to do this when he was a kid.
Well I can ask them about it later.
Right now it’s time to make a new spear. I take the spearhead out of the stick that had broken when I fought the night wolf and set the spearhead aside along with the cloth that I used to tie the rock onto the stick. Then I take another long stick and start to make it into a solid staff by griping to the stick in pain with my left hand and carving with the dagger in my right. I cut the notch onto one end of the stick like I had before and get ready to place the spearhead into the notch. Wait a second if I put some sticky stuff into the notch of the stick the spearhead might become better attached to the spear shaft.
I hop up and walk to the nearest sticky tree and cut a notch into the side of it so that some sticky stuff leaks out. Then I coat the back end of the spearhead in the sticky stuff. I place the spearhead into the notch on the staff and wrap the cloth from the broken spear onto the new one.
Hmmm. How else can I improve my spear?
Oh, I got it. When my spear broke I was left with the back end that didn’t have a point. So if I carve a point onto the other end of my spear, I’ll be able to fight with it even if it breaks. I should do that with the rest of the spears too.
By the time I finished putting another point onto all of the spears the sun had gotten fairly close to the ground. There’s so much to do in so little time. I have to gather more food, maybe even a larger verity instead of purely meat. I want to hunt down the rest of the night wolves since they took my frost rabbit. My arm has to heal first though. I should probably experiment more with my mana in this area since I know no one is around. I would also like to find out what direction the village is in. The man made it seem like I had to find out on my own. I’ll worry about that latter on though. Overall I just have to survive.
“Ahh.”
These next twenty or so days are going to be hard, aren’t they...