In the end, it was simply a matter of mass. Dragging the Forest Lord's remains to his camp would be a foolish effort. Although annoying, it would be far less work to simply rebuild his shelter. His concerns were ill founded though. He'd done good work before, his shelter could be lifted and carried without coming apart. The loss of a few leaves mattered little and he proved strong enough to simply haul the teepee over to the kill. Generally, it was a bad idea to camp at a kill site. But if the thing you killed was the thing that killed everything else that was an exception to the rule. Creatures would avoid the smell of this place for a long while yet, he figured.
Having reestablished his shelter, Ulric spent an hour coaxing his old fire to life so that he could transport some lit sticks to a new fire lay in his new campsite. Another two hours saw a small boxy hut with many sticks run in rows up its sides built. Inside this he hung strips of meat and started a small low fire to which he kept fed in the leaves of one of the fragrant citrusy plants he'd tested earlier. He stood to the side of his improvised smoker and watched his handy work, white smoke rolling gently out of the top of it, sweet smell bathing the clearing. The leaves smelled like orange peels mixed with apple. It should impart some of its smell without drastically effecting the flavor, he hoped. The plant tasted exactly nothing like it smelled, having an astringency that he suspected would make it a potent wound cleaner. Well, bitter was something he could live with if it meant having some half ton of travel rations. He could potentially leap frog his way from one camp to another, carrying rations from one base to the next, resting, and repeating until he got out of the forest.
While about thirty kilos of meat smoked, he grabbed a marbled three kilogram section and carved it into three centimeter thick slabs which he ran across a pole over the open flame of a campfire positioned outside the opening of his shelter. Juices dripped. The aroma was divine. As awful as the thing had smelled, Mr. Lord of the Forest was cooking up nicely. Five minutes and Ulric turned it, exercising his everything not to pull it off and start eating. Now that food was imminent, the gnawing hunger that had persistently followed him the last two days had come to life. He had to swallow saliva every minute or so. Meat popped and bubbled. Another tortuous five minutes and Ulric slapped the slabs down onto a rock and stared at them. Let them rest. Let them rest. Let them rest….
His mantra held him, watching the smoke roll off into the air, carrying the savory smell of freshly charred meat and fat. At last, his control failed him. He grabbed a slab, still hot enough to be slightly painful, and bit into it. When he lay somewhere on his death bed he would never fail to remember this moment. This flavor. The juices poured into his mouth, grease carrying the taste dissolving into his saliva. Meat that should be tough as work boots chewed like veal. It was magic. It was wonderful. The first slab disappeared. The second lasted barely longer. It wasn't until this third that Ulric was willing to pause and take his time devouring it. He cut it with his knife, making thin strips that he then shish-kabab'd over the fire to add to the char flavor.
The meat sat heavy on his stomach. Three kilograms, at least. He shouldn't have been able to eat that much without vomiting. He was sprawled in the dirt, the area around his fire having been cleared to prevent sparks from catching leaves or causing subsurface fires. Unlikely but he wasn't willing to risk killing himself in an uncontrolled burn. The suns had risen brilliant, had traversed steadily as he worked, and sat well enough to the end of their journey through the sky. Warmth bathed Ulric's naked body. He slept.
The nap was brief, an hour at most. The chill of dark had set in, despite the low coals of his fire. Ulric was still full, still bruised, and now he was feeling the call of his leaf bed. Briefly stopping to stoke the fire, urinate and drink some water, carefully stepping in the dark, his eyes only barely able to make out the path to the rock pool, he turned in. It had been a good day.
Ulric slept like a corpse but rose before dawn.
And he felt incredible. He had energy again, his bruises didn't ache as much as they had earlier. The suns were at least an hour away from granting him light to see. He considered his progress so far. He had food. He had water. He had a decent, but not great shelter and materials for tools. What he didn't have was clothes, a weapon to hunt from a distance, a fast way to get fire, or any idea which plants could be eaten. He also had no idea how he was ever going to get down from this plateau. As soon as the sun rose it would be time to get back to work, but the next hour passed in contemplation of the problems and what his plan of attack would be to solve them.
Daylight! Some leaves and wood saw his smoker continue to carry out its name sake. A quick drink settled Ulric's belly and he thought to collect samples of nearby plant leaves, stalks, and roots to determine what might be edible.
After a few hours of trial and error, persistence paid its bills. A broad-leafed plant with fernlike fiddles and small, round violet like flowers, hid large tubers which, upon a smell and small taste test, resembled radish. Another plant growing in a cluster of small herby smelling shrubs held a nearly potato like root. A small bite discovered it to be nearly flavorless, but continued chewing had it sweetening in his mouth, the sign of starchy goodness. He gathered as many of these from the area as he could, intentionally skipping patches of them to prevent him from culling them. He had a few more likely candidates as food but didn't sample anymore, trying to keep his testing methodology somewhat rigorous. Ulric recognized euphoria in his emotional state. A possible side-effect of the meat? Maybe. Would that prevent him from eating more of it? Never. He'd eat that sonofabitch down to the bones.
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The rest of the morning saw a fairly sizable amount of starchy tubers buried in a shallow pit and covered by leaves near his shelter. Now to get back to processing His Lordship.
Ulric used a small glassresin knife to separate the tendon from the muscles and reduce the slabs of flesh to cleaner cuts and then transferred the finished cuts of meat to a stack, finally he then wrapped the hide, unexpectedly heavy, in opposition to the lightness of the bones, around the meat. Processing that amount of meat had taken the majority of the afternoon.
He took a break for supper, roasted meat and "radish" shishkebab. His bowels finally moved and he spent a few minutes cleaning up, glad that his body was normalizing now that it had nutrition.
Back to the beast hide.
He cut away the excess, a heavy portion of hide which contained the head to mid back. This would become his new forest suit and bedroll. The fur was warm. That much he'd confirmed as he'd been plenty cozy lying beneath the beast's corpse. But. He'd need to tan it. Good thing he had a plentiful supply of brains. If only he could get to them.
That problem stumped him for awhile. He sat looking at the skull for a solid fifteen minutes, fingers snapping. Cleaned of meat it was scary as hell. Jaws that were clearly meant to crush bones and peel flesh. Teeth with cutting edges and canines half as long as his forearm. The skull would be nearly impossible to penetrate, if it were anything like the leg bones. The glassresin wouldn't be able to cut it or drill it. The solution came to him as he looked at the hateful eyes of the thing. Just bore out the eyes and scramble the brains inside. Pour the brains into a big trough or something and mix water from the pool to make a brain tanning solution. Voila!
The trough was actually a tougher problem. The soil didn't hold water so great. No doubt an excellent clay lie beneath all the rotting detritus. But digging down that far? No chance. Instead he went to the rock pool. The cracked and demolished rock had several pockets in and around the pool. He'd need to keep the brain tanning pool away from the water. Wouldn't do to contaminate the only drinking water he'd found. But a few minutes survey and a few rocks lifted had him a sufficient hole which appeared fit to hold water in the volume he'd need. Now how to transfer the water? Ah. That's right, he'd been working on a basket when the Giga-bear had attacked.
Ulric went back to the thicket and resumed his project. There were maybe two hours of daylight remaining. He was doing the same task he had been when he'd been attacked, in the same place. A paranoid man would have been pretty nervous. See our paranoid man looking around significantly more than strictly necessary for the job at which he worked.
Hauling his bundle of leaves and thin limbs, Ulric returned hastily to his relocated shelter. It was just before dark and he couldn't see much farther than he could throw a rock. Which in his current state was actually probably a pretty good distance. The cook fire had died down. A part of him wanted to experiment with the warmth potential of the Lord's hide, but the pragmatic part of his brain, as was usual, won out and he rekindled the fire after dropping off the leaves inside the shelter. It was better having the fire outside than in, he decided. Less heat, more wood burned to keep the space warm, but far less likely to set his shelter on fire. He'd sleep soundly not having to worry about waking up bathed in flame or dying unconscious to smoke inhalation.
The fur was hauled inside, its bulk and weight bending him over, even with his new strength. The thing had to mass close to eighty kilos and had a distribution that made carrying it without setting it on fire a cast iron bitch. Situated thusly, with bed inside shelter, basket materials stacked to the left side of the shelter and hide rolled up near filling the right side, he was ready to settle in for the night and relearn basket weaving. It took longer than he'd care to admit, with the wire frame coming easily but the weaving having to be aborted three times before he'd figured out how to get the layers to be even and even remotely possibly watertight.
He retired to bed after completing a prototype which had potential. Wrapped in the fur side of the pelt, warmth rapidly building in the insulating material, Ulric drifted off to sleep with what he would call satisfaction for the first time since dying.
Morning found Ulric sitting up rapidly in a mild panic. He'd just had the first dream he could remember since he'd been a child. He'd been fighting the Forest Lord. Events had played out exactly as they had the first time. Until it had slammed him to the ground. He'd called for magic. Nothing had come. The monster had slammed its claws into his chest and ripped him from its head. He'd awoken just as it started to eat him alive. Sweating and bathed in the smell of the beast it was no wonder the source of the nightmare. Still. He shook for a solid ten minutes until the adrenaline worked its way out of his system.
Ulric rolled up the fur and leaned it against the wall of his shelter. Hopefully he'd be able to fashion it into garments that smelled less awful. For now though, he went through the list of things he intended to accomplish and planned his priorities.
For starters, he'd kindle the fire and eat more of the bastard that had struck such fear into him. Next he needed to replace the spear head with a better option. The sharpness had been good but the breakage on first contact had convinced him of the glassresin's inadequacy as a weapon. After that he'd check the smoker and see how his preserved meat was working out. If it had operated as intended he'd be running it as close to all day as he could manage. And, finally, he'd test his basket to see if it could be used to fill a crater in the rocks near the torn roots so that he could brain tan the hide. He'd have to scrape the flesh side of it first, remove as much of the leftover fat and meat as possible.
The animal products reminded him that there was potential in the use of the ligaments and tendons as tool components. A sinew bow string could be fashioned which would completely revolutionize his hunting potential. The glassresin, awful as it was in striking applications, would make for a tremendously powerful broadhead point on arrows. That was assuming he would be able to find suitable material for a bow stave and then be able to carve it into the proper shape. He'd never made a bow. He'd never made arrows. He'd only watched it done a bare two or three times while investigating various curiosities off the clock.
Well, he thought, even if the bow string was a no, it would be very likely that he could use sinew to sew the hide into a sturdy and warm set of clothes. It wouldn't be pretty. It probably wouldn't fit right. But it'd be better than prancing around Fern Gully in his birthday suit.