The week quickly passed, and everything went smoothly. No trouble of any kind arose and the hunt they usually got was good. It was summer, sure, but on other places they barely managed to eat daily. This week they found meat two times and many plants on the zone were digestible.

Gabriel decided it was a good place to stay, so they started building a more stable house that’d help them keep warm on cold nights on winter, because even in summer they had to stay close to a fire, so in winter they’d need more to keep themselves warm.

Such as clothes, that they first completely failed at doing, losing the valuable pelts and having to dispose of them or leave them for sewing practice. The shack they built was simple, it had a single room, two windows and only three walls, because they’d built it on a wall of the cave for a firmer structure, but mostly to save resources and time.

Piti had helped them a lot with hunting, and it also helped to watch guard, as it once warned them from a family of incoming moose-like creatures that were quite pacific and kept their distance from them and their dog.

The days and weeks passed without much action, just surviving in the wild, but I realized that I always spoke less and less with my sister, as if I was losing her. Sometimes I tried to strike a conversation, but she always had something else to do.

At the time I didn’t really mind, as I also had things to do and the things, she did were useful for the two of us, but had I investigated a bit further I may have been able to prevent something I’d regret for years…

Summer soon turned into Fall and though there were plants inside of the cave, they barely changed, but when they looked at the landscape through the natural mountain-window, the changes were completely visible as the usually green trees turned orange and brown.

Now, resources were scarcer, but they had already saved some, though they weren’t enough to last through Fall and Winter, therefore they would still be busy for this season. Still, Gabriel was already thinking of what they could do during the cold season because they’d be mostly locked inside due to the cold temperatures.

With some of the free time Gabriel had between searching for food, preparing tools and storing everything orderly, he started making a list full of activities that could be done inside the now three-room shack.

The original room had turned into a “living room” although it barely had any furniture. The second room they built was a bathroom, so they could stop shitting and pissing on nature and have a little privacy. Finally, they added a bedroom of sorts, where two large leaf-piles worked as beds.

During Fall the siblings had more chances to see each other but Gabriel started to realize that some distance was building between them, yet all he did was keep working. He gave himself excuses not to speak with her, yet he didn’t know why. It wasn’t that he disliked her nor that he didn’t want to speak to her, it was mostly subconscious.

And so, he managed to barely talk to her through both Summer and Fall, but Winter was a different story. It was so cold outside that the some of the plants that lived inside the cave had been frozen and cracked if too much force was exerted on them.

Forced to stay inside and sleep together to keep their temperatures higher, they had to communicate more. Before they usually only spoke a bit before and after eating, but now they had almost the whole day free, most of the time.

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They did some of the activities that Gabriel had planned, but on some warmer days, enough not to freeze outside, Gabriel and Piti went out to hunt because he had realized that they hadn’t stockpiled enough. Now their hunts weren’t as effective as before, but from time to time they managed to get something that they now rationed so that it’d last longer.

The largest conflict that they had had happened on a night when Gabriel had, while sleeping, taken almost all of the bed sheet around him and Arabelle had almost nothing to cover herself. She tried to turn Gabriel around so that she could keep herself warm, but it woke him up right before she had enough for herself, so Gabriel observed the situation and asked her why she had woken him up.

After hearing to her plausible explanation, he noted that there was enough for her right there, but she quickly replied that that was now and not before and that she had already taken some from him. Gabriel talked louder, annoyed at the situation and therefore Arabelle increased the tone of her voice as well. It kept increasing until Piti cried out to them and they realized that they’d gone too far for such a simple problem.

But that was all interesting that happened during the first year, because during Spring we were divided once more, I was working outside while Arabelle stayed inside the caves, as far as I knew at the time. I believed that it was best for her, but now, I’m not so sure…

Time flowed like a river as the rivers from the mountains flowed. Usually it flowed normally, but at times it froze and stopped moving. These were the moments when Gabriel stopped acting like a machine, repeating similar actions and reflected on what he was doing, instead. He thought of what he should be doing, on whether being here on the mountain was a good idea or on whether he should worry more about his sister.

But he didn’t progress much and didn’t want to stay thinking about it either, he would rather do menial tasks where he could turn his brain off or do things on the other side of the spectrum and need his brain fully so that he couldn’t let his mind wander.

This, added with him talking less and less, stunted his intelligence and made him go a little mad. It didn’t really show much if one looked at his continuous state of mind, but if one compared the start with the current situation, it’d be very clear that he wasn’t ok.

But for now, he was still able to do everything on his own and could live on his own. It was in tasks where he had to cooperate that he wasn’t doing so well. He didn’t behave animalistically…yet but he found it hard to work with his sister on joint projects. Yet he had no problem hunting with Piti.

Piti had stopped growing now physically but it still behaved jovially, although it was limited due to his relatively harsh young life full of training and hunting. But for Gabriel it was well worth it as Piti was showing his worth helping with the hunts and keeping them alive.

The investment of food that he had to spent to keep the dog alive was well worth as it made a profit taking in consideration how much they’d hunted. Not everything was perfect with their pet, though, because now, in the cold season, it was kept inside and it didn’t know how to use a toilet, at the beginning, so the whole home reeked of piss and shit until they didn’t smell it anymore, because they got used to it.

It wasn’t like they could clean the house and then leave it open so that the smell would clear out, they’d lose on so many resources reheating the place and while the smell exited the place, they’d also be cold, maybe even get sick. Even after Piti learned where to do its necessities, the smell of its piss was worse than their own and all they could do is put up with the fetid smell.

Over time they smelt it less, but it wasn’t enough for them not to feel glad of the temperatures rising and being able to exit the prison-like shack. What should’ve grabbed my attention, more than the smell, was that even under such close conditions that basically forced conversation, we barely talked. Most of our communication turned out to be non-verbal and even that was uncommon.

This was not only Gabriel’s fault, however. Arabelle was employing psychological warfare on his brother so that he wouldn’t miss her so much when she eventually left and managed to escape from his clutches. She purposefully didn’t try to converse and when his brother talked to her, she evaded most of his questions.

She tried leaving once already, simply walking away while his brother had gone hunting, but somehow, he “felt” that she wasn’t home, so he searched for his sister and quickly found her. To stop any doubts about her behavior from arising, she simply said that she felt a little tired and didn’t really know what she was doing, feigning sickness.