He always carried his knife with him no matter what he was doing. In those first days while he was building his burrow, he was aware of how exposed he was to this new world. He was carrying a load of mud up the hillside. He had been a little tired, and who wouldn’t be? Walking a mile or two uphill per trip with an armful of mud and clay would be enough to wear out anybody.
It was the late afternoon and he heard it, a desperate feeling that shattered his fragile sense of security and safety. He looked around and he couldn’t see anything but somehow, he knew that a predator was nearby and he was the target. He panicked and started to run. He tore through the woods to get to his burrow. The underbrush clung and ripped at his denim pants, but he was only aware of how far away from the safety of his burrow he was. Not that an open frame over a shallow hole in the ground was any kind of protection. And with that thought he stopped running and pressed his back against a nearby tree. He had become very calm as he dropped his load of mud and clay, and he unsheathed his knife.
This was the reason he had wanted to live out here among nature, to test himself and live by a higher code of life. Life had to be earned out here and there was no ‘safe house’ to run to.
He pulled the moderate sized blade up to his chest and held it at the ready. It was a big knife, not quite a machete but bigger than a Bowie knife. He heard the creature only seconds before the animal burst through the underbrush. It was tan in color with black eyes and a black nose. That was all his mind could take in before the creature jumped up and attacked. His mind registered the snarling of the beast in midair and it was pure reactive instincts that brought his knife to pierce the underside of his attacker. He looked at the animal as it hung for a few perfect seconds in midair. He looked down into the animal's eyes and he could see that there was no hatred there, only what had to be. This was a hunter who had hunted something that could fight back. In that second, through this animal's eyes, he understood the price for carelessness and this predator had paid nature’s tax for its negligence.
The weight of the thing pushed it farther down on his knife and his arm was simply unable to hold the weight of the animal and as his arm dropped the predator slid from his knife and collapsed down on the ground, a pool of its blood gathering beneath its already dead corpse.
He had taken enough classes to know that the blood would attract some unwanted attention, so he had dragged the dead coyote off away from his burrow. He stashed the carcass under some bushes and ran back to his burrow to get some of his rope. He came back to the carcass and began to skin, and butcher it.
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He had let the blood soak into the forest floor, while the strips of meat he had carved off was laid out on some plastic from a tarp, which he had brought with him for this purpose. He knew that, while the coyote didn’t give a lot of meat for an animal it would probably be too much for him to eat safely in one sitting. After he had cleaned and gutted the thing, he wrapped up the meat and bones from the dead coyote and brought them away from the butcher site and his home.
He had built a fire and cooked what meat he was going to eat, turned out that it was only about a quarter of the animal. The rest he smoked and dried so it would keep. When he was done the sun had already set and he needed to get back to his home. He made one last trip down to the river to clean the bones and the skin.
To wash the smell and the blood away he used a bag net. He rinsed off every piece of the skeleton and scrubbed the skin. He placed everything into the bag net and tied it to a nearby tree with the bag in a nice little alcove in the river stream that had some good water movement. The natural motion of the river would continue to rinse the small off of the articles and clean the skin.
The next day, he retrieved his bag. The skeleton pieces were white and cold, he could detect no smell of blood on them, not that that was a big vote of confidence, but it was enough to make him secure in the fact that no other animals would be able to smell it either. He left the skeleton pieces in the bag, and he retrieved the skin. It was a sizable piece of fabric, and he knew that it would make a great bag to keep his stuff all in one place. He might need to pick up quickly if something ever happened, a fire, or a bear crashing through his home one day. You could never be too prepared out here.
By nightfall he had finished the majority of the sewing that was necessary for his bag. He had sewn a leather strip onto the skin to use as a shoulder strap.
That bag had been with him since the very beginning and now as he reached inside to grab his small tackle box, he was really glad that he had made the thing. He set the tackle box down next to him. He placed his fishing pole across his legs and pulled out a little of his fishing line. He then opened his tackle box and grabbed a bone fishhook that he had made. With the excess fishing line, he fastened the hook to his pole.
He stood up and looked around him listening to his forest. He always had to remember where he was and he was always careful not to lose himself in what he was doing for too long. Satisfied that he was still alone, or as alone as could be expected, he started rooting around in the mud and dirt next to the river. He could usually find worms near the riverbank and today was no exception. With a practiced hand he slipped a caught worm onto his hook and cast his line out into the river.