by Logan Jacobs
“Probably more rats,” I muttered to myself as I finished the last drop of water in the bottle. My head felt less foggy than it had while I’d been shuffling up and down the slope looking for flint, although even forty-eight ounces of cool, pure water didn’t have the kick that my usual morning coffee did. “Just don’t try to gnaw on me, little guys.”
I decided to keep an eye on the woods behind me anyway. I laid down on my belly facing upstream, dangled the Nalgene’s loop from my left hand so that the mouth of the filter faced the flowing water, and trained my Glock on the woods that led back up to the slope. I watched the tree line as the Nalgene bottle got heavier in my hand, but it was hard to see anything between the thick, waving branches of the pine trees anyway.
The Nalgene finally stopped getting heavier, and I could tell by the way it started to sink into the water that it was now full. Now that the bottle was full, I was ready to go back to my pocket dimension and spend the rest of the day experimenting with rocks.
I slipped my Glock back into the holster, stood up, and capped the Nalgene bottle. As I stretched out the kinks in my back, my bladder started to twinge. I didn’t want to piss into the stream and fuck up someone else’s water source, whether the stream fed into civilization somehow or just served as a water supply for more giant sloths, but pissing against a tree like I’d been doing ever since I got here seemed like a safe enough bet, especially if I kept my Glock ready while I relieved myself. I drew my Glock again, then turned toward the treeline.
A round brown face peered out at me through the trees a little under my eye level. Its face was rimmed by a halo of short brown hair and half-moon ears stuck out of the top of its head. Its nose and jaw looked like a bear’s, and that sent a jolt of freezing fear through my guts, but brown, human eyes that peered out from its bald upper face made me think that maybe it could be reasoned with.
The rest of the creature’s body was a little harder to see through the pine trees, but I could make out the shape of a short, fairly buff humanoid covered with thin brown hair through the green needles of the pine branches. One of the bear’s long, hairy arms hung down behind a rough tan sphere that hung from a tan loop around its waist. The other hand’s short brown fingers wrapped around a thin white stick that looked like it had been shaved clean of bark.
Even if the thing that peered out of the woods at me was half bear and didn’t wear clothes, it still looked like it was able to use tools. Maybe it was smart enough to communicate with. A bear-person who knew the territory and understood how to survive here might be a fantastic ally to have, even if it was only for the next day.
“I come in peace,” I stuttered out at the bear-man. I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart, then raised my left hand palm out in a gesture of peace, but I kept my Glock trained on the bear-man in case he did decide to attack. I just hoped this world really was so primitive that the bear-man had never seen a gun before.
Two more brown faces appeared out of the dark green gloom of the pine trees, one to each side of the first bear-man. Each of the new bear-men wore the same tan sphere at their waists and held a long, peeled stick just like the first one. The larger bear-man on the right looked me up and down while the middle bear and the shorter bear on his left glanced at each other.
“I can help you hunt if you help me survive here,” I told the bear-men. “I want to be friends. No fighting, okay?”
“No fighting,” grunted the shortest bear-man. His narrow brown muzzle opened slightly to show off his spiky yellow teeth, and the corners of his red mouth curved up into a smile. He turned to the other two bear-men and nodded.
I lowered my Glock as my stomach untwisted in relief.
The bear-man in the middle twisted his head back behind his shoulder and roared, while the shorter bear-man threw back his head and ululated a loud, high trill at the sky.
The largest bear-man yanked his stick out of the ground and pulled it back over his shoulder. The stick’s sharp white point flashed in the sunlight that filtered down through the pine trees, and I realized that it hadn’t been a walking stick, but a spear.
My heart slammed against my chest as I flicked the Glock’s barrel toward the largest bear-man. My finger twitched on the trigger, and the gun’s explosion echoed through the trees as my bullet tore a ragged red hole in the largest bear-man’s throat.
The big bear-man’s arm fell before the rest of him did, but the spear had barely dropped from his limp fingers before I managed to squeeze off two more shots at the other two bears. The middle bear caught my bullet in his hairy chest, and he stared down at the red hole that I’d torn in his torso before he dropped his spear and staggered backward.
The shortest bear-man dropped his spear, then clapped his other hand to the jagged red line that my bullet had torn in his spear-throwing shoulder as he threw back his head and roared.
I froze for a second, then turned on my heels and ran downstream along the sandy edge of the riverbank. I could hear the bear’s roars die off behind me, but I could also hear frantic rustling and the sound of branches breaking from upstream. I didn’t dare look behind me as the soles of my boots slapped the moist sand of the river’s edge, but I did squeeze off a shot behind me when my right arm pumped backward. I didn’t hear any roars of pain, but the rustling grew louder and started coming from more directions after the echoes of the shot died away, and I kicked myself internally as I realized that I’d just given my position away to more hidden bear people that had probably been lurking in the woods around me. It wasn’t like I was hard to see or hear out in the open of the riverbank, anyway. If I couldn’t lose the bear-men by masking my sound, I could at least get out of their sight.
The river curved gently to the right about five yards ahead of me, then swung back to the left and bent so sharply that it flowed out of sight behind a cluster of fir trees to the right. A steep hill covered in spiky greenery loomed up right ahead of me beyond the trees, and I glanced around quickly to assess my options as the distance between me and the tree line shrank.
I would definitely lose speed if I tried to scramble up the steep hill in front of me, but if I tried to double back up the hill that sat between me and Honest Abe I would run right back into the bear-men. I would have the best chance of running away from them if I followed the downhill curve of the river, but then I’d be exposed to the bear-men.
Unless I tried to lose them like I had the Men in Black Cars. I didn’t know how smart the bears were, but maybe if I pretended that I was going one way and then went another under the cover of the trees, I could misdirect them long enough to get a better head start.
I kept pounding my feet in a straight line toward the curve of trees that bent along with the river, and I could hear the rustling grow even louder behind me as I darted between two cypress bushes and into the trees ahead. I slammed my boots over the dry, branch-filled forest floor as I crashed through the branches, but after about one hundred paces I turned on my heels about sixty degrees to my right and headed toward what I was pretty sure was the bank of the river. I could still hear rustling and crashing behind me, but the sound of my own footsteps were so loud in my ears that it was hard to tell where it was coming from. I just hoped the bear-men had better hearing than sight and might follow one of their own pretty far into the woods before they realized their mistake, but either way I still had to get as far away from them as possible.
I kept an eye out on my right for either the glint of water through the trees or the brown bodies of the bear-men. I saw plenty of brown trunks and glimpses of brown dirt, and each new patch of brown made my pounding heart skip another beat as my breath scraped against my lungs, but it wasn’t too long before I saw the welcome glint of silvery water running through the patches of brown dirt on my right. I kept the river in my line of sight as I ran, even as the ground tilted and dipped beneath me.
My sides started to ache after a little while, but I kept pumping my arms and legs forward even though the ache got deeper with eve
ry step. My left side started to ache particularly hard when I turned to the right to follow the river’s curve, and I realized that the stones I’d stuffed into my pockets were slamming against my hips and waist. I definitely didn’t have time to try to empty my pockets while I ran from the bear-men, so I just told myself that at least I’d still have plenty of potential flint stones to test out whenever I fucking made it to safety.
I lost all sense of time as I scrambled through the trees. My legs started to ache, then burn, then went a little numb, and I stumbled forward through the forest on what felt like stumps of bleeding wood. My lungs felt like they’d been slashed by a high-carbon steel blade, my stomach muscles tightened and burned, and my sweaty fingers cramped around the handle of my Glock.
When my body gave out, it felt like it gave out all at once. My feet stumbled over a patch of slippery pine needles, my left toe hit a branch, and when I tried to hop over it and regain my balance my knees just went out from under me. My palms hit the ground with a smack, and the Glock went skidding across the bumpy forest floor before it stopped with a clack against a rock. My lungs didn’t feel like they were sucking in air anymore, but like they were expanding and contracting uselessly in the vacuum of space. My arms only held me up for a second before they collapsed like limp noodles and I fell to the pine needle-covered ground on my chest.
I struggled to get up, but my arms barely budged, and my numbed legs refused to obey my commands. My head reeled and my vision swam, and for about a minute I couldn’t hear anything but the blood pounding in my ears and the ragged sound of my lungs trying to suck in air. I retched out a mouthful of sour, tomato-flavored water, rested my flaming hot cheek on my cold, clammy hand, and prepared for death via claws, jaws, and spears.
As the pounding in my head quieted down and air scraped into my chest, I realized that I didn’t hear any of the frantic rustling or branch-breaking sounds that had been following me all the way along the stream. I didn’t hear the faint sound of roars, either. Had I lost the bear-men, or were they just lurking in the trees waiting for me?
I was pretty sure I looked like a sitting duck all sprawled out in the woods. I figured that if the bears had caught up with me, they would have already killed me by now. Either I had actually lost the bears with my subterfuge, or I’d managed to outrun them for long enough that I’d convinced them I’d be more trouble as prey than I was worth. At least I’d lost the bears, but I was exhausted and I had no idea how far away from Honest Abe I was.
I checked my watch and groaned as I saw that it was already 3:30. I hadn’t bothered to note the time when I’d gotten to the stream, so I had no idea how long I’d taken trying to get away from the bear-men, but I estimated that I’d spent at least an hour scrambling through the woods, even if I hadn’t been running so much as staggering for a lot of the way. I was exhausted again, I definitely hadn’t had enough to eat in the last twenty-four hours, and I was easy pickings for anything hungry that came along while I was trying to recuperate on the forest floor. Even if I’d really left the bear-men behind, I had to find somewhere safe or at least relatively defensible to rest while I gathered my strength enough to head back home.
I finally got my wobbling arms to push me up from the forest floor. I stood, retrieved my Glock from where it had come to rest against the stone, and checked the position of the river. I’d been following the water on the left for a little while, so I started to stagger up the hill on my left that the river curved around. I figured that the top of the hill would at least be a more defensible position than the bottom of the valley, even if a lot of my ammunition might just be pieces of rejected flint.
My progress up the hill was a lot slower than before, and I could barely see the clear blue sky through the pine branches even after twenty minutes of climbing. I knew I still had more than four hours to get back to Honest Abe before it got too dark for me to see at all, but I also really didn’t want to try to pass back through the territory that the bear-men had been chasing me through while I was still too tired to run.
I stopped to catch my breath for a few seconds, and I used the break to take a good look around the woods for any lurking bear-men. All I saw behind me or to the right was the same mix of pines, firs, and spiky green bushes that surrounded me everywhere else, but the forest to my left was a little bit more interesting.
About five yards away from me, the trees stopped and gave way to a level patch of moss-covered dirt about ten feet wide and fifteen feet long. It looked like the trees had been cleared on purpose, and fairly recently, or saplings would have already been sprouting up from the moss like they were everywhere else in the forest. The other possibility was that whatever was under the moss and dirt was just a really bad spot for trees to grow. Maybe there was a patch of something weird just under the dirt, or maybe there was nothing at all, but something about the patch of moss-covered lichen seemed deliberate to me.
I wondered if a different perspective on the hillside would show me something new. I backed down through the trees for a few yards and kept my eyes on the area of slope under the moss-covered patch.
The ground under the mossy patch dropped off vertically for about five feet before it resumed its downward slope, and I realized that I hadn’t been able to see the overhang easily from much farther back on the hillside because it was covered by long, slender pine branches and strips of hanging moss. The curtain of branches and moss was much easier to see as I got closer, and so was the ten-foot-wide circle of bare packed dirt just below the plant curtain on the downward slope. The worn oval faded off into a little dirt trail that wove through a few pine trees before it disappeared into the woods.
I crept as slowly and quietly as I could over the forest floor until I made it over to the welcome mat of dirt in front of the curtain. From my new perspective, the moss curtain was clearly situated on the right side of the cave, and it was only about five feet wide. I listened for any breathing, rustling, or moving around inside, but I couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the breeze through the pine branches and the faint buzz of a bug somewhere in the near distance. I knelt down in front of the moss curtain, parted two strips of moss near the bottom where they brushed against the dirt, and peered through the veil of plants.
The curtain hid the entrance to a small cave in the ground. The inside of the cave was shaped like an oblong, and the evenness of the walls combined with the few scraggly roots that hung from the ceiling suggested that the cave was natural but that the walls had been smoothed out by someone’s hand. There were a few layered furs about the size of a twin mattress pushed against the far corner of the wall, and I figured that it was the cave-dweller’s bed. Next to the makeshift bed were three of the tan spheres that the bear-men had hanging from their tan belts. The cave didn’t have anything written on the walls, so I guessed that whoever slept here either didn’t see it as a permanent situation, or maybe they hadn’t developed written language or art yet. There also weren’t any ashes, burnt wood, or anything to suggest a campfire.
Whoever lived here couldn’t make a fire, but it seemed like they had figured out how to make fur blankets.
I crawled into the cave, inched over to the furs, and inspected the tan round things by the bed. When I got up close, I noticed that there was a thick, jagged black gap in the top of each of the round things that ran all the way around, like a lid. I lifted the tops and checked inside.
The inside of the spheres looked like the inside of a dried-out pumpkin, and I realized that they were just gourds that had been hollowed out. One of the gourds held a small handful of what looked and smelled like dried purple raspberries, one of them held about a quarter cup of what looked like green shelled pumpkin seeds, and one of them held maybe a dozen of what I was pretty sure were white dried garbanzo beans. It looked like a recipe for someone’s trail mix, and it also didn’t look like it would last for more than a meal.
I put the lids back on the gourds and crawled onto the furs. They weren’t as soft as my bed at h
ome or even as soft as Honest Abe’s back seat, but they were definitely better than the hard-packed dirt of the cave floor.
I really hoped that this cave didn’t belong to one of the bear-men, but it looked like the best place I had to hide while I recuperated and drank some water. I reminded myself that I’d seen the bear-men hunting in a pack, and that this place looked like it only belonged to one person. I still had my Glock with me anyway, and that meant I had a definite advantage over someone whose technology seemed to stop at furs, dried fruit, and probably at stone blades.
I sat up, unhooked my Nalgene, took a drink of water, and decided to use my resting time to check the stones I’d collected for possible flints. I pulled my knife out of its holster, took a rough gray stone speckled with white out of my pocket, and scraped it against the flat steel on the bottom of the knife’s blade. I didn’t see any sparks fly, but that was fine. I had two pockets full of stones to go through, and one of the stones had to be flint. I sipped my water slowly while I went through the stones one by one.
I’d finished about a third of my water and almost emptied my pockets by the time I finally saw a few yellow sparks jump up from the edge of a triangle-shaped brownish-gray rock. I scraped the sharp edge of the three-inch-wide rock against the flat steel of my blade to see the sparks fly again, then grinned as my sawing made a little fireworks show against the shadows of the cave. I sheathed my knife and looped the Nalgene bottle back onto my belt, stood up, and then shook the last few stones out of my jacket pockets before I stuck the flint into the little fifth pocket in my jeans. I’d spent a lot of time and effort looking for that stone, and I really didn’t want to lose it.
My legs still felt a little tender, but the long rest and the water had restored some of my energy, and I estimated that I could probably make it back to camp in less than four hours if I walked steadily. I checked my watch for the time.
