“Don’t lie to me!” the poacher roared, vaulting forward. Merek flipped off of the back end, landing on the ground just as the poacher slipped off the cage and hit the dirt. He had long brown hair, and the left half of his face was covered in red war paint. He was taller than Merek, but he was a bit skinnier too. Unlike Merek, the poacher was actually clothed with armor probably made from hides. It was enough to cover his torso and legs, at least.
Merek curled his fists, trying to prepare himself for a fight. He wasn’t sure if he even stood a chance, but he had little choice now.
“What do you want, child?”
Merek shrugged, hoping it wouldn’t sound as stupid out loud as it did in his head. “I want you to let those bears go.”
The poacher stared at him, as if wondering if he was actually serious.
“And why would I do that?” he asked, his head tilting to the side.
“Because they did nothing to you,” Merek replied, spreading his arms wide. “They just wander the forest, not harming anyone.”
“Yeah, and there pelts go for a hundred gold apiece. The young ones… probably seventy. I can live off that for a few weeks.”
“Aren’t there… normal jobs you could do? Cutting wood, tilling farmland, that sort of thing?”
“Please,” the poacher snarled. Something had entered his voice, something angry. “That sort of ‘work’ doesn’t lead a man anywhere. All it does is leave your back broken while someone else makes all of the money.”
“Sounds like you know from experience.”
The poacher chuckled to himself, looking away towards the forest with his jaw clenched.
“Why the bears?”
“Because they make me the most gold. We’re done talking about this now. Go away, or I’ll make you go away.”
Merek looked down, considering his options. He could just walk away. It wasn’t like he owed the bears anything. Leaving was still very much an option.
Except that’s what his father would do.
“Sorry,” Merek said, “but those bears are… kind of my friends. You need to let them go. Please.”
“Fool,” the poacher said, strutting forward. He cracked his knuckles and popped his neck. Merek bent his knees, dropping the stone so he could grip his staff with both hands.
I am in so far over my head.
It was too late to turn back now, for the poacher sprinted forward. Thinking quickly, Merek jammed the staff forward and it smashed into the poacher’s gut. He backed away, sucking air through pursed lips. Merek whirled the staff, holding it behind him as if he had any idea what he was doing.
“A stick? You plan on beating me with a stick, do you?”
“Oh no,” Merek replied, “Not unless you’re foolish enough to make me.”
Yes, talk big. As if you know how to back it up.
“I’m no mood for this, child.”
“I’m not… I’m not a child.”
The poacher merely shrugged. Then he came in close, just out of reach of Merek’s staff but close enough to put him on edge. The two circled each other, neither one looking away from the other.
Merek’s eyes narrowed after they made a full revolution around each other. What was he waiting for?
Stalling.
Merek had to hurry, before whatever the poacher was waiting for showed up. Because of that, he charged in without really thinking about it and promptly took a fist to his gut. The pain wasn’t too terrible, but the breath being knocked from his lungs made it hard to focus. On instinct he whirled his staff into the poacher’s leg, and the man shouted in pain.
Merek swung his staff straight into the poacher’s face. Surprisingly, the staff held together and the poacher hit the ground, holding his head.
He was unprepared for Merek to hit him again, and was knocked out cold.
“Wow,” Merek said, looking at his staff, “I very much thought you were going to shatter.”
The mother bear growled, redirecting Merek’s attention.
“Right,” he said. He searched the downed poacher, and found the key to the lock. Within seconds, the bears were free and running into the forest as fast as their legs could carry them. Only Merek’s coat was left behind, crumpled and stained with blood. Chuckling to himself in disbelief, he put the coat on for a marginal amount of protection.
He considered running into the forest himself, but something held him back. There was a horse and a cart, sure. He could do something with that. But the poacher would come to at any moment, and he wasn’t sure he had enough time to get away. Maybe he should just take the horse…
The sound of commotion reached his ears, and Merek dived into the forest. Thinking quickly, he scaled the nearest tree so that he would get a look at what was happening without anyone seeing him.
He didn’t have to wait long. Five seconds after he found his perch, three other men showed up. They all looked far more terrifying than the poacher did, and all three were armed with swords. Their clothes seemed to match the original poachers and were equally as badly made. Over their backs were slung bags filled with something bloody, which probably explained why they were behind.
“What happened? Where’re the bears?” the first one of them said when they managed to awaken the poacher. The speaker was a bald older man with a gray mustache that took up half of his face.
“There were…” the poacher stammered, but he covered it nicely by pretending to be dizzy. Or maybe he really was, Merek couldn’t tell. “They came from the forest. A dozen villagers. There was nothing I could do.”
“Damn villagers,” the bald man replied, “they must have caught sight of us. Are you hurt?”
“Just my pride,” the poacher said.
“Well, let’s get going. We can at least catch some foxes, if nothing else.” With that, the four of them got on the cart and they all left for somewhere else.
Merek stayed in his tree for a long while after that, deep in thought.
Chapter Five: Living in the Wild
A few days after freeing the bears, Merek’s wounds finally healed up enough that they didn’t bleed every time he moved. His shoulder still rung with soreness from time to time, but Merek was usually able to ignore it. It was good, because Merek was finding that there were a lot more streams in the forest than he originally thought. One such stream was deeper than Merek was tall, and wider than he could simply jump.
This is where his staff came in handy. He couldn’t go around the stream, and he certainly couldn’t swim through it, so instead…
He got a running start and jammed his staff into the very edge of the stream. His momentum carried him over, and he soared across the stream. To his credit, he almost made it to the other side.
Almost.
Merek crashed into the water, only a foot from his target, immediately being submerged over his head. He lost his grip on his staff in a desperate bid to grab something solid, but nothing touched his fingertips. For the second time in as many weeks, Merek was sure he was going to drown.
Then his feet hit the bottom of the stream.
Gathering what energy he could, he vaulted back towards the surface. His hands found stone, and he was able to pull himself up to air. He looked around quickly, grabbing his staff before it floated too far down stream.
“Well, I almost made it,” he said with a sad chuckle.
However, he did make the return jump with inches to spare. All it took was a simple correction of how hard he jumped.
“Not a complete loss,” Merek commented, practicing the jump a few more times just to be sure he was not terrible at it. He still miscalculated twice more of his six or seven tries, but he managed not to die.
The next day, Merek found he was incredibly hungry again. He had long lost the stream that held fish in it, and every other fish was too small to make it worth catching. His fish catching trap wasn’t really holding up, as if the fish were getting too smart for him. So in light of no other idea, Merek sat down and started weaving grass togethe
r to make a rope. Maybe he could attach the rope to his staff and then attach a net of some kind to the rope.
He deliberated it for an hour before actually beginning, wondering if it was far too much work to be worthwhile. But having a rope and having a net sounded like useful things to have, and besides, he had nothing but time on his hands.
So Merek spent the next few days gathering grass and leaves and anything that he thought would make an effective rope, lashing it all together. He had several first attempts go awry, either being too weak or too stiff to be a rope. But eventually, he made a passable imitation of a rope that he could use.
The net, however, was a whole different problem. Weaving the grass to make a rope was a long, tiring process, but the net… that was just plain maddening. Making the cross sections and then making it fit together but still be sturdy… Merek spent the better part of a week trying to make one, with no success. Of course, in that time he also gathered his own forest worth of wood to make fires, and he was soon able to light a fire on the first try almost half the time.
“At least I can do something not terribly wrong,” Merek said to the fire one night.
The next day, Merek decided he should broaden his eating interests. There were rabbits and foxes in the forest, though killing and eating them kind of made him feel bad. But in the face of starving (the berries just weren’t enough), he was willing to make some sacrifices. At first he tried chasing them down, but they were far faster than he was and he recognized his folly immediately.
So instead, he came up with another plan.
He formed a better tie with the leaves he used, securing the sharp stones to his staff. Then he climbed into a tree, and waited. After a few minutes, the animals seemed to forget his existence and wandered around.
Then his staff became a spear again, and he hurled it at unsuspecting animals. Again, he felt a little bad, but he was starting to literally starve.
His aim was shoddy at best, and he missed far more than he hit. First he just plain missed the target. Then when he hit what he was aiming for, his attack was aimed incorrectly and the rock didn’t pierce flesh. Some of the animals still fell due to the force of the blow, but that wasn’t nearly as humane as Merek was trying to be.
But with practice came better aim, and more edible food. Well, mostly. But Merek found out catching the animals wasn’t even half of the problem.
Getting the furs off was.
On the first day he actually managed to peg a target, he tried cutting its fur off with the stone. It smelled terribly, first of all, and it was a very messy job. His stone wasn’t really sharp enough to smoothly cut through the flesh, and so he was more chopping at it.
Merek firmly decided that there had to be an easier route. Namely, he needed a sharper tool. He scoured every creek and river bed he could, hunting for a sharper stone. Eventually he found one that had an edge as sharp as a knife.
And he finally had some good fortune. After the find, skinning animals was much easier. Catching them was still just as difficult and he was a terrible skinner, but he had nothing but time in which to get marginally better. He knew he’d never be any good at it, but at least he’d be good enough to live on.
About a week and a half into his exile was when the winds came.
The rain was bad, certainly. The lightning, equally if not more so. But neither really compared to the winds. Merek was trying to master skinning a squirrel when he heard the sound of rushing air. Looking up, he could see the trees shake as if under attack.
A single moment later, as a rock whipped past his head fast enough to cause a resounding thunk off of the tree it struck, Merek realized why. Every instinct in his brain told him to run, and it was lucky he didn’t hesitate to listen. Leaving the dead animal where it lay, he gathered up his staff and coat and bolted away from the furious wind.
Try as he might, there was no outrunning nature.
He made it to the relative safety of a stream when the gale hit him. It was like being hit with an icy wall of untouchable water, the way it chilled him to his core and knocked him sideways by the pure force of its being. He headed for a waterfall, seeking shelter around the waves. But fleeing from the gale, he had made a serious error.
He had backed himself into a corner with nowhere to run.
Then the stones started flying.
At first he tried to block them with his hands and arms, but the pain was intense, and he was sure he would have bruises if not welts for days to come. Instead, he turned to his staff. Not many stones flew, but the ones that came at him he raised his staff to deflect. He caught about half of them on average, sending them in different directions. The ones he missed he either dodged away from or they hit him, causing him to wince in pain. He refused to cry out, no matter how hard they struck him. Even though no one would hear him, he wouldn’t give anyone or anything the satisfaction.
But his resolve nearly failed under the weight of so many blows. The wind wasn’t strong enough to lift truly heavy stones, but it tossed around small ones like snowflakes.
It felt like days before the rushing wind simply disappeared. As soon as the wind found him, it was gone.
He sunk to his knees, breath little more than a memory, as he felt trickles of blood run down his face.
“Okay,” he said, “we need to find actual, permanent shelter. Something sturdy. Now.”
And that’s exactly what he did.
It took him over two days of nonstop searching, but eventually he found exactly what he was looking for. About halfway up a tall rocky hill there was a cave composed entirely of stone. It wasn’t more than thirty feet deep, and it was about ten feet tall on the inside. The mouth of the cave was only about four feet tall and as many feet wide, making it easy to overlook.
It was just what he wanted.
“Perfect,” Merek said as he examined it. He could stockpile wood in there, and it being stone inside and out would make it difficult for anything to get inside it.
“I think I found myself a home,” he laughed. Now all he had to do was occupy it.
He put the cave’s location to memory, memorizing the surrounding area and never venturing very far unless he was sure he could find his way back. He didn’t want to mark anything, lest someone else see it and figure out where he was. Though Merek hadn’t seen another human being in weeks, he was always worried that his peace would be shattered.
“So the first thing I need is cover. I need to hide the entrance,” Merek said, pacing back and forth in his new home. He had already dragged up enough wood to build a cabin, and had several ropes made from grass (an exhaustingly tedious project) in the cave. He even managed to gather enough furs and clean them to make an almost comfortable sleeping area. All he needed to do was find some way of bringing them all together and he’d almost have a bed, or a new coat. Or maybe both.
“New first thing,” Merek grunted as he arranged the different furs, “we make a needle and some thread. Then we can make a cover for the cave.”
While he wasn’t sure at all if that plan would work, he was certainly excited to find out.
He had to spend the next two days confined to his cave due to a bad storm, venturing out only when there was a brief lull to pick a mountain of berries and hide them in the cave. It was a hungry two days, but Merek was happy he wasn’t spending it out in the storm.
After the storm had passed, Merek went about trying to find something that would function as a needle and thread. He figured grass, his go-to tool, would serve as thread, but the needle was proving to be difficult. Finally, he settled on a piece of a branch, little more than a splinter, as the needle. It wouldn’t be very pretty, but hopefully it would be sturdy enough to bind together fur.
Now all Merek had to do was teach himself how to sew. His mother had refused to even allow him to watch her, always saying he would never be good at it so why bother teaching him?
“I don’t have to be good,” Merek said as he tried over and over again, for hours that seemed t
o never end. “I just have to be good enough.”
All told, it took Merek exactly a week to make the cave comfortable. He brought in enough furs to make a sleeping area and a blanket, and the smell of death and decay was mostly washed out of them. He had a good fire whenever he needed to eat, and his cave was obscure enough to never be noticed.
As the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, Merek wasn’t just surviving. He was, if only just, thriving in the forest. He noticed there was more muscle on his bones. He could run faster, and he was far more rested than he had ever been in his whole life. He investigated every part of the forest he could in a single day, though he never followed the same path twice and still he hadn’t discovered it all. He found several roads and even discovered several villages, though he never dared get close to them.
He even managed to sew so much he put together his own shirt, pants, shoes and coat, burning the ragged pants and blood-soaked coat of his old life.
It wasn’t until he stared at the cloth burning that he realized how very freeing the moment was. It was coincidentally at that moment he finally stopped wanting to go home and try to make amends.
Merek smiled at his cave. He was home. He sat in the mouth, eating a handful of berries and reflected on how far had had come. It certainly wasn’t anything impressive, and his parents would no doubt laugh at his contentment, but still. It was his.
He was careful never to kill what he wasn’t going to eat that day. He found no pleasure in killing animals, and always considered it lucky when he found one already dead from whatever it was that killed animals other than him. His grass-thread wasn’t the best material, but it held together well enough. Perhaps it was his sewing skills that were to blame. Either way, he at least had a working set of clothes.
Merek Quinn was at peace.
Then the day came that he discovered the plains.
He was more surprised than he probably should have been to discover the wide expanse of land. The ground was saturated in some places, but dry in others, as if the ground couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be fertile or barren. But just like the huge body of water, Merek could look out for miles without seeing a break. There were dips and hills, but it was all uncharted to him. Merek half wanted to explore it, but the other half of him liked it just fine in his forest.
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