A month later, Milo was back on his feet and feeling like he might make it with this wilderness thing. The bear had snuffled around a few more times, but finding all of the foodstuffs hoisted in a tree it had soon given up. Or gone to ground for the winter. A few of the trees had started to turn the yellow of a traffic light, warning of impending red, of coming winter. The days were now shorter and the temperature had dropped, especially at night. Milo wore most of his clothes all of the time. He was sure that he was filling the air with his scent for miles around, no doubt offending all of the animals with his body odor. On the other hand, he was not sweating much, so maybe not.
A growing scarcity of animals were beginning to become his biggest issue. Milo knew that he desperately needed to start stocking up for the winter when small animals would become scarce. He most likely should have been stocking up for all of the month that he had been out in the woods. But, there had always been something else to do. At first it was recovering from the bear attack. Then hunting for his daily needs began to take up more time in a shorter day, leaving no daylight left for additional trapping. Like back in the office, there was always one more thing that must be done immediately, killing time for future planning.
He also had his share of time wasters out in the wilderness, things he did because they amused him. Sometimes, he flashed on a solution to a small problem and could not do anything else until he worked it through. He had carved needles from SFR bones, letting him patch the rain fly with a bit of torn ground tarp. He had dug a drainage ditch with a berm around his tent, diverting rain water to the pond.
He had also spent time devising a way to keep a coal smoldering slowly. His matches had all but run out and he could no longer rely on them except in true emergency situations. The solution had involved scraping the fur off of one of the SFR skins and then pissing on one it in place of tannic acid (an on-line video trick that had returned to him late one night) then staking it out close to the fire to cure it into leather. The next morning, he rolled it into a cone, stitching it with his fishing line and bone needle. He filled the bottom with moss, plopped an ember on top and then more moss to keep the air flow to a minimum. Then he stuffed the whole thing down his pants, both to hold it and to keep him warm. He managed to keep the first ember viable from breakfast through dinner the first day, though he did lose it that night. Apparently, even protected embers should not be rained on, but he had been wary of bringing it into the tent. Nylon burned too well, a lesson that he had learned a week or two earlier when he had tried fixing the rain fly by melting the two edges of the rip together. To keep this from happening again, Milo built up a small cairn of rocks, leaving a hole for the ember cone a meter off the ground. That kept rain it out of any puddles and kept most of the rain off of it.
After that, Milo focused on getting in a good supply of firewood. He was living in a forest, so he had thought that this would be easy. But with all of the rain, most of the wood was damp or still alive. He experimented with sawing down a smaller, dead tree with his camping saw. It worked, but took him most of an afternoon to cut it down, strip all of the branches and then cut it into pieces that would fit in his fire pit. By the time he had moved all of the log sections back to his camp, it was too late to go hunting that day, so he had dipped into his dwindling reserves.
Every day there was something else to do, something that pushed hunting for stores farther down his to-do list. Building a lean-to to shelter his drying wood. Digging his water collection cistern deeper. Washing his clothes (a chore that involved dipping each garment into the pond, squeezing it out and then spreading them all out on convenient local branches to drip onto the ground).
By the time Milo got around to aggressively hunting with the intent to store some food for the winter, many of the SFRs had already started going to ground. There were still enough scampering around to fill his stomach on a daily basis, but he never managed to trap enough to have any left over. This despite what he considered to be severe rationing on his part, to the point that he had ripped off another part of the ground tarp to use as a belt to keep his now-too-loose pants around his waist.
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Rejected
Художественная прозаDumped via text and hounded on social media, Milo decides to leave his job, city and life. He heads out into the wilderness because it has to be better. Right?
