Rejected

Enough

When it finally happened, it was not the food or the animals, large or small, that broke Milo's wilderness conviction. It was the snow.

Almost three months into his new life and Milo thought that he had it figured out. He had enough food thanks to Jules. He had enough firewood for a while, though he was a little unclear as to exactly how long it would last. He was comfortable with his daily routine and had adjusted it over and over again to ensure that no ants or bears or anything in between ruined his little corner of the forest.

The forest was also adjusting, but not to Milo. It was preparing itself for winter. Rain was no longer afternoon showers, but week-long drizzles. The leaves were now off the trees and on the ground, forcing him to walk carefully: wet leaves were as slippery as leaflet littered street after rain. Without the leaves, the trees did less to protect Milo and his camp from these longer rains. Or the winds that made sounds through the branches that reminded Milo of similar howls from breezes playing with the broken window casings in his old apartment.

Earlier in the fall, he had spent some of the time butchering Jules. A full grown moose is a lot of meat, even after removing the guts and the bones and such. Much more than Milo knew how to store. With the SFR meat, he had stuffed it into the empty plastic bags from his initial freeze dried food, then stored it in one of the grocery bags, hoisted up with his packs. The vast quantity of moose meat would not fit in the same way. Finally, Milo had pulled the plastic sheeting out of his cistern and wrapped up Jules in that and then storing him in one side of the pit trap while filling in the other. He was aware that he could smoke the meat, but had not researched the process back in his former life. Experimenting on his winter store of food seemed a bad idea.

Without the plastic sheeting, the cistern was no longer useful as any water that collected in the unlined pit took on the flavor of the dirt and blown in leaves. Even had the sheeting still been in place, the cistern would not have done Milo much good. Every morning, it was cold enough to freeze a layer of ice onto the pond and likely would have frozen the cistern solid. So, one of the adjustments that he had had to make was to rely exclusively on boiling pond water. His morning routine now included finding a large rock to throw on to the pond ice and break a hole big enough for him to fill his pot. He also kept his fire pit lit and with a pot on it at all times. He needed the hot water as much to warm him up as for hydration.

These changes he took in stride. He had known that winter would come, that he would need to adapt to the cold and the wind and the gray. Those things he thought he could handle. It took over a meter of snow howling down around him over the course of a day and a night to make him realize that there was no way he was going to survive the winter out in this forest.

These early snowfalls did not cause Milo much break in his routine. He would wake up, knock the snow off the tent by thumping the sides of the tent from the inside. He would lace and zip and tie all of his clothes on then step out and brush off the log he had dragged over to his fire pit as a seat. Then, as every morning, he would revive his fire, throw a rock through the pond ice, start boiling some water and cook some moose meat. That was all he needed to do. These early snows were not deep enough to hinder his movement and allowed him to continue hunting. In fact, it allowed him to better gauge where to put his trap as he could see the tracks of the SFRs more easily. Based on this information, Milo started to think that winter was going to be easy.

Then, late one afternoon, the snow showed him how wrong he was. A few flakes filtered through the bare trees as a precursor, but Milo paid them no mind, having seen their like before. Then the wind picked up. And the light dimmed. And the few filtered flakes became a blinding sheet of white, reducing Milo's visibility to a few feet. He almost did not get back to his tent, getting lost within a few meters because he could not see his usual landmarks. Finally, he stepped into his little pond, his foot breaking the scum ice that had formed on top, letting him know that home was close. He tried to light his fire, but the wind kept blowing out the flames just as they started to catch. He was afraid that he would lose his ember, and so tucked it away and retreated inside his tent.