Before Death

Chapter 9: Survival

The sun slipped below the horison and left me in total darkness. Nevertheless my spirits remained high and I was motivated to put as much distance as possible between anyone who might pursue me.

I made my way by touch, running my hands over the rough bark of a pine and then stretching my arms out and taking small, shuffling steps until I reached the next one. I glanced back periodically, half expecting a search party to be on my heels even though logic told me that any possible search for me would only be conducted in the daytime.

An owl hooted ominously in the distance and caused me to startle so much that I abandonned my careful progress and sprinted along the thin summer grass with only my outstretched arms to save me from a faceful of tree trunk. In my haste I didn't spot a chain lying in my path and tripped ungraciously over it.

When I recovered enough sense to realise that I was unharmed except for a minor graze I ran my hand cautiously over the chain. My fingers met the coarse stump of a tree. I reversed my path and followed to chain to its other end. A closed bear trap was attached to the other point of the chain.

What had been caught? I pondered.Whatever it was, though, it had perished recently. The stench of decay is not present yet.

I maneuvred the tips of my fingers along the spikes of the mouth of the trap until I felt a small furry mass under my palm. A poor rabbit caught in a trap meant for a much bigger animal. At least it had been crushed by the barbs and had died instantly, instead of being doomed to the slow and painful starvation that awaited bears and wolves when their legs were caught.

I wrestled the limp animal from the claws of the bear trap to supplement the supplies I had in my backpack. I contemplated taking the bear trap as well, but besides it being too heavy to haul around and firmly secured to the tree, I was not prepared to resort to the cruelty that other humans employed as a means of survival.

Realising the mortal danger that charging blindly through the forest would put me in, I opted instead to rest right there for the night and lay my head on my packpack.

Despite the uncertain future that awaited me, I had never felt more alive with the prospect of a life on my own in the forest that lay before me.

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And so time went on, marked only by cycles of eating, walking further from my childhood home and reading the survival book that I had bought.

This book was the key to my continued co-existance with the elements of the forest. It taught me how to identify small game trails and to set snares so that I could capture my food. It was also the source of information that supplemented my previous knowledge of making fires. I had to make do with small fires stacked in a way to release the smallest amount of smoke straight upwards into the sky.

Even though I was, by now, many days' trek away from the village, I was still paranoid about the severe punishment that would result if I was captured and sent back 'home'. However, I suspected that the villagers would not be extremely eager or invested in reclaiming a wayward child who was clearly determined to effectively commit suicide by running off to the forest at every chance she got.

I fared surprisingly well in providing for myself by setting traps and gathering various seeds, berries and bulbs that were deemed safe to consume by my handy survival guide. The woods seemed to become accustomed to my presence and sung me to sleep nightly with the whistling of a pleasant breeze through its branches. We lived in peace, me only taking the amount of resources that I required for the immediate future and the forest appearing not to begrudge giving up some of itself to care for me.

I had recently come across the shredded carcass of a young coyote and managed to scavenge some bones that I could boil for a stew in the small pot I had lugged around in my supplies pack. I readily inferred that, judging by the bite marks around the poor coyote's neck and the fact that his flesh had not been eaten, he had been torn apart by others of his kind. Such things happened sometimes as a way to weed out the old or sick individuals in a population.

But, looking up from where I was hacking apart the coyote's ribcase, I spotted a track in the nearby loam soil. A massive paw stretched over the ground, twice as big as the palm of my hand.

Wolves.

A shiver passed through my spine, and it was not because of the chilly autumn wind that had picked up.