Three weeks passed the way unpleasant things tend to, slowly while they were happening and then all at once when he looked back at them.
He noticed the weight loss first in his hands. The knuckles looked more pronounced than he remembered. Then he noticed it in the way his tracksuit sat on him, the shoulders slightly looser, the waistband no longer fitting the way it had. He pulled the waistband out and looked at the gap between fabric and skin and said nothing because there was nothing useful to say about it.
He was disappearing.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. But consistently, every day, a little less of him than there had been the day before. The berries and fruits and mushrooms he had been surviving on were keeping him alive in the technical sense of the word, the sense that meant his heart was still beating and his lungs were still exchanging gases, but they were not keeping him intact. His body had started paying for the deficit by withdrawing from its own reserves, and those reserves were not unlimited.
He could feel it in how he moved. The walk to the river in the morning, which had once been nothing, now required a considered effort. He had started sitting down more than he used to. He noticed slopes he hadn't noticed before.
He needed protein. He needed fat. He needed to kill something and eat it.
This was not a conclusion he had arrived at happily. He had arrived at it the way you arrive at the decision to finally call a doctor, only after exhausting every alternative and being forced to admit that the alternatives were not working. He had foraged his immediate radius until there was nothing left in it worth foraging. The mushrooms he had identified as safe were becoming less common as the season shifted, or whatever passed for seasons here. The fruits were inconsistent. Some days he found enough, most days he didn't.
He needed meat.
The problem was finding something to kill.
He started extending his search radius from the cave in deliberate increments. Fifty meters north, then back. Fifty meters northeast, then back. Working his way around the compass points slowly over several days, mapping what was out there, looking for signs of animal activity. Tracks in soft ground near the river. Disturbed undergrowth. Droppings. Anything that told him something warm-blooded was moving through here regularly.
He found tracks on the fourth day of searching. Small things, cloven, light. Some kind of deer or equivalent. He followed the trail until it disappeared into dense undergrowth he couldn't push through quietly, and he came back the next day and tried again, and the day after that, and saw nothing.
He found what appeared to be a burrow system on day six. Holes in the earth at the base of a large root cluster, several of them, with the packed smooth edges that suggested regular use. He sat downwind of it for two hours with his spear across his knees and nothing came out. He came back the next morning and sat for another hour. Still nothing. Whatever lived there either knew he was there or was operating on a schedule that didn't coincide with his patience.
He was slower than he used to be. He knew this abstractly but the forest kept demonstrating it concretely. Things he heard moving in the undergrowth were gone by the time he turned. Twice he caught movement between trees at the edge of his vision and by the time he had the spear up there was nothing there. He was not fast enough and he was getting less fast by the day and he was aware that this was a problem with a self-reinforcing quality that he did not enjoy thinking about.
On the twenty-third day, or what he counted as the twenty-third day, he went further than he had gone before. He pushed his radius to a full hundred meters east of the cave, following a slight depression in the ground that suggested water drainage and therefore animal movement, and he found the clearing.
It was not large. Maybe fifteen meters across, the trees pulling back from a flat area of shorter grass where light actually reached the ground for once. At the far edge of the clearing, its back to the trees, eating something off the ground with an air of complete unconcerned ownership, was the biggest rabbit he had ever seen.
He stopped moving immediately.
The animal was black. Not dark brown, not very dark grey, black, the kind of black that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. It stood with its haunches at roughly his hip height, which put its full standing height somewhere around his chest, maybe higher. It had the general architecture of a rabbit, the long back legs, the ears, the rounded body, but the ears terminated in short curved horns the color of old bone, and when it lifted its head and looked across the clearing its eyes were red and entirely without the gentle stupidity of the domestic rabbit. They were the eyes of something that had never been prey.
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Eto did not move.
The creature looked at the middle distance for a moment, found nothing interesting, and went back to eating.
He had the spear. He had the dagger. He had the element of surprise and whatever remained of his physical capability after three weeks of inadequate nutrition. He needed to get within throwing range or close enough to use the spear as a contact weapon, and he needed to do it without the creature hearing him, and he had approximately one chance at this before it either ran or decided not to run.
He started moving along the treeline, staying in the shadow, keeping his feet as quiet as the undergrowth would allow. Each step was slow and deliberate, heel down first, rolling to the toe, the spear held horizontal so it didn't catch on branches. He covered maybe eight meters this way, closing the angle, getting closer to the creature's flank.
He was ten meters out when he stepped on the branch.
The crack was not loud. In a city it would have been inaudible. In this clearing at this moment it was a gunshot.
The rabbit's head came up.
He threw himself forward because there was no other option.
The ground between them disappeared under his legs and for a moment, a single moment, he thought he had the distance right, thought the spear was going to connect, thought the weeks of inadequate protein hadn't actually taken as much from him as he feared.
Then his leading foot caught on a root he hadn't seen and his body dropped six inches at exactly the wrong moment.
The spear glanced off the creature's flank instead of driving in. He stumbled forward and tried to recover and the creature moved sideways with a speed that had no business belonging to something that size and then it turned, and he got a very clear close-range look at those horns as they swung toward him.
The left horn caught him in the shoulder.
The pain was extraordinary. Not sharp, not clean, but deep and tearing and accompanied by a sound from his own body that he had never heard before and immediately wanted to never hear again. It lifted him slightly and threw him sideways and he hit the trunk of a tree with his back hard enough that his vision went white at the edges.
He coughed. Blood in his mouth, from where he had bitten the inside of his cheek, or from something worse, he couldn't tell. He tried to raise his left arm and his left arm declined to participate.
The creature turned to face him.
It was not afraid of him. That was the thing. It was looking at him the way something looks at a problem it has already solved and is now tidying up. It lowered its head and the horns dropped level and its haunches coiled and Eto thought, with the specific clarity that arrives when the body decides that panic is a luxury it cannot currently afford, that he was about to die in a forest wearing a tracksuit because he tried to stab a magic rabbit.
It came at him.
He moved.
He didn't decide to move. His body moved and his mind caught up afterward, and what he found when it caught up was that he was standing beside the creature instead of in front of it, maybe a meter to its right, and the horns had gone through the tree trunk he had been pressed against. Wood chips in the air. The creature wrenching its head sideways trying to pull free.
He had no idea how he had done that.
He had no time to think about it.
He hit the creature with his right fist as hard as he could manage.
The creature's head moved approximately two centimeters. It looked at him with its red eye from very close range and then it pulled its horns free from the tree trunk and kicked him.
The kick connected with his midsection and he traveled backward through the air in a way that briefly removed gravity from his list of ongoing concerns. The second tree trunk was less forgiving than the first had been about receiving him and he landed in a heap at its base with all the grace of a dropped bag of laundry.
He lay there for a moment and assessed his situation. Left shoulder non-functional and bleeding. Right side of his body informing him via comprehensive pain signals that the kick had not been gentle. Spear somewhere in the clearing behind him. Dagger still on his hip.
The creature was coming again.
He got up. Not quickly. Not smoothly. But completely, both feet under him, because the only alternative to getting up was staying down and staying down had a very obvious conclusion.
He pulled the dagger.
The creature came in the same way it had before, head lowered, horns forward, direct and confident, because direct and confident had worked every time so far and there was no particular reason to change a successful approach.
He waited longer than felt safe.
Then he stepped into it, not away from it, into it, grabbed the left horn with his right hand and hauled his body close to the creature's neck, and he forced his left arm to work. The shoulder screamed at him in a language made entirely of white hot specificity. He closed his left hand around the dagger anyway and drew it across the creature's neck in one hard pull and felt the resistance give.
The blood was immediate and total. It went everywhere with the enthusiastic volume of something that had been under considerable pressure and had just found an exit. The creature made a sound he had not expected, something between a scream and a cough, and its legs went in three different directions and it went down.
He went down with it.
He lay on the ground of the clearing next to a black rabbit the size of a large dog, both of them bleeding, the forest completely indifferent to this outcome or any other. His left shoulder was a conversation he was going to have to have with himself in a moment. His right hand was still around the dagger. The creature was still, its red eyes open and already going flat.
He stared at the canopy above.
"Fuck this shit," he said aloud.
His voice sounded strange in the quiet clearing. The trees did not respond. The river was audible faintly in the distance. Something moved briefly in the undergrowth at the far edge of the clearing and then decided against investigating further.
He closed his eyes.
He had about ten minutes before the blood loss became a more urgent problem than the exhaustion. He knew this the way he knew things now, not from books or media but from his body telling him directly and without softening the message.
Ten minutes.
He opened his eyes and started the process of getting up.