He sat against the tree for longer than he should have.
The shoulder had stopped being a sharp pain and had become a comprehensive one, the kind that installed itself in the background and colored everything else. He looked at the dead creature in front of him and then down at his left arm, which was doing nothing useful and had soaked the sleeve of his tracksuit top a dark red from the shoulder down.
He needed to deal with that before he dealt with anything else.
He reached across with his right hand, grabbed the left sleeve at the shoulder seam, and pulled. The fabric resisted in the way cheap stitching does, holding for a moment and then giving all at once. He pulled the sleeve free and held it in his right hand.
What followed was not dignified.
He got the sleeve around the shoulder by looping it over with his right hand, pulling one end with his teeth to hold tension while his right hand brought the other end around, and then tying it off in a knot that took four attempts because one-handed knot tying is a skill nobody develops until they absolutely have to. Each time the fabric moved against the wound he made sounds he would not have made in company. Not screaming exactly, more a sustained pressurized vocalization that served the practical purpose of keeping him from fainting.
He pulled the knot tight with his teeth and his right hand simultaneously.
The pain peaked at something that temporarily removed his ability to form thoughts and then settled back to its established baseline of comprehensive and constant.
He sat there with his back against the tree. His left arm hung at his side doing nothing. His right hand found the stone dagger on his hip and he held it without particular purpose, just the comfort of holding something solid.
The creature lay in front of him. Black fur, horns buried slightly in the earth from where it had fallen, blood pooling dark and wide beneath its neck. It was genuinely large up close and not moving. He had killed it, which still occupied some part of his brain as an abstract fact it hadn't fully processed yet.
"Fuck this shit," he said again, to the clearing, to the creature, to nobody.
He put one hand on the ground and got his feet under him.
The walk back to the cave with the creature took the better part of an hour. He grabbed it by the hind legs with his right hand and dragged it, and it was heavier than things that size had any right to be, and the ground between the clearing and the cave seemed to have acquired new obstacles since the last time he had walked it. Roots, slopes, a wet patch near the river that he sank into past his ankle. He stopped four times to breathe and once to sit down for a few minutes because the alternative was falling down.
He got it to the cave.
He dropped the hind legs outside the entrance, straightened up, and stood with his hand on his knee looking at the animal for a moment.
He had been to Namibia once. He was eleven years old and his parents had taken him back to show him where he had been born, a trip that had involved a great deal of driving and two nights at a safari camp outside Etosha where a guide named Johannes had skinned a small antelope in the late afternoon while Eto had stood watching with the specific fascination of a child witnessing something that was both slightly terrible and completely compelling. He had watched the whole thing. He remembered the technique more than he had realized, the way Johannes had worked quickly and without wasted movement, where to cut first, how to separate the hide from the flesh beneath.
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He had been watching with two working hands and no open wound in his shoulder at the time, which he now recognized as a significant advantage Johannes had enjoyed.
He started with the hind legs, cutting around the ankles with the stone dagger and working up. The dagger was not ideal for this. It was sharp but not precisely sharp, and he had to use more pressure than was elegant, which meant more movement, which meant the shoulder made its presence known repeatedly and without sympathy. He cut, then repositioned, then held the hide down with his foot while he pulled with his right hand, then cut again where it hadn't separated cleanly.
He used his teeth twice. Once to hold a section of hide taut while he cut underneath it, once to pull a piece free when his right hand didn't have the angle. He was aware that this was not the technique Johannes had demonstrated. He was also aware that Johannes had not been working under these specific conditions.
It took hours.
The light moved across the clearing, came through the trees at a lower angle, started going amber. He worked through all of it, stopping occasionally to sit and breathe and tell himself he was not going to pass out, which was partly instruction and partly negotiation. His right arm ached from doing the work of two arms. His left arm remained committed to its position of non-participation. At some point he realized he was talking to the animal while he worked, not saying anything meaningful, just a continuous low commentary that was mostly profanity arranged in different grammatical configurations.
The hide came free eventually. Not cleanly, not the way Johannes had done it, but completely. He rolled it to one side. The carcass beneath was dark red and smelled like raw meat, which was exactly what it was.
He butchered what he could manage. Haunches, the back sections, whatever came away in pieces he could work with one hand. He left the rest. He had neither the tools nor the remaining energy for comprehensive butchery and the parts he had were going to be more food than he had eaten in three weeks.
He built the fire.
This part at least he had down. Three weeks of lighting fires from scratch had produced a competence he hadn't expected of himself. He had the materials staged near the cave entrance, the dry bark shavings, the small sticks, the larger ones, a flat piece of wood with a groove worn into it from repeated use. He did it mostly by feel now, the friction method that had taken him four days of failed attempts to get right the first time and now took him maybe three minutes.
The flame caught. He fed it up through the sizes until it was stable and producing heat, then rigged the meat on green sticks angled over the fire.
Then he sat back against the cave entrance and watched it cook.
The smell hit him before the first drop of fat had finished falling into the fire. Meat. Real meat, cooking, the smell of it rising up through the trees and into what remained of the afternoon. His stomach made a sound that was less polite than he would have preferred.
The meat sweated and hissed and dripped and the fire answered each drop with a small spike of flame. He watched it with the concentration of a man who had genuinely nothing else to do except remain conscious, which was proving to require more active effort than it usually did.
His vision did the thing it had been doing periodically since the clearing, a slight softening at the edges that was his body's way of suggesting that unconsciousness was available as an option if he wanted it. He did not want it.
"Fuck," he said. Not at anything. Just as a general statement of position.
The meat turned darker on the outside. Fat ran down the sticks toward the fire.
"Fuck," he said again.
He shifted against the cave entrance and his shoulder reminded him that shifting was a decision with consequences. He settled back into the position that hurt least and fixed his eyes on the meat and kept them there.
The light was going now, the grey deepening toward dark, the forest closing in the way it did every evening, all the spaces between the trees filling with shadow. The fire pushed back against this in a small orange radius that included the cave entrance and not much else.
He was cold. He hadn't noticed it while he was working but sitting still it arrived, the evening temperature dropping through his sleeveless tracksuit top with the indifference of weather that had no awareness of and no interest in his current situation.
"Fuck fuck fuck," he said, with the specific rhythm of someone using words to stay awake rather than to communicate anything. He blinked hard. Blinked again.
The meat hissed.
He was not going to pass out.
He picked up a stone from the ground next to him and held it in his right hand and pressed its edge against his palm with enough pressure to keep the edge of his attention on the physical world.
The meat was darkening properly now. He leaned forward and turned the sticks, one at a time, right hand only, and the underside was pale and needed more time. He leaned back.
"Fuck fuck fuck," he said again, into the dark.
The forest said nothing back.
The fire kept burning.