He pulled the first stick from the fire and did not wait for it to cool.
The first bite burned his mouth and he did not care. He chewed and swallowed and pulled another piece free and kept going with the single-minded focus of a body that had been running on deficit for three weeks and had finally been presented with payment. The meat was dark on the outside and not quite finished in the center and it was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life without competition or qualification. Better than anything he could name. Better than the grilled meat at that restaurant his colleagues had taken him to for his birthday two years ago. Better than his mother's cooking, and he would take that opinion to his grave and deny having it.
He ate everything he had cooked.
Then he put more on the sticks and cooked that too and ate that.
He sat back against the cave entrance with the specific physical satisfaction of a body that had received what it needed after a long period of not receiving it. The fire was low. The forest was fully dark now, the kind of dark that had weight to it, and the only light was the orange glow of the remaining coals and whatever came from the stars through the canopy above the clearing.
He felt the shaking start in his hands.
He looked down at them. Both hands, trembling with a fine rapid vibration that he had not initiated and could not stop. He pressed them against his thighs. The shaking continued through the pressure and then moved up his arms and into his shoulders and then it was his whole body, a continuous uncontrolled tremor that rattled his teeth and made the cave entrance blur in his vision.
He tried to stand and could not.
His vision went red at the edges. Not dark, not the soft grey of approaching unconsciousness, red, a deep vivid red that crept inward from the periphery and turned the dying firelight into something that looked like the inside of a furnace. He was aware, in the part of his brain still generating coherent observations, that this was probably not a normal physiological response to eating meat after a period of starvation.
He tried to say something and what came out was not a word.
The red filled his vision completely.
Then it stopped.
All of it stopped at once. The shaking, the red, the heat he hadn't noticed building until it was gone. He was sitting against the cave entrance with his hands in his lap and the fire was coals and the forest was dark and quiet and he felt entirely normal except for the shoulder, which maintained its position as the primary ongoing complaint.
He sat there for a moment.
"What," he said.
Nothing answered.
He looked at his hands. Steady. He looked at the forest. Dark, normal, trees where trees had always been. He looked at the coals.
He was tired. He was more tired than he could remember being, the kind of tired that bypasses preference and simply makes decisions on your behalf. He got himself inside the cave and onto the pile of leaves and bracken he had been using as bedding and was asleep before he had finished the thought of going to sleep.
He woke up and could not move.
This was not the ordinary difficulty of waking. This was a comprehensive physical refusal, every muscle in his body locked in a simultaneous complaint that turned movement from an action into a negotiation he was losing badly. He lay on his back and stared at the cave ceiling and conducted an inventory. Legs, present, non-functional. Arms, present, the left still shouldering its ongoing situation, the right theoretically operational but currently pinned under a weight of general body pain that made lifting it an act of significant will. Back, a specific and detailed agony from the base of his spine to his shoulders.
He managed to turn his head.
Daylight outside the cave entrance. Morning, the grey-green light of the forest in early hours filtering in past the flat rock at the entrance.
He tried to sit up.
He got about three centimeters off the ground before his body filed a formal objection and he went back down.
"Okay," he said to the cave ceiling.
He lay there.
The day passed the way days pass when you cannot move and have nothing to do. Slowly, with considerable personal commentary. He drank water from the leaf cups he could reach without sitting up, rolling onto his side and bringing the cup to his face, losing about a third of it in the process. He ate the last small pieces of cooked meat he had left near the entrance within arm's reach. He slept again in the afternoon not because he chose to but because his body decided the conversation was over.
The second day was worse.
The pain had not diminished so much as redistributed, moving from the broad general agony of the first day into something more specific and targeted, like his body was renovating itself room by room and not being tidy about it. His joints ached in ways he had no prior reference for. His spine felt like it was being reorganized by someone working from a diagram they didn't fully understand. He managed to sit up on the second day, briefly, long enough to drink properly and drag himself to the cave entrance to relieve himself outside, which he considered an achievement worth acknowledging given the circumstances.
He was genuinely worried by the evening of the second day.
Not the performative worry of someone who wanted to complain about their situation but the quiet factual worry of someone doing an honest assessment. He was injured, alone, unable to move properly, his food supply was exhausted, and whatever had happened to him after eating the meat was either going to resolve itself or it was not. He had no medical knowledge that applied here. He had no one to ask. He lay in the cave and looked at the entrance and thought about his mother and then stopped thinking about his mother because that line of thinking had a destination he didn't want to arrive at.
He slept.
He woke on the third morning and lay still for a moment before attempting anything, expecting the same report from his body.
The report was different.
He sat up. Not easily, not without the shoulder making its position clear, but without the full body mutiny of the previous two days. He sat up and stayed sitting and breathed and looked at the cave entrance and the morning light coming through it.
He stood.
The shoulder was there. The shoulder was always there, a constant specific pain that he had simply incorporated into his baseline experience of being alive. But the rest of him, the legs, the back, the joints that had spent two days informing him of their grievances, felt different. Not painless. But lighter. The way a room feels when you open the windows.
He walked to the cave entrance and stood outside.
The forest was the same forest it had always been. Ancient, grey, indifferent. But he stood in it and breathed and noticed that breathing felt easier than it had in weeks. He rolled his right shoulder. He bent and straightened his knees. He turned his head side to side.
Something was different in his body and he could not name it specifically. It was not dramatic. It was not the arrival of a glowing status screen or a voice in his head announcing new parameters. It was subtler than that, a quality in his own physical experience, like a camera that had been slightly out of focus for weeks had been quietly adjusted while he wasn't paying attention.
He was also extraordinarily hungry.
The hunger was not the background deficit hunger of the past three weeks. It was immediate and demanding and it had opinions. His stomach had processed everything he had given it and had submitted a formal request for more with considerable urgency.
He looked at the remains of the carcass outside the cave.
He built the fire. The routine was automatic now, hands finding the materials and moving through the process without requiring his full attention. Bark shavings, small sticks, the friction board, the ember caught in the dry grass nest, the careful breath, the flame. He had it going in under three minutes.
He put everything remaining on sticks. Every piece he had cut from the carcass, everything that hadn't been eaten before the shaking started. He arranged them over the fire and sat back and watched them cook and said nothing because there was nothing to say that the situation hadn't already said more clearly.
He ate it all.
Every piece, working through them methodically from the time the outside was cooked without waiting for the center to catch up, because the center could catch up in his stomach and that was its problem. He ate until there was nothing left on any stick and then he sat back and looked at the stripped bones and the dead fire and the forest beyond.
His shoulder hurt.
Everything else felt better than it had in weeks. Better than it had in possibly longer than weeks. There was something in his legs specifically, a quality of readiness, like a coiled thing that hadn't been there before. He pressed his feet into the ground and felt it, some new relationship between his legs and the earth beneath them.
He stood up.
He looked at the trees.
He had a cave, a river, a stone spear, a stone dagger, an injured shoulder, and whatever the black rabbit had left behind in him when it died.
Time to find out what that was worth.