The wolves had a pattern.
Eto spent three days watching them from the canopy, moving through the trees above their territory, learning the rhythm of their movements. They hunted in the early morning, when the light was grey and the forest was still. They returned to the same clearing in the mid-afternoon, the one with the packed earth where the undergrowth had been flattened by generations of their passage. They rested there, five bodies pressed together in the way of things that trusted each other completely.
The grey one with the white streak was the leader. It moved first, ate first, chose the direction when the pack moved. The white one, the old one, stayed close to its flank. The brown one ranged wider, more restless, breaking from the pack more often than the others. The black-grey one and the second grey, the smaller one, moved together, always together, their shoulders nearly touching when they walked.
The brown one was the one he would take.
It was the one that separated. Not far, never far enough to lose sight of the pack, but far enough. It would stop to investigate something the others had passed, a scent in the undergrowth, a sound in the trees. It would linger while the others moved ahead, then lope to catch up, its confidence absolute.
Nothing in this forest threatened them. The brown one had never needed to be careful.
Eto spent the fourth day building the trap.
He found a section of the wolf trail where the trees came close together, the trunks narrow enough that a wolf the size of a horse could pass through but not turn around quickly. The ground here was soft, the soil dark and damp from a stream that ran nearby, and the roots that crossed the path created natural places where a foot could be caught.
He worked with the stone dagger and the horn dagger and the bone spear, cutting stakes from the branches of dead trees, sharpening each one to a point that would go through hide and muscle. He drove them into the ground at angles, hidden beneath leaves and loose soil, their points aimed at the path. He built a tripwire from vine, low to the ground, where the wolf's front legs would catch it.
It was not a good trap. He knew this the way he knew things now, with the practical understanding of a man who had learned to make what he needed from what the forest gave him. A good trap would have been built by someone who had built traps before. This trap was built by a man who had read about traps in books and was now discovering that theory and practice were two different countries with a language barrier.
It would have to be enough.
He hid in the canopy above the trap, thirty meters up, the bone spear in his hand and the horn dagger on his hip. He waited.
They came in the mid-afternoon, the same time they had come for the past three days. The grey leader first, its head low, its yellow eyes scanning the forest with the casual attention of something that had never found anything worth fearing. The white one behind it, then the two grey ones moving together, then the brown one at the back, already lagging, its nose to the ground.
Eto watched them approach the trap.
The grey leader passed through the narrow section without slowing. The white one passed. The two greys passed together, their shoulders brushing the trunks on either side, the space tight for them but not tight enough to make them hesitate.
The brown one was twenty meters behind. It stopped to sniff at something on the ground, some scent the others had ignored, and Eto felt his hands tighten on the spear.
Ten meters. The brown one moved forward, its head still down, its attention on the earth beneath its feet.
Five meters.
Its front paw caught the vine.
The tripwire pulled tight and the stakes released from their hidden positions, three of them, driven forward by the tension of bent saplings he had spent the morning setting. They did not fire straight. One went wide, burying itself in a tree trunk with a sound like a hammer hitting wood. One went low, scraping across the wolf's foreleg without penetrating. The third went high and caught the wolf in the shoulder, driving into the muscle with a sound that he felt in his chest.
The wolf screamed.
It was not a howl. It was a sound of pain and surprise and rage, a sound that stopped the other wolves in their tracks and turned them around before the echo of it had faded. They came back fast, faster than he had expected, their bodies low to the ground, their teeth already showing.
He dropped from the canopy.
He landed on the brown wolf's back the way he had landed on the reindeer, his legs finding purchase on either side of its ribs, his left hand grabbing the fur at its neck, his right hand driving the bone spear down into the wound the stake had already opened. The spear went deep, deeper than he had meant it to, and the wolf's body convulsed beneath him.
The others were coming.
He pulled the horn dagger from his hip with his left hand and drove it into the wolf's neck, once, twice, three times, fast and hard, his shoulder screaming at the motion. The wolf's legs went out from under it and it crashed to the ground and he went with it, rolling clear as the first of the other wolves reached them.
The grey leader's jaws closed on empty air where his head had been a second before. He was already moving, his legs taking him away from the brown wolf's body, toward the trees, toward the canopy, toward anything that would put something solid between him and the four wolves that were now looking at him with eyes that had found something worth killing.
He ran.
He ran faster than he had ever run, the speed the rabbit had given him and the reindeer had built on and the months in this forest had sharpened. The trees blurred past him. The ground disappeared under his feet. He heard them behind him, the sound of their bodies crashing through the undergrowth, the sound of their breathing, the sound of the grey leader's jaws snapping closed on air that was always a half-second too far away.
He reached the tree and went up it without slowing, his hands finding the bark, his legs pushing, his body climbing faster than he had ever climbed. He was ten meters up when the grey leader hit the trunk below him, its weight making the whole tree shake, its jaws tearing splinters from the bark where his feet had been.
He climbed higher.
The grey leader circled the base of the tree, its yellow eyes fixed on him, its lips pulled back from teeth that were longer than his fingers. The other three wolves arrived behind it, their bodies pressing together at the base of the trunk, looking up at him with the same yellow eyes, the same teeth, the same absolute certainty that he was prey.
He sat on a branch twenty meters up and looked down at them and waited.
They stayed for an hour. They circled, they sniffed at the base of the tree, they looked up at him with eyes that did not look away. The grey leader tried to climb twice, its claws finding purchase on the lower branches, its weight bringing them down before it could get higher. It fell back each time and stood at the base and looked at him and made a sound that was low and steady and had nothing of fear in it.
Then it turned and walked away. The others followed, their bodies moving through the undergrowth until the forest swallowed them.
He stayed in the tree for another hour.
When he climbed down, the brown wolf was where it had fallen, its blood dark on the packed earth, its eyes already going flat. The stake was still in its shoulder. The bone spear was still in its side. The horn dagger was still in its neck.
He pulled the weapons free. He cut the haunches off where the wolf lay, working fast, his eyes moving constantly to the trees where the pack had disappeared. He wrapped the meat in the broad leaves he had gathered on the way down, bound it with vine, tied the drag line to his wrist.
He pulled.
The haunches were heavy, heavier than the reindeer's had been, and the distance back to the cave was eighteen kilometers and the forest was getting dark. He pulled them through the undergrowth with his right hand and kept the bone spear in his left and moved as fast as he could move, which was not fast enough, which was never fast enough when the light was going and the forest was full of things that might still be watching.
He reached the cave when the light was gone.
He built the fire with hands that were shaking from the run and the fear and the hunger that had been building since he dropped from the canopy onto the wolf's back. The flames caught and grew and he fed them until they were high enough to cook on, and then he cut the meat and put it on sticks and waited.
The first bite burned his mouth and he did not care.
He ate one haunch completely. He cut the second and put it on sticks and ate that too. He ate until there was nothing left, until the fire was low and his hands were steady and his body was full in a way it had not been full since before the slimes.
The shaking started while he was cleaning the bone spear.
It came from his hands first, the fine tremor he had learned to recognize, and then it moved up his arms and into his chest and his vision went red at the edges and he set the spear down carefully, deliberately, because he knew what was coming and he wanted to be on the ground when it arrived.
He lay back against the cave entrance and let it take him.
The shaking was worse than the slimes. Worse than the rabbit. His body arched off the ground and the lightning came out of him in arcs that lit the cave entrance like a storm contained, blue-white light jumping from his hands to the stone, from his chest to the earth, from his shoulders to the tree trunk beside him. He could not breathe. He could not think. There was only the current and the shaking and the red light behind his eyes and the knowledge that this was what it cost to take what the wolf had.
He did not know how long it lasted.
When it stopped, he was on his back looking up at the canopy, the stars visible through the gaps in the leaves, his body so heavy that moving his fingers felt like lifting stones. He tried to sit up and his body declined to participate.
He lay there.
The fire had gone out. The cave was dark. The forest was quiet in the way it was quiet when the things that lived in it were sleeping or watching or waiting for something to die so they could eat it.
He could not move.
He was eighteen inches from the cave, which he had reached, which he had dragged the wolf's haunches to, which he was now lying outside of because he had not had the strength to crawl inside before the shaking started. His body was a thing that did not belong to him anymore, a weight on the ground, a problem he would have to solve later.
He closed his eyes.
The first day passed in fragments. He was aware of light changing, the grey of morning giving way to the grey of afternoon giving way to the grey of evening. He was aware of thirst, a dryness in his mouth that became a constant presence. He was aware of the forest around him, the sounds of it, the small things that moved in the undergrowth and decided not to approach the thing that smelled like wolf and lightning and something that was not quite either.
He drank from the leaf cup he had left outside the cave, the one he had filled that morning before the hunt, reaching for it with an arm that felt like it was made of the same material as the trees. He spilled most of it. Enough got into his mouth to keep the thirst from becoming something that demanded more attention than he had to give.
The second day was worse.
The thirst was worse. The cold was worse. The position he was lying in had become a source of pain, not the sharp pain of injury but the deep ache of a body held too long in one shape. He tried to move and could not. He tried to think about the wolves and the pack and what he had taken from them and what it would give him, and thinking was too hard, so he stopped thinking.
The third day he slept.
The fourth day he woke and the thirst was the only thing in his mind. He crawled. It was not walking. It was not the smooth movement he had learned over the months in this forest. It was a dragging of his body across the earth toward the river he could hear but could not see, an inch at a time, his arms pulling and his legs following and his chest scraping against roots and stones.
He made it maybe ten meters before he stopped.
He lay with his face against the earth and his hands in the dead leaves and he could not go further. The river was somewhere ahead of him, close enough to hear, too far to reach, and he lay there and listened to it and hated the sound of it for being where he was not.
The fifth day he stood up.
He did not decide to stand up. He opened his eyes and his body was under his control again, the heaviness gone, the weakness replaced by something that felt like hunger and restlessness and the need to move. He stood in the middle of the forest eighteen kilometers from the cave, his tracksuit torn at the knees, his hands covered in dirt and dried blood, and he looked at the river he had been trying to reach and walked to it and drank.
He drank for a long time.
He sat back on his heels and looked at the water and tried to feel what the wolf had given him. His legs felt the same. His arms felt the same. The lightning was there under his skin, the same hum, the same current waiting to be called. He ran his hand across his face, felt the beard that had grown thick and uneven, felt his own breath on his palm.
Nothing felt different.
He stood up and walked back toward the cave, and halfway there he understood that something was different. He was walking at a normal pace, not running, not trying to cover ground quickly, and the forest was giving him more information than it had given him before. He could smell the stream before he reached it. He could smell the rabbit that had passed this way maybe an hour ago, its scent still on the leaves. He could hear the reindeer moving in the distance, the sound of its hooves on the forest floor, the sound of its breathing, the sound of its heart.
He stopped.
He stood in the middle of the forest and closed his eyes and let the information come. The smells were a map of everything that had moved through here in the past hours. The sounds were a map of everything that was moving now. He could hear the river he had left behind, the one he had drunk from, the water moving over stones. He could hear the wind in the canopy above him, the way it moved through the branches in patterns that told him where the trees were without him having to look.
He opened his eyes.
The wolf had given him the forest. Not the lightning, not the strength, not the speed. The ability to know what was in it, to smell what he could not see, to hear what he could not reach. He stood there and breathed and the forest breathed with him, and for the first time since he had arrived here, he understood what it meant to be a predator in a place where everything was trying to survive.
He ran.
He ran back toward the cave and his legs moved differently. Not faster, not at first. But the motion was smoother, the rhythm of it more natural, the way his feet found the ground and left it and found it again without the jarring impact that had been there before. He pushed harder and his legs responded, the rate of his strides increasing in a way that had not been possible before the wolf.
He reached the cave in minutes instead of hours.
He stopped outside the entrance and bent over with his hands on his knees and breathed. He had run eighteen kilometers in less time than it had taken him to crawl ten meters the day before. He had run at a speed that should have killed him, that should have torn his muscles and shattered his bones, and he was not even winded.
He looked at the cave. He looked at the forest. He looked at his hands, the dirt under his nails, the scars on his knuckles, the veins that stood out against the muscle that had grown there over months of hunting and eating and becoming.
He walked inside and gathered the skins.
He had been saving them since the first rabbit, stacking them in the back of the cave where the rain did not reach. The rabbit skins, the reindeer hides, the wolf pelt he had taken from the brown wolf before he ate it. They were stiff and uneven and smelled like the animals they had come from, and he had no idea how to turn them into something he could wear.
He spent three weeks learning.
The first week was failure after failure. He cut the rabbit skins too small, sewed them with vine that broke under the tension, made a shape that might have fit a child or a very small dog but did not fit him. He threw it aside and started again. The second attempt was better. The third attempt was something he could put on, something that covered his chest and his arms, something that held together when he moved.
The reindeer hides were harder. They were thicker, heavier, the needle he had carved from bone bending or breaking when he tried to push it through. He made a new needle from the wolf's rib, sharpening it against a stone until it was thin enough to pierce the hide without snapping. He used the wolf's sinew for thread, drying it and splitting it and twisting it into something that held.
He made a coat. It was ugly. The seams were uneven, the arms too long, the shoulders too tight. It smelled like smoke and blood and the things he had killed. He put it on and moved in it and it did not fall apart, and that was enough.
He made trousers from the second reindeer hide. He made boots from the rabbit skins, wrapping them around his feet and lacing them with vine, something to protect against the cold that was coming. He made a blanket from the largest reindeer hide, something to wrap himself in at night when the fire was low.
He was working on the wolf pelt on the twenty-first day when he felt the cold change.
He was outside the cave, scraping the last of the fat from the inside of the pelt with the stone scraper he had made for this purpose, and the wind shifted. It came from a direction it had not come from before, and the air in it was different, thinner, the moisture gone from it in a way that made his skin tighten and his breath cloud in front of his face.
He stopped scraping and looked up.
The forest was the same forest. The trees were the same trees. But the light was different, the grey of the sky lower and heavier than it had been, the shadows under the canopy longer and darker. The leaves that had been green when he arrived were brown now, some of them, the ones that changed with the season, and more of them were falling every day.
He finished the wolf pelt that week. He made it into a cloak, something he could wear over the reindeer coat, something that would keep the wind out and the warmth in. The fur was thick, the grey-brown of the wolf's back, the white of its chest showing at the edges where he had cut it. He wrapped it around his shoulders and fastened it with a pin he had carved from the wolf's bone, and he stood outside the cave and watched the sky.
The snow came on the twenty-eighth day.
It started in the early morning, when the light was barely light, small flakes that drifted down through the canopy and settled on the leaves and the branches and the earth. He stood at the cave entrance with the wolf cloak around his shoulders and the reindeer coat underneath and the rabbit boots on his feet and watched it fall.
The forest changed under the snow. The grey of the bark became dark against the white, the lines of the branches drawn sharp against the sky. The sounds were different, muffled, the usual noise of the forest reduced to something softer and further away.
He built the fire up and sat at the cave entrance with the blanket over his legs and watched the snow accumulate on the ground outside. It was beautiful, he thought, in the way that things were beautiful when they did not care whether you lived or died.
He had food for the winter. The reindeer meat he had dried and stored in the back of the cave, the rabbit meat, the last of the wolf. He had water from the river, which had not frozen yet but would, and he had a plan for that when it did. He had clothes that would keep him alive, a cave that would keep the wind out, a fire that he could build with his hands and the lightning if he needed to.
He had been in this forest for more than a hundred days.
He sat at the entrance of his cave in the clothes he had made from the things he had killed and watched the snow fall and thought about the world he had left behind. The apartment with the radiator that never worked properly. The coffee from the machine at work that tasted like burnt plastic. The web novels he had read on his phone during slow evenings, the ones where the hero arrived in another world and was given everything he needed to survive and thrive and conquer.
He had been given nothing.
He had taken everything.
The snow fell. The fire burned. The forest was quiet in the way it was quiet when it was waiting for something, and he sat in the entrance of his cave and waited with it.