Chapter 4 - "The Path."
Alpha Date Year(002): 315,848
Day: 259/365
Day 1:
"After my first time returning to the cave after hunting for close to a week, I decided to make my way back to the campsite I stayed at before. I needed to make sure I stayed in the safe zone and that I knew exactly where I was going. The book named 'Basic Monster Survival' mentioned keeping track of everything in your journal, from which direction you're going for the day to what you are doing there. This means that before I return to the campsite in the afternoon, I need to gather either information or new supplies. So after making my way to camp and setting up the fire pit and tent for when I return. I used a trick with four sticks that Uncle showed me during the week he spent teaching me survival, and found North in about 45 minutes.
I then remembered the marks I placed on the tree and found out that during the time I was trying to catch one rabbit by myself, I only went about North-Northeast from the campsite, and when following the map he gave me, I realized that the danger zones that Uncle marked down were towards the West, the South, and Far North, and the less dangerous regions were in the East, towards where Uncle lived. This made sense, but the way Uncle marked these places down didn't make sense, as if every place near the initial campsite was dangerous. So I decided that for today, I would search for where the black rabbits are and look for places to place the different traps in the book so that I can at least catch more than one rabbit in a week. I discovered an interesting tree that seemed dark gray, with black lines inside the wood, giving it a deeper color than a normal tree. The place seemed peaceful, so I marked it as a safe zone on the map."
Day 3:
"So much has happened to me in just two days. For one, I had spent so much time and energy trying to find out where exactly the majority of black rabbits were. I found out that I was always just missing where they were located because where they burrow is farther North than I expected and was farther than the pass where I caught my first rabbit. It also didn't help that my scent was exposing me, so I couldn't follow them to their home. But after I read from the book that stated, 'Monsters that are prey animals have a keen awareness and a powerful sense of smell, rubbing yourself with dirt, leaves, and certain grasses can block their nose for a short time.' After I learned this, I trailed the rabbits to a general location that they all seemed to go to, and once I found their home, I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I then prepared by digging a hole in a clearing that they normally use and worked as fast as I could before the afternoon came. I was able to finish the narrow hole, but couldn't fully finish the pit as sunset was approaching. So, I gathered my belongings and headed straight to camp, again following my markings. I was able to make it to camp and roasted some herbs I found in the woods that the book said would help me with hunger pains. They lasted through the night, and I was able to get a good night's sleep, but I still needed something, as after waking up and relieving myself, I felt that I needed more. So at the crack of dawn, I went straight back to where the hole I had dug out was, and after walking for 15 to 20 minutes, I found myself right where I had placed the hole. I didn't want to raid the homes of the rabbits because the book said, 'Raiding the monster's home risks the chances of them leaving the region completely and will make it even harder in the long run to hunt them all.'
Though I don't know why they call these creatures monsters, since all they do is run away. But I guess they can cause damage if you corner them and try to hunt them like I am doing. Anyways, the night before, I used my knife to sharpen as many sticks as I could and dried them with soot from my campfire to harden them, creating a very small yet sharp and pointy stick to line the pit. The pit was about 2 yards deep and four feet wide. I was honestly surprised by how deep I was able to make it, but it made sense since I spent almost my entire afternoon making sure the pit was deep and narrow as the book suggested. After lining the entire bottom with sticks of varying sizes and sharpnesses, I climbed out and decided to cover the pit using sticks, leaves, and, most importantly, mud.
After marking where my trap was with a bunch of sticks with cuts across the entire branch, I then went back to camp and used the book to gather as many supplies as I could. This time, I gathered not only root herbs but also some mushrooms that the book said were edible. I still had to double-check whether or not they were safe, so I made sure that there were no peculiar problems with the mushrooms and roasted them for a light meal with what the book said was ginger root. After eating my meal, I prepared myself for bed, studying the book for as long as possible before my eyes gave in to sleep. The meal before made me more tired than I realized and soothed my nerves."
Day 4:
"You won't believe what just happened. I had woken up early, like always, to begin my journey. I cleaned myself using the river nearby as I had begun to smell, dried myself by the fire, and made sure my gear was prepared for the day. Then I prepared myself to hunt rabbits by rubbing sweet grass under my arms and all around my body, with some dirt to make sure I wasn't detected. Then I made my way to the trap, this time being quieter than before because the woods felt especially restless today for some reason. Then I checked on the pit, seeing that there were no creatures that had fallen inside the pit.
So then I went to see what other trap I could set up and began looking into something called a snare. I found out that what I had made before with my tarp was a crude version of this trap and decided to readjust my design to match the book's version. After half an hour, I figured out exactly why my snare was so bad. It was because I only cut holes inside the corners of the tarp. If I wanted to do it properly, then I needed to also cut holes above and below the center of the bag. This made it so that when placed far away, the bag could close more easily when trying to catch the prey. By tying it a certain way, the whole tarp can move forward more easily than before because it expands less when compared to before, so the wind doesn't catch it.
After making and testing the new version of the snare, I saw how effective it was, and I wanted to try it out when catching rabbits, but before heading out, I wanted to double-check the trap again. But just as I was going to dismiss the trap from working on the agile black rabbits, I looked at the top of the pit. The sticks, leaves, and dirt were disturbed, and there was a sound of thrashing coming from inside the pit. I then ran over as quickly as I could, stared deep inside the pit, and saw that a black rabbit had fallen and had been stabbed by the hardened, sharp sticks inside of it. I jumped up and screamed, "IT WORKS!" happy to have already caught a rabbit in four days. I saw how the rabbit flinched in my presence, but it couldn't move much because of the sharp stick in its lower abdomen. But to retrieve the rabbit, I needed to tie a rope to a tree and securely lower myself down, so I did it based on the instructions in the book, and tied a rope to a nearby tree, making sure everything was secure, from the knots on the tree to the knot tying my body. I then lowered myself down, legs first, clutching the sides of the pit so that I could slowly descend and reach the bottom with the rabbit.
I grabbed the rabbit, and even though it thrashed around, trying its best to survive, it simply couldn't muster enough strength with its small, frail upper body alone, and its lower body was now paralyzed from the stick going straight through its body. I didn't want it to suffer like this, so I decided to kill it then, and I acted quickly, stabbing it straight through the heart like before, this time more urgently. The rabbit fell dead, but I didn't have enough time to observe. I needed to hurry and leave before the scent of blood became too strong and caused my trap to be useless. So I wrapped it in the new version of the snare and ran straight to the campsite to harvest everything I needed from the rabbit. It only took me about 12 minutes to get there after running and then coming to a light jog to save energy for the harsh terrain. After this, I was able to immediately reach the camp with plenty of energy to spare after catching my breath briefly.
I sliced along the outlines of the body just like how Uncle taught me, but I made sure to this time keep the lower intestines as the guide said they could be used to help in setting traps. After taking out the core and other organs, I then harvested the hide and hung it where I kept the previous rabbit hide, making sure that the meat was also hanging properly so that all the blood in the animal drained properly. The guide mentions how the lower intestines of prey are good for something called 'fishing' and that extracting the fecal matter from them and smearing them on traps can attract more of that animal to your traps. I was happy after learning how to use all the organs properly, especially after wasting so many organs besides the heart and liver, which Uncle taught me to keep. But now I can use almost everything from the rabbit to help me in the future.
The book was helping me more and more every day. I then started reading about how to make string from fibrous trees for more traps. After I finished prepping the meat, I made a delicious stew with all the herbs and mushrooms I could find. The normally gamey meat of the rabbit became so much more tasty. I knew that this stew could last me another two or three meals, so I saved as much as I could for the next day. Today was honestly the best day since I've been out here. I caught a rabbit and gained another interesting round blue core, figured out how to make my trap even better, and made a new trap to catch even more black rabbits. If every day were like this, then I could probably save up enough cores to stay in the cave for multiple days or even weeks in a row. But I knew deep down that I was only lucky today, and if the rabbits learned to avoid my traps, then I would be back to starving for a week. This meant only one thing: I needed to learn much more than what was in the book to gain more cores and catch more rabbits."
Day 10:
Today, everything changed, and I now realized just what I've been trying to survive against in these woods. I didn't want to write anything in my journal these days because I wanted to save it on paper, but after what just happened, I needed to write this down. On the fifth day, I spent the whole day trying out the new version of my tarp snare. It took me a long time to capture a rabbit, but eventually, one just so happened to pass by the same clearing where I used the snare before. I caught the rabbit, took it to camp, killed it, and prepared the rabbit, this time making sure to take out the tendons because the book stated that dissecting the tendons and drying them can create a small thread suitable for sewing hide and cloth. I'm glad I learned this because it was so much harder creating a thin thread from the fibrous plants around me. But with this new way of gathering thread, I can prepare my meal and repair or make new clothes while I eat. I was relaxing, having two cores in my grasp in the same week made me happy, and I was excited to start learning how to make new clothes and thread.
The next three days, until the eighth day, I spent trying to find better locations for hunting rabbits and figuring out how to sew the rabbit hide into hand warmers to survive the upcoming cold season. On the eighth day after exhausting my time and efforts in the woods learning how to sew and stabbing my hand with a needle made of bone for hours, I finally figured out how to sew clothes. It was so hard and painful; my hands were covered in small cuts, and I had to clean my wounds using tea leaves and hot water. I finished making the hand warmers for both of my hands. I wanted to make gloves like the pair my Uncle wore at times, but I couldn't finish making the fingers. However, they still warmed my palms and wrists. The next day, I spent trying to capture more rabbits since most of my food ran out the day before
On this day, everything was different. The normally bustling woods seemed more silent, and the rabbits were nowhere in sight. I checked on my pit trap, but it was left undisturbed, even though I rubbed rabbit droppings near it to attract the rabbits close by. I even tried to catch rabbits in a place near the clearing, which seemed like a popular place for rabbits to go through. I even laid out some wild onions to attract them even more. However, no matter how many places I tried, it seemed like the woods were dead silent, and the gray sky made me even more nervous. When I went to check on the pit trap for the third time that day, I saw something that scared me even more than the dead forest. There were bushes near the pit that were somehow broken, and they looked like they had been trampled. I also looked at the tracks near the bushes and saw something terrifying. Instead of the small tracks of a black rabbit, there was a paw print bigger than my hand. After I saw this, I immediately started running away and headed down the safest path listed on the map.
The day after that, it rained all day, and because I didn't have my tarp at the bottom of my tent, the ground beneath it became too wet to sleep on. I was in trouble and getting cold, which I remembered Uncle saying would make me sick. I didn't want to get sick in the woods because that would be the worst. I remember being sick before and how bad it was. I couldn't do anything besides drink water and lie in bed, and if I were stuck in the woods, then no one would take care of me. So I used the book, which suggested using the tent cover in a tree and tying my body to it to keep warm for the day. It was exactly what I needed to do, so I hung up my gear for the day, took the cover for my tent, went up the tree, tied the tent cover between the trunk and two branches, tied myself to the tree so that I wouldn't fall, and lastly covered myself in a blanket to rest for the day. It was a great plan because the tree was dense enough to catch the rain, and the tree offered protection from the groundwater. The hand warmers helped keep me warm.
I spent the ninth day reading through the book, trying to learn as much as I could since I couldn't hunt anything in the rain. I was also nervous about the pit trap since I didn't want it to be flooded by the rain and groundwater. The rain lasted far into the night and began thundering as well. It was hard to shut out the thunderstorm, which made it even harder to understand the book, which still had some words that were difficult for me to understand or read. To be truthful, I still needed more reading lessons, and even though Uncle taught me diligently, I still needed more practice with reading and writing. Math was fun for me because numbers made more sense to me, but I did enjoy reading and writing, especially because he always told me a story to help me learn how to read books. However, I knew that there were some details I was missing as I was reading the book, and the instructions were so detailed that it made it hard to learn. After reading through most of the book, I decided to head straight to bed since most of the book at this point didn't make sense, and I was too tired to focus. I tried shutting out the noise, but the thunder continued and even got louder at one point.
However, even though the sound of thunder crashed in the sky, what scared me the most wasn't the noise but the flashes of images coming through the tent cover. I was able to ignore them until an image flashed that still scares me now when I think about it. Just when my eyes were closing and I was about to head back to bed, I saw the figure of a large creature with giant teeth ready to pounce at me. I tried to push the figure away out of fear, causing rain to fall on my face and wake me up completely. After the cover flew off, I tried to grab it and look down, but when I looked down, everything changed. I saw it…the very thing that would cause my Uncle to mark down the direction where I shouldn't go unless I wanted to die. It was a large dog, bigger than me, and with a large mouth, filled with teeth that looked like they could rip my head off if it wanted to. Not only that, but the worst part about that dog being there wasn't the fact that they looked like they could easily catch me if I ran away, or if I were to try and trap them with my snare or in my pit then they wouldn't fit, it was the fact that there more of them, three to be exact. They were all equally intimidating and coordinated as they searched my campsite thoroughly. They seemed to spot my gear hanging up and tried jumping up. They jumped higher than I could, but still couldn't make it to my gear. I was suddenly thankful for Uncle telling me to hang my gear as high as possible so that no animal and the forest could get to it easily.
While I tried to calm myself, I was so nervous after being awoken in such a way. But my fear only increased because I observed one of the dogs coming towards me. They seemed to be attracted to the movement of the cover flapping in the wind, so I quickly pulled it up as the thunder roared to stay hidden. This only made the hound come closer as it approached, now with more of a crouched walk, as if it was observing or…hunting something. This made me fear for my life as if the hound already knew where I was and was about to get me, so I hugged the branch I was lying on, face first, and made sure that they couldn't see me. I didn't even think about the cold and the rain; I only knew that if they knew I was here, then they could try to climb the tree, and if they got up here, then I was dead. The hound moved at a crawling pace, trying to observe what or who had caused the cover to move upward, and while looking at the trunk, he found nothing. Their vision must have blurred with the rain and lightning... at that moment, all I remember thinking was how grateful I was that it was storming.