I Was Not the Only One Here
What floated before my eyes was the Survival Chat Window. A translucent rectangle hung fixed in empty air, and when I swept a hand through it, the hand passed straight through. Even with my eyes shut, the letters stayed dead center in my vision, as if someone had etched them directly onto my retina.
A word on the third line caught me. Dick. I lowered my head and looked down at myself. Mud was caked over me in thick clumps, and beyond that I had nothing to cover myself with. Someone was seeing me exactly like this. In thirty-seven years of living, it was a first.
I folded the thought away. It was a thought that would allow itself to be folded. An ember was dying on my palm right now, and shame could wait until that ember was alive again; it would not be too late then. I laid a pinch of dry bark dust over it, cupped my hand against the wind, and let out a thin thread of breath. The ember wavered once, then spread into the powder.
My hand stopped around the twigs. He was right. The fire was still a newborn. I blew nothing but breath for a long while after that, and only once the flame had grown to the size of my palm did I begin setting on the finest twigs, one at a time. Smoke climbed, and through the damp air a dry warmth touched my face for the first time.
"......Thank you for the advice."
"I am. But embarrassment is something I can still do after the fire's caught."
"I don't know. I was on my way to work in Seoul, and I fell."
"I'm an office worker. Manager on the sales management team at a mid-sized trading company."
"My father was a tour guide. I followed him around from the time I was little."
I didn't explain any further. Whether they believed me was theirs to decide. My work was to keep the order: fire, water, body heat, a place to sleep. It was the order my father had taught me in front of a campfire in the Sahara.
At four thousand meters in the Himalayas, breath itself had been time. In the Amazon, a single wound had eaten an entire arm in three days. In Africa, the lives of all twelve in the party had hung on one dry well. Every time, my father said the same thing. Feelings later. The order, now. The fire was alive, for the moment. Next was water.
It nagged at me that I had already swallowed a mouthful of the creek, taken from upstream. Right after a hard rain, a tropical stream sweeps carcasses and droppings down from above. Giardia, E. coli, Leptospira. An incubation of three days to a week. I had already drunk it, so there was nothing to be done. From here on, I would drink only what I had boiled.
The problem was that I had no vessel to boil it in. From the bank I chose several stones as thick as my forearm and pushed them into the fire.
"I'm boiling water."
With my hands I dug into the earth beside a tree root and laid broad leaves down in several layers, then caught creek water in the hollow they made. Using two sticks, I pinched up a stone heated in the fire and dropped it in. It struck with a hiss, and steam jumped. When a stone cooled I took it out and put in a fresh one. After three or four rounds, fine bubbles began to rise off the surface.
"You shouldn't use stones from the creek bed. A stone that's taken on water will explode when you heat it."
"Dry ones. Bright, light stones with a tight grain are better. A rock full of holes, or one that water has seeped into, is holding water inside."
"The water carries the heat away. As long as there's water, the leaf won't burn."
Then unfamiliar text surfaced along the bottom of my vision.
I blinked. It was shaped differently from the chat that had come before. Angle brackets, not square ones, and a courteous honorific tacked on beside the name.
"I don't know either."
At the sound of my voice the chat froze for a long moment, then began to flow again. I pushed the fact that the number had something to do with this broadcast into a corner of my mind and checked the water. Enough bubbles had risen. Cooling it would take time. While I waited, I wiped the blister the bow drill had split open on my palm, using a leaf from the side the boiling water hadn't touched. A ruptured blister is a road in for infection. The rule is to keep it covered, but in humidity like this it has to be washed first. It didn't hurt. I had taken pain out of the calculation. I unwound the banana leaves bound around my soles as well, rinsed them once in the boiled water, and wrapped them again in fresh leaves. In the tropics, a small wound becomes an ulcer in three days.
When the water had cooled, I folded a leaf, scooped with my hand, and drank. It was lukewarm and tasted of soil. Far worse than the creek, and far safer. I swallowed. This time, no text appeared.
"Tomorrow. A person can last three weeks without food. What's urgent is water and body heat."
The first day, you have to save your strength. From the second day without food, judgment dulls, and sweat only makes you need more water. No walking. No hurrying. Hunger is a sensation you can endure.
I swallowed another mouthful. KP. Kilopoints, key points, survival points—I had no way of knowing. The only thing certain was that the text had appeared the moment someone tried my words for themselves, and that the someone was a person on the far side of this screen. Had it been daylight, I would have laid wet leaves on the fire and sent smoke up. But I didn't know where this place was, or who might come if they saw it. A signal was a problem for later. It was nearly midnight.
The forest had gone quieter. Now and then, between the frogs and the insects, some animal cried low. I heaped fallen leaves thick in a hollow between the roots. To stop the cold climbing out of the ground, what lies under the body has to be thicker than what lies over it. Along the approach on the creek side I laid a ring of thorny vine. It wouldn't stop anything, but it would make a sound. I left the ember tucked between two stones and built the campfire up only as far as the large branches that could hold through the night.
"I have to sleep. If my body temperature drops, my judgment goes with it."
It was a night without a single star. The only way to read the time was by how fast the fire sank.
I pushed myself down into the leaves. The moment I shut my eyes, my father's voice was there. Survival is not what a hero does. It is what a person who does not give up does. For the first time in thirty-seven years, I believed those words with my body.
What I opened my eyes to was dawn. The sky was thinning from ink-black toward a deep navy. The fire had not died, and my lower half felt heavy. I looked down. My cock stood rigidly upright. A full bladder at dawn. Nothing but physiology. Nerves answering during REM sleep, that was all.
"My bladder is just full."
I got up as if nothing were the matter and walked to a thicket ten paces from the fire. There's a claim that scattering urine around a camp reduces how close certain predators will come. It has never been scientifically proven, but I had nothing to lose by it. The chat had gone into an uproar, and I ignored every word. The first urine of dawn, you read the color. Dark means dehydration. Mine was a pale yellow. Still all right.
It happened as I finished and turned. I had started back toward the fire when I stopped.
Clear tracks were pressed into the mud of the creek bank. Feline prints, each the size of my palm—far fresher than the ones I had seen yesterday, and they made a full circuit of the camp. Depth and spacing put the weight at somewhere around sixty kilograms, the gait a slow, searching walk. It had prowled the whole night through, waiting for the fire to die. In this forest, the fire had been what kept me.
I held my breath and eased back toward the fire. Show your back and it chases. Run, and it chases harder. I couldn't tell where the beast was watching from. A single axe, and I would have felt like a different man. I drew the thickest branch from the fire. Its tip was blazing a violent red. No axe. No spear. Nothing but my bare body. Even so, there was fire.
It meant someone had learned a thing from the scene just now and put it to use. In this situation? Not a chance. I pressed the question down and stared toward the creek.
The wind blew from the beast's side toward mine. Its scent would already have reached me. The underbrush shook.