[Solo Flashback] Anchors and Arrows (Completed)

[Daske Baggywrinkle]

Flashback 25 Fall 511, near Vanti Island Daske woke up to the sound of something bumping against the side of the boat. He scrambled out of his bunk, up the steps and into the cockpit, shivering in his underwear. A heavy morning fog reduced his world to an area about 50 feet around the boat. The bumping sound turned out to be a log hitting the side of the boat. He was surprised to see that he was only a few feet away from the beach. He had anchored a good thirty feet out the night before but it had been a high tide and now the tide had gone out. The keel of the boat was probably just a few inches above the bottom. He watched the waves lapping up on the beach for a minute and decided the tide was coming back in, so there probably wasn't anything to worry about. He threw some clothes on, wolfed down a cold breakfast and leaped off the stern of the boat, easily clearing the water separating the boat from the beach. An anchor held the bow and a rope tied to a tree held the stern. This “double anchor” arrangement kept the boat from drifting in a circle around the anchor during the night, which might result in it finding some rocks to collide with. It would also ensured that if the anchor were to drag, the boat couldn't go anywhere except aground. At least that was what he had been told. Daske set off down the beach scouring the edge of the dense forest for the materials he would need for the day's project – making a decent bow and a supply of arrows. He was struck by the contrast between the white sandy beach and the dark green jungle and he reveled in the sense of independence and self-sufficiency he felt. A few hours later he returned to his boat with an arm load of bamboo stems, a variety of other smaller branches, and the stalks of some variety of jute plant he had not run across before. He had worked with jute plants when he lived on the plains of Cyphrus. Jute plants could be processed into fibers, which in turn could be used to make twine, rope and cloth. He already had a supply of bow strings made from jute twine. He figured the same would be true of this variety. The sun had burned off the fog to reveal a clear blue sky punctuated by puffy white clouds. It took him a few minutes to free the stern line from the tree it was tied to. Apparently his knot tying skills needed work. Then waded out to his boat and climbed aboard. I already made one mistake, he thought, by letting the boat get too close to shore during the night. An animal could have made the same leap I did. It would be even more dangerous to stay in the cove during the day. Who knows what might show up and decide to have me for lunch. He had heard rumors about savage races that called the jungle home. He would work on his bow and arrows from a safe distance offshore. A gentle breeze was blowing across the boat's starboard side. He thought it might be stronger outside the cove. He raised the jib and left it flapping in the wind while he went forward and hauled in the anchor line until he had pulled the boat directly over the anchor. He gave a hard jerk on the line. It didn't come loose. He jerked harder on the line. It still wouldn't come loose. He spent the next half hour pulling on the line, jerking on the line, letting the boat drift away a bit and yanking on the line again. Eventually the anchor let go of whatever it had gotten hold of, and he was able to pull it up and lash it on the deck. Then he realized that the boat had headed up into the wind and was beginning to drift backward toward shore. He ran back to the cockpit and took up the slack in the port side jib sheet. The boat heeled over sharply, nearly throwing him overboard, and then surged forward as the wind filled the sail and took him off on a starboard reach toward a rocky outcrop along the outer edge of the cove. He secured the sheet and raised the mains'l as fast as he could. Then he brought the boat up to a close haul, overshot and found himself tacking to a port reach. He ducked as the boom flew over his head to the other side. He released the port side jib sheet and pulled the starboard jib sheet in. The jib flapped wildly in the wind as it swept across the bow. Then it filled and he was headed away from the rocks and out of the cove. He trimmed the mains'l and jib as best he could. As expected, the wind was stronger outside the protection of the cove. The boat heeled over about fifteen degrees to starboard. The gunnels were almost buried in the water, and spray was flying over the side and hitting him the face. His heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. But he had managed to avoid disaster and had gotten the boat out of the cove. He settled in on the low side of the cockpit with his left hand holding the tiller in a death grip and his right hand grasping the main sheet. Damn I'm good, he thought to himself as he sailed out into the open sea.

[Daske Baggywrinkle]

An hour or so later he hove-to, pushed the tiller hard over and tied it down, and waited for a few minutes to be sure the boat had achieved a balanced configuration. In this position it would remain pretty much stationary, slowly drifting backward in long, sweeping arcs, requiring little or no attention from him. He didn't really understand why it worked. Something about the mains'l, jib and tiller being arranged in such a way that they pushed the boat back and forth in an oscillating pattern. All he knew was that it worked if you got it set up right. It was the next best thing to anchoring, which was impossible this far out. He spent a few minutes adjusting sails and tiller until it seemed stable. He spent the next few hours making bows out of bamboo. He had learned basic bow making from the Drykas, but wasn't very good at it yet. He made and discarded six bows before he came up with one he thought would perform reasonably well. He strung it and tested its tension. It's not pretty, he said to himself, but it'll do as long as I don't ask too much of it. Next he cut twenty arrows, examining each one closely to make sure it was absolutely straight. He fletched each one with feathers he had collected along the beach, and whittled the other end to a sharp point, which he would harden in a fire later on. He would have liked to have had shale to make heavier tips, but he hadn't found any on the beach and he wasn't willing to go further into the jungle to look for it. It was late afternoon by the time he sailed back into the cove. He collected some dry driftwood and whittled thin shavings off it for tinder and then into slightly larger pieces for kindling. He built a compact fire pit surrounded with stones and began striking flint against his hunting knife and trying to get the resultant hot sparks to ignite the tinder. Twenty minutes later he had a small fire going, which he fed with kindling and then larger pieces of driftwood. Once he had a self-sustaining fire going, he prepared a dinner for himself. While he ate, he used the hot coals in the fire to harden his arrow points, managing to ruin only six of them in the process, which gave him fourteen usable arrows. Tomorrow he would go hunting. It was dark by the time he finished up. He buried the fire in sand, anchored a good distance out from the shore and turned in for the night. It had been a good day.

[Daske Baggywrinkle]

There is a brief span of time – only a few minutes really – just before the sun rises in the East, that is magical. The eastern sky glows with soft hues; blue or red or possibly amber, depending on the weather. The western sky, on the other hand, is dark with stars still visible. Everything is silent in this magical moment, as though the whole world were holding its breath waiting for the sun god to arise and ride forth in all his blazing glory. The magical moment was lost on Daske. He was sitting in the cockpit of his boat smoking a pipe and thinking about hunting. The previous day he had found a steam flowing out of a ravine and into the sea. It seemed as good a place as any to go hunting. Not that Daske had ever been hunting before. But he had been out with Drykas hunters and had picked up some knowledge by watching them. So he knew that dawn and dusk were the best times to hunt, and that water was the best place. He put his pipe in the cabin, took up his bamboo bow and arrows, his long sword and his hunting knife, and jumped over the side of the boat. “Whoa!” he shouted as he found himself chest deep in shockingly cold water. He waded into shore, thinking to himself that he probably should have checked how deep the water was before jumping. The sun had finally put in a appearance, rising surprisingly quickly over the Suvan Sea. He set off down the beach toward the stream. A half hour walk brought him to the stream. He stopped to drink and to fill his water skin and then turned inland, following the stream up a narrow ravine. It was tough going at first, slipping and sliding as he made his way up the ravine through a tangle of dense, unforgiving underbrush. After a while the terrain leveled out some and opened up into a forest. And what a forest it was. Daske had never seen anything like it. Great trees fifteen or twenty feet in diameter dominated the scene, rising hundreds of feet into the sky. Lichens hung from the branches like giant spider webs, and the undergrowth was dense. Vines hung everywhere. But the most striking thing was the cacophony of squawking and shrieking and hooting and howling that filled the air. Birds, Daske realized. He climbed a knoll overlooking the stream. There he saw two wild boars who had come to the stream for water. The smaller of the two lacked tusks and was probably a female. The other looked to be upwards of a hundred pounds and had large, curved tusks protruding from the sides of its mouth. Daske would go for the male. He fitted an arrow to the bow string and slowly pulled it back. It looked to be a thirty foot shot, which he figured was at the outer limit of his bow's ability to hit things reliably and with force. He sited, gave it a little elevation and released. Both boars heard the twang of the bow and looked in his direction. The arrow missed and hit a tree behind them with a solid thud. Both boars spun around to face the tree. Daske quickly fitted a second arrow, pulled and released. This time he hit the male boar in the shoulder. It let out a shriek as the female ran off. I hit it! thought Daske. Damn, I hit it! Then the boar charged.

[Daske Baggywrinkle]

Daske fitted another arrow, pulled and released. And missed. The boar was almost on top of him and was clearly upset. He dropped his bow and drew his long sword. As the boar closed on him it opened its mouth, revealing a nasty looking set of teeth and two six inch tusks. Daske swung the heavy sword as hard as he could. It glanced off the side of the boars head, slicing off an ear. It probably wasn't enough to do much damage, but it was enough to force the boar to turn a bit to one side. One of his tusks ripped through Daske's leg as it charged past him. I've been hit! Thought Daske. Damn, I've been hit! The boar turned and charged again. This time Daske hit it solidly on the snout, which caused it to veer off in one direction while Daske's sword sailed off in another. Blood was flying all over the place. The boar stopped a few feet away with his head swaying back and forth. It seemed to be dazed. Daske pulled out his hunting knife and jumped on the boar's back, sinking the knife into the back of its neck as hard as he could. The boar kicked and Daske went flying into a patch of prickly bushes. He was now weaponless, having left his knife buried in the boar's neck. He watched as the boar eyed him and prepared to charge again. It's head was still swaying slowly back and forth and it was making grunting sounds. Then it staggered and fell over. It struggled to get up for a few minutes and then lay still, breathing heavily. A few more minutes went by before it finally stopped breathing. Daske pulled himself out of the thorny bushes, earning himself some deep scratches. He hoped the thorns weren't poisonous. He was breathing hard, his clothes were ripped and splattered in blood, and his leg was bleeding. He collected his bow and sword, and then extracted his knife from the boar's carcass. He staggered over to the stream and sat down to examine his leg. The wound wasn't as bad as he had expected. But it sure hurt. The boar's tusk had ripped away some skin and muscle but had not hit a bone or severed an artery. At least not as far as he could tell. He carefully cleaned out the wound, grimacing through the pain. He tore off part of his shirt for a bandage, and used his bow string to secure it over the wound. He cinched it tight to close the wound as much as possible. He'd have to keep an eye on it to be sure he wasn't cutting off the blood flow. Then he made his way back to the dead boar and pondered what to do with it now that he had killed it.

[Daske Baggywrinkle]

Daske had accompanied the Drykas on hunts, so he had seen field dressing done and he knew that it was important to get the organs and other internal stuff out of the animal as soon as possible. He rolled the boar over on its back and used his hunting knife to make a cut from just below the breast bone down to the pelvis. This allowed him to access to the body cavity. The stench was so overwhelming that he had to back away gagging. After a minute he approached the animal again and carefully pulled out and cut away the internal organs and intestines. It was a truly disgusting operation. He stopped twice to vomit. Then he rolled the animal over on its side and let it drain. He followed that with a quick washing down with water from his water skin. He tied the boar's hind legs together and began dragging the hundred pound carcass back to the boat. It took him three hours to make it back to the boat. He was exhausted but he had to do something with the boar or he would lose it, either to animals or to spoilage. The first order of business was to skin it. He had seen this done many times and had even done it himself once. Using the rope he had used to drag the carcass back, Daske secured one end around the boar's snout and tusks and tossed the rope over a sturdy tree branch hanging out over the sand. He hoisted the boar up until it was hanging by its snout with its hind feet about a foot above the sand. He cut a ring through the skin around each of the boar's legs where they connect with its body. He did the same thing at the knee joints. Then he made a straight and shallow cut on each leg connecting the two rings, and peeled the skin off. Next, he cut a ring through the skin all the way around the boar's neck and then used his knife to carefully separate the hide from the fatty tissue beneath it as he peeled the skin off starting at the neck cut and working his way down to the feet. The entire operation took four hours and he ended up with only a few usable parts of the hide, having damaged the rest. By the time he was done, his knife was dull and pitted by the boar's tough hide. With the boar still hanging by its snout, he cut two slabs of meat from the haunches, and several strips from the belly. He let the boar down on to the sand and untied the rope. Then he carefully extracted the teeth. He was definitely going to make a boar tooth necklace. Not that he had any idea how to do that, but he was sure he would figure it out. Daske built a large fire and fed it wood until he had a solid bed of coals to work with. Then he strung the slabs of meat over the coals and continued laying wood over the coals. He kept this up for ten long hours. Then he took the smoked meat down and stored it on the boat. Done properly, it would keep for months. Done by Daske's hands, it would probably keep about two weeks. But that was two weeks of meat that he wouldn't have had otherwise. It was quite late when he finally turned in for the night. He was bone weary. But he was satisfied with the day's work.

[Trident]

Daske Skills: Wilderness Survival +3 Sailing +3 Weapon (Bow) +2 Fletching +1 Medicine +1 Food Preservation +1 Lores: Setting Sail on a Casinor Whittling a Bow out of Bamboo Hardening Arrowtips Hunting Boar [incomplete] Field Dressing Ones Own Wound Skinning a Dead Boar Comments: Great job! This was a very enjoyable thread. I've read a thousand of hunting/sailing threads, but none as in-depth and informative as yours. I think I actually learned a couple of things from this thread! Anyways, I tried to give you what you had requested, but some of them were grouped together (like Field Dressing and Medicine, and Butchering and Food Preservation) but hopefully that's okay by you. If you have any questions about my ruling, feel free to PM me!