His second hit, thankfully, was one to the head. It wasn’t a clean kill by any means, but the pig fell over prone, and Aspen advanced onwards. Taking out the game knife, Aspen roughly slit the throat, ensuring this pig would not be able to escape him. Now Aspen realised his folly – to cook the beast, he needed to make a fire. And he had no wood. Looking around him, Aspen assessed the situation. He couldn’t let any predators steal his catch, but he couldn’t lug it about with him as he went to collect wood.
Retrieving his tarp from his backpack, Aspen wrapped the pig up in it, then began to dig a hole in the sand. Well, tried too. The fine sand would just pour back down the second he managed to move it, so he eventually settled on not burying it, instead placing the pig-in-tarp a good way away from his posessions, in hopes no animal would come across it. Retrieving the wood carving axe from the bottom of his bag – he’d always meant to learn how to use it, maybe to carve a statue of Morwen in her honor, - he headed a few steps into the thick jungle. The shade felt good on his back, he’d admit, but the jungle still filled him with unease. After taking a few steps into this greenery, Aspen realised the potential for him to get lost forever in it. Returning to his backpack, he took out a stick of chalk. Clutching the axe in one hand, and the chalk in the other, he reentered the rainforest.
There was no obvious path, so Aspen began to hack his way through the endless greenery. It couldn’t be good for the carving axe, admittedly, and he would need to sharpen it later, but for now it would do. There was a wide away of lianas and vines throughout, but Aspen wasn’t familiar with them, so decided to leave them for now. The trees were nothing like those back home, larger than he was, and impossible for him to cut down even if he did have the proper equipment and knowledge. There were a few branches scattered on the floor however, some of them so caught in the tangle that lined the floor and others home to some sort of insect he didn’t want to get involved with. Despite that however, he still managed to find some branches which looked suitable, and dragged them out alone the path he’d cleared. He hadn’t gone anyway near enough to need the chalk, but he promised himself he’d keep in on him, just in case.
He couldn’t find any stones on the beach to make a fire pit, so he started to roughly break the branches apart. Getting some of the tinder out of his bag as well as the flint and steel, he started striking away at the pile of tinder. It took a good ten minutes of striking at fire before he managed to get enough sparks to light the tinder. Lightly blowing on it, Aspen coaxed the fire upwards, until eventually he had produced a mediocre fire. Now, he turned to the pig.
His wood gathering hadn’t taken as long as he’d expected, so thankfully the pig was untouched. Now came the tricky part. Aspen had never cleaned a kill that wasn’t fish before, as the occasional hunting he had done with the Frostfawn had never involved cleaning up. Unsure of what to do, Aspen took out his gaming knife again, cutting into the flesh around the leg. When he reached the bone, Aspen wrenched it off. A leg would be enough for him to eat anyway; as wasteful as it seemed, he wasn’t sure how he would carve the rest of the animal, so this seemed like the easiest option.
Setting up the tripod over the fire, Aspen placed the leg on it, turning it every so often as he vaguely remembered his mother doing back home. Unsure of how long to cook it for, Aspen left it on there until the complexion of the meat had changed all the way through. It tasted very dry, and Aspen felt he had overcooked it, but at least it was better than it being overcooked. The relief on his face, on having fresh food that wasn’t the blasted fish, was obvious. Aspen quickly devoured the leg, and would have gone for a second, but the fire was starting to ebb, and Aspen’s head was starting to overrule his stomach. He should get moving. He had to be close to Syka, and should keep moving. Besides, if he did get lost, he could always return here.
Aspen started to pack up his gear. For the first time in his long journey, he was starting to feel optimistic about the journey. |
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