Primitive Instinct: The Journey Home

The next day, Roar’kaol’tok woke very early and made quick work of skinning the pulak and borrowed my sled to take the hides and the meat wherever he needed them to go and came back with a lot of leather bags.

“Fern’rath’fik,” he said calling me over from where I’d been waiting for Diesel to finish his morning potty break.

He opened the bags and I saw a lot of meat in one, dried poop in another two, and a bunch of things that looked like different types of potatoes and other root vegetables.

“Good tein-tein,” he smiled and started taking the bags into the tent.

I laughed and pulled the empty sled out of the way before staring, again, at the orou.

“Trophy. Make weapons,” I said to myself.

The snow wolf had white and light gray fur with the same kind of spots as a snow leopard, intended to make it the perfect ambush predator. It had a canine muzzle and feline ears and paws, and the body was narrow, but powerful like a wolf, but had strong, thick legs like the snow leopard. The tail looked like a wolf for the first half or so, then turned feline at the end with a thick, almost bulbous tuft. It was very long, giving it better balance and agility at speeds a wolf was incapable of reaching.

Roar’kaol’tok came back outside and handed me his knife and a cup of tea.

“Make raan?” he asked, and I nodded as Diesel bounded back from his trip to poop and took a chunk of meat from the hunter.

“Keep trophy,” I growled at the thing that nearly took the only people I cared about from me.

Diesel and I were family and had been for two years when I got him out of the shelter and off the kill list. It was a bond grown over earning trust and respecting one another. Roar’kaol’tok might been a new face, but he was family, too. Just not as close as Diesel and I... yet.

“This thing almost took both of my family members. I’m going to wear this bitch like a warning label,” I spat, and Diesel growled viciously, making the hunter laugh and point at me.

“Rath’fik,” he gestured to me, then blinked before looking at me. He looked completely confused before pointing to himself. “Baanbak?”

“Family looks after one another. They help each other and have each other's back. What you’ve done for me and Diesel makes you family,” I nodded and went to start skinning my new coat.

Once I had the fur off the body, I laid it aside and started to cut the meat and remove bone.

It was a small animal so there wasn’t a lot I could do with it, but I could make arrowheads from the teeth and maybe a spear point and some different blades from the leg bones. The ribs I could maybe straighten and made a fishing spear out of. I cut the tail off and grinned as I looked at the sled, making Roar’kaol’tok laugh from where he’d sat on a big piece of firewood. He took it and removed the bones and meat from inside of it before turning it inside out, scraping the skin clean, and going inside.

A few minutes later, he came back, the inner skin charred and smoking still before he turned the tail right side out and pushed a green fragrant stick into it, stitching the base shut.

“Vara eetha,” he explained and held up a chunk of raw meat and making a face like he smelled something bad. “Kaa.”

“Keeps it from rotting,” I nodded understanding.

“Trophy. Good keep,” he nodded and tilted his head when I ripped the claws out of the orou’s paws.

I laid one on the back of my hand and flexed it into a fist a few times. When my hand was loose, the claws would look decorative on the back of my gloves, but when I made a fist, they would poke out and be my own set of claws.

“Neela,” the hunter nodded and flexed his own claws out. “Good make.”

“Strong-good,” I nodded.

“Strong,” he waved his paw under his wrinkled nose, and I gaped at him before we both laughed.

“You stink, too, you know,” I pointed at him, and he lifted an eyebrow, looking me up and down pointedly. I looked at myself and noticed that I was practically covered in blood. I just pursed my lips, and he laughed before gesturing for me to come with him, pulling the sled full of body parts behind him.

We stopped at the tent to have the meat smoked and then went to another tent where a bunch of hides were hanging up so my orou fur could be turned into a usable skin, then we went back to the tent to get my snowshoes and pack.

We walked for a while before coming to a series of pools that were steaming in the cold air.

“Oh, Diesel,” I sighed wistfully. “Hot springs. This is going to be the best bath ever.”

He sneezed and turned to get away from us and I snorted. He hated getting a bath, no matter where it was, I guess.

I didn’t even care that the hunter was with me, and this was out in the open. I reeked and I hadn’t had a bath in almost a week. I stripped until I was naked and practically dove into one of the pools, coming up with a moan of immense pleasure at feeling completely warmed for the first time since I got out of my truck in Texas.

“Fern’rath’fik,” the hunter said and grabbed a handful of mud from beside the pool and scrubbed it on his arm before pointing into the water.

I ducked under and came up with a handful of rough silt that smelled like lemongrass and sage, oddly enough. I started scrubbing vigorously and the hunter flicked the mud off his paw before going to a different pool for his own bath.

It felt amazing to scrub like a fiend after everything that’s happened this week. It was kind of amazing when I counted the days and only had a few of them. I had come a very long way from the frozen corpse that had yet to die when Roar’kaol’tok took me in. I was surviving in a strange and primitive new world and doing pretty good. Far better than I would have on my own, especially now that I know those nutjob scientists that were able to bring back mammoths were playing around with the DNA of more than just passive herbivores. I mean, how in the hell did you get feline and canine traits on the same animal? Or horns on a rabbit? A wooly capybara? At least the fish were still fish.

When I was done with my long and thorough scrubbing, I grabbed the clothes I had discarded and dipped them into the water to wash the blood and God only knew what else from them before wringing them out and shaking as much of the water from them as I could. It wouldn’t help to bathe if I was just going to wear smelly clothes, right? I ducked back under the water and swam around the three or four feet of depth and nearly ten feet of diameter in my pool before breaching the surface for a breath and rubbed the water off my face.

“Fern’rath’fik alteen,” I heard the hunter chuckle from his pool and laughed.

“Alteen that needs to breathe,” I snorted and found a small protrusion to sit on and lean against the side of the pool with my eyes closed, enjoying the heat and feeling of being actually clean.

After a while, I sighed and got out of the pool, and tried to wipe off as much of the water as I could before putting my original clothes on and hanging my new ones in a tree to dry some more before we needed to go home. I used my fingers to try and comb tangles from my hair so it would dry better as I stared into the distant snow.

I couldn’t deny that I liked it here. I know that primitive living like this was hard and dangerous, now that I knew there was predators here, but I was happier than I’d been in a long time. Even Diesel seemed to be thriving more than he ever did in Texas. The saying about home not being a place so much as a feeling was making a hell of a lot of sense the more I thought about it. Somehow, in just a few days, my perspective where home was for me had started to change.

I saw Diesel come over, looking warily at the pools before coming to sit beside me. He really did look like he was living the best life out here.

“Why do I want to go back so badly?” I asked him softly. “There’s not much in Texas for us to go back to. A load of bills I can barely pay, a job that makes me want to punch people, and restrictions. So many restrictions. Not to mention an apartment neither of us like, with noisy ass neighbors and a lazy super that can’t be bothered to change a light bulb in the hall, much less fix a leaking sink.”

I kept staring into the trees and Diesel slowly laid down, letting his body fall to the side a bit to get comfy.

“Why should we go back at all?” I asked him after a moment. “There’s no other family and no friends to miss us. It wouldn’t matter if we just... stayed here.”

It was crazy. I know it was, but still... It was very enticing, despite it being one of those major, life altering choices that shouldn’t be made after only a few days.

“We have a hell of a rough spot coming, Dies,” I spoke again. “Winter here is going to be harsh. Mistakes can’t happen or it could kill us. Traveling alone is a terrible idea in the dark when you don’t see shit that wants to eat you. It’s dangerous enough with the bit of light we do have, and I still almost lost you and our hunter. Staying or going shouldn’t be the concern right now. Survival is the key focus. If we make it through the winter, when Spring comes, we’ll chose then. But I think I already know what that choice will be.”