The world spun, and I desperately wanted to sit down. I was afraid though that if I sat, I wouldn’t be able to get up again. My feet were on fire from the burst blisters, the pain radiating up into my legs and groin.

I walked, stumbling a little, and looked for a safe place to rest. My priorities hadn’t changed. I still needed to find shelter, water, and food, but now added to the list was information. Information to explain what happened to me.

“One step at a time,” I said, whispering to myself.

There were no obvious places to shelter nearby, and I was forced to keep walking. There was no denying though that I was lost. The forest stretched in all directions, one as good as any other.

Thinking that water flows downhill, I headed towards a slight slope. But fifteen minutes later, I stopped again. The pain made my eyes water, and I didn’t trust moving through the forest without being able to see.

I was resting, leaning against a maple, admiring the cool of its trunk, when an animal chittered in the distance. Assuming it was an animal. For all I knew, it could’ve been a giant spider or carnivorous plant. Whatever it was, it encouraged me to limp onward.

The going was slow, this part of the forest thick with bushes and brambles. My clothes were covered with small tears. The cloth was dotted red from the small cuts on my body.

I was considering my options when a twig snapped behind me. I glanced back and spotted a baboon-like creature with a blue snout and reddish fur. It was broader across the chest than a baboon. Taller too. But what stood out most were the teeth. Long, sharp teeth meant for eating meat.

The creature was stalking me.

Adrenaline flooded through my system, and I ran. My feet be damned, I ran with all I could, the whole world narrowing to the path ahead. My only advantage was that I was small and nimble. I kept the baboon at bay by weaving between the trees and slipping between brambles, but it was tenacious, chittering as it gave chase.

I knew it was physically impossible for me to outrun the baboon--it was stronger and faster--but I’ve learned to never give up. The one thing I was best at in my life was dogged persistence. All my real successes came from it. And so I kept running and looked for anything to change the dynamics of the chase.

To my right, a tree had fallen and beyond it, the ground fell way towards a steep hillside. There was less cover, but I took the chance, ducking under the fallen tree to throw myself down the slope. I rode the loam for twenty feet before I nearly lost an eye jamming up against a low-hanging tree branch. Meanwhile, the baboon overshot, continuing along the way I’d been going, before it swung around toward me.

The slope below was broken by a rocky outcropping. I scrambled towards it, looking for another obstacle to extend the chase. Instead, I found salvation--a fissure in the rocks just wide enough for a small child. My feet splashed through a rill of water as I squeezed myself inside.

The baboon arrived moments later. Furious, it pounded at the stones with its fists. The small space reverberated with the impacts. All the more reason to push myself further inside toward a small hollow at the back.

I curled up and waited, but the baboon didn’t give up. It found a branch long enough to reach and poked and poked into the hollow to get at me. I batted the branch aside, earning new scratches each time. When the first branch didn’t work, the baboon smashed it against the rocks and found another. When that didn’t work, it found a third and a fourth and a fifth.

Finally, finally, the baboon howled, raging at the injustice of lost prey and gave the stone one last strike before departing. It was all I could do to hold on for ten minutes to make sure it wasn’t a trick before letting myself pass out.

###

I woke up a bloody and battered mess. At least my injuries scabbed over while I slept. A dim part of my mind worried about infection. And tetanus. That thought woke me right up, but I sagged back down immediately. The nearest antibiotics and tetanus antitoxin were a world away.

Water flowed through the hollow in a trickle, and I reached down for some, my hand trembling. It took two attempts to bring a handful to my mouth. The water tasted clean but rusty, probably from the dried blood on my hands. Normally, I’d worry about contaminants, but my belly was empty and I was desperately thirsty.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”

After drinking my fill, I stared at the rock, my thoughts hung on the fact that I was in another world and all I’ve said so far were aphorisms.

“I can do better than that,” I said, but then wondered if that too was an aphorism. I shook the muddy thought from my head. My death had been just moments away. I needed to focus if I wanted to survive. Panic, denial, and distraction would only lead to tragedy.

I crawled out of the fissure, careful to make sure there were no predators nearby. Once outside, I followed the rill down the hillside. We meandered for a time, me and the rill, but eventually we were reunited with her big sister, a stream just wide enough for a man to throw a stone and reach the other side.

I expected to be more heartened by the sound of running water. It was after all one of my goals. But I hesitated, keeping my distance. I needed to work up the courage to look into the water, and when I did, I saw that my face was not my own. The shock rolled through me, waking up the thing muffling my emotions, causing it to spread a blanket over me.

Looking past the cuts and scabs, I distantly noted that I still looked half Hispanic, but now the other half was Chinese. The face I wore had prominent cheekbones, with dark eyes and--I could tell already--those were going to be some bushy eyebrows when I grew older. On top of it all was a shock of black hair.

I sat back and let the new face sink in. Eventually, the daze would pass, and then I’d head upstream. I heard the roar of a waterfall in the distance.