If it weren’t for the fact that I woke up under a tree, dressed in a shirt and pants that I’d never seen before, in front of a dirt road I could have played it off as a bad dream. Unfortunately for me, I woke up under a tree, dressed in a shirt and pants that I’d never seen before, in front of a dirt road. Now, I’m no arborist, but from my position on the ground the trees didn’t look like the oak and hickory I was familiar with from back home. The shirt and pants I was wearing were both a light tan and seemed to be made of something like linen. Both were loose fitting, cut in a style I was not familiar with and were belted at the waist with a heavy leather belt. The boots I had been wearing were gone, replaced with a pair of leather sandals.

It wasn’t until I had stood up that I realized a small backpack was on the ground slightly behind me. Opening it revealed a crumpled leather bag that, once shaken out into shape, seemed to be a waterskin, a handful of dried fruit and nuts in a waxed paper package, a knife with a sheath, a few circular and square pieces of metal with holes punched around the outsides, and a folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, I read it quickly.

“Reach for the mountain. Ask for the hermit. He has agreed to teach you. Allow your curiosity and heart to be your guide. Above all, enjoy your new home.”

“Thanks Eolia, that clears up exactly nothing.” I muttered to myself.

A cursory glance at my surroundings was enough to convince me I was in the foothills of a large mountain range. To my left the road continued at a slight upward incline toward several large peaks, snowcapped despite the early summer temperatures in the foothills. To the right the road wound further down the hills, small ribbons of dirt plainly visible as the terrain fell off. In college I had done a little hiking with friends, mostly prompted by Joe, a biology major, who had an unhealthy, in my opinion, obsession with reptiles. Several times he had organized trips to state parks to look for snakes, lizards, and various amphibians to further his graduate research. While I wasn’t planning on tipping rotten logs to look for snakes, the experience of hiking the wilderness came in handy as I shouldered my backpack and began looking around for a hiking pole.

In hindsight I’ll admit that I shouldn’t have bothered. What I should have done was put on the backpack and run like hell toward the mountain. But with inexperience comes ignorance and with a mere ten minutes of experience in this new world I certainly qualified as ignorant. I was less than twenty feet from the road, in the forest, looking for a sapling or branch straight enough to serve as a walking aide, when I first heard the rustling. Used to the more civilized world of Earth, where not everything wanted to kill me and eat my entrails, I ignored it, my mind automatically associating the noise in the underbrush with birds, squirrels, or rabbits looking for a meal. My third mistake, for those counting, was not realizing that the normal forest noises I’d heard earlier had stopped. I, of course, was happily oblivious to these potentially lethal blunders and busy inspecting saplings. It wasn’t until three small green humanoids in loincloths slinked out of the underbrush on each side of me that I could fathom the depths of how badly I’d screwed the pooch.

It was pretty obvious to even my inexperienced eye that their intentions were less than peaceful. While they weren’t more than three feet tall, two of the three had long knives, which were more like swords when wielded by them, in their hands while the third carried a crude club. One of the knife wielders was directly in front of me, one was to my left, and the club-wielder was to the right of me. All of them seemed scrawny, the open sores on their bodies and jutting ribs hinting at malnourishment. None of the three, however, seemed friendly as they slowly walked closer and raised their weapons.

“Hey there fellas. Nothing to see here, just gonna back away real slow and get back to the road. No need to come any closer. I’ll just ease on out of here and get out of your hair.” I said in what I hoped was a calming voice as I started to slowly back away from them and toward the road.

Matching words to action I took a step back. When they didn’t approach further, I took another step back. This time my traitorous foot snapped a twig when I set it down. That seemed to be the signal for the knife-wielding thing in front of me to let loose a scream and charge. In a panic, I backpedaled, almost falling over a fallen branch. As the shrieking thing got closer I tossed my backpack at it and ducked down to grab the branch I’d almost tripped over earlier. It was a good three feet long and quite thick, a bit too cumbersome to serve as a club, but better than trying to fight barehanded against something using a knife.

Green Number One, my subconscious designation for the one charging me, had barely untangled himself from the backpack before I took a big step forward and did my best impression of the Mighty Casey. Fueled by adrenaline and fear the makeshift club almost whistled as I put my entire upper body into the swing. The branch, which had started to rot during its stint on the forest floor, crumbled as it impacted the little guy’s head and sent his entire body flying back. It landed with a thud on the ground, and the other two looked at the body, then back at me, and then shrieked and ran back into the forest.

I grabbed my backpack and the knife that my assailant dropped and staggered to the road before I collapsed to my knees in the dirt. I felt almost hollow after the adrenaline rush. Still clutching the knife in my left hand, I got back to my feet and very cautiously I crept up to the tree line to look for any signs of the other two green midgets. Very carefully I watched and listened for any signs that they were coming back for revenge. Not seeing them I gripped the knife tightly before I stole over to the unmoving body of my attacker. It was dead. My panicked strike had nailed it right in the temple and, unless it kept its brain somewhere else, there was no chance it was getting back up. Its head, while not exactly symmetrical before I’d managed to whack it with my improvised bludgeon, was cracked like an egg and green blood was pooling on the ground where it lay. I crept back out to the road and broke into a light jog, thinking it best to put as much distance as I could between my assailants as possible.

I’ve always hated running. I played football in high school, not very well, for a few years and my least favorite part, hands down, was running during practice. Another of my college friends had been big into running marathons and half-marathons. She claimed that after a while one would experience a runner’s high; a euphoric state of mind in which all the worries of the world fell away, and all focus was on putting one foot in front of the other. Until that day I’d had no idea what she meant. My lungs started to strain, and my legs begin to burn a little as I jogged. I focused on my breathing, in and out, in and out. One foot in front of the other. My mind turned inward and as I ran I thought could feel energy being brought into my body on each inhale.

I maintained a slow jogging pace for several hours, the temperature slowly rising as the sun crept higher into the sky, before I came to a small stone bridge with a clear stream flowing under it. My brain reminded me that on Earth it’s always advised to boil water before drinking it in a survival situation. My body told my brain that I wasn’t on Earth any longer, I was thirsty, I didn’t have any way to start a fire to boil the water, and that even if I was able to make a fire I didn’t have anything to boil the water in. I carefully picked my way down the small rocky incline to the stream and took a drink of quite possibly the coldest and tastiest water I’ve ever had in my life, old or new. The lingering shakiness from my earlier fight faded and the fatigue I’d accumulated on the jog thus far seemed to melt away as I drank. Filling my waterskin, I walked back up to the bridge and after stretching a bit to make sure I didn’t cramp up, sat on a broad stone railing while fishing out package of dried fruit and nuts from my pack. I slowly ate half of them, savoring each piece, before I wrapped the paper back up and put it in the backpack.

During my jog toward the mountains I hadn’t really spared the time for conscious thought, but now the issue of food started to weigh heavily on my mind. Most of the hiking I’d done during college had been on heavily forested hills or smaller mountains. However, a few times we had all loaded up and taken trips into the Rockies for a week of camping. I knew very well how deceptive distances could be when it came to mountains large enough to maintain a snow pack all year. With exceptional conditions it’s not impossible to see mountains on earth from distances of around a hundred miles away. While I doubted that I was that far away from the peaks it had become readily apparent through the morning that despite my brisk pace I wasn’t going to reach them before night fell. While I was good for a few days without food I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. Hunting or foraging weren’t really an option either. I doubted I could get close enough to anything edible to kill it with a knife; and without knowing which plants were edible foraging was just begging to get poisoned. There were fish swimming in a deeper section of the stream that were visible from my vantage point on the bridge, but without a line and hook I didn’t have a way to catch them. I suppose a fish trap would have worked but learning how to make one wasn’t really covered during my engineering courses in college. Should have taken a course on underwater basket weaving instead of logistics.

I tarried longer than I should have on the bridge and soaked in the vista. The hike so far had been up a gradual incline and my slightly higher vantage point, combined with the cleared space provided by the river, allowed me a spectacular view of the valley below me. Trees stretched out into an endless sea of green, broken only by waterways that wound their way through the forest. The air had started off crisp, although it had warmed up a bit as the sun climbed higher into the sky, but the light breeze that was blowing down off the mountains kept the temperature comfortable and brought with it the scents of nature. The air was so rich with scent I could almost taste it and as I relaxed further each breath seemed to energize my body and spirit. The fight with the little green people was miles behind me and the feelings of panic and confusion it had caused all seemed to be washed away by the breeze and the scenery, with only the knife I carried with me to serve as a reminder that it ever happened.

When I caught myself starting to doze off, I figured it was a good time to get up and keep moving because falling asleep in the wilderness in this world seemed like a one-way ticket to never waking up again. As I got back on the road and hit my hiking pace, I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering. Unless my reading of the seasons was completely off, or this world didn’t have seasons analogous to Earth, it seemed like mid to late spring. Where were all of the people? Spring on Earth during the Middle Ages, or whatever Eolia meant by Iron Age, always involved traders and traveling merchants in my mind. I’d been traveling for half the day and hadn’t seen anyone other than the midget murder-hobos that tried to gut me. She’d given me assurances that the world wouldn’t actively be trying to kill me, so if she wasn’t lying, I was either dropped in a very remote location that didn’t see much traffic or this was the wrong season for commerce. Of course, I thought, I could be wrong all the way around and she was lying, in which case I’d need to figure out how to live like a mountain man while risking death in the wilderness. The vantage point provided by the bridge had given me a decent look at the valley behind me and from what I saw it was unspoiled wilderness with no signs of fields for crops, houses, or cities. On the other hand, though the road was hard-packed dirt it seemed to be very well maintained with no signs of overgrowth. The forest was even cut back a bit from the roadway and stumps were evident as I passed.

The sun was starting to dip below the horizon when I made it to the top of what turned out to be the back side of a truly massive escarpment. The road narrowed considerably as it dropped precipitously into an enormous valley a few thousand feet below. My spirits soared as I spotted smoke from fires rising from a village at the bottom of the slope. As the smoke rose it was dispersed by the breeze, which kept me from noticing it during my climb to the top of the ridge. I took a long drink of now lukewarm water from my waterskin before all but skipping down the steep road. I was almost to the bottom, a wooden wall and gates in view before my brain came up with another problem. What language did these people speak?