Hannah

We woke up the next morning to the smell of meat being cooked. Outside it was still dark; Kevin, at the entrance of the cave, had a fire going and was frying some of the meat we’d packed in the frying pan. Miranda and Lisa still being asleep I thought that I’d have the opportunity to have a few minutes alone with Kevin.

“Wake the others up, we need to eat and get moving,” he said to me when he saw me approaching him.

He had been very cold to us and to me especially ever since we’d left. I understood that he was worried about what we might be facing in the future and that the added responsibility of the three of us was weighing on him but still, that was no reason for him to be giving us the cold treatment that we were receiving from him. Not wishing to create any discord so early in our trip I said nothing to him about it and walked over to where Miranda and Lisa were sleeping to wake them up. Underneath their thick wool winter robes that they were using as covers they were sleeping in each other’s arms and looked so sweet that I almost couldn’t bring myself to disturb them. Waking up and seeing the person they loved lying next to them brought a happy smile to both Lisa and Miranda’s faces. They kissed even before saying good-morning to each other. The three of us rolled up the blankets and bound them and went outside the cave to join Kevin by the fire. He was pensive and didn’t do a great deal to acknowledge us when we sat down on the ground next to the fire. Miranda and Lisa immediately sensed that there was something off about him and the discomfort that it was making them feel was evident on their faces.

“How much of the meat are you frying in there?” Lisa asked him.

“About half,” he responded curtly.

“Isn’t that too much?”

“There are four of us, and we’re going to be walking all day today so we’re going to need the energy; this is the only meal we’re going to be having until tonight.”

“We have a lot of apples though, should we not be conserving the meat for when we’re desperately hungry?”

“If we conserve it too long it’ll go bad, then it’ll be of no use to us at all.”

Lisa didn’t argue with him any further. Kevin had made his decision as to what was the best way for us to manage our food resources and it didn’t sound like there was any chance of swaying him. I agreed with Lisa that it was perhaps too soon for us to be eating so much of the meat but it didn’t look like it was going to take much to get on Kevin’s bad side. I remained silent and decided to trust that Kevin did have some sort of plan for ensuring our food security. Short term we would be okay; inside the cave one of the bags that were used to transport grain around the village was full of apples that Kevin had been accumulating, there must have been at least fifty in there. We each had a piece of meat and two apples that morning for breakfast, which Kevin said was going to be our only meal until much later that night.

“Which way are we going to be travelling?” I asked while we were eating.

“First we’re going to walk to the stream where I’ve been getting water and follow that to the river, which we’re going to follow downstream until we’re out of the forest,” Kevin answered.

“Are you sure that’s the quickest way out of here?”

“If we take that route we’ll always have access to water; the canteen you packed is small and we don’t want to get lost here without any water, plus if there are any animals in these woods the place we’re likeliest to spot them is by the river.”

“Why are you worried about where the animals might be?”

“Because that’s where we’re going to have to get our food from.”

Kevin’s plan didn’t put me at ease. Our food security was cause for a great deal of concern if hunting—with which none of us had any experience—was his plan for feeding us. It was then that I realized just how large the challenge we had before us was and what a burden it placed on Kevin’s shoulders as the leader of this expedition. We could die out here from any number of things: starvation if we weren’t able to acquire more food, freezing if we didn’t get out of there before it started snowing, and there was still the possibility of there being predators in these woods.

As soon as we finished eating we set off. Kevin hoisted the bag, which was really quite heavy, up onto his shoulders and grabbed hold of the sack of apples, leaving us with only the light blankets to carry. The responsibility that Kevin had to assume with us coming along was enormous; I saw more of the strain that he was under from what he was taking it upon himself to bear every time I looked at him, and my inability to think of something that I could say or do to alleviate some of the pressure from him was causing me to feel a great amount of strain myself. Lisa and Miranda had each other, they were spared from what I was feeling: alone, shut out, and inadequate to the task of making my usefulness felt, that is if I had any usefulness to offer.

About thirty minutes into our walk the sky started turning blue and the woods around us became clearer; the trees around us and the ground beneath us were easier to see. We caught our first sightings of some of the animals that resided in the forest, a few birds in the trees and a couple of rabbits running along the ground and into their warrens, nothing that represented a substantial food source. We arrived at the stream that Kevin had been getting water from just after morning had fully broken. We took a break there and had a drink from the stream; Kevin also took the opportunity to fill the water canteen.

“How long until we reach the river?” Lisa asked him.

“I don’t know; this is the furthest I’ve ever been.”

Our walk to the river was long, and arduous. At a small waterfall that we eventually reached we took another break to have a drink and to eat a few apples, undermining Kevin’s plan for rationing our extremely limited food supplies. Getting past the waterfall was an ordeal. The rocks on either side of it were too wet and slippery with moss for us to simply climb down them; we had to backtrack and circle around until we’d found a place where we could circumnavigate the waterfall. All of these obstacles that we had to deal with were forcing us to consume precious time and energy. Most worryingly, in all the time that we had been walking we hadn’t yet seen a single animal that was suitable for hunting. We were in trouble if we didn’t find some soon. The position of the sun in the sky indicated that it was approaching noon and we hadn’t so much as reached the river yet; the journey was proving to be longer than any of us had anticipated it would be and with only enough meat left for one more meal the issue of our food provisions was becoming increasingly concerning.

“As soon as we find a place that can serve as an effective shelter I think we should stop, we might not find another place like it,” Kevin said to all of us.

I had been so worried about our food provisions that the question of where we would be bedding down for the night had not occurred to me at all. The were so many factors that needed to be simultaneously kept on top of for us to get through this and Kevin’s mind was focused on them all.

“We should go up that way,” Kevin stopped walking and said, gesturing to his right to a portion of land that was dauntingly steep.

“You said we shouldn’t stray far from the stream so that we’re always close to water, and it’s so steep, we’re all exhausted,” Lisa responded.

“We’re only going up temporarily, my hope is that the elevation will give us a vantage point from which we can spot some animals and maybe even discern a quicker way out of here.”

Once again Kevin’s reasoning was sound; none of us protested and we all went along with his plan. We trekked up the exhaustingly steep hill behind him, stopping occasionally to rest against a tree. Kevin didn’t take any breaks and reached the top before the three of us had gotten halfway. Even Lisa, whose physical attributes were greater than mine and Miranda’s, was finding it hard going. A part of me resented Kevin for asking so much of us; I was having serious doubts about my ability to make it the rest of the way and for a moment I was tempted to be angry at Kevin for not being more of a gentleman and concerning himself more with our limitations as girls.

“Hey guys, you have to get up here and see this,” he yelled at us from the top.

The thought of something special waiting for us at the top gave us the motivation we needed to push through our fatigue and make it the rest of the way.

Kevin was right, the hike was worth it. The top of the hill levelled out to a plateau with a high vertical drop, from which we had a view of absolutely everything.

“There’s the river,” Kevin said, pointing to his left, “and see that? That’s Guardian Mountain,” he said, pointing to his right.

“We’ve travelled that far?” Miranda asked, amazed at the distance we had covered.

The river from which the stream that we had been following broke off was very close, which was encouraging. What wasn’t encouraging was what Lisa pointed out about what we were looking at.

“We’re going to be in this forest a long time.”

All around us, as far as we could see, was mountainous terrain covered in trees. The challenge before us, which we’d always known was big, looked impossible.

“Anybody who wants to turn around and go back to Prospera, now’s the time to do it; if we keep going we’re going to be too far to turn back, I’ll even walk back with you if you’re afraid to do it alone,” Kevin said to all of us.

The three of us seriously contemplated what he’d said. The sight of the sheer scale of what was in store for us gave us all second thoughts about carrying on. Continuing the journey we were on was going to push us well past our mental and physical limits. Death from starvation was our likeliest fate. It was a dangerous and extreme undertaking, but for me, in the end, the decision was easy.

“I’m coming with you, all the way,” I turned to Kevin and said confidently.

“If you want to go back I’ll come with you,” Lisa placed a hand on Miranda’s shoulder and said to her, “if you want to keep going then we’ll keep going.”

“Prospera doesn’t want us, right? Why would I want to go back?”

We were all resolute in our desire to continue with Kevin, with that out of the way our focus shifted to planning for the next phase of the journey.

“The best way for us to conserve our food provisions as much as possible would be for us to conserve our energy as much as possible; maybe we should stop walking for today and camp here for tonight,” Lisa suggested.

“I don’t know if we’ve gotten far enough from Prospera yet; by now they know we’re missing and have probably sent out a search party, if they’re on horseback with dogs then they’ll reach us here in no time,” Kevin said.

“How would they get horses over the mountain?” Miranda asked him.

“They’d load them onto the fishing boat and transport them around the cliffs; that boat can easily fit four horses at least.”

“If they come after us on horses we’re not going to have much of a chance of escaping them, no matter how much walking we do,” I said.

“Even so, we should still try to cover as much ground as possible, especially with the snow only a few weeks away.”

“Look out there; there’s no place we can see that would provide adequate shelter, and if we push ourselves too hard today then tomorrow our muscles are going to be too sore for us to do any walking at all,” Lisa said to Kevin.

It didn’t take long for Kevin to realize that she had a point, though his agreement with her was marked with perceptible reluctance.

“Fine, you three stay here and collect some firewood for tonight, I’m going to do some scouting.”

“Scouting for what?” I asked him.

“For food.”

Kevin stayed with us only a short while to give his body a rest before going back down the hill with the knife. With him gone, Lisa, Miranda and I took the opportunity to relieve our bladders that were bursting from all of the water that we’d been drinking to fill our bellies. Only when I was peeing that afternoon did it occur to me that we’d neglected to pack any toilet paper, another big problem that we were going to need to improvise a solution to.

Collecting the firewood that Kevin had asked us to collect proved not to be as easy as we’d thought it would be. The fast-burning wood was easy to collect; all we needed to do was pick up dry sticks from the ground. Getting slow burning wood was the problem. We needed thicker pieces of wood that hadn’t been completely dried out, that meant using the hatchet to cut branches off the trees. Finding a tree that we could climb up was hard enough, using a tiny hatchet to cut off decent size branches was near impossible. In Prospera hatchets were only used to split logs that had already been cut into smaller pieces, they weren’t meant to be used as a substitute for an axe. Making headway with the branches proved so frustrating that after getting halfway through with the hatchet we used our feet to push down on the branches and snap them off. We only finished collecting the firewood we’d need for the night just before Kevin returned from his scouting trip.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked him upon his return.

“I found some deer, not far from the river.”

“Why have you come back empty handed then?”

“They ran away from me when I tried to get close to them; I’m going to need to come up with a creative way of getting close to them to kill one.”

That evening Kevin did something that made the three of us very happy: he went down to the river with the bar of soap and a change of clothes courtesy of Darren and cleaned himself up, returning to us sans the horrible smell that he’d been accumulating for six days that we had been silently enduring all day. Lisa, Miranda and I went down to the river with the soap shortly after Kevin had returned to also have a wash. Kevin had given us directions to a part of the river that he said was perfect was bathing, the current there was gentle and the water only came up to your knees. Being naked in the water with Lisa and Miranda, watching them unreservedly touching each others’ bodies, I felt no discomfort or any of the hatred toward them that my mother said homosexuals were the victims of in the outside world. Surely in Prospera we were evolved enough not to descend to such bigotry and intolerance; it didn’t make sense to me that the governing authorities in Prospera would have never explored the possibility of permitting homosexuality in the village.

“It’s because in Prospera they limit the number of things for people to react to, because they don’t trust their reactions,” Kevin said later that night by the fire when I posed the question.

“You’re saying that this whole time we’ve been distrustful of Prospera because it’s distrustful of us?” I asked him.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“What reason would they have for not trusting the citizens of Prospera? Nothing that happens in the outside world happens in Prospera.”

“They must know things about the outside world and the people there that makes them fearful of us becoming like them, because then Prospera would become like the outside world.”

“Is it wise then for us to be doing this? Maybe the outside world is every bit as dysfunctional as they told us it is.”

“I guess we’re going to find out, if we make it through this forest alive that is.”

It was impossible not to question if we were doing the right thing after having that conversation with Kevin. There was so much that we just didn’t know, about the place that we had left and about where we were going. Around the fire that night the unease we felt about the future was palpable but our resolve to continue remained undiminished. We were free from Prospera’s control and were mapping our own destiny, no amount of fear or unease was going to be enough to get us to turn back.