The forest did not boggle the imagination; trees, leaves, grass, herbs - the usual woodland kit. Here and there, pieces of large squirrels I’ve seen from up above, scattered in an artistic mess. The trail was clearly visible, and I was moving forward, counting on its ease of notice.

I got tired pretty soon. Being nearly two meters long, the rifle always wanted to catch the next branch or tangle in some peculiar-looking instance of local flora. The trail became less straightforward as I deepened into the forest. It looked like there were too many targets, so Paige started to deviate from the previously, more or less, linear path. It became hard to navigate between different possible variants. Several times I had to come back to the divarication to choose another part of the path fork.

I got lost completely on about twenty-something fork. Trying to go back confirmed the overall approach’s ineffectiveness in this case - the area of the fight was too spread on all sides to understand the actual position of its epicenter and possible continuation of the path.

The situation was not hopeless, though. The expansion of the squirrel-Paige battlefield was so massive and progressed so much that I would encounter the battle signs sooner or later, either way.

My first actual combative encounter with a hostile creature of this planet happened about two hours later. I don’t usually like to talk about it because it was a bizarre fight. I would even quote the word “fight” because it looked rather like gardening than an actual battle. As you’ve already figured, the fight occurred with a plant.

I was walking in the approximate direction of Paige’s. There was no road whatsoever; the wood turned into a swamp with trees growing much further apart than before, so even the long rifle wasn’t an obstacle to the pretty fast movement through the site.

The soil was mainly marshy with small solid patches here and there. I moved from one to another. My path looked very curvative and lacked definitive direction. Two steps forward, one step back - even then, in my thoughts, I called it the swamp tango.

It happened when I stepped on the next solid ground patch. The surface that should have been hard and reliable turned out to be squishy and soft. I have understood too late, though, that something is not right. Basically, I figured it out already being underwater. As it turned out, the twenty-five kilograms rifle works even better than a bag of stones or bucket with cement on your feet, serving an almost perfect anchor burden. I submerged in seconds and became mired into a thick layer of silt. My feet appeared to be tied with liana-like tentacles of either a great underwater flytrap or a very motionless gigantic octopus. I dismissed the latter after I probed the lianas on my legs. They even had some kind of flowers on them. Moreover, I was standing on some type of flower either. I assumed it was supposed to digest me in some (significant) time. It would be a shame to become a supper of a flower.

I was performing all these manipulations blindly since the water of the swamp was opaque and dirty. After about half a minute (damn, I thought I was more enduring) underwater, I’ve understood that I need more oxygen to keep myself alive. The panic overflowed me even more than the water itself. Reflexes ordered me to open my mouth and breathe, but common sense resisted as hard as it could. Completely immobile, unable to do anything about the situation and dazed by fear and shock I gave up to the reflexes and started to drown. I was drowning for about two minutes, and the worst part was that I didn’t even have any memories for my mind to construct my near-death “my-whole-life-run-before-my-eyes” experience. Shitty feeling - it is like you have never even existed.

After the second minute of my agony, I have started to understand that something is not right. I should have lost my consciousness already by now. After two more minutes, the fear was gone, leaving only its nasty aftertaste in the form of shaking limbs from the abundance of adrenaline and cortisol in my blood. I still wanted to breathe desperately, and my mouth was full of bitter swamp water, but my lungs were dry - not a single drop of water got there. In few more minutes, I realized that I am able to breathe. Underwater. That was crazy. Naturally, I touched my neck and found small horizontal openings there that were opening and closing along with my breathing. I’ve developed gills. I decided to think about it later and started to free myself from an underwater carnivorous plant.

Pretty soon, I have discovered that I am unable neither to break lianas nor free myself from them. The solution came quickly. The receptacle of a flower on which I was standing appeared to be soft and relatively easy to penetrate even with bare hands. Which was what I did. I had to dig into the flesh of this flower for several minutes till the grip of its tentacles weakened. To completely free myself out of that trap, I dug through the flower till the very basis of it, dismantling its root system from the shoot system, killing it ultimately.

The part of my emerging from the bottom of a swamp was hard and very tiresome. I picked a direction a started to move forward. It was extremely hard to do that underwater, in waist-high silt, with a heavy burden on my back. It took me an hour or so to reach the patch of solid ground and climb on it. I was soaked and angry. Moreover, when I have emerged, I discovered that I cannot breathe. My gills prevented me from breathing above the surface of the water. In about ten minutes, they disappeared, and I took my first actual breath. I tried to make it not too deep but failed, and, I swear, my cough should have been heard even in my previous world.

Exhausted and freezing, I found a bigger solid patch of ground with several trees on it and decided to call it a day. In minutes I was sitting there drying my clothes and warming myself near the firestone. I even put several semi-dry brushwoods in there to make the fire more intense.

When I was more or less dry and relaxed, a new problem appeared. The hunger I was barely feeling all this time got very avid for some reason, so I almost involuntarily went to my first hunt in the new world, maybe, even, ever.