I was back in the dojo that I trained in as a kid. My sensei was there at the front holding a bo staff. He was a short man, about 5 foot 2 and around 60 years old. He always had a smile that would disarm anything anyone said. Yet his eyes would gleam with mischief when showing how to take someone down. It was that same sparkle that he had in his eyes when he called me forward.

His mouth moved funny like in an old dubbed-over Kung-fu movie, and he said, “Arn.” The rest of his words seemed to line upright as he kept talking, “Come to the front of the class. We are going to go over how to sweep with a staff today. While the staff is not the most common stick weapon you can find it is one that you can pick up just about anywhere. Brooms, mops, pool cues, or a broken branch, are just a few of the staves that you can find if you need a weapon. So knowing how to use one is important. Today we are going to show how to sweep.”

With that, he stepped, hooked my leg with the bottom of the staff, and yanked the bottom back while pushing the top forward. I felt myself go airborne, and then I slapped out on the mat. I rolled, got up, and bowed to him.

Sensei laughed and said, “Alright let’s break this down step by step.”

The rest of the dream was falling down over and over again.

That night I woke up. I wish I hadn’t because I didn’t like what I heard. Down below me, I heard dogs, and I’m not talking one or two, but it sounded like a large pack. They were barking and jumping below me. It sounded like they were trying to get up to me. I could see just a little ways away because of the moonlight, and I saw that there was one on the rock that I used to jump to the other side of the ledge before coming down towards me. I saw it bounce, and then it started down the narrow dirt shelf. It was kind of doing this whole low crawl thing that dogs sometimes do. The entire time it was snapping its mouth and growling and snarling. The other dogs looked like they were trying to get up the same way.

The one close to me was getting near the narrow spot when it slipped off the path and fell ten feet down to the ground. It whimpered a bit and then stood and began to climb back up. At this point, they were all on the jump-off rock or ledge. None of the dogs had made it the whole way, and they were tearing up the narrow ledge as they tried to push on. This went on for a long time that night. They seemed to wear themselves out as dawn started to show up, but they didn’t leave. Instead, they hunkered down on my beach and seemed ready to wait me out.

We did the whole I wait, you wait, thing with the dogs for a full day. They were some of the wildest-looking dogs I’d seen. Their ears stood up and were as big as saucers none of them had a consistent coat. They had this tawny and black fur that just looked bad. They were far from a pooch and much closer to a jackal or perhaps an ugly wolf. They fought with each other and barked at me as they went on.

That night they started their attack again. I wasn’t going to just die here, so I wanted to fight back. The first one that tried the narrow ledge got my new spear right into the face. It went down yipping. Which ended up with a fight down below. It seemed that the pack worked on the idea of survival of the fittest, and any sign of weakness was bad. Which, in this case, included getting a nasty cut on your face.

I had hoped that showing that I was able to hurt them might make them back off and let me sleep. However, the dogs kept coming. I was amazed at how poorly they thought about this. Each one that came at me couldn’t move very fast, as the ledge was very narrow and slippery.

That night was long and loud. Every fifteen or so minutes, a dog would try the ledge, and I would stand up and spear it from the safety of my little barricade. They made no more headway but made sure that I was tired when morning came. I felt like they had done this before to animals that they had cornered.

I was out of water and not sleeping, which would end up with me doing something dumb.

I needed to find a way out that they wouldn’t likely be following. But unfortunately, that meant that I would have to climb the ledge up and then haul my equipment out since I wasn’t sure that I would be able to carry my pack now that I had food and tools and still climb almost straight up.

Lucky for me, I still had lots of the vine I had cut down since it was the closest thing to rope I could find. I knew that I was in an adventure, so I needed rope because no one goes on an adventure without rope. So I tied my pack to my waist with the vines and started to climb.

I went slow and got to the top of the ledge, about 20 feet up, in under an hour. I was sore, tired, and unhappy. I’d seen that the dogs had run off about fifteen minutes into my climb. I hoped that I had a way out that they didn’t know. I pulled my bag up and started to go knowing that if they were coming, I needed to put some distance between them and me.

I hiked up the river with it on my left for the better part of the morning. I hadn’t heard anything behind me, which made me happy. It was about noon when I took a break.

The river was below my point by about eighty feet at this time. It also had cut over to my left another 200 feet, so there was kind of a ravine just down the edge from where I was. There wasn’t much growing down there, so I figured that it must flood, making it not someplace that I wanted to camp.

I pushed on after lunch and likely made about three more miles before I heard barking. I had not been running, knowing that I’d tire out. I had kind of hoped they had given up on me since I hadn’t heard them as of yet.

I did what every sane person would do. I ran and cussed, but mostly I ran afraid. Dogs weren’t something I liked at all. I was a cat person mostly because they didn’t get me muddy and didn’t leave piles in the yard.

I also was afraid of dogs when I was younger; I’d been chased by them when walking. So I wasn’t looking forward to these wild dogs catching up to me. They were everything I feared from all but the most trained dogs.

I went right for the drop-off and started down the slope hoping that the shifting ground on my way down might mess up the trail they had on me. It was a lousy slide down. Not having pants when sliding down a hill with gravel and loose dirt makes things hurt more than you want them to, and pebbles go places that they shouldn’t ever go.

At the end of the eighty-foot gravel tumble slide, I felt like I would be broken, but I could still get up and run; run, I did!

I think it had something to do with still hearing dogs and being scared that I would get eaten alive; that gave me the boost to get moving.

The river at this point was about ten feet wide and running fast. It looked deeper than where I’d been fishing, and the water was tumbling around like shoes in the dryer. I didn’t want to dive in and swim because I was sure that the rocks I had in my pack would help sink me like rocks, and my smoked meat would get wet. I’d drop my bag and swim if I had to, but I hoped I could get out of this without losing what little I had. So I turned and kept running up the bank. I heard the wild dogs barking behind me, but they were still up at the top and hadn’t taken a slide down yet.

I kept running until I was tired, which was only about another five minutes, and then I was sucking wind hard. That green bar had shown up again and was mostly gone now.

I slowed down to a fast walk; I still heard the dogs, though. The cliff to my right was getting higher and closer the farther upstream I went. I was hopeful that this was a good thing. I thought that might mean that they would give up on me in this spot.

I was also keeping an eye out to see if there was someplace that I could cross. I’d make my way across and hope they would lose me within the river if I could.

If they got to me too soon, I’d see if I could find a rock I could hope to in the river and fight from there. That way, if they came after me, I could knock them into the water, and it could take them down.

It was about another ten minutes of walk-running before I heard the sound of the dogs closing in on me. My green bar was slowly going up as I walked and quickly went down as I ran.

Hearing barks much closer, I looked behind and saw that they were on my level and closing fast. I felt like one of those guys on TV being chased by the cop dog. Only there were at least 6 of them, and they were ugly.

I broke into a sprint and started in a more panicked way looking for a place to jump to. Finally, when the dogs were about ten feet away, I saw what I was looking for and dashed towards the rock. I jumped from the bank to one boulder and out to a mostly underwater stone.

I was now standing on a space about twelve feet from the banks on either side and on a rock that had a dry place of about five feet. I spun around and looked back at the dogs.

There they were pacing up and down the bank, looking at me. Then, after what felt like an hour but was closer to five minutes, the rest of the pack showed up. They came down the river from the direction I had been heading.

These things were really pack-hunters and weren’t as dumb as I wanted them to have been. They were driving me into the others so that they would have me on all sides.

However, by them taking their time to regroup, my stamina had refilled. I was forcing myself to calm down. There was too much going on, and I needed to think about what to do to survive this mess.