Walking at the rear it was really obvious which of the others had spent time in forests before. Emily walked effortlessly along the path, barely touching the twigs, and avoiding all the bramble-like growth and branches, whereas Charlie by contrast would regularly walk into the branches swinging back to hit them in the face and seemed to break every twig around. The noise difference between the two was tremendous. Kajal’s feet seemed to find every exposed root and he tripped or stumbled over loose stones regularly. Mike had good movement for such a big man and had obviously spent quite a lot of time in woodland. Jo was an enigma. She didn’t walk as though she was used to forests but even so she made very little sound and barely disturbed the plants she passed.

Mark himself was the product of English middle-class life. He had been a scout growing up and therefore was used to walking in the woods of England, which were generally very well maintained and with obvious paths. He knew how to walk properly because of the ‘wide games’ they played but had never had the opportunity to spend much time in a heavily forested area. As such, he had moderate skills and avoided the obvious problems but was still noisier than Emily, Jo, and Mike.

It wasn’t long before they heard water and soon, they met up with a stream. They walked parallel with it for a while before finding access that wasn’t covered with low hanging plants or with a steep bank. This was obviously a place where animals both came to drink and cross the stream. They filled their filters and waited for the water to process before transferring the water to their containers and refilling the filters.

The filters themselves were a double ended container separated by a membrane that cleaned the water and could itself be easily cleaned. Just letting gravity pull the water through the membrane removed all the impurities.

As they walked Mark could see a pond ahead of them. The path went around it, and Emily followed the path. Charlie followed closely on her heels and therefore it was Kajal who not only got closer to the pond but tripped and put a hand into the water.

The complete stillness of the pond was immediately broken by a tentacle swiftly wrapping itself around the hand and drawing the man towards the pond. Kajal immediately started screaming and pulling away from the tentacle. However, he was unable to free himself and more tentacles appeared from the pond and immediately tried to latch themselves onto the hapless man. Fortunately for him both Charlie and Mike reacted instantly. Charlie had a knife cutting at the first tentacle within seconds and then Mike was there swinging his axe and cutting much further through the offending pseudopod. The effect of both attacks in conjunction was to cause all of the tentacles to disappear. The group was reminded once again that they weren’t on Earth.

It was very easy to forget that. Whilst there were some oddly coloured plants, the insects were pretty much like the insects they were used to and the birds whilst mainly looking slightly different were not so odd as to make you think you were elsewhere. In fact, some of the birds looked like they could have come from Earth as did some of the other inhabitants of the forest. A deer they had disturbed as they walked would easily fit into any woodland in Europe and Mark was convinced that the squirrels, they occasionally saw jumping from tree to tree were identical to the ones they had seen at the army camp.

After the attack at the pond, they stopped some distance away from it and checked out Kajal. They quickly discovered that he was fine apart from red marks on his hand and wrist. His clothing had protected any other part of his body from being in contact with the tentacles and fortunately his skin had not been broken. Nobody knew what sort of diseases he could have developed otherwise.

“Perhaps you will want a weapon now.” Mike suggested to Kajal.

“It might be better.” The smaller man agreed. “I doubt that I would have reacted as quickly as you did though.”

“As a doorman you learn to move at the start of trouble rather than let it develop.” Mike replied. He removed one of his spare knives from his belt and handed it over complete with sheaf. “Wear it so you can get at it with either hand.” Mike instructed. “We’ll get you something better when we find civilisation.”

“Two thoughts about that.” Mark added. The others turned to regard him.

“We are likely to find civilization downstream. Villages, towns and cities grow up on rivers rather than streams as they need more water. Also, we need something to buy weapons with, any ideas?”

“Well, we could be hunters.” Said Emily. “Pelts are generally something that you can sell if we can cure them properly. Anyone know how to do that?”

Mike knew a little but didn’t know how to make baking soda, which was needed to get the grease from the pelts.

“Well how about gold panning.” Jo suggested, looking pointedly at Mark.

“Generally, that’s further upstream.” Mark replied. “We can check the stream to see if it has any small amounts of gold and then go uphill, if that is our plan. We need to work out what we are going to do about food though.”

Surprisingly Mike was the person who had the best ideas about getting food. He knew how to trap animals from his younger days living near the Adirondacks. As long as they could live on the meat, they should be able hunt.

“So, we have a basic plan. Find a good place to pan for gold. Have it not be too far away from an area where we can hunt for food and maybe gather some plants we can eat as well. Only when we have something we can sell or bargain with do we try and find civilisation.” Mark summarised. “You good to go Kajal?” The small man nodded. “Then let’s make like the birds and get the flock out of here!”

So, the group now started walking uphill, following the stream. They had agreed a range of things that they were looking for that would make an ideal site and those included a place where the stream went from fast moving to slow, somewhere they could shelter, ideally a cave, somewhere within the forest so there was plenty of potential food and somewhere defensible.

As they passed through different parts of the forest, they were continually reminded about the alien nature of the place. Plants would grow at odd angles that made for slightly uncomfortable viewing. Birds would make strange calls. There were things rustling in the undergrowth that didn’t look like anything Mark had seen before, but they were too far away for him to be sure.

Eventually, they broke into a clearing caused mainly by the stream widening out at that point and also the ground was much more rock strewn making it harder for things to grow. The stream was ideal for panning but there didn’t seem to be that much shelter around. Emily, Mike and Charlie used the space as a base to explore the area further, leaving their bags with the others. Mark started panning in the deposits left by the stream.

It wasn’t long before he had found flakes of gold in amongst the detritus. Separating out the flakes from the rest was quite a slow process but he started to develop the knack after a while. In the meantime, Jo had found herself a long wooden pole and sharpened one end into a crude spear. She stood in the shadows of a tree overlooking the water and waited. Then in a quick thrusting movement she moved the spear into the water and managed to strike one of the fish swimming in the deeper parts of the stream. She placed the fish in one of the bags she had in her backpack and retook her waiting position. Over an hour or so she had caught enough fish that with some vegetables she could easily feed the six of them.

Kajal had been investigating the edges of the clearing and had found some plants with bulbous roots. He was in the process of thoroughly boiling them before he tried sampling them. Mark was hoping that at least one type was edible and didn’t taste awful. All three of them had bits of different plants pressed against their bodies as contact tests and so far, nobody had experienced any itching, burning or numbing. They’d also got some fruit from some of the trees that they had passed in travelling to the spot, but it was a slow process testing each bit of each food stuff. Fortunately, nothing so far had smelled awful or had the almond smell of cyanide.

Mark had no idea how much gold would be needed for them to have enough to buy what they needed. So far after a bit more than an hour he had some flakes and some very small nuggets. He guessed that he would need much more as the lot combined wouldn’t make even one small coin. He did plan to melt the days takings together using some clay that he had dug from the stream bank and the cooking fire.

A noise from the undergrowth caused him to look up from his panning and he was greeted with the sight of the other three returning. They looked pretty pleased with themselves, and Mark guessed that they had found a decent shelter.

“About ten minutes in that direction,” Mike pointed upstream, “Is a series of shallow caves in the hillside near to the stream. There’s a steep slope between them and the stream and they are at the bottom of small cliffs so basically anyone approaching the caves can only come uphill from one direction. Better still, there’s a closer clearing where the stream slows and that puts you in easy reach of the caves.”

“That sounds pretty much ideal.” Mark stated excitedly. “Well done! Now is there anybody who wants to risk eating fish tonight? Or even the vegetables?”

“I think everybody should try a small portion of one thing and if they aren’t ill after a few hours, we will know it’s fine to eat. I’ve got a purgative in my first aid kit if anyone chooses poorly.” Emily seemed keen to try the new foods.

Jo was equally keen “Does anyone know how to prepare fish?” she asked.

Mike answered in the affirmative and they both moved over to the small pile that she had caught. They dug a hole for the bits of fish that Mike demonstrated shouldn’t be kept and wrapped the fish flesh in large leaves so that Jo could carry them in her bag.

Kajal offered small bites of various different tubers to the group and whilst most of these seemed edible and not too unpleasant in small amounts, the piece that Mark had was so bitter, that when he bit into it, he had to immediately spit it out. It took several mouthfuls of water to remove the flavour.

Mark collected his gold into a small bag, and they moved off, towards the caves. As they walked towards shelter, they collected dry wood from the forest floor. There weren’t any coniferous trees around or Mark would have collected cones to make fire lighting easier. Instead, Mike and he ended up carrying a largish branch between them. Thankfully the journey wasn’t very long.

With the exception of one cave that was separated from the other three that the group had found and which gave Mark a worrying feeling when he approached it the caves seemed ideal. They were deep enough that the rain would only reach them if it came from the direction of the cave mouth and the three that were close together only allowed people or anything large to go into them a short way. One of the caves had a deep crack in the floor but that crack was less than an arm width wide, whilst being several foot long and fairly deep. Mark immediately thought of it as the toilet cave.

The rest of the day was spent hauling stones and branches up to the caves to provide shelter from potential poor weather. Mark was particularly proud of the woven screen that they made as a group. They forced long branches into standing vertically, mainly by the friction between the branch and the stone and then weaved smaller branches horizontally between the bigger branches. This enclosed most of one cave and Mark used some of his string to construct a door woven in a similar way and hinged against the larger cover.

They could put a fire at one end of the cave and hopefully a crack in the rock above them would draw the smoke up, otherwise things would get very smoky for them once the fire was lit. It would still be cosy with all six of them in the same cave but nobody showed any interest in sleeping in the other cave.

As no-one had shown any signs of being sick, Jo decided that she would risk eating some of the fish and so they quickly got a fire going and made a spit-like device from forked branches and a thinner branch to attempt to cook the fish evenly. The smell as it cooked was divine and everyone was salivating as it was done. Mark was a little concerned that juices from the branch the fish had been cooked on may have got on the fish and so Jo only tried a small portion of the fish meat that had not been in contact with anything. The rest of the group ate some of the tubers and some of the ration packs that they had left and looked longingly at the fish.

Mark suggested that they take it in turn to be on watch during the night and volunteered for the 2 o’clock time slot. Jo had a clockwork watch and whilst there was some debate about whether the day was longer or shorter than with Earth they decided that they had no way of knowing. They therefore split the night into slots of two hours and made ready for their first night knowingly sleeping on a new world.