They spent a week exploring the area. Part way through Mark moved his panning to a glade further upstream as he was spending longer to find less gold. Moving allowed him to go back to starting levels of gold. By the end of the week, he had six nuggets formed from the flakes he had found, and these were distributed evenly. As a group they had no idea if they had a lot of gold or hardly any.

Each night they had been attacked. The attacks came at different times and seemingly randomly. The group managed to defend themselves well and they remained unhurt, but their sleep was disrupted, and they were all getting gradually more irritable.

One thing they had noticed was that they were never attacked when Kajal was on duty. This seemed weird as he was hardly the best fighter. In fact, he was by far the worst. Mark’s sense for the environment which grew a little stronger each day saw Kajal as being the opposite of the creatures that attacked. It would be trite to say that if the creatures were filled by the feeling of hate, Kajal was filled with love, and it would also be wrong. Kajal was instead giving off a feeling of power that felt healing. Mark had noticed that he felt less irritable when Kajal was around as well.

During one of the evening meals Mark had asked the group whether they could all sense the world around them and the results were mixed. Emily could sense further than anyone else but seemed only able to feel the presence of animals and plants. Mike, like Mark seemed aware of more of the different energies around. Kajal and Charlie didn’t seem able to sense anything whilst Jo seemed only to be aware of the different levels of light and darkness.

Also, over the week it became more and more obvious that both Mike and Charlie had grown taller whilst Jo was a little smaller. None of them had really noticed anything different about themselves other than that.

By the end of the week, they had done a fairly good job of collecting foods that they knew they could eat. Storage was a problem, and they were beginning to run out of their packed foods and so they needed meat to add to their otherwise vegetable diet. Even though Charlie was a vegan they also realised that they didn’t have a wide enough food intake or supplements and indeed were the person who first pointed out the problem with the lack of food variety. It appeared that they had educated themselves in exactly what food types their body needed and especially with their and Mike’s growth they needed extra protein to help with muscle growth.

The decision was reached to go hunting. Kajal refused anything to do with hunting although was quite prepared to prepare the food after it had been killed and field dressed.

They set off with Mike leading the way. Three of them were familiar with the area and had decided that a large glade, almost the size of a field, would be a good place through which to herd animals. Once they reached the glade Mark, Jo and Charlie would act as beaters and try to drive animals into the glade where Emily would try to shoot something and Mike finish it off.

Emily hid herself in the shadow of a tree at the edge of the glade at roughly ninety degrees from the direction that the animals were being driven from and downwind. Mike was directly in the path of the animals and also hidden. They were hoping to get a small deer or similar that would provide enough meat for all of them for a few days without getting an animal so big that the meat would spoil.

When the other three started walking towards Emily and Mike they made loud drumming sounds by knocking pieces of wood together. They also started shouting and made sure they loudly walked through the undergrowth. They could hear rustling ahead of them and spotted movement both on the ground and in the trees. They had only started half a kilometre into the woodland and so it wasn’t long before Emily could hear them and got herself ready to shoot. She had arrows placed in the dirt in front of her so she should be able to get several shots.

There was movement from the edge of the woodland and some small furry creatures appeared and scurried past Emily, nothing was particularly large and so she waited. Then a deer like creature appeared, it was perfect. Emily took aim and shot but either the sounds behind the beast or something else disturbed it. The beast bolted to the side and Emily’s arrow missed. She turned to follow it whilst grabbing a second arrow from the ground in front of her. Her hasty second shot managing to hit the haunch of the beast causing it to falter slightly and then continue running, noticeably bleeding as it ran.

Emily followed the beast as it ran in Mike’s direction and was able to see him move to attack. She could also see that a large cat like beast was also moving to attack the injured deer and neither attacker had seen the other. She screamed for Mike to watch out just as they both attacked.