It took me a while to find the boar, even after the thing snorted. I had been looking on the ground for a boar to fight, not in a tree to put down. It was angry, but it was also dying. Looked like one of those big guys threw it into the tree where a branch impaled it. I used my spear to finish it off and then looked for the things rider.

Even after half an hour of looking I couldn’t find it. There was no telling where it was; it could have been thrown free or run off. Either way, I headed back to the boar. It had drained out most of the way, and so I worked to get it down. I wasn’t above stealing someone’s kill, and it would be a waste to leave it here.

I ended up building a travois to load the boar onto and then headed back. I felt reasonably sure that the goblins were done at this place, and they weren’t planning on tracking the two that beat them. I also felt comfortable with the idea that the two big uglies had someplace else they were going.

I headed to the top of the waterfall since I had a way to lower everything down. I wanted to get the boar back to camp, and then I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t easy to spot. I was getting more worried that where I picked to learn about the world put me almost at the bottom of the food chain.

“Blink, We need to get back to camp fast and hide our tracks. I am going to climb down and drop the boar off and then pull everything back up. There is no need to let all of these monsters know where we are.”

With that, I started to climb down. It was only about 80-feet of a rock wall, and while I wasn’t at a very high level of climbing, I was doing it without carrying anything. There were a few times that I slipped, but the rope was there for me to grab.

I untied the boar and made my way back to the top of the wall. I was incredibly worn out with the double climb. After a quick rest, I pulled up the rope and stored it and the basket in the tree, making sure it was hard to see.

I took some time to look off the cliff to see if I could spot the smoke I had seen a few days before, and I could. There were at least four fires, maybe more. I figured the smoke was from cooking fires, likely from the goblins. My fire, I’d built a rack over the day before that was about eight feet above the fire, and I’d several branches over it. I hoped to defuse the smoke to keep it from being seen.

I spent about the next hour with my hand axe chopping down some nice spear-sized branches and tossing them over the cliff. I also dumped as many vines as I could find over the cliff face so that I could make more rope. I’d a feeling that I would be figuring out some traps and that I would need rope to make it work. I then headed back down the ridge, working on hiding my tracks as I went.

We headed down the trail past where our turn-off was and kept on pushing. I wanted to take it down about an hour more or so to see if I could get a better lay of the land. I also wanted to know if I could find any other turn-offs from the trail. Right now, it seemed just to follow the ridge to the river above the falls. In most cases, there would be additional paths that came in from other places if this was a game trail. Yet it seemed the more I traveled it that I might be dealing with a path.

I found evidence about half an hour passed my lower river access of those green monsters. There was a dead one or at least part of a dead one on the ground. It looked like it had been chewed on. The odd thing was that next to it were its spears. I’d have thought that even if the monsters left the bodies of their dead just lying around, then they would take the weapons. Some amount of time had to go into making them. Granted, they were almost worthless, but still, they were weapons.

Just a little bit further down the path, I saw why the first one was left with its spears. There was another battleground like the one I found the boar at. The goblins were strewn everywhere, and there were broken trees like before. I saw no evidence of anyone coming through to look for survivors of the battle.

The big difference between this battle and the last wasn’t the number of dead or the amount of damage to the trees. No, it was the odd nature of much of some of the damage done to the plant life.

There were places that appeared to be burn marks and other areas that looked like the ground had frozen. I moved around the edge of the battle and saw one of the trees had a perfect circle on it that looked like it rotted out. Just a two-inch circle, but it was noticeable.

I wanted to go in and examine the bodies and look to see what they had in their pouches. However, my survival instincts kicked in. If I looked at their bodies, then if someone came back, they would see my prints. As it was, I was counting on no one looking too closely at the tracks around the battle.

I ended up pushing on for another mile before I felt like I had seen enough for the day. I looked over another drop-off and tried to get an angle where I thought the fires were before, but I couldn’t find the smoke. I found a rabbit in a snare and one of those little spears through it. That meant that I was close enough for trapping, so I needed to make sure that I moved off nice and easy so that I wouldn’t get found. I needed to use every bit of my tracking skill to mask my return home. It wouldn’t do to lead them home when I was trying to hide.

Now that I knew how close they were to my home, it meant that I needed to actively work on doing things to keep safe. Before, I’d just assumed that I’d be, and even now, I kind of did. They’d have to find me, so my best bet for defense is to stay away from where they are and not go up that way. If I could, I’d also do some checks before going up to hunt the unnt.

I needed a way to stay safe, but I didn’t have to worry about just monsters. I also had to worry about not starving and taking care of everything about life. So while I needed to prepare for the monsters, I also had to start hunting so that I could live and learn. I could only hide so long before I needed to either move on or deal with the local problem. Likely I’d need to do both.

I traveled slowly home, staying on hard rocks or brushing out my tracks. When I got to soft areas, I made sure that I took a long look at them to see if there was anything amiss. Once I got back, I made sure to pull my ladder up and do a full sweep of the landing. I hadn’t seen signs before of anyone here, but I wanted to check each time I came back. I might be acting paranoid, but I knew now that there were those out to get me.

The last bit of light I’d I set down in the open on the sand and popped the question to Sam.

“Oh great and mighty greeter Sam, I the lowly Arn beseech you to answer my question. How do I feed The Necklace of Cores?”

The nice thing was when sitting with my legs crossed, I couldn’t stand, so I didn’t fall very far. The odd thing was that I managed to rock forward on my knee caps before throwing my arms in the air while I yelled. So when I fell forward after that, I passed out with my legs crossed under me which ended up a hard way to get out of. To add to this little problem in the amount of time it took me to wake up from being passed out from mana drain, Blink had added her weight to my back just ’cause.

Once I got myself untangled, I was off to bed to see what all I learned and to see what Sam had in store for me.

By your actions today

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Tracking (level 5)