Lost Inside the Forest's Throat

Hours turn to nights turn to days Renard spends in that valley.

Though he has passed the timeframe wherein he expected to reach a town, or at least leave the valley, the simple work of following the riverbed keeps his mind off the worst-case scenarios. He does have some hares on him, in a basket on his back, which he retrieved from his father’s traps to sustain him comfortably through this little tramp. Because surely, the valley cannot go much longer.

But it does go much longer. Another night forces Renard to camp on the cold, hard ground. He brains a hare against a rock, sucks the blood from its severed neck, rips open the creature’s body with his hands and slurps out the raw meat like an animal. No longer enjoying the experience, and rather resentful of it, now when he looks at the crystalline river and the lush trees and the stars above, all he sees is a place he is sick of, and that he would rather not be.

Morning doesn’t restore his morale. As he trudges for another day under the waves of blistering Western sun, sweating despite the shade of the trees and cool of the river, he grows light-headed and lethargic. Without running it through a distiller, blood can’t substitute for water forever. He cracks open another hare and pauses to water the couple remaining, aware of his dwindling resources.

Sighing, he sets back to the road. Toxic as it is, the tinkling of the clear river beside him is growing kind of tempting.

But those concerns can wait. Renard freezes in surprise as the river before him plummets into a waterfall, though the drop is not so massive as to be impossible to scale.

He carefully climbs down, but partway his footing slips. He lands on the tough, rocky ground below. He is lucky not to break any bones, though his hips to his ankles all hurt and his last hares have escaped from his broken basket. Thoroughly dejected, he can only return to the thought of, ‘surely, now, it can’t be much longer’. And in fact — he shortly comes to the end of the river.

It flows into a small hole under the brush that must be an opening to a cave system, disappearing into the earth. Renard can’t go any further along it, and there’s no settlement to find.

Rather, as he turns around to survey the area, he finds he is just stuck. His efforts to climb back up the cliffs abutting the waterfall reward him only with scrapes (nevermind the hazardousness of the water, which could splash into his cuts or eyes), and every other direction is mountain. He has trapped himself in a sort of ‘bowl’ in the middle of the valley.

Forced now to stay put, it finally, for the first time, starts to dawn on Renard that he might die.

All the same, it is not until he is lying half-dead on the rocks, barely conscious, head pounding, vision blurred, too weak to even sit up much less stand, that he thinks that he actually will.

He doesn’t have any thoughts of regret, or of anything truly poignant at all. Perhaps some would question their place in the universe, or curse the world for its cruelty. Others might scream for the people they would leave behind, the potential they never realised, or the business they never finished. Renard is not any of these people. When faced with his own impending mortality, all he can think, insofar as he thinks anything, is ‘nobody cares anyway’.

But even that’s wrong, since Renard cares, and if Renard cares, somebody cares, and if somebody cares, nothing bad can happen. Surely the forces of the universe will align to conform to this logic. How could they not? But even these sentiments aren’t held with any conscious will, so much as a feeling of intrinsic correctness.

Nothing bad can happen. Whatever Renard does, the outcome will be good.

Or so are the half-formed, half-conscious thoughts in his degrading brain as his eyelids begin to droop. A blurry silhouette shifts on the waterfall above him, but its presence is less significant than the comfort of oncoming sleep, even as voices rise, and the world moves, in the darkness.