Chapter 1: Skinner's Advent

Ripped from his Illinois life, Skinner finds himself in a mountain wilderness and must learn to survive.

 

The Unsummoned: Chronicles of the Fulcrum I

Chapter 1: Skinner’s Advent

Robert Dean Skinner awoke with a start. It was dark. Disoriented, he reached for his bedside lamp, but jammed his fingers instead on something rough like tree bark. He blinked his eyes to clear them of sleep, and looked at the tree on which he had just skinned his knuckles.

“Poot!” He stifled the urge to cuss, just in case his fifteen-year-old son was within earshot.

He sat bolt upright and looked around, finding himself surrounded by trees and ground cover as though in a forest. His mind spun with the unlikelihood of it. He thought back to falling asleep, certain he had been in bed . . . No. His wife was away. Usual to his habit with her away, he had sat up drinking cognac and writing poetry. He had fallen asleep in the wee hours of morning with his pen still clutched in his right hand. The pen that was still there, a Levenger fountain pen styled after Isaac Newton’s walking stick. It’s weight felt familiar, comforting.

But, no. That had been Tuesday night. His wife, Siobhan, was home. They had gone to bed together. He had stayed up to write a few more notes on the Anthropology essay he was researching for the museum. Cognac was part of tonight’s celebration to welcome his wife home from her Galena workshop. He should be in his own bed, beside his wife . . .

He muttered to himself something about the impossibility of going to sleep in Springfield, Illinois and waking in a forest. The nearest wood with trees like this was—he shook his head, attempting to clear it, and wondered now how he had gotten into Washington Park—a ten-minute drive from his house, an hour-long walk.

“Perhaps the absinthe . . .” he muttered. He shivered, realizing that he was chilled. He climbed to his feet and tried to orient himself. He was barefoot, clad in sweat pants and a t-shirt. He checked his pockets to find them empty. Shrugging, he stuck his pen in his pocket.

He stood still for a few minutes, adjusting his eyes to the shadows. It was too dark. There was no light glowing over the trees, just very bright stars and a full moon—which was impossible, as the moon had been full over a week ago.

“Hello?” he called out to the forest, his voice both louder and more quiet than he wanted. “Anyone here? I seem to . . .” he shrugged his square, broad shoulders. “Dreaming, I guess,” he muttered.

He listened carefully to the sounds around him. Having hunted and camped in his youth, he was not unfamiliar with wilderness. He breathed deeply the scents around him; the fragrance of blooms led him to conclude that it must be spring wherever he was. The music of running water caught his ear. He headed to it, thirsty.

The tender soles of his feet kept him cursing most of the way as evergreen needles and sharp rocks bruised him. He was growing frustrated with the realism of his dream even as he bent to drink from a small stream that ran tinkling over a rocky streambed.

Having slaked his thirst, he looked around and decided to go upstream for no particular reason. His intuition, in the manner of dreams, told him that it was the right way to go. Moonlight glinted off the water in jubilant dance as he strode along the bank, ascending eventually to an incline he found more and more challenging.

It seemed he walked for half the night and several miles when he spotted a cluster of rocks that suggested to him that he might find a cave nearby. He left the stream bank and worked his way carefully among the rocks, cursing now and then as he stubbed his toes or stepped on or in anything that further grieved his excruciated feet.

I’ll just find a cave here and go to sleep, he thought. I’ll wake up with numb feet and wonder what the fiery conflagration this dream was about.

He had little trouble finding the cave. It seemed to call to him, though he suspected more that he had caused it to materialize in his dream as one does in dreams. He shrugged the question off as silly and lay down on the smooth, cool earth of the cave floor, comfortable with the idea he would awaken back in his own bedroom clutching a pen and smelling of caramel from the cognac.

 

A low growl awakened him some time after dawn. Skinner opened his eyes slowly, confounded by the rocky slope of cave above him. Slowly as he could, he rolled to his left and looked toward the cave mouth. The growling came from somewhere close, but he could see nothing from his position on the floor.

He climbed to his feet as silently as possible, swallowing a tirade as he felt his bruises protest. The growling came closer. He reached out to pick up a fist-sized stone, careful to move as steadily and deliberately as possible to pull the stone free without shifting the stones around it and thereby signaling his position with their rustling. He cocked his arm, ready to hurl the stone, and waited.

It did not occur to him to wonder about the situation. Urgency forced him to deal with it as though it were real. He gazed back into the cave, looking to see how deep into the hillside it went. The cave narrowed and its ceiling, nearly nine feet high where he was, lowered to about six feet or so. He moved as quietly toward the darkness as he could, careful of his tortured feet.

The tunnel at the rear of the cave went back as far as he could see, disappearing into inky darkness on a downward slope. He sniffed the air, trying to convince himself that he was not in the lair of some animal, especially not a predator larger than himself. A strong, pungent odor seemed to hang in the air all around, but Skinner decided it was an old smell.

He squatted in the tunnel and waited. Nothing happened for what seemed hours after the growl faded. He began to ponder the situation: “Okay. I’m either stuck in a dream or completely off my bubble . . .” Another low growl interrupted his argument with himself. He raised his head, listening with all his concentration. The second low growl brought a smile of self-deprecation to his lips—his empty stomach was protesting the time between meals.

The air outside the cave was almost painfully clear. He smelled only the fragrances of nature: evergreen sap, lilac, sage of some sort, and too many other things to name. He looked around, reminded of the time he had spent in the mountains of northeast Arizona. He could see the stream roll down the mountainside and into a valley thick with forest where evergreen met deciduous.

“Peculiar,” he said. Nothing for it but to make the best . . . he thought to himself.

He made his way to the stream and drank deeply. A flat stone caught his eye. He pulled it up and set it on a flat rock in the sunlight to dry, then went back to find similar rocks. Within an hour, he had collected more than a dozen such rocks and dried them in the sun. He found a boulder about twice the size of his head and man-handled it over to his flat rock.

Though he continued expecting to awaken from the strange dream, Skinner began to ponder the odd possibility that he was indeed awake and somehow removed from his own life. “Translocation,” he muttered to the piece of flint he was chipping. It was taking on the shape of an axe head as he patiently chipped away at it. He had broken his first three attempts, but kept the fragments in hopes of making points for spears and arrow heads.

“Okay,” he told himself, “we’ll play Survivor-man until this gets figured out.”

He found berries and nuts down in the valley. Collecting all he could carry in his t-shirt, he brought them to the cave while he rested his aching wrists from the work of napping flint. Now he looked hungrily at the stream and wondered if he could catch fish by hand.

“Excuse me,” he said to a squirrel who came down to steal from his pile of what he equated to the local version of walnuts. They tasted like black pepper ground into black walnuts and mixed with pecans. “Do you know where I might find a bait shop?”

The squirrel stared at him for a moment without comment before scrambling up a tree. Skinner chuckled at it and promised himself he would eat that little critter as soon as his bow was finished and he could hunt it down. “Rude little vermin,” he muttered.

W          W          W

A week later Skinner had come to the conclusion that he had indeed gone mad, that his former life had been some strange delusion, and that he was actually a hermit who lived in a cave somewhere outside of America. He based this conclusion on what he considered to be the very best of possible evidence. Studying the night sky for several nights; he became certain that this was not his night sky. Orion was nowhere evident in this sky, and this moon was not his moon. Though he was not well studied in astronomy, he was confident that this moon was either larger or closer than the moon he had seen, or imagined he had seen, for forty years. Not only that, this moon remained full for nearly three days before waning, and moved more slowly than he thought it should.

He saw birds and small mammals here that were completely unfamiliar to him. They were similar to the forest creatures he had seen both in his travels around America and in books, but slightly askew in one way or another. The ground squirrels here had tufted ears, but the tree squirrels, whose song was not the barking of foxtails, had thin pointy ears and amber eyes. The birds had plumage that was slightly off-tint of what he thought they should have. And while much of their song was similar, there were odd cadences he was certain were as intricate as his own language. He had almost convinced himself that he would understand them if he only relaxed and absorbed himself in the song.

Though he scouted for miles in every direction over the next many days, he found no sign of civilization. No smoke, no tracks, no buildings. Day or night, he could find no evidence that any human being other than himself lived on this mountain. It was this that led him to conclude that the animals were secure with his presence because they had never seen another human to learn fear of them.

One of his forays led him to a source of cane reeds. He cut them into shafts for arrows with the axe he had chipped from flint and fixed with vines to a Y-shaped branch cut with a great deal of effort from one of the large deciduous trees he was certain was a lost species of oak. The right material for making a bow evaded him.

Weeks later he set out from the cave early in the morning, deciding it was time to test his skill with the short spears he had spent so much time and energy balancing and learning to throw. He hardened the cane in the coals of fires he built to cook the fish he had become efficient at hand-catching from the stream.

“Red meat,” he mumbled. “What’ll it be? Boar? Venison?”

He was almost happy as he set out to a game trail he had scouted several days previous. He studied the trail and the animals in the forest. He took clues from the animals on what was edible and what not. He learned to avoid the blood-red berries of a bush he found beautiful in a sinister sort of way, and watched as the animals avoided it. It took a fairly self-destructive mood for him to try the mushrooms he noticed a young deer eating. It made him feel odd, but did not hurt him. He found a great number of fruits, nuts, vegetables and tubers from watching the animals as well, enough to keep him well fed, healthy, and fit. But now he was hungry for meat.

Skinner found his spot and waited. He avoided the few deer that entered what he thought might be his range, knowing that they tended to roam together and being cautious of their antlers. After long deliberation, he decided to wait for one of the solitary wild pigs he had seen rooting here and there all over the mountain.

“Work my way up to one of those rams up yonder,” he mumbled to himself. He had gone up to the bluffs at the snowline early on to get a greater view of the area, and encountered one of the rams there on his third or fourth day in the cave. The ram, unlike the mountain goats he was used to, had very wide antlers that spread in a sort of wide W from its forehead. He wanted to try making a bow of those horns, which reminded him more of a longhorn steer than—

He jumped and threw his spear as hard as he could. A shrill scream split the silence, sending birds from the nearby trees into a frenzied flurry and darting into the lazy blue sky. He swore and knelt to grab his other spear as the boar charged him. He planted the spear and held it low, pointed at the boar’s chest. His heart beat madly. Wet warmth ran down his leg as screamed unconsciously in reaction. The boar ran headlong onto the spear, but its head was lowered in such a way that the flint Clovis pierced its lower jaw and was driven up through the animal’s throat and onward through its back. The shaft snapped.

Skinner rolled to avoid the tusks that suddenly became the pivot of his reality, its only focus. Without thought he reached to his waist and pulled the flint knife free, stabbing at the boar. Air exploded from his lungs as the tusks slammed into his ribs and he was knocked down the hill.

He gained his feet almost instantly and screamed savagely as he tackled the swine, wrestling with a fury born of survival instinct. His hand moved without volition to stab into the porcine ball of fury. The boar roared and squealed, then kicked and lay still on top of him as he continued to thrash against it, sinking his teeth into its neck just below the place where the spear had broken off.

“Brute!” he growled, spitting blood and a chunk of bristly flesh from his mouth. “Broke my rib, ya fecund chunk of unsavory other-meat.” He kicked the twitching corpse, cussing and panting, shocked at his own savagery. Then he gutted the boar and began to drag it home after marking the spot of his victory.

By the time he got back to the cave, Skinner was feverish from pain. He pushed himself beyond reasonable endurance, dragging the carcass of the boar stubbornly through underbrush, brambles, and thick clumps of grass. He had stopped as soon as his blood cooled from the encounter, realizing that his injuries were more than casual bruises. He cursed the boar vociferously, creating curse words in his fury, and hacked its head off to drop more weight from it.

“Wanted those tusks!” he snapped. “Need the pelt, too. Gotta make shoes.”

He was half a mile from the cave when his ribs and shoulder refused further torture and he stumbled to the shore of the stream. “Fine, then,” he told his own reflection. “I’ll take a drink and a rest . . .” His reflection caught his attention and he looked at his left shoulder. It hung wrong. There was a hollow in front between his pectoral and shoulder muscles, visible through the tatters of his stained and bloody t-shirt.

“Puddin’!” he grumbled. “No wonder you’re hurting. Seems I’ve dislocated you clean out of—hold on . . .”

Birds flocked from the tree above him as a savage scream arose from Skinner’s throat. His head spun and vision dimmed as he righted his own shoulder. He lay panting several moments before sitting up against a tree and looking around. Stars and shadows chased each other through his skull. He fought off unconsciousness.

When he finally cleared his mind enough to be aware of his surroundings, something in the breeze had changed.

“Get away from that!” he bellowed. A wolf trotted close to his prize, sniffing hungrily. “That’s mine ya greedy beastie! Piss off!”

The wolf cocked its head inquisitively, staring at the man.

“I am Skinner, varmint!” he yelled. “Get away from my trophy!”

The wolf sniffed, then trotted off as though bored. Skinner watched him, suddenly wishing the wolf would stay. He shrugged painfully, vexed at himself for feeling lonely and muttering angrily about how great it was to be a man alone in the mountains.

Within sight of the cave, he turned impulsively to look behind. The wolf slunk behind a shrub as though to avoid being seen. Skinner was certain it was following. Don’t you dare think me weak enough or injured enough for the like of you, he thought scornfully. He found a flat place to sit with his prize and crossed his legs beneath him in a meditative pose, something he had taken to doing at sunrise and sunset every day to remind himself that he was human. This time, though, he dropped himself into meditation for the purpose of managing pain. He relaxed his mind and body, concentrating on his breath.

When he opened his eyes much later, the wolf sat staring at him.

“Hello,” he smiled weakly. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll share.” He pulled his flint knife out and cut a haunch from the boar, nearly screaming as tossing it sent a stab of pain through his ribs.

The wolf watched him warily several minutes before approaching the haunch. Skinner studied him back. He was a large canine, Skinner guessed him well over a hundred pounds. About forty inches at the shoulder. Rusty tan mixed with gray throughout the wolf’s coat, markings more like a cat than a dog. Its snout was short for a wolf, but toothy and with a purplish tongue reminiscent of a chow’s.

“Well,” Skinner said conversationally, “go ahead and have some.”

The wolf lashed its bushy tail once as though in salute, picked up the haunch gently, and loped off as though content with a good bargain. Skinner stared after him for nearly a quarter of an hour with a puzzled look on his face.

It was nearly dusk by the time he got the boar spitted and cooking. He sat scraping the skin with an edged piece of flint, chewing on the mushrooms he had learned had a slightly intoxicating property as well as being an unrivaled painkiller.

Reviews

[patricia]

a great chapter. Flawless and realy interesting.