Chapter 5: Intellectual Pursuits

Having assured his physical survival, for the most part, Skinner turns his mind to matters of higher learning.

 

Chapter 5: Intellectual Pursuits

Something wet and cold awoke him. Skinner smiled, his eyes still closed. Socrates was telling him it was time to get up.

“Spring already?” Skinner sat up and stroked the wolf’s thick fur.

“Good morning, then,” he told the wolf.

Having stretched and resumed his bearskin cape, Skinner went out into the clear midwinter day to forage again. He had put aside the matter of the scroll and wall for weeks now, putting himself fully into the business of updating his tools and carving little fetishes of wood and stone. No matter how much he was tempted, he restrained himself from looking at the wall or scroll. He had nearly snuffed himself in the attempt to understand them, and now his sense of self-preservation demanded careful avoidance.

He hunted. It was his life in the mountain. He had decided early on to shun trapping as an unfair and unworthy pursuit. If he could not hunt successfully, then he would just go without. Most times he had let whim and chance dictate what he was hunting, but today he was deliberate. He wanted deer hides and lizard skins for a project he had in mind.

“I’ve lived here like a savage for years now,” he told Socrates, who stopped licking his paws to listen. “It’s time I used all my resources. I’m a scholar; it’s time I started acting like it.”

Socrates cocked his head as though in curiosity.

“Yeah, I know,” Skinner nodded, tying on his motley boots. This was his fourth pair since assuming the cave as his home. He had stitched them by hand from several hides. The soles were thick lizard hide, the uppers were rabbit on the inside and something akin to beaver on the outside. The cords were bear gut. He was proud of his tailorship by now. He honed his skills during long hours in the cave sitting in from winter storms. Experiment and error led him to different designs, his own habit of constant improvement drove him to improvise time and again. He had finally gotten to the point of sewing for style as well as for utility.

“If you’re the only scholar in the world . . .” he tossed a venomous glance over his shoulder toward the north wall. “I know I’m not. But if you were, you’d have to start all over, wouldn’t you? I am a scholar, am I not? Yes. I am. And if you’re a scholar, you should study. I’ve dreamed of having time to write a book—even as a hermit in a cave . . . So now I am . . . Never took into account the dearth of resource texts. So, if you don’t have a text, a good scholar should go to the source. Field study. The old fashioned way: direct observation and journaling.

“So I am,” he continued to explain, shouldering his bow and quiver of arrows before taking one of his short spears in each hand and exiting the cave. “I’m going to collect specimens and begin the Skinner taxonomy of . . . well . . . everything.”

Socrates loped off ahead of him. He used the spears to navigate the deep drifts, thinking he should try his hand at snowshoes. The sun, painfully bright and reflected from all the snow and ice on trees, rocks, and ground, hurt his eyes. He squinted and willed his eyes to acclimate. It took only a moment.

He knew it was about two hours before sunset when he was back within sight of the cave. His hunt had been wonderfully successful. Among other things, he found a smaller cave a few miles away that served as a lair for several hundred of the large indigenous lizards. He settled for taking the first dozen to challenge him. They ranged from three feet to eight feet in length, and just over twenty to well over a hundred pounds. Knowing that they were cannibalistic, he left all but the choicest cuts of meat for the others, taking the skins and claws for use in decoration and as writing materials.

“So what shall we call these?” he mused to himself while cleaning his final, and largest, prize. “Only thing I know this size back home is monitor lizards.”

He dubbed their lair Monitor Point. It was marked by an outcrop of rocks among the litter of shale and scree running from the treeline to the permanent snowline a thousand yards further up the slope. Climbing down with comfortable agility, Skinner gathered several stout limbs into a pile. Beaming with success, he uncoiled a length of braided rope and used it to tie together a litter on which to drag his haul.

Now, pulling the litter laboriously toward his cave, he sensed sudden danger. Contentment dwindled into predatory caution. It vexed him to be so close to home and sense danger, invasion into his territory. He scanned the terrain. Nothing of threat was visible. He scanned the sky. One single eagle, a golden eagle, cast a shadow. The eagles were a fixture throughout the mountain, ranging from wingspans of six to over twelve feet. He liked to leave them offerings any time he cleaned game in the wild.

He sniffed the air but found no unfamiliar odor, though he suspected that perhaps the rank stench of field-dressed lizard would likely overpower any scent of predators. He stood motionless and stretched his senses to their utmost, trying to locate the threat. The sun sank several degrees as he stood motionless, searching and hoping simultaneously that whatever it might be would pass without incident.

Slowly, he planted his spears in the snow and drew the bow from his shoulder, placing an arrow at the ready. He closed his eyes now, using his ears and his inner sense to search. His eyes snapped open a heartbeat later. He stared at the strange shadows on the rocks only five yards from him. The rocks were unfamiliar, out of place. He drew the bow as fully as he could and loosed an arrow into a cleft in the rock pile. It exploded into an enormous humanoid form and charged him.

He dropped his bow and grabbed a spear in each hand as the creature attacked. He saw flashes of great, gnarled teeth like tusks. Powdered snow rose in a cloud around them like fog. He dropped over backward, the spear points aimed skyward. A howl. Wrenching. Searing. He rolled and jumped to his feet, a long flint dagger in one hand and bone-handled axe in the other. Snow flew. Something growled. A furry streak slammed into the beast. An enormous, bear-like claw grazed his shoulder, caught in his fur robes and sent him tumbling several yards down the mountainside.

“Soxy!” he screamed, rage and fear turning his shriek into something savage and frightening. He was suddenly facing the thing, his dagger gone and both hands swinging the axe, which was made of a four-pound wedge of flint fixed to a bear’s leg bone. A blur of fur, blood, fangs and axe ended with Skinner straddling a great fur clad beast, struggling to free his axe from the thing’s skull where it was lodged just over the left eye. Its lower mandible lay a few feet away in the blood-soaked snow.

“Soxy?” he called, looking frantically for the wolf. There was a soft whine from somewhere down the slope. Skinner raced down to find Socrates badly injured. He shed his shredded robe, picked up the heavy wolf, and returned to the cave.

“Fire!” he snapped. The wood he had laid out that morning burst into flame.

“Here, Soxy.” He placed the wolf gently on his bearskin pallet next to the fire. “I’ll get the bag balm.”

What he called ‘bag balm’ was simply a poultice made of herbs and flowers crushed into rendered bear grease. He had experimented numerous times with variations to find a formula that worked best, and stored it for such encounters. Ignoring his own painful wounds, he raced to the greased hide he kept the balm in. Grabbing the whole hand-stitched bag, he raced back over to Socrates and began to smear the muck into the wolf’s wounds.

“These are bad,” he mumbled, brushing tears unconsciously from his cheeks. Ice crystals formed in his beard, but he was completely unaware of it.

“Oh!” he moaned in terror and agonized misery as he turned the wolf slightly and found a long tear, through which he could see the wolf’s bowels and ribs. He rocked back and forth on his heels howling “no” over and over.

The echoes had died when he raised his head again and bit down his overwhelmed emotions. He sat back in his cross-legged meditation pose and began to sing wordlessly. A voice he was just on the verge of recognizing teased at the edge of his senses. He dropped into his meditative center and pulled his will around him as though it were a fur blanket. Breathing evenly, he placed his hands carefully on Socrates and willed the wounds to heal themselves.

He opened himself to the soft voice within his mind. A name whispered itself into his core: Kandor. He called the name aloud. There was a flash of pure silver light, then one of blue that faded into aqua and then a rich, pure green. He felt something within him tear, as though he had pulled an abdominal muscle, only it was not physical. Pain blotted out all knowing and tossed him into pitch darkness.

W          W           W

“Hunh?” he sat up, looking dazedly around. Socrates slept softly by a dying fire. Darkness yawned out from the cave mouth into the night beyond. He checked himself over quickly, recalling the wounds.

“Soxy?” he called softly. The wolf gave a shallow cough in his sleep.

Skinner made his way to his feet, finding with surprise that his right hand was clutched to the staff he had left with the scrolls at the north wall. Kandor, it whispered. He knew by intuition that Kandor was the staff’s name, that it had chosen him, and that he could call it from anywhere and it would come.

A howl from outside reminded him of what he was doing before the encounter. He ran to the cave mouth and gazed down the hill to where the giant corpse lay a dozen yards from his makeshift litter. He turned back and grabbed another fur robe before heading down. It occurred to him to wonder at the lack of scavengers; the moon was close enough to setting that most of the night must have passed. He pulled his skid of prize lizard skin and assorted specimens stubbornly up the hill. He would take care of their attacker in the morning.

By the next morning, though, half the thing had been eaten. Skinner chased off a murder of crows as he made his way to investigate. He spoke politely to the birds, as he did with anything he did not find a threat. They looked slightly affronted, but he had fed them often enough that Skinner thought it was a bit ungrateful for them to be miffed over this one meal.

“Patience, fecund scavengers!” he growled.

He studied the remains of the beast for several minutes. Whatever it had been, the thing had suffered quite a change of shape since the encounter. The eyes, he recalled that they were icy blue, had been taken as prizes—he suspected the crows. Its face, which Skinner himself had rendered unrecognizable in his panic, was stripped to the bone.

“Okay,” Skinner shrugged. “Let’s see what we do have here and ignore what we can’t know.”

He stripped the remaining fur from the beast. It was the best pelt he had yet found, short-haired and thick skinned. Waterproof. Having finessed the skin free, Skinner cut into its organs and inspected everything with great curiosity, taking mental notes. He came to think of it as a snowtroll. His best guess was a height of sixteen feet. Its femur, which he kept separate for his next axe handle, was as long as Skinner’s whole leg. Insulated with dense fat, the thing had a heavy skeleton and long, thin muscles. He guessed it at around nine-hundred pounds.

Skinner tossed huge chunks of meat now and again at the cacophonous throng of scavengers throughout his investigation. To finish, he strained to salvage the greater tendons for later use.

“Snowtroll,” he told Socrates that night at his fireside. The wolf whined thinly. Though its wounds had sealed themselves, he was still weak from blood loss and blunt trauma.

“That’s what I’ll call them.” He wrote on a lizard skin with a charstick. “More humanoid than anything else I know. Skeleton’s scary manlike. Same basic internal organ system, too. They have a few glands or something I have no idea about, but all major parts are similar . . .”