Chapter 3

Leon woke easily on his third day, the excitement of finally getting some food driving him to quickly dress and prepare himself. He again wore the short coat and clothes from the previous day. With his knife on his hip, he exited his bedroom to find that it was still dark outside. Chuckling to himself that he had gotten up too early, he moved over to where he had laid out the fire ring and, after stooping around for a bit, lit it with one of the flints.

With a healthy fire now giving him some light, he went into the forge and grabbed his spear to examine it again. With the addition of the spearhead and sauroter, the total length of the duro was almost 9ft. Sitting by his fire, the only thing he noticed wrong was a little knob on the shaft that was quickly removed with a pass of his knife.

Looking outside, Leon found it was getting very light and so he stomped out his fire and started walking to the river. He needed a drink to start the day with, a big one. Once he had drunk his fill, he headed for the trees.

He stopped at the tree line and thought about how to throw the spear. In his past life, the only thing that had come close to this was in school when he had thrown a javelin. That situation was of only a little help as then he was going for distance, here it was accuracy that was important. Still, the throwing action should be mostly the same.

Taking a firm grip on his spear, he drew back his arm, picked a tree and threw the spear as hard and as straight as possible. To his great surprise, he watched it fly through the air and impact the tree, albeit about 3ft higher than his target. He retrieved his spear, finding it very firmly imbedded in the trunk, before standing in the same spot and repeating his throw with less force behind it. It hit the tree; however he was still 2ft over the target.

For the next hour he repeated the exercise, varying his force and distance from the tree. He found, to his astonishment, that he could hit the target accurately, 80% of the time from a distance of just over 150ft. Leon felt very confident that he could now hunt and survive.

As he thought about where the best place to hunt was, while retrieving his spear after another throw, he heard voices coming from the trees. Not wanting to be seen yet, he grabbed his spear and scaled a tree. As the voices quieted, Leon waited to see who it was.

Not long after, a group of 10 men came walking through the trees. They carried what Leon thought was the meat and skins from four animals, elk, he thought. They were each dressed in an array of skins and furs, crudely sewn to form pants and tunics. Each was armed with a flint-tipped spear and once carried a knife made from flint.

As they passed his tree, he carefully looked them over and thought that the oldest one was about 40, while the youngest couldn't have been more then 16. They continued on out of the trees, and headed north, past his little canyon. He thought they might be from the camp where he saw the smoke from so he decided to quietly follow them home.

He dropped from his tree and, keeping low to the ground, hurried to catch up with them. He stayed about a half a mile behind them, so as to lower the chances of them seeing him, though he doubted they thought that anyone would be following them.

They walked throughout the morning, not stopping once. It was approaching midday when they rounded an outcropping in the escarpment and disappeared from sight. Leon carefully moved up to the outcropping and peered around.

He watched as the ten men approached a cave that had many crude huts set up near it. People were out to greet them, almost 30 men, women and children and from where he watched, Leon could hear them speak. It surprised him at first. He knew that they weren't speaking English but he could still understand. He put it down to one of the many things the people that put him here did to him.

"Welcome back Bunta. How was the hunt?" asked a large man.

"It was good as you can see, Gara," Bunta, one of the hunters, replied.