The cliff was harder going up than the thirty feet he'd climbed for reconnaissance.
He found his route carefully, testing each hold before committing his weight, the knife at his belt in case he needed a hand that was elsewhere. The mist from the waterfall made the lower section slick and he moved through it slowly, his arm protesting the overhead reaches with a stiffness that loosened degree by degree as he climbed. By the time he pulled himself over the clifftop and onto the riverbank above, he was breathing harder than the exertion alone justified and his side had registered a formal complaint.
He rested for a moment. Drank from the river. Looked at the forest.
It looked the same.
He had not expected it to look different — five days was nothing to something this old — but there was a quality to standing at its edge again that was different from how it had felt the last time he'd been here, which had been in the dark and the rain with a Death Ape between him and everything else. It looked like a forest in the daylight. Dense, certainly. Old, certainly. The particular quality of a place that had its own rules and enforced them.
He knew some of those rules now.
He went in.
The first hour was cautious — not the paralysed, every-sound-significant caution of the first day but a more functional version, the wariness of someone who had learned the difference between sounds that mattered and sounds that didn't. He moved at an angle southwest, using the river as his reference, keeping it within earshot without following it directly. The sun was clear overhead and he tracked it through the canopy, adjusting his bearing when the tree cover shifted.
He found his own trail from five days ago without meaning to.
Not clear — the forest had already begun absorbing it, the broken undergrowth partly recovered, the boot impressions in the softer ground blurred by rain and time. But recognisable if you were looking, which he was. He followed it for a while, the inverse journey, retracing the direction of the pack chase in daylight and at a pace he controlled entirely.
The bent tree where he'd first found the branch. Still there, the fresh-broken end lighter than the weathered bark around it.
He kept moving.
The forest was not empty. He had learned that on the first day and nothing since had changed it — the question was always whether what occupied the space had any interest in him specifically, and the answer most of the time, with proper attention and reasonable noise discipline, was no. He moved carefully past a section of dense undergrowth where something large was moving, the sounds of it too slow and heavy for anything likely to pursue him. He gave it distance and it gave him none in return, both parties apparently content with the arrangement.
Mid-morning he crossed the tributary that fed the main river — shallower here than where he'd been before, the rocks exposed, the crossing straightforward if he picked his line. He crossed dry above the knee and took a moment on the far bank to check his bearings from the sun.
Good. He was making progress.
The first creature that required engagement found him an hour later.
He heard it before he saw it — a rustling in the undergrowth at the path's edge that had a specific quality, too light for anything dangerous, too persistent for anything random. He slowed and watched and a small, dark-furred thing emerged from the vegetation with the complete confidence of something that had never had reason to develop caution. It looked at him. He looked at it. It had the general shape of a rabbit and the specific attitude of something that had expanded into an ecological niche vacated by the things that would normally have kept its numbers down.
He was out of vine fruit.
He had the knife.
He was not proud of what followed but he was practical about it, and the fire kit had enough tallow left for one small fire, and the creature in question had made several poor decisions about threat assessment that had contributed to the outcome.
He ate well for the first time in five days.
The second creature was less cooperative.
He was moving through a section of older forest, the trees wider-spaced, the canopy high enough that the afternoon light came through in proper columns, when the thing dropped from the branch above him. Not a Death Ape — smaller, faster, the body long and serpentine in a way that suggested a different evolutionary strategy, four limbs but held close while it moved in a motion that was more flowing than stepping. It landed two metres ahead and turned toward him with the speed of something that had done this many times.
He had the knife out before it closed half the distance.
What followed was less a fight than a series of very fast decisions about angles and footwork, the creature's speed requiring him to move rather than stand and react. It was aggressive but not large, and its aggression had a pattern — three quick strikes and a withdrawal, repeat — that he identified on the second cycle and used on the third, moving into the withdrawal instead of back from the strike and ending the encounter with more efficiency than grace.
He stood over it breathing harder than he'd have liked and looked at the claw marks across his forearm — not deep, superficial, the creature's reach not quite matching its ambition.
He rewrapped the arm from his remaining cloth strips.
Kept moving.
By the time the light began its afternoon shift he had covered more ground than he'd estimated, the terrain more familiar now — not comfortable, the forest was not a place that offered comfort, but known. He could feel the difference in how he navigated it, the small adjustments happening faster, the threat assessment running with less effort and more accuracy.
He found a tree before dark.
Not the leaning one — a different one, a better one, the kind of vantage point he would have struggled to identify a week ago and found within twenty minutes tonight. He was up in it before the last light left the canopy and settled himself with his back to the trunk, the knife in his hand, and listened to the forest change register as the dark arrived.
The howls came around midnight.
Distant, and moving across rather than toward him — the pack's territory ran some way to the north of his current position and they were elsewhere tonight, the sound passing through the forest the way sound passed through water, present everywhere and directed nowhere. He listened to them and felt his pulse stay even and recognised that as something.
He slept in intervals, the way he'd learned, and woke at dawn and climbed down and kept moving.