The next morning, Ethan rose stiff and groggy from a night of broken sleep. His makeshift shelter had done little to keep out the cold, and dew clung to his clothes. His stomach growled angrily, and the berries he had eaten yesterday had done little more than tease his hunger.
"Alright," he muttered, rubbing his eyes. "Time to figure this out."
Survival looked easier on television. Out here, every task felt like pushing against a wall of exhaustion and uncertainty. He knew he needed better food than berries if he wanted to last. Hunting or fishing seemed like the only option—but how? He had no gun, no bow, just a knife.
Still, desperation breeds creativity.
He spent the morning searching the underbrush for anything useful. Fallen branches became tools. He sharpened one end of a sturdy stick into a crude spear, hacking at it with his knife until the wood split into a jagged point. It wasn't elegant, but it was something.
Down by the brook, he tried his luck spearfishing. The water was cold, biting at his calves as he waded in. Tiny silver shapes darted just beneath the surface, faster than his eyes could follow. For hours he jabbed and splashed, each miss soaking him further and fraying his patience.
Finally, with the sun leaning west, he struck true. The spear pinned a small trout against the stream bed. Ethan whooped aloud, nearly losing his balance in the rush of triumph. He yanked it out of the water, staring at the wriggling body in his hands.
It was no feast, but it was food.
The next problem: fire.
He gathered dry twigs and leaves, stacking them carefully. He remembered, vaguely, watching his uncle start a campfire once, but doing it himself was a different matter. He tried sparking his lighter—but it was dead, out of fuel. Swearing under his breath, he attempted the old-fashioned way: rubbing sticks. Hours passed with nothing but smoke and blistering palms.
By nightfall, he managed a weak flame that sputtered, then caught. Ethan fed it carefully, nursing it like a newborn until it grew into a small, steady fire. The heat wrapped around him, and for the first time since entering the woods, he felt a sliver of safety.
He cooked the fish on a sharpened branch, charring it black on the outside, barely cooked inside. It tasted like smoke and grit, but he devoured it as if it were the finest meal he'd ever had.
When he finally leaned back, belly less empty, fire crackling, a strange satisfaction filled him. He had made this happen—him, a man who once ordered takeout for every meal.
But the woods weren't done teaching him.
The next day, while gathering branches, he slipped on a mossy rock and gashed his leg on a sharp edge. Pain shot through him, hot and blinding. Blood ran down his shin, soaking into his boot. Panic clawed at him. Infection. Blood loss. The words hammered in his skull.
He tore his shirt sleeve and pressed it to the wound, cursing through clenched teeth. The bleeding slowed, but every step sent pain knifing up his leg.
The forest showed no mercy.
He limped back to his shelter, each minute stretching into eternity. Lying there, leg throbbing, he realized how fragile he was out here. One mistake, one accident—that was all it took to die alone in the woods.
That night, fever sweat drenched him as he drifted in and out of sleep. He dreamed of his apartment, the hum of traffic, the smell of coffee from the corner shop. He dreamed of his fiancée's face, not cruel this time but soft, like it had been when they first met. He woke with tears in his eyes, shivering under the weight of loneliness.
But when dawn came, and he saw the fire's last embers glowing faintly, something hardened in him. He had survived the night, injury and all. And survival, he realized, was a war fought moment by moment.
Ethan bound his leg tighter with strips from his shirt, cleaned the wound with cold stream water, and whispered to himself through the pain:
"Get up. Keep moving."
The forest had taught him its first lesson—pain was a teacher, and mistakes were fatal.
And Ethan Cole was a man who would learn, no matter how hard the lesson.