Chapter 2 #3
Simon and Wulfric took me into this open wilderness to serve as their smiling pack mule, happily tasked with foraging and
carrying anything they managed to shoot with their bows.
“We’ll make do with a few rabbits, but we need the stag. There’s an eight-pointer I saw the other day past the road to Dover.”
They spoke as if we were at a grocery store, trampling through forest like shoppers trawling supermarket aisles. Grab those
berries, pick these leaves, find the stag.
“What for?” I asked. The only meals I had seen or eaten myself so far were bowls of barley porridge and root vegetables.
Eating was less a pleasurable activity and more a purposeful fueling, flavor taking a backseat to the simple stacking of calories.
Some days I swear I could feel my blood and muscles sucking up basic building block nutrients, shrinking and expanding like eager sponges.
I hadn’t had any form of meat in three months save for the hairlike bones of a fish left in a briny broth once. Three whole months of this, my god.
“The lord is coming tonight,” said Wulfric. “We need to get him the eight-pointer.”
“Where’s he been all this time?” I asked.
Wulfric told me—in their manner of speech—to shut up. I was too loud and would scare the animals, he said. I sighed and trudged
behind them, scanning everything we passed. And along these shores of silence we stalked, my complacency—this kind of happy
idiot I felt myself becoming, this jolly camper—began to give way to other thoughts, to reality, to something serious.
Simon shot a rabbit. I collected the rabbit. I felt it slip away into death in my hands as I fastened it to my belt, and I
felt this slippage of mortality like a knock on the door, confirming that my current reality here was the reality, the only one—that if I were to die here, I would be dead here, I would not wake up from whatever time-travel reverie I might
have tricked myself into thinking I was in. This was real life. This was blood from what had been a living organism and this
would somehow, someday, be me, still here.
Panic began to flutter inside me. If I was going to get out of here, this was a chance.
Maybe not my one and only chance, but a chance nonetheless, and there was no telling how long it would take for another to come along.
I watched Simon and Wulfric, how they walked so lightly over the ground, barely making any noise, their bodies lean and trim, but with rounded, well-worn muscles that could overpower me in a snap.
They both carried bows and plenty of arrows.
And Simon . . . Simon watched me closely.
His blue eyes looked over his shoulder every so often.
He’d find an herb or a mushroom and hand it to me to place in the foraging bag I carried, while making clear, decisive eye contact.
It was the eye contact I feared the most, how it communicated that he wasn’t some caricature of history or background foot soldier, but a man of my own, living and breathing exactly like me at the same intervals, a mind working just the same, if not better.
“Look!” said Wulfric.
We arrived at a clearing. On the map in my head of future-London we had walked up the slope of Greenwich Park and beyond Blackheath,
past where there would one day be a large stone cathedral, a high street strangled with cars, a train station, then Kidbrooke
and all the new builds. There, in the center of the clearing, a family of deer was grazing. Among them was the stag, with
his sturdy antlers, all eight points, just as Wulfric had said.
Wulfric drew an arrow from his quiver and readied his bow. Simon also drew an arrow but instead of placing it in his bow,
he took both and pushed them into my chest, giving them to me.
“What’s this?” I asked. I looked at Simon—he was unreadable. I looked at Wulfric—his bow was pulled and pointed but not at
the deer. It was pointed at me. He was smiling. “Show us your shot, soldier.”
“What the hell?” I said. “I don’t have a shot.”
“Don’t lie,” said Simon, serious and steady. “We know what you are.”
I was rattled. “What do you think I am? I’ve told you what I am—and I can’t shoot a bow and arrow, I’ve never touched one
in my life.”
“You’re a soldier.”
“I’m not a soldier.” I couldn’t help but laugh. I sputtered and winced at Wulfric’s raised bow. “That’s what you’ve thought
this whole time? That I’m a soldier—for who? From where? I’ve told you what I am and what happened to me—a soldier wouldn’t
have any reason to make that up.”
“A Dane would.”
“A Dane! You think I’m Danish?” I couldn’t believe it. I laughed again and tried to back away but they accosted me, Wulfric’s
arrow was pointed right at my chest. The two of them were agitated and hyped up on each other the way they had been the day
they attacked me. It was strange to imagine how their voices had sounded to me back then, so alien and abrasive. Now they
were just two jumpy lads, eager to see me shoot a deer.
“I’m not going to shoot a deer,” I said. “I’m not a soldier, I’m not Danish, and I wouldn’t know the first thing about how
to use this thing.”
“You shoot the deer or I shoot you,” said Wulfric. His arm was tensed, and I knew, based off this world’s ease of quickening
I had already witnessed, that he was deadly serious. “Look at your arms, your shoulders—those are the arms of an archer.”
I shook my head. “These are the arms of someone who went to the gym a few times a week. This is why you took me along? Because you think I’m a soldier and can help you hunt?
Look I don’t even know—” I fumbled with the bow and arrow.
It was a limber, slippery thing. “I don’t even know which way to hold it! ”
“You shoot it or I shoot you,” Wulfric repeated.
“Stop—you’re both scaring them away,” said Simon, shushing us. Across the meadow the deer were clued in to our presence. The
eight-point stag had tensed up. The fawns seated around him were now standing.
“It’s now or never,” said Simon. He looked at me with a curt, disappointed expression, and at Wulfric with the same chagrin,
like he knew this had been a bad idea from the start.
“And we really do mean now or never,” said Wulfric, running his thumb across the back end of the drawn arrow.
“Seriously, I swear I’ve never shot—”
“You’ll shoot the stag,” said Simon, finally dead serious. Between the two of them, Simon was the more reasonable, or at least
the more stable and coherent, and his tone confirmed this wasn’t a joke. Whatever lane of logic they were running on had brought
them to this point and there was no going back—they had planned on taking me out here to do this exact thing. They truly believed
I was capable of shooting a deer from a hundred yards away, that my arm muscles, which had faded and leaned out considerably
over the months, were more than just inflated vanity projects.
I sighed and looked around the meadow. Wulfric tightened his grip. “OK then can we at least get a little closer?” I asked.
“Some soldier.”
“Well that’s correct because I’m not.”
We crouched low and shuffled around the edge of the meadow.
The grass was dry and snappy no matter how slowly I tried to move and I could sense the gathering skittishness of the deer, they were about to bolt.
No, I didn’t want to shoot a deer, but there was an emotional detachment in having to use a bow and arrow—it didn’t feel real and I knew there was no way I’d actually be able to hit anything.
I’d scare them off with my bad shot and we’d all go back empty-handed and hopefully Wulfric wouldn’t shoot me.
When we were closer, I drew the bow—I had never done this before, save for maybe a Scouts camping trip when I was ten, shooting
targets with blunt plastic sticks. The bow was wound tight and difficult to pull back. My arms strained, the arrow wobbled,
the stag’s muscles twitched, it knew what was about to happen, and in a split second, just as the whole herd was about to
vanish, I let go.
The arrow thunked off a rock ten feet away and twirled into the bushes. I flushed with relief. The deer scattered and fled
and—
“What in God’s name is that?” Wulfric cried. He dropped his bow in shock. As the deer parted . . .
There was a dog.
“No way,” I gasped.
It was Matilda.
I erupted into a fit of laughter, I couldn’t hold it back. All tension gave way to delirium.
Matilda the Afghan hound was sitting prim and proper in the shade of an oak tree, too unbothered to run for cover with her
newfound family of deer. I couldn’t believe it. She watched me from across the meadow with her panting smile. If she remembered
me at all, she couldn’t care less.
“What kind of bastard deer . . .” said Simon.
“It’s a wolf!” Wulfric readied his bow and pulled back hard with the arrow.
“No, wait!” I lunged and grabbed Wulfric’s arm as he let go. The arrow whipped through the air and disappeared into the trees. Before he could pull another, I jumped in front of him, putting myself between him and the dog.
“Stop! Look. Just stop for a second and let me talk. I am what I told you—I was a dog walker. I swear to God. I traveled through
time and right before that happened, I was with that dog.” I pointed at Matilda. “That’s my dog. I was holding on to her.
I must have pulled her through whatever wormhole I got sucked into.” My English stumbled over itself. Even if I had gotten
every word exactly perfect in this new dialect there was no way I was making sense.
“That’s no dog,” said Simon.
“It’s some kind of hellhound. A wolf at least,” said Wulfric.
I tried to explain the concept of a Russian oligarch’s purebred Afghan hound worth more money than any of us could imagine
and insisted this was irrefutable proof that my story was true, that I really had come from the future, but Wulfric and Simon
remained apathetic, more in awe of the dog. Even if my rudimentary description of time traveling was understood, it meant