This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
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Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
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Having arrived, descending to his barren island in the middle north Atlantic Ocean, with the intention of documenting the lives and nature of those obscure and terrifying beasts of the sea, said to come to these waters to spawn and feed, I, Blackwood A Pool, on this day, 28 August, 1889, shall turn inland and upward, in search of a precipice overlooking the sea, and also, more immediately a shelter of some sort, which is a more pressing need. I have only two hours of useful light remaining.
Pool returned his journal to his inner jacket pocket and began walking.
The brush was not so thickly packed that he couldn’t wind his way through with out the use of the machete. It consisted of low blue and purple flowering plants, lupine and a species of thyme Pool suspected (the latter from the herbal smell), and a small, woodier sumac-like plant which did not seem to grow taller than a meter or a meter and a half, which had reddish twisting and wholly foreign looking trunks, as well as an extremely dwarfish variety of arctic spruce, again not rising taller than his head in most cases.
The rough sand and pebble nature of the shore and the area immediately adjacent to it it was bare of soil in many areas not directly inhabited by the plant-life and showed little sign of animal inhabitation other than ubiquitous bird nests and droppings. The bird nests were so common that after a mere moments of trekking, Pool had decided that he would feast on eggs for supper and spare his dry rations for a time of greater need.
After a meandering path which took him around 200 meters as the crow flies, though Pool’s route ultimately was twice that, he reached the edge of the quaking birch forest.
The forest consisted of countless, identical, thin-trunked and white-barked birches. They were smaller than found elsewhere in the world, such as northern Europe, the Scandian peninsula and the marches of Muscovy. The ground beneath his feet was strewn with fallen timbers and branches in various stages of rot; the durable (and usefully flammable bark) containing oils preventing its own decay, all the while trapping moisture inside and causing the grain to turn to spongy clumps before a year was out.
The chaotic jumble made progress here more difficult. Pool could tell that there were no large animals, at least on this part of the island, for there were no tracks or paths, no scat or signs of damage to the standing trees. Typically forests such as this would have deer, or elk, or northern species of boar, or other such fauna. No humans either.
Between the trees, the same flowering ground cover spread, concealing the fallen trunks, and spreading their moisture to Pool’s pants. Soon his pants and legs beneath were soaked through.
Pool travelled through this forest for for only a little over a kilometer, and being acutely aware of the dimming light, he decided to make camp at the first relatively clear and dry area he came to.
It was a low hill, attached like vertebra to a string of increasingly taller and sharper mounds, rising to the first low mountain of the foothills inland. While it was not free of trees, it was mostly free of the damp undergrowth.
He hung his jacket (with seagull eggs in the outer pockets), satchel and field glasses on the stump of a branch (to free himself to use the machete more effectively as well as to mark the location of his campsite) and, careful to keep close, Pool set to work. First, he cut poles from several smaller trees. One, the longest he threaded into the branches, secured in vertical crotches of standing live trees. The others he leaned at 45 degrees between the horizontal one and the ground, angled in such a way that the ground-ends were close together, and the upper ends wedged into the same branches as the horizontal beam. The tarp covered this structure, draped over the beam and the outer edges of the slope, and held in place by another horizontal tree trunk placed on top of the first. The sides hung over the edges creating a semi enclosure, protected at the rear and sides. Inside this the hammock was hung, beneath the cover.
Next, scavenged bark, twigs and sticks and the driest wood he could find were gathered from the area and by means of his, steel and a rock he had sourced nearby, Pool soon had a fire burning.
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Ion Fyr 