He made his way across the plain towards some rolling wooded hills in the distance. It was nice to have his sensory perception back after living for three months in the grey hell that was 21st Century America, where he was half deaf; could barely smell anything through his broken nose, and still hadn’t figured out how to erase the text messages from Arlene from his cell-phone so that Sharita could not read them while he slept.

His 16th Century Branch One experience had been so wonderful—minus the mountains of gore and rivers of blood that is—because he had been able to smell, taste and hear in great detail and at great distance. He also had enjoyed an acute tactile sensitivity. This too had returned with his translocation back into the deep past. He could feel the wings of a bird beating above, and could sense what direction a leaf was falling as it glided past him.

The downside of these ‘super senses’ was that he could not tolerate loud noise and even speaking hurt his head. For this reason a solitary existence did suit him, at least it had in the 16th Century when he just wanted to get lost in the forest. But now, for some reason, he was feeling different. Perhaps it was losing his friends. Perhaps it was leaving his family after getting to know the twins and being treated so well by his two bi-sexual wives—and that little freak Arlene.

That’s it dummy. Do you feel that?

He was off obliquely to the east across the vast plain toward what might have been hedgerow country in Pap Bracken’s day after they drove inland from the beachhead. The moist spitting air was bringing field reports to his nose—which felt very moist and spongy inside, almost as if he had bloody gauze packed in there, but gauze that amplified his sense of smell a hundred-fold…

Herds were coming this way: horses; deer—reindeer dummy; and some big reeking elephants—those would be mammoths. Wood-smoke was coming from farther out—that would be people. Cat shit assaulted his senses—those would be lions; not enough kitty litter in the world to take care of that.

At this point he reminded himself to keep strict latrine discipline. Sarge had explained to him that the reason why special ops soldiers buried their own waste was not because of camp sanitation but because of the danger of being located. Every hunter used a prey animal’s waste to track it.

Remember Bracken, when you are a strict meat-eater your shit really reeks. That’s why cats bury it, because all they eat is meat and their shit will give them away to the prey. I want you covering thirty miles a day. That will require ten fucking pounds of meat to keep your body from cannibalizing itself. Kill, eat, stalk, shit, bury it, run, and stalk again. No straight lines Bracken, alternate stalking and running on an ellipse. Preserve your angle of attack while you move from A to Z—you never know when you’ll have to kill M…

I’m keeping with the program Sarge, eating like a hillbilly and moving like an Apache. Sure wish you were here. I’ve got to be forgetting something…

He made the hills by 10:00 a.m. Sorry Sarge, never did pick up the military time clock—just couldn’t internalize something that purely mathematic.

He got into some stunted trees that reminded him of birch, passed through a streambed, got a drink, and headed up into a stand of what looked like chestnut trees. There had been no traffic other than some huge deer and a pack of hungry wolves. As he wound his way along some gentle ridgelines he began to smell some wood-smoke, mixed with leaves and something else rather than dung and horseshit like down on the plain.

He took cover among a stand of pines just below the ridge-line and caught man-scent, a lot of it. He travelled northeast along the military crest on the reverse of this ridgeline, where the ground sloped gently into a shallow bottomland covered with broad-leaf trees that had not yet begun to bud. He minded his silhouette and took it from tree to tree in a crouch.

Just before he hit the next streambed he caught the scent of a large hunting party. About a dozen men had recently traversed this bottomland without fear. He could smell fear, even when it was old. They had taken few precautions. He could see their tracks from twenty yards, and could hear someone gathering kindling up at the head of the valley about two miles along their line-of-march to the southeast.

He kept cover heading northeast along their back-trail until the pines starting clustering. Then he hit their trail and examined the tracks. There were 14 males, ranging in weight from 80 to 160 pounds. One fellow was really tall with narrow feet. They travelled light—just projectile weapons and knives—and kept five to fifteen yards between men depending on the cover.

This is a main force for a strictly hunting economy. Whatever they left behind is a soft target. Parallel their back-trail.

By noon he came across their previous night’s camp and the bones of a stag, minus a foreleg. Three individuals: a 150-pound older man; a 180-pound young man; and a young 80-pound female, had split off from the main group when this camp had broken just after daybreak, and headed east over the next ridge-line with a haunch of meat. He caught the scent of the girl and became intoxicated. As he followed their trail her scent kept getting stronger. The young man’s scent was growing stronger too.

A quarter-mile over the ridge she stopped behind an old oak to urinate. He sniffed out this spot and noticed that she had carved the likeness of a stag into the bark of the tree.

He found a strand of her hair; long, black, curly, smelling like oil and wood-smoke. He became ever more intoxicated with her scent.

He could feel his nostrils flare even as he heard a bear shuffling over the next ridgeline and felt the beating of the eagle’s wings above. He could already taste her in the back of his throat, and just could not imagine letting her go…

Hey dummy, can we spell bad idea?