The construction of the pond took him three days.
Not three full days—nothing came in neat blocks anymore—but three stretches of light where his hands moved more than his thoughts did.
During those days, he hardly ate or slept.
A little rest, with unpredictable weather, meant every progress—other than permanence—was wiped away come morning.
His first choice was next to his hut—he realized fast it wasn't going to work.
Then, he considered building atop the hill but it didn't take a genius to realize the logistical nightmare involved in walking up and down with weaved baskets.
In the end, Xavier chose a shallow depression downhill from his shelter, where runoff already gathered after rain.
It didn't require any digging.
It took considerable searching to find the perfect rocks to layer above the soil, then the limestone to give the gaps some form of hardness.
And even then, it wasn't perfect—it would never be, given his limited knowledge.
Then the real challenges started.
He didn't know anything about fish farming. He barely knew what fish lived this far inland. But water collected here naturally, and that felt like the mountain granting its permission.
With the first pond taking advantage of nature, he decided to make the second pond a complete human experiment.
He dug with a flat stone and the remains of a branch hardened by fire.
The location he decided was a couple of meters from the previous pond, where the ground was stubborn—root-laced, slick with rot—but it gave eventually.
Everything did, if you kept at it long enough.
By the end of the first day, his shoulder had swollen again.
Purple and yellow marbled the skin. His jaw throbbed with each breath. He worked anyway, gritting his teeth, stopping only when his hands shook so badly he couldn't tell tool from dirt.
The night brough chill, which meant the morning—just before twilight—was the perfect time for a cold bath that wouldn't kill.
It resolved aches and pains, and if your imagination was rich enough, which his was, you could convince yourself it was a spa of only one super-elite residence.
The most exclusive in the world.
The second day, he reinforced the edges of both ponds with stones, wedging them carefully so the walls wouldn't collapse.
It wasn't elegant.
It wasn't even smart. But it held water.
The third day, he built a fence.
Thin branches woven together, vines pulled tight and knotted with fingers that barely cooperated.
It looked ridiculous—too much effort for something so small—but he wanted the act of it.
The repetition. The idea that there was something in his life worth protecting.
As it turned out, the idea of value, when assigned to anything, brought with it a shallow sense of mental stability.
In the jungle, even fragility was a strength.
Fishing, he decided, didn't need to be efficient. It could just be… something to do.
The afternoon brought with it a strange edge.
The first gust of wind wasn't strange.
Neither was the second rustle.
But when no wind came and the rustle continued, he scanned the trees with an edge baked into his survival over the months.
Then, by the fifth rustle, he saw movement in the trees.
A puma.
Not close—thank God—but close enough that his breath caught wrong.
Tawny fur slid between trunks like liquid shadow. It paused once, head lifting, nose tasting the air. It had been watching for some time, evaluating its chances at a successful attack.
Xavier froze.
He didn't run. He didn't reach for anything. He simply… ceased.
Became stone, breath shallow, pain screaming quietly in the background.
After a long moment, the cat moved on, uninterested.
Only when it was gone did his legs give out—had he run, he would have shown just enough weakness to tilt its evaluation of his state into prey status.
He laughed then—quietly, hysterically—and crawled back to his shelter on hands and knees, dirt grinding into his palms.
In the past, he had joked with his friends about hunters reverse-hunted by animals, naively believing hunting meant the willingness to suffer what one would inflict. But now, with the shoe so firmly on the other foot, the terror spat reality onto his face.
It was so early to mock. To believe yourself invisible. Until you find yourself at the zoo, facing the lion with no fences or obstructions between you.
Suddenly, everything wasn't so straightforward.
Xavier threw himself into another task—the only way to cope.
The bungalow came together slower.
"Bungalow" was generous.
It was a raised platform of lashed branches with a slanted roof of bark and leaves, angled to shed rain. But it was dry. Mostly. He lined the floor with moss and fern fronds, changing them often to keep mold down.
He slept there at night, curled awkwardly around his injuries, waking often to pain or sound or nothing at all.
He treated his wounds with crushed herbs and sap mashed into paste.
The plants burned like acid when applied, lighting his nerves on fire. He took that as a good sign.
Or a bad one.
Hard to tell anymore.
Sometimes the skin around a cut turned angry red and wept.
Sometimes it scabbed clean and quiet. He didn't know which plants healed and which poisoned. He learned by consequence.
One night, after applying too much of a bitter-smelling leaf to his leg, he vomited until his vision went white. He rinsed the wound in the river and due to his chaotic storage method, ended up trying the same medication twice more.
It almost killed him twice more.
The third time would have been the charm had he not turned chaos into chaotic organization.
Progress wasn't linear. It was… negotiated.
He foraged daily.
Mushrooms—careful ones.
Moss scraped from rocks and dried for insulation.
Small fishes gathered from the river's bank, transferred into his ponds over weeks, became entertainment.
Some grew, others died.
Soon, as if a blessing from the mountain, other fishes started to appear in the ponds that he hadn't captured. Or perhaps, he had, in varying levels of fugue states.
In a few weeks, he was catching fishes from the ponds with his bare hands.
They thrashed wildly, slick and alive, eyes bulging.
Some days he would stare at it. Then he let it go.
He didn't know why.
Maybe it was because he wanted the pond to feel alive, not emptied. Maybe it was because killing took more from him than he could afford on some days.
The next time, he didn't hesitate.
A battle of conscience raged every day of harvest—he almost felt undeserving of the efforts he had made with his own hands.
A stupid feeling to have, but undeniable in its potency.
It was a week later, trailing the same pudú deer for the tenth time. Hiding behind a shrub of crutch-itch-inducing bushes—the kind the deer, and other prey, had learned to stick close, not having to watch their backs for ambushes in those cases.
It was amazing what Xavier had grown to notice due to his survival depending on it.
The ambush was perfectly laid out—he had weaved longer sleeves onto his hunting clothes, it limited skin exposure, allowing him to hide in places where prey would feel safest.
He should have known something was wrong when the pudú deer darted past, not taking its usual, establish routes.
He should have acted illogically and given chase right away, even if he knew his chances of catching it was near zero. But that was the curse, knowledge—true hunting knowledge—was a flame before the sun which was luck.
The first growl—my stomach, he thought.
The second growl—there was no hesitation, he broke into a run as if his life depended on it. Because it did.
Once upon of time, he would have made the mistake of examining, listening, knowing what was attacking before he reacted. But there were times, few and far between, where the correct choice was the first result of the naïve, human condition.
PANIC AND RUN!
He had already taken a dozen steps, knowing his route like the back of his hand, when the first bark erupted.
Two strides later.
Then another.
Leaping over two logs later.
Then several—sharp, frantic, wrong.
Feral dogs burst from the undergrowth, ribs showing, eyes bright with hunger and habit. Not trained. Not owned.
Just surviving the same way he was—but faster. More ruthless. Definitely hungrier, and with the uncanny ability to eat raw meat.
Panic detonated in his chest anew.
His speed increased faster.
He had learned to compensate for his shoulder—knew where to set his foot, how to arch his body.
He crashed through brush, breath tearing, shoulder screaming as he tripped and caught himself again and again.
But there was no outrunning them.
That was not the objective—it could never be his objective.
Everything in the jungle was lethal—faster than him.
But there was a chance.
The dogs fanned out instinctively, cutting him off, driving him toward rougher ground. He ran routes where he knew there would only be so many ways he could be cornered—manipulating his manipulators.
So as they were cutting off routes he never intended to take.
His thoughts fragmented.
Foot—rock—don't fall—don't—
His foot slipped on wet leaves.
Bone cracked.
White-hot pain exploded up his leg, stealing sound from the world. He hit the ground hard, air forced from his lungs in a wet gasp.
The dogs closed in.
Not there yet.
Xavier screamed.
Not words. Just sound. Raw and animal.
He grabbed a stone and swung blindly, connecting with a skull. A yelp. Another dog lunged. Teeth grazed his arm, slicing skin.
That would lead to a concerning infection.
He crawled.
Dragged himself downhill, hands tearing, vision blurring. He rolled into a thicket of thorny bushes, branches whipping his face, ripping at his already-damaged jaw.
Safe. He thought. I made it.
From the beginning, there were only two ways to survive—there were always two ways. The river was too far and unpredictable but preferred to a large animal attack.
The thorn bushes were a zero-sum game but preferred to injuries that would ultimately lead to death.
The dogs hesitated—thorns biting them too.
Xavier didn't stop.
He didn't think.
He moved because stopping meant dying.
Within a couple of seconds, he was meters deep into the bushes, back against a hollow, wooden plank he had placed there weeks prior. In another almost—attack by a particularly grumpy hog.
Barking echoed loudly.
Why not attract the entire jungle?
It was hours later when the dogs finally retreated—frustrated, injured, distracted.
It had started to drizzle at some point. Xavier lay in the mud, shaking violently.
His leg was wrong. Bent where it shouldn't be—he would have to stay here tonight.
He sobbed then.
Quietly.
Brokenly.
Pressing his face against the plank so the forest wouldn't hear.
It was strange to feel simultaneously detached from himself, sorry for himself, and disgusted from himself. As if a spectator looking at Xavier, feeling sorry for him, mourning for him, but also smirking at his weakness.
Anyone else would have died there.
Shock. Blood loss. Infection. The leg alone would have ended it.
Xavier didn't.
The next two days saw him tearing vines with his teeth—cracking another tooth in the process—and bound the leg tight, screaming into the ground as he forced it straighter.
He used bark as splints, wedging them in place with shaking hands.
Then he crawled.
It took hours. Or days. He didn't know.
He moved by inches, resting when the world narrowed too much. Drank from puddles. Ate nothing. Slept in fragments.
When he reached his shelter, he collapsed inside and didn't move for a long time.
Recovery was ugly.
The leg swelled grotesquely. Fever came and went.
He chewed moss and spat it onto the wound, wrapped it in boiled cloth, whispered nothing at all.
He didn't talk during that time.
Not even to himself.
When he finally stood again—weeks later, leg stiff and wrong but holding weight—he felt something unfamiliar.
Not triumph.
Not relief.
Just… continuation.
He limped to the pond and watched the water ripple. A fish broke the surface briefly, alive.
Xavier sat down hard, breath shaking.
He was still here.
And somehow—disgustingly, painfully—that was enough. This time, he didn't hesitate to kill all the fishes in the pond.