C: A grumpy old man, that lives alone.
C
You are a salted old man with a slowly graying beard. You were a woodsman all your life, and made your living at the lumber camps in your youth, but you resented the move to electric saws and corporate management and when the camps finally closed years later you saw it with some bitter satisfaction. When so much of the town disappeared with the camps you managed to buy up an old house on the edge of the woods. You pay your bills off a meager retirement you set up years ago, but you don't need much money.
A stash of treasures... The stash you found has peaked your interest. You gather up the items and bring them back to your shack to look at. The gun is custom make by look of it. A bolt action breech with a long rifled barrel. The stock is dark wood of a kind you don't recognize, and patterns and tally-marks are scratched into it's surface. A leather pouch tied onto the fore-stock produces a pile of bullets. These are obviously home made, and seem to be comprised of an iridescent black metal. Taking one apart reveals the powder inside is dry and usable, and you assume they would still fire if you wanted. The rounds measure at .333, but don't match anything you could buy in town. You take it apart piece by piece, cleaning the dust and noting the engravings even behind the rifling in the barrel. This gun has been well used.
Next you take a look at the knife. It's a strange thing, seemingly made of two separate metals foraged together. Most of the blade is made of silver, but the top edge and tip is something else entirely. It almost looks like gold, but it's too solid, and dosent bend or fold under weight. The handle is carved from bone and engraved with lines in many different languages. You recognize the line in English as scripture, though you can't remember where you have heard it before. It's a fixed blade of 5 inches, curved ever so slightly with a single edge.
Last of all is the leather wrapped booklet, and you open it eagerly, hoping for some answers. The pages are yellowed and brittle, and some are clearly ruined with water damage. You pick through the pages with the utmost care, like a surgeon in a dying man. Useless, you think to yourself. All useless. It's in some other language, Finnish maybe? and these later parts are not even in that, looking more like runes than regular letters. Frustrated and almost ready to toss the book aside, find a single page in English, burned into the leather of the back cover.
It reads as such: "If you find this journal, I am likely dead. Take my things if you must, but bury my body if it is still nearby. Burn it, if you can. My name is Algot Jukanpoika. Across the sea, we would hunt the old things for life, but they are few and our souls went hungry. I have heard that this is a land of darkness, and old things grow in such lands. I came here with many others to hunt, but we could not hunt them here. There are few of us left. We will find life, or we will die in this land. I hope yet to find the former."
Such is the story you think to yourself. So many people came here to build a life. Not all survived. You flip back through the other pages, admiring the sketches and landscapes here and there. You could probably translate some of the other pages, if you wanted. Maybe find out where he was living. There might be more things there for you, or records in better condition than this book.
You decide to translate;
A The first page of the journal. A story starts at the beginning after all.
B A page with a drawing of a landscape. Maybe this will give you a location to search?
C A damaged page with stains upon it. Probably more difficult. Probably less useful.
Author
Topic: There is something in the woods (Read 1923 times)