A bold journey begins by placing one’s heel on the ground.

  “Collected Wisdoms”

  The shepherd in the Swiss Alps knew there was trouble when he found the barn empty.

  Honestly, he knew there was trouble brewing from a few weeks ago. A patch of discolored grass on the edge of his usual pastures. No doubt some pollution spilled from whatever was brewing down in the valleys. Modern stuff, medical installations, whatever. Timeo Kammer knew that nothing good came from this. And now, they came to dump their waste since that would be cheaper than recycling.

  He saw that on one of his favorite video channels a month ago. All those chemical companies polluting like there was no tomorrow. No doubt those medical conglomerates did it when they could get away with it. But he was a proud shepherd, son of shepherds, grandson of more, and ten-year-old Friedolin would succeed him. And you did not shit on your livelihood.

  Still, he’d lost his dog yesterday without a trace. And now, he’d lost his flock.

  A sound came from further up, and he spotted a sheep’s head poking from uphill. His thoughts turned to relief. It looked like the flock hadn’t gone far.

  The ram’s head that came out was accompanied by a bleat that sounded far deeper than usual.

  (end of prologue missing)

  The last minutes of the biology class were stretching as if the end of the course was a black hole doing its weird trick of time dilatation. Prof. Gretchen – Maria Gretchen, but only for the parents – was obviously managing to time the end of the course perfectly with the bell and the end of the year.

  Connor Gibson was not really paying attention, of course. Few would, all focused on either the upcoming summer vacations or the mild anxiety surrounding college this fall. Or both. Still, the example of DNA stuff and its application to genealogy and ancestry research was mildly engaging. Not that he needed help unraveling his ancestry, of course. Thanks to a mother obsessed with the topic, he knew all the details of his pedigree... even if she had died long ago.

  He caught briefly the eyes of Grace, two desks to his side. She rolled her eyes upward, wiggling her eyebrows significantly. There had been some ribbing when the class course on DNA started, as people joked about pairing G and C together, so Connor Gibson and Grace Cooke were obvious.

  And why not? They’d been together for over a year, prom and all.

  But summer was coming, and he was not really looking toward that.

  As everyone headed out, he slowed to let Grace catch up.

  “Last foreign language class for me,” she said.

  “Same. Then I have the last meeting with the school counselor in the early afternoon, and it’s over,” Connor replied.

  “Good luck,” she said, giving him a light peek on the lips.

  They split up. Grace was headed to Russian class, of all things, while he’d picked Spanish as an easier and more practical course.

  (missing scenes with the counsellor and girlfriend)

  Sitting at the edge of the world is the highest privilege there is. And it doesn’t even require you to be rich or anything. You must live far from cities and large towns, their bustle and crowds, and that's all.

  Connor had always liked watching the stars when the world around him was swallowed by the dark. Sitting at the edge of a mirror-flat lake, without even the smallest lamp on a shore and no atrocious light haze on the horizon behind the trees surrounding it.

  He had to pay a price for it, of course. Living in a small rural county, going through the small high school of the largest town nearby, surrounded by people he saw all the time. Seeing the girls he crushed on packing and moving to college a hundred miles away, while his SAT scores landed him an auto mechanic job. Such was the price one pays for a sight like that.

  But Connor Gibson was ready to pay that price again and again. He thought it was worth it and would not trade it for the nightclubs and spectacles of legendary New York City, where he was born almost two decades ago.

  The crashing sound behind him ended the Zen-like contemplation of the heavens above. Connor turned, crouching and squinting at the shadows behind the lakeshore.

  The vague shape wasn’t that obvious, but if he were to be a betting man, he would have put his money on a boar. The upper parts of northeast America were full of all kinds of wildlife, but centuries of relentless hunting had extinguished almost all dangerous lifeforms. It was more likely to be the hog variety than the near-extinct wolf or some other rare alpha predator at that size. God forbid if it was a bear or grizzly. There should not be many of them around, but you never knew.

  For once, he regretted not having a gun with him. His uncle had always told him to keep one, but he believed that waving a gun around in near-total darkness was the surest way to cause an accident rather than being helpful. So, his firearm was in his uncle’s closet nearly two miles away. The only weapon he had to face the hundred pounds of a wild boar was a good hunting knife that he’d never been without since he was ten and his dad died.

  He drew it slowly while crouching on the lake shore, trying not to attract the beast's attention. Best not to use it if he could avoid a confrontation with things that wrecked a car’s hood and kept on running. He’d seen that a few times in the months since he started working for a living. Boars were a plague upon man’s works, and they hated fenders.

  The beast’s shallow breathing told him that something was wrong. The boar’s only sounds felt like gulps, more than grunts or anything he’d expect from it.

  There was something wrong with it. And Connor didn’t want any part of that.

  He slowly retreated as the beast advanced toward the lake, trying to stay low on the ground. The boar seemed to be looking for the waters. Maybe it was going for a nighttime drink.

  The beast had almost reached the lake when chance failed David. The boar stilled suddenly, instincts telling it that something was there. For a fraction of a second, Connor hoped that he would be able to escape unseen, but the boar’s gulp sounds changed pitch.

  The beast turned and charged.

  Connor rolled sideways. The passage of the beast felt like a physical blow despite it missing him entirely by feet.

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  He hadn’t expected to find himself facing an enraged boar, but that’s what fate had in store for him today. And while he knew the lake well, he wasn’t about to run away. Not under just starlight, knowing that there were all kinds of potential traps waiting to trip him.

  The boar was turning, gulping again. The sound had gurgling in it, making Connor wonder what was going on. Then, the boar came running back.

  He sidestepped again, feeling like one of those matadors avoiding a bull’s rush. But this time, he did what he could. He struck with his knife at the beast as it passed him by inches.

  The knife was ripped from his hand by the charge. In retrospect, it was probably the wrong move. He should have tried to slice, make a shallow cut, and weaken the beast, not sink his knife in a hundred pounds of charging muscle.

  So, the sound of the beast crashing on the ground took him by surprise. For a second, he wondered how he could have struck such a blow before the boar rose back on its legs and started to turn.

  Connor knew he had to run. Better to risk tripping than face an enraged boar gunning for you.

  The boar charged. Connor ducked as the beast passed him again.

  But he noticed that the charge had been slow. As if the beast was exhausted already.

  The boar crashed on the ground at the end of its charge. It tried to rise, then slumped again as Connor retreated toward the shore. He kept watching as he walked backward, but the beast remained slumped. Reaching the water, wetting his shoes, Connor stopped. The beast’s silhouette remained immobile.

  “This is where I should run… but that thing seems done for.”

  Connor realized he’d spoken, although in whispers. But the sounds of his voice didn’t trigger the boar. So, against the counsel of his intellect, he slowly approached the beast.

  Despite the dim light and darkness of the night, it seemed like the boar was… dead?

  Now that things were calmer, Connor fished for his torchlight. He turned it on and pointed at the boar.

  The pigster was huge. He had not realized it under the dim light of stars, but that was easily a two or three-hundred-pound specimen of the beast. The terror of the wild, the devastator of grounds, the bane of farmers and foresters alike, the destroyer of car fronts. And it was laying there, slumped, unmoving, its flanks inert.

  The torchlight brought more details. And Connor realized why the boar had been so wrong in its charges. There was an arrow sticking from its flank. No, make that three arrows.

  “Fucking sports hunters,” he breathed.

  The metal shafts were a telltale indicator. Someone, following the fashionable “bow hunting” method, had tried to kill that boar earlier.

  Some sport, Connor thought. Instead of using a proper rifle, you tried to be sporting by using a bow and arrows. Titanium arrows with composite vanes and multiple-pulley bows that propelled an arrow with more force than most basic guns, in total silence rather than the crack of a proper hunting rifle. The sporting aspect was that the bow required you to fetch another arrow rather than simply use the reload of your rifle.

  The beast had taken three arrows, survived, and fled. That was impressive, but boars were nothing if not hardy. And judging by the blood that was seeping, those wounds had reopened during the charge. Or was that his knife? Connor couldn’t see it, but that didn’t mean it had not done more damage, finishing the boar.

  He pushed at the beast, turning it. Given its size, he would have to leave it there. That was too bad; wild boar made for good cooking. You needed very thorough cooking to avoid any parasite or infection, but the taste was a thousand times better than anything store-bought. His uncle’s friends sometimes brought some back from up north.

  The knife wasn’t anywhere in sight. David brought his torch and started to inspect the beast carefully, hoping he would not have to search all over the shore for it.

  The boar's eyes shone in the light, and for a second, he thought the beast had three. He peered more carefully, and the reflection in between the two eyes turned out to be some kind of glassy stone or something glued to the matted fur. Connor scratched at the brow, and the glassy concretion came off. He picked it up and pointed its light at it.

  The thing looked like a flat, perfectly circular bead or something. In fact, save for the fact it was slightly translucent brown, it felt the exact size of an M&M. Of course, it didn’t sport the trademark symbol or anything, but it did look like a perfect glass version of the candy.

  Connor sniffed the glassy stone. It even gave a very, very faint, sugary smell. For a second, he entertained the idea of trying to lick it to see if it was indeed sweet, but anything coming out of a wild boar was probably tainted with parasites and bacteria to the wazoo.

  Connor searched around for ten more minutes, but there was no trace of his hunting knife anywhere. He would have to return during the day and try his chance again. This one might have saved him, and he owed it to the knife to recover it.

  End of the evening, time to go home, he thought.

  He could have spent another hour watching the Milky Way stretching over the lake, but such a dangerous encounter was not to be discounted. Enough excitement for the day and adrenaline crashes were tiring.

  On the way, once he reached the path across the forest area that separated home from the lake, he brought out the glassy concretion from the board again, looking at it again and sniffing the faint sugary odor.

  It did look like it was some candy that ended up stuck on the beast’s brow. How such a sweet could have ended up there was beyond him.

  He kept the sweet in his left hand as he shone the torchlight from his right to find his way on the path. He’d followed that one for many years, but only a fool would go across a forest path in the dark of night, even one he knew by heart.

  He chuckled, reflecting on how he’d have one of the best stories in town to tell. How mighty Conan - well, Connor - fell the giant boar at night. Without a gun.

  Maybe he’d figure out who the hunting party that peppered that boar was and yell at them for making the beast a threat to everyone. Never start what you can’t finish. But those assholes were almost certainly some out-of-state hunters come to find sport.

  He reached the path split, where one branch went to the clump of houses where his uncle lived, and he still kept his own room until the distant day he could afford to move out. The other branch simply reached the main road out of town if one was inclined to go there. He reached and traced the old cross on the tree there. The cross sign carved on the bark had been there when he was a young five-year old, and even Uncle Joss had no idea how old it was when he'd asked.

  As he continued toward home, a small bit of his mind was disturbed, but he couldn’t figure out why.

  A dozen feet away from the forest border, the pain struck across his belly. A feeling like acid eating at his guts, unexpected. He stumbled on the path, almost falling to the ground.

  Fuck, what was that?

  He kept on, pulling out of the forest and entering the backyards of the half-dozen houses that clumped there, aiming for his home. But a few yards in, he stumbled again, half scrambling over a small fence, falling over it and rolling on the ground as yet another spike hit his guts.

  He thought he’d ask for help as light spilled out and someone came out to investigate the noise, but the pain was surrounding his sight with red borders, and thinking was becoming hard.

  And there was nothing else.

  “Subject is Caucasian male, 19 years, found unresponsive in his own backyard,” the paramedic announced as they rushed the stretcher into the ER entrance.

  “What happened?” the nurse-in-charge asked as he pushed the stretcher along.

  “A neighbor heard a noise and found him sprawled over his path. Lives with his uncle next door, but the uncle was away. The subject vomited, and the man swears the vomit was smoking.”

  “Wait, what? It’s summer, almost fall, but not winter.”

  “Yea. Blood pressure low, pulse barely noticeable, and heartbeat at 30bpm, slightly irregular,” he added.

  “Fuck? 30 bpm and low blood pressure? Any known cardiac problems?”

  “The neighbor doesn’t know, but that’s not uncommon, even in those neighborhoods. You know your neighbors and have a barbecue every week, but then one day you miss it and they find out you died of cancer or something.”

  The team entered the triage room and settled on the routine when facing people who got rushed there. Sensors attached, pupilar reflexes checked, and the entire checklist of symptoms. The young man’s complexion was waxen, bordering on a yellow tinge that might indicate some liver-related damage. The internist who came immediately started to discard possible complications, raising the chance of others.

  “Get me some noradrenaline immediately,” he said.

  “Already done,” announced the paramedic.

  “Get another dose ready then. If he remains that low, I’ll give him some more.”

  Before he could say another, David Reiker convulsed on the bed. The half dozen nurses converged on him, trying to keep him confined.

  “Fucker is strong!”

  The convulsion suddenly subsided, and they wasted no time strapping him. The internist watched the cardiac monitor that had spiked to a whopping 200 BPM subside, the heartbeat returning to a very low BPM.

  The doctor had a hard time figuring out what was happening. There was an obvious shock there, but he couldn’t figure out a possible cause, which offended his professional pride.

  There was a sound. He turned his head, trying to figure out what happened, and then his nose was hit.

  “God, that’s the worst fart I’ve ever seen,” an orderly spoke.

  “Seen? Really?” another nurse quipped.

  “Figure of speech, drat,” the first one replied.

  The doctor looked carefully, spotting a telltale darkening of the paper sheets under the boy’s body.

  “General sphincter release. I need some cleaning,” he sighed.