His survival so far was entirely due to his determination to learn, to live, to adapt, Connor decided. If he'd been the sort to give up, he wouldn't have made it even a week. Three weeks later (he'd started keeping count by scoring a line in the trunk of his tree with his knife) and he felt his natural optimism finally beginning to return, if only a little.
Connor turned the spit on the branch-tripod over his cookfire, and then went back to whittling away at a long section of wood, about as long as he was tall, and two thumb-lengths thick. It was going to be a spear, when he was finished. Lucky his pocketknife was good quality, it barely had a couple of nics in it.
He'd caught a small early mammal earlier today, but it'd given him the runaround and he'd gotten way too close to what he'd figured was the regular hunting grounds of the resident [input carnivorous cretaceous dino here], and while he wasn't great pickings for such a large dinosaur, he was probably much easier prey to catch, unfortunately. It'd just been luck he'd caught it in his pack.
The first time he'd had to kill a creature he'd hunted, Connor had been a nervous wreck. It was one thing to cook and eat meat, it was another thing to have to kill that animal, skin it, and cook it all yourself. There'd been blood and mess, and he'd ended up with burnt food that had tasted like charcoal more'n anything else. The second time, he'd been a little more prepared, but it would never be easy.
He thought maybe the little animal this time was a Deltatheridium, because it looked a little like a weasel. But there were a lot more types of little mammals here in the Cretaceous than he'd thought - they didn't show up in the fossil record at all, for the most part. (Connor really, relaly hoped he wasn't messing up time itself by eating early mammals! Not like he could do anything about it but he just would hate to return home and find out, say, cows, or his great aunt, or someone else, suddenly didn't exist or something 'cause of him.)
Making a spear, it'd turn everything a lot easier: he could try spear-fishing, could have more successful hunts, and have a real weapon to ward off all the creatures that could harm him...
His mind had wandered, and Connor was brought back into the present by the scent of his meal turning just this side of charred. The green fern leaves wrapped around were darkened slightly, but Connor was sure he was getting better at cooking like this. Even if the food never had much flavor anyway. He quickly took the stick off the tripod and pushed the leaf-wrapped bundle onto the piece of slate he'd been using as a 'plate' of sorts. He held the blade of his pocketknife over the flame for a moment, and then used it to check the meat by cutting a little.
Finding it fully cooked, Connor set to eating, his thoughts wandering once more.
x_X_X
Roots and bulbs, he'd found, tended to be a safer bet than fruits when it came to what was edible or not. The fig was probably an early relative of that very fruit, and it was safe to eat and didn't taste horrible. He was lucky he could remember things so well, because it meant he could keep track of what things he could and couldn't consume.
He learned to cook things in - or rather, over - the fire, trial by error, and burned his fingertips more times than he cared to count.
A potato-like tuber was tasty when wrapped in fern leaves - which, for some reason he knew but couldn't exactly remember, wouldn't burn easily- and put in the flames at the very edge of the fire, though getting it out without getting hurt too badly was tricky.
The tubers and roots and bulbs weren't too terribly hard to find, but gathering them did leave him vulnerable. Especially at night. He'd been digging in the dirt around dusk one time, when the too-close chirping of a dinosaur was followed seconds later by a chorus of cackles and chirps. Connor'd looked around, terrified, and identified the creatures that had snuck up on him as some sort of Troodontid, before they attacked, and he'd fled, heart beating like it was going to fly out of his chest as his boot-clad feet pounded on the ground. He'd made it back to his tree and into the safety of its branches in one piece, but the intelligent therapods had gotten nips at him, and he had scratches all along his arms and legs. He'd been much more careful from then on.
x_X_X
Connor'd started making tools, and planning ways to not just survive, but live. Besides the spear, tripod, and the pieces of slate he'd started using as plates, there were other things he'd planned in his head and started work on, earning himself splinters and cuts in plenty.
Things like a dish made of wood to collect rain water in, and a blade made of stone. Plans for a platform in the fork of his tree to sleep on, a better pulley system with rope if he ever became badly injured and needed to get to safety, and many other ideas fill his mind.
Nets, fishing rods, knives... he wondered if he could even make those things with what he had.
x_X_X
The clinking jangle of metal-on-metal had Connor alert in seconds, looking around him with hope in his eyes. His gaze moved to the homemade anomaly detector he'd fashioned from his keys... only to find them missing.
"Dammit!" Connor cursed, growling. He needed those! Whatever creature'd taken them would regret doing that, Connor thought, as he stomped off in the direction of the clawprints he'd spotted in the swampy earth.
x_X_X
"Give me back me keys!" Connor shouted and grabbed at them.
The Archarornithoides - a very small bird-like therapod - stepped back, away from him, the keys in its mouth. It took 'em, like a magpie does with shiny things, and he was arguing with a 3 foot long dinosaur over keys that're basically useless.
Connor snatched at them again and shoved the thought of how silly this was away. The thing screeched and dropped the keys, and Connor's the idiot who reached for them - jerking his hand back with a cry of pain as the Archarornithoides bit down, hard, before running away.
Connor clutched his bleeding hand, and stared at the keys for a long moment before picking them up and heading back to his tree. Realizing he left the fire unattended had Connor scolding himself repeatedly in his mind. He'd been lucky so far in the Cretaceous, now is not the time to make stupid mistakes.
He wrapped his hand with strips of gauze from the first aid kit, and took a gulp of water from the canteen. When he climbed higher in the tree across the way from his and hung the keys on the end of a branch, Connor spotted a Pteranodon soaring gracefully in the distance, wheeling over the tree tops.
An amazing sight, but it reminded Connor of what the therapod somehow had failed to: he wasn't meant to be here. The keys could help him get home, it was worth the set of teeth marks in his hand. They weren't even that bad, were like a cat bite gone wrong, and only hurt a little. He was lucky he was bigger than the Archarornithoides, otherwise it might've put up more of a fight.
x_X_X
He lay uncomfortably on his branch in his tree, cuddled under the foil blanket to keep himself warm in the cold Cretaceous night. Connor couldn't fall asleep, yet again. It happened far too often here... and it wasn't the threat of creatures keeping him awake. No, it was his fear and worry for Abby and Danny that he pushed to the back of his mind during the day that filled his head at night.
"I miss you Abbs..." Connor whispered, wrapping his arms around himself and curling as much as he could on the branch without falling off. He was so lonely... how could he do this alone? He was normally so optimistic, but sometimes, like now, the fear and worry caught him and he couldn't help but feel incredibly sorry for himself. That night, for the first time in weeks, he cried himself to sleep.