The forest had stopped being beautiful by the third day.
At first, Janis had admired the birches glowing silver at dusk, the chorus of frogs, the river winding like glass through the pines. But hunger changed everything.
Now the trees seemed hostile, their shadows long and accusing. His legs trembled from weakness. The berries he had eaten on the first day were gone, and the mushrooms he tried the second had made him retch.
The river mocked him most of all. It gurgled and sang, full of unseen life. Fish darted under its surface, silver flashes he could never catch. Once he had seen an otter slide through the reeds with something wriggling in its jaws. The sight made his stomach twist with envy so sharp it felt like a knife.
By evening, he sat on a rock above the water, hollow-eyed. His reflection stared back at him—mud-streaked, lips cracked.
“If I don’t eat tonight,” he muttered to no one, “tomorrow I won’t walk.”
His grandfather’s words echoed in memory: “The river gives to those who know how to ask. But it takes from the greedy.”
Janis clenched his fists. He didn’t care if the river was generous or cruel. He only knew he had to eat.
His eyes scanned the banks: driftwood, reeds, stones. Tools waiting to be made, if his hands remembered the old tricks.
He whispered aloud, as if to steady himself: “Then I’ll make the river feed me. One way or another.”
And with that, he stood, hunger sharpening into resolve.
Janis crouched at the river’s edge, choosing stones as if they were coins and he had only one chance to spend them. He found a flat one sharp enough to cut bark, and another heavy enough to crack wood.
He stripped a branch of willow with trembling hands, scraping away wet bark until it was smooth. Then he split the end, sharpening it against the stone until it formed a crude point. It wasn’t elegant, but it could stab.
“Grandfather used to spear pike in the shallows,” he muttered to himself. “Stand still, wait for the shadow, then strike.”
But when he tried, the water betrayed him. Fish scattered at the slightest ripple of his foot. Twice he lunged and hit nothing but mud, sending silver shapes darting away. By the third attempt, he slipped, plunging waist-deep into the icy current. The spear flew from his hands, carried off before he could snatch it back.
He cursed until his throat hurt. The hunger made his rage raw, childlike.
Crawling out, soaked and shivering, he refused to give up. He tore reeds from the bank, twisting them into rough cord. His fingers bled where the stalks cut. With that cord he lashed another branch into a hoop, bending it until it formed a crude frame. More reeds woven across made a trap that looked more like a broken basket than a tool.
He anchored it with stones at the mouth of a narrow stream feeding the river. “If fish are smarter than me,” he muttered, “then maybe they’ll trap themselves.”
But as night fell, the trap held only water and mud. No shimmer of scales, no salvation.
Janis slumped against a pine, stomach cramping. His failure pressed heavier than the darkness.
Then he heard it: a splash, not far upstream. Slow, deliberate. He crept closer, bare feet sinking in wet soil. There, by the shallows, a shape moved—broad, furred, half in shadow.
Not a man. Not a fish. An animal, feeding.
And suddenly, Janis remembered another way the river could feed him—through what hunted in it.
The shape by the shallows moved with easy confidence, dipping its head into the water and surfacing with a fish that writhed silver in the moonlight.
An otter.
Janis crouched in the reeds, heart pounding. He had seen one on the first day, sleek and playful, but now he looked at it differently. To him it was not just an animal. It was competition. It was survival wrapped in fur.
The otter slid onto a flat stone, flipped the fish against it, and tore into the flesh with quick, neat bites. The sound of crunching bones carried across the water. Janis’s mouth watered so sharply it hurt.
He thought of throwing a rock, of lunging with his bare hands. But even in his hunger, he knew better. An otter was fast, teeth sharp, claws stronger than they looked. It would vanish into the river before he touched it—and might leave him bleeding for his trouble.
Still… where the otter hunted, there were fish. Where the otter fed, there was proof the river gave.
He watched carefully, noting the eddy where the fish gathered, the rocks that funneled them into shallows. His grandfather’s voice returned again, faint but insistent: “Animals know first. Watch them, and you’ll learn what they never say.”
When the otter slid back into the water, vanishing without a sound, Janis crept to the stone. Fish scales glistened in the moonlight, scattered like coins. He crouched, fingers brushing them, and whispered: “Thank you, hunter.”
Then, with renewed urgency, he set to work.
He dragged fallen branches into a narrow bend of the river, stacking them into a crude V-shape with its point downstream. Reeds wove into gaps, stones anchored the base. It was sloppy, clumsy—but it might guide fish into a trap where they couldn’t escape.
All night he labored, sweat freezing on his skin, hands raw from bark and stone. By dawn, the weir stood crooked in the water, humming faintly with the current.
Janis collapsed on the bank, too tired to stand. His eyes closed, but even in half-sleep he listened for the river’s voice—waiting to know if it would answer his desperate bargain.
The morning came pale and cold, mist curling from the water. Janis woke stiff and sore, every muscle aching from the night’s work. For a moment he lay still, afraid to check the trap.
But hunger forced him to his feet. His stomach gnawed like a live thing inside him.
The weir stood where he had built it—crooked, trembling with the current. He staggered into the water, heart hammering. At first he saw nothing but reeds and foam. Then, as the light shifted, he caught it—
a flicker of silver, frantic against the wooden bars.
A fish.
Janis dropped to his knees in the stream, laughing hoarsely. He plunged his hands in, fumbling until he caught it, slippery and thrashing. Its scales cut his palms, but he clutched it to his chest, gasping as if he’d seized treasure.
“Thank you,” he whispered, not sure if he spoke to the river, the otter, or his grandfather’s ghost.
On the bank, he found dry twigs under a fallen pine and coaxed them into flame with his last match. The smoke rose thin, uncertain, but it caught.
He gutted the fish with a sharpened stone, fingers clumsy but steady now. The smell of raw flesh almost drove him mad. When the first hiss of skin over fire came, he nearly wept.
The taste was everything. Greasy, smoky, bones crunching between his teeth—food that filled, that gave his body back its strength. He ate like a wolf, licking his fingers, burning his tongue in his haste.
When it was gone, he stared at the charred bones in silence. For the first time since he was lost, he didn’t feel doomed. The river had answered. It had given.
And yet, as he licked the last grease from his palm, he knew the river demanded respect in return. If he grew greedy, it would take back more than it gave.
He glanced at the trap, where two more flashes of silver writhed. He smiled faintly, shaking his head. “Not today,” he said aloud. “One is enough.”
He banked the fire, curled on the moss, and slept with a full stomach—for the first time in days.
The days that followed grew easier, though never easy.
Janis checked the trap each morning, always taking only what he needed—one fish, sometimes two if the night had been cruelly cold. He learned to smoke the meat over slow coals so it lasted longer. He learned which reeds could be woven into stronger cord, which stones split sharp enough to cut.
But more than tools, he learned patience.
Each evening he sat by the fire, watching the river slip past, brown and endless. It no longer mocked him. It no longer felt like an enemy. It was a teacher—stern, unyielding, but fair.
Sometimes the otter appeared again, sliding through the reeds, sleek and quick. Once it stopped on the same flat stone, a fish glistening in its jaws. The animal turned its dark eyes on him, head cocked, as if judging.
Janis raised his hand in silent greeting. “I take only what you leave behind,” he whispered. “We share.”
The otter slipped back into the water without a sound.
On the tenth day, Janis found a hunting trail through the forest. It led him back to people—loggers who gave him bread, warmth, and a road home.
But the memory of hunger and the river’s voice stayed with him. He never looked at water the same way again.
Years later, when his children complained at a meal, he would hold up a fish bone by the firelight and tell them:
“The river doesn’t feed the greedy. It only feeds the ones who respect it.”
And though they laughed, though they didn’t understand, Janis knew the truth.
Because once, alone and starving, the river had given him life—and taught him how to keep it.