Wolves & Sheepdogs

Part 3

By the time the sun was fully up, Leslie was fairly sure the dog was stalking him again. Although, considering it had curled up to the fire closer than he had, maybe stalking wasn't quite the right word. Since it had seemed indifferent to his departure at dawn, he couldn't understand what motivation it might have in keeping track of him. Marklar wasn't a very heavily populated planet, less than half a million people on the only settled continent and while it had been explored, at least according to the records, that exploration could be considered more along the lines of a very vague, general survey. The residents still had a lot to see and catalog. And he had no idea where he was on the planet or how long he'd been out, or even, if he were completely honest, if he was still on Marklar. It looked right, and the air didn't taste any different than he remembered, and taking him to a different solar system to abandon him seemed excessive for Romulans, even if his former companion had a ship in orbit with its crew for assistance.

Overthinking things. He was stranded somewhere on a settled planet, and a giant dog living in the wild was curious about him, probably the first human, maybe even humanoid, it had ever seen.

Curious. That had to be it. Walking, Leslie considered that while he continued to scan the rock face. He was under no illusions that simple curiosity could possibly mean communication skills, although it probably had a very large brain inside the giant skull. But just because the creature was checking him out, albeit from a distance, didn't mean it had any desire or expectation of exchanging greetings with him, and he couldn't expect to understand things if it did. He wondered if it would come lay by his fire again tonight if he made one.

Not the way he should be thinking. He had to keep moving, had to find a way to get up out of the canyon so the Enterprise could find him before it left orbit. Because sooner or later the ship would be forced to move on, and he would really prefer to be on it when that happened. The Captain would never abandon anyone, but he might, at some point, be given an order he couldn't ignore. Or some other crisis might come up. In this situation, he couldn't expect a rescue if he didn't work on his end to make it happen. And sooner or later, he'd need to eat.

But he somehow didn't feel as threatened by the beast. Oh, he had no doubt it could tear him apart if it chose to, but then why would it sleep beside the fire without so much as scratching him? Of all of the skill sets and specialties he'd cultivated, none of them were in xenopsychology, especially of less than fully sentient lifeforms. He was equally at home in engineering and security, and could function adequately on any bridge station as a matter of course, perform in whatever landing party specification the Captain might require. But some days, he had a hard enough time figuring out what was going on in his own head, much less in other humans', to have any idea what a giant alien dog might be thinking.

Unless it was just waiting until it was really hungry, there was no reason it couldn't have killed him during the night, and it hadn't. So Leslie kept walking, and tried to ignore the feeling of eyes on his back.

After a while, he decided a walking stick might be nice, something that could double as a club in a pinch, and found a nice straight length of something that reminded him of bamboo. Not quite his height, but close enough, and strong enough to take as much of his weight as he wanted to give it without buckling. Something to lean on came welcome. He was getting tired and it might be a lot of work to get up again if he gave in to the urge to actually rest somewhere.

Noon seemed to come quickly, and it had to be an hour or two after that when he stopped in the dubious shade of a large leafy plant, thinking he could pick out the beginnings of a path up the cliff face. Well, not so much a path as a place where water might run down regularly. Dry now, the near vertical streambed seemed to promise plenty of hand- and footholds. Scraggly vegetation grew here and there in a long, sort of straight path, probably sucking greedily at whatever water happened by, and included some gnarled, tough looking tree analogues with roots pushed into the rock. Those might provide extra handholds, or even resting spots along the way, because it still didn't look like anything less than 100 metres straight up from where he stood to gawk.