Doomed

Mac knew that things weren’t going his way.
Not at all.
Not even slightly.
He was shaking all over, feeling cold as the ice beneath him.
The efforts of the Witch didn’t seem to help much either. She’d been padding him with reindeer skins all around his body and given him hot water with dried peppermint leaves to drink.
It was as if her very gestures warmed him more than the actual hot fluid and furry covers.
He was sometimes delirious, seeing old friends in the cave entrance from time to time. He was happy they would check in on him, but their faces didn’t reassure him very much. They would be smiling when they arrived, but soon adopted gloomy expressions, and some even shook their heads as if to tell him he’d really made things difficult for himself this time, and that there wasn’t much they could do at this point.
All this and more he could read out of their faces, and at no point did he find it strange that he could do so.
It wasn’t until his Grandfather stood in the cave opening that he got a little worried. Worried, not because the old man had been dead for years, but because his presence made him remember so many things from his childhood days.
Emotional memories.
Noise.
His granddad had been living next door where he grew up in the forests just a few hours north of Petrograd, and together they had been hanging out a lot, getting into all kinds of situations.
Sometimes situations involving big trouble.
His granddad had a simple philosophy:
Life, was all about survival.
That, and having fun.
Much fun.
They would spend a lot of time in the outdoors, going on all kind of expeditions in the forest. Mac had learned to face some basic facts of life on these trips. One being that you should always make sure you were on top of things, whenever setting out to challenge the elements.
Not so at this present moment.
He’d also learned that it was either a question of the survival of you, or your prey.
Not necessarily him at this present moment.
This might be a good moment to get seriously worried.
His granddad suddenly interrupted him:
“Why weren’t you listening?” he said.
This confused Mac. There wasn’t another being on this planet that he had listened to more than this old man.
“What do you mean?” he answered, not finding the slightest bit strange that he had gotten his voice back.
“I mean what I say, as I have always done. Why didn’t you listen? Look at the mess you’re in now.”
Mac felt a rush of sadness inside.
A feeling he hadn’t felt since last time he saw this man.
When he died.
“But what do you mean? I owe you everything. All my skills of survival I can thank you for. All my preparations for these challenges were made from your advice. I don’t understand.”
Mac was on the verge of crying, and it almost made him panic – something he never did.
“To think that I spent so much time on you, and all you ever learned you could have learned from the most insignificant, lost fool on Earth.”
The old man looked both defeated and angry at the same time.
“Please, I don’t understand. I listened! I did nothing but listen.” Mac tried to file his protest without bursting into tears. He was suddenly the seven-year-old boy out in the woods again, only he couldn’t ever remember ever being corrected in this way back then.
“Matchek!” the old man said sternly, addressing him as a young boy. “Survivors don’t just barge into situations and act as blind idiots. They don’t close their ears to their surroundings and dilute themselves with their own excellence. Real survivors listen all the way. Didn’t you get this? It was my only message to you. Why did you stop listening?”
“B..but. I listened.” Mac tried to protest.
“No you didn’t. You stopped listening when I was no longer there. Real survivors keep on listening. Listening to themselves.”
Mac couldn’t hold his tears back.
“I listened, I really listened!” he just repeated.
“Then,” his granddad continued, “then maybe you listened to the wrong Self.”
The old man left, and Mac cried himself into a deep sleep, unable to stop shaking.