Redwoodsbackpacker

With a gasp then a sigh, young Artemus scans the contents of his broken home. Just a fortnight ago; before calamity befell the home which his parents, his brothers and himself once dined, slept, laughed, and loved; he had come home to visit from the forest where he earned a silver a day cutting wood from sun up to sun down, on much more favorable terms. The cauldron lying on its side, its spilled contents since eaten by stray dogs and the rest dried on the floor as is the stilt blood of his family. The most valuable of his possessions are gone, stolen by the merciless few who slew his parents and had done god knowns what with his last surviving brother. With a muffled thud, Artemus' near empty buckskin packsack is plopped on a newly uprighted, though slightly broken, wooden table. Only the essentials will be taken, what is left of the essentials that is. Carefully hung, though crookedly hung above the now shattered mantel is the heirloom family crest, newly decorated with several fresh blood spots. The burlap is carefully rolled about a bundle of sticks and slid carefully with a tear and a sniffle into the buckskin bag. Heavy footsteps trod across the dirt floor, kicking up dust and spilled feathers from the tattered bed that his parents saved for years to bring home. Within the mass of fallen shelves and wet feathers wreaking of urine he finds his fathers bow, hopelessly broken. "RRR-AAAAAAA!!" Artemus screams and lauches it across the disheveled dwelling. With the pops and crashed of splintered timber thrown out of the way over, he lifts his tinderbox and the partly filled leather bound chronicle of his father's family, 5 generations past. The missing jewel from the dragons eye on the cover once burned with the fury that is now in the young boy's heart. Stepping over an overturned and collapsed wooden trunk he puts these too within his packsack. Returning to the heap of what was once his mother's trunk, he recovers woolen undergarments and sox, and a leather trenchcoat, worn white where the sleeves meet the body and tan in other areas from years of use. He slided on the jacket to find a ring of fine silver in the pocked. A smile lights his face as he rolls the ring two sizes too small between his grubby thumb and finger. He grasps it tightly and slides in back into his pocket with as much care as he slides his woolen winter wear into his packsack. Rummaging through the debris he also reclaims a few unbroken candles, a small pot, a wooden spoon, a length of rope, a short novel and a woolen blanket. With his packsack full to the brim, as his eyes are with tears of pain, he slings it over his shoulder and wipes the tears from his burning eyes with his other hand. Stepping over the leaning and cracked front door the rising sun warms his moistened face. His lantern still burns gently as it lays in the rocky soil in front of his former home. Bending over he picks up the lantern and hurls it onto the thatched roof before he finishes standing up. Without turning around to witness the housing of his memories he lifts his ax from the ground and balances it over his shoulder with the head behind him and the haft directing him with his right wrist atop it. Wreathed in the flames of the little cottage that was no longer his home he vowed to himself never to return to this place and let the smoke disappear in the horizon behind him without ever looking back.