I walked briskly towards the sun. The forest looked the same for hundreds of meters. Bright green leaves of trees and shrubs, moss, and white flowers. The terrain was almost entirely flat, which made navigating through it even more difficult. Without the sun, a few spins with closed eyes would suffice to lose my sense of direction entirely. I tried to follow the small rays of sun that illuminated the bright green leaves in the tree crowns and, breaking through, lit the ground cover with bright spots.

After a few minutes, the dew dried, the air felt noticeably warmer, I was sweating, and my clothing started to stick to my body and rub painfully. I wondered how far I had walked. Naturally, my first thought was to activate Strava or some other fitness app to track my workout. But an automatic hand movement towards my pocket found only my fashionable retro pants. There was nothing left to do but count my steps.

I continued towards the sun. Due to the chafing, I had to adjust my walking style to make it a bit easier, but I didn’t have much room to maneuver. I gritted my teeth and kept going.

After more than two thousand steps, the forest became a bit denser. Still the same deciduous trees, but between them, there were more and more bushes reaching up to my shoulders. The further I went, the tighter it became, and it was increasingly difficult for me to break through the bushes in a straight line. Pants and a vest were good protection against the branches of bushes, but my arms quickly became covered with abrasions and cuts. After a short while of making my way through, I doubted whether it was a good idea and considered returning the same way I came, at least to the point where the forest was not so dense. I turned around, made sure the sun was exactly behind me, and before I took the first step, the cry of a crane rang out in the air again. It seemed as if it was very close, approximately a few dozen meters from me. If not for the bushes, I probably would have seen it. Without thinking, I headed in that direction. I made my way through the bushes for a good few dozen steps and noticed that the canopy of trees was sparser and more clear, blue sky was visible. After a few minutes of making my way through, paying no attention to the wounds on my arms and hands, I reached the edge of the forest.

Before my eyes appeared a lake about 50 meters in diameter, surrounded densely by cattails or some other type of reed. The lake, in the morning light, had a blue-greenish color, tiny waves like wrinkles on smooth water reflected the sun rays, flashing like golden ribbons on the surface. Beyond the lake was a grassy plain, ending in a wall of another forest that seemed distant, as if on the horizon's edge. Everywhere was bright, vivid green. I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen anything like it in my life. I recall that similar views were in one version of the game Far Cry - they seemed so beautiful that they felt unnatural.

My reverie was broken again by the loud cry of a crane. I saw it standing on the opposite shore of the lake. A black bird, on long legs stood among the reeds. It had a long, thin beak and feathers on its head that ended like curling longer hairs. I don’t know if it was a heron, crane, or something else. My knowledge of zoology was limited, but I knew it was neither a stork nor a flamingo. The bird shrieked every few minutes, and sometimes another responded from a distance, from the south, judging by the position of the sun.

I approached the lake, carefully squeezing through the reeds to avoid startling the bird. The lake's edge was so overgrown that I had to wade at least two meters in shallow water between the hard stems before reaching the clear water surface.

I washed my face and cleaned my hands covered with numerous scrapes and dried blood. It stung, but the refreshing cold brought immense relief after a short but intense forest hike.

I scooped up some water in my hands and smelled it to make sure it was fit for drinking. It didn't smell like gasoline or decay, so I tasted a bit. Nothing extraordinary, just the taste of ordinary clean water, quite similar to what we normally drank from taps at home.

The sun was already heating up strongly, so I untied the laces of my vest and pulled it over my head. The sweaty linen shirt began to breathe and dry in the sun.

I decided to walk around the lake to check if it had any inflow or outflow. A river, which could help me navigate. Rivers usually flow into larger rivers and then into the sea, and if I find the sea, maybe I can figure out where I am. I walked around the lake but only found a tiny outflow, which was more of a marsh than a stream. The sounds of that other bird had come from there earlier. Walking through marshes was not my hobby, and I didn't want to completely soak or, worse, lose my shoes in the mud. They were, after all, the most comfortable part of my attire.

"I need to decide what to do next," I thought. The grassy plain to the west ended with the deciduous forest I came from, and far to the east, it ended with another barely visible forest. To the north, it stretched far to the horizon, while to the south, it seemed to narrow and ended sharply at the point where the forests from both sides meet. It was interesting that the forest I came from had a much lighter green color than the one on the other side.

I was not able to see details or differences at that distance. Previously, I spent many hours a day staring at a monitor or phone about a meter from my face, and my eyes had long since become unaccustomed to looking at greater distances. I was nearsighted, sometimes I wore glasses with -0.5 lenses. Usually, I didn't need them and just carried them in my bag along with my laptop, cables, and other stuff, but now I missed them. I felt angry at myself, as if I could influence the fact that I didn’t bring them with me on this strange adventure.

I decided to continue my journey to the south, where the two forests meet. I have an easy navigation point, and in the forest, it will probably be easier to find food and shelter than on the open grassy plain.

I had been walking for about an hour. I didn't have a watch, so it just seemed to me that an hour had passed. The sun had already moved a bit towards the point I was heading to and was shining almost directly into my face. The grass, which from a distance looked as even as the turf at Wembley, turned out to be knee-high in places and scattered with uneven tufts up close. Walking in a straight line was very troublesome; I often stepped on uneven surfaces and my ankles were starting to hurt. It reminded me of trips across the Norwegian mountain plains covered with similar grass, only that this one, fortunately, wasn't as wet.

I walked and counted my steps. There were already over 4,000. As I neared the end of the plain, I saw bushes and small trees more frequently. When I was close enough to the forest's edge that my eyesight could distinguish individual trees, and not just a dense green-brown wall, suddenly a few startled roe deer or wild goats burst out of the nearby bushes and ran towards the forest. I got scared and my heart started to beat faster, shaking my chest. I had to stop for a moment to calm down. Thoughts about what other animals might live here and what would happen, when it got dark, started to come back. How many species living here would eagerly hunt me

Luckily, it wasn't even noon yet, so I had some time before dusk to find a hiding place and plan what to do next. So I marched towards my navigation point, the border of the two forests.

So far, I had walked through undisturbed patches of grass, but now, closer to the forest, I noticed more trampled paths and animal tracks. One of these paths led directly towards my goal. In places where there was some dried mud, I could clearly see hoof prints. This must have been some main highway for the local deer. When I reached the line of shadow cast by the forest wall, the worn path was over half a meter wide and looked like a hiking trail on the Bieszczady Mountain meadows. The eastern, darker side of the forest was also deciduous, but the trees were much thinner than those on the western side and had dark green hard leaves, as if half dried. The trees also grew much denser, roughly at the distance of outstretched arms. They were tall, and branches came out of the trunk only above head height. However, it was noticeable that many of these lowest branches at the forest's edge were bitten off by animals. There must live large deer, elk, or moose here, which are able to reach so high because giraffes probably do not occur here.

"I reached my navigation point, quest completed," I thought sarcastically, "probably got a few experience points and maybe a stamina point. If I keep this up, soon a window will pop up informing me that I've leveled up."

These kinds of silly, abstract thoughts improved my mood and helped me detach a bit from the stress of the situation I found myself in.