...oh, right, she would probably not come with him back to civilisation, would she. This is not an "obvious in hindsight" thing, this is just an "obvious" thing.

He's not sure why it hit him like this right now.

"If only I could ride you instead of needing a boat," he says wistfully after a pause.

Eutelia sporfles.

"What, just pick you up and carry you off wherever you'd like to go? That sounds exhausting, and I need to sleep. Not to mention swimming on the surface is more tiring than swimming under it, and one of us needs to breathe more than the other."

"Maybe the solution is a raft, but you pull it."

"I'm willing to help pull your boat, but it would be very dumb to have a boat that only moves under its own power by me pulling it. You'd be stranded if something happened to me."

"I will probably need oars and maybe a sail, yes."

“Mhmm. And stores of fresh water.”

"Those too!"

She beams at him, then: "Okay, go chop down trees, you won't get yourself off this island just by talking to me. And I'll see if I can scrounge up another water vessel."

"Yes, ma'am."

Chop chop!

And she heads off to look for things that could be scavenged in the shallows of the islands! Fortunately for her, humans are notorious litterbugs, and this island is a known fresh water source for sailors, so this is not a hopeless endeavor! ... Still pretty difficult, though.

The trees fall before Zotikos! All trees will bow before his might!

.... are those olives? Those look like olives. They don't look very ripe, but they do look like they'll be edible at some point. Dietary variety!

Huh. Actual olives and not weird suspicious probably-poisonous lookalikes?

They look like actual olives to him, but he can always eat one and see if it makes him sick if he's not sure! Would he like to test them, by that method or perhaps by a method that won't potentially lead to puking his guts out or killing him?

He can lick one.

It tastes like an olive! A very unripe one, though, so it's not precisely delicious.

Well, he'll pop it into his mouth and eat it and if it's poisonous at least it was his own stupidity that killed him instead of any gods. He'll memorise this location for future foraging.

While the taste of an unripe, raw olive is quite bitter, it is at least a change from the unseasoned cooked meat he's been eating. So it has that going for it.

The small tree is certainly not going to get up and walk away from him.

Other small trees are still available for chopping!

And he's probably going to need quite a lot of wood if he wants anything more useful than a raft. Which he will, because it would be the height of idiocy to try to go all the way to Troy on a raft.

Lots of trees fall before him. His ankle hurts the entire time he does it, but the swelling and the painful throbbing increase over time. It may or may not start to become distracting after long enough.

He can keep at it until he thinks it needs tending, he starts to feel hungry, dusk, or presumably until he collapses from utter exhaustion. It's up to him.

Hunger or tending, whichever happens first.

Hunger! How would he like to handle this? Eutelia is absent and has yet to leave him any gifts of fish.

Well, archery practice, probably. He'll have to deal with the pain forever anyway, so he might as well figure out how to become the best archer in the world again while in unreasonable amounts of pain.

Small birds are available for shooting! The principles of archery are the same, but there is something of a trick to standing and moving and firing in a way that doesn't cause flareups of agony. Also something of a trick to ignoring agony. It's somewhat predictable agony, at least. Flareups only happen when something touches the area directly, or he puts too much weight on it, or he moves in these particular kinds of ways....

His archery skills improve with practice, and soon enough he can (mostly) avoid missing small, swift moving birds. How many would he like to acquire before he goes to cook them? They're plentiful enough that they're not going to run out anytime soon. The challenge of sneaking up on and then shooting either a small target through a lot of brush, or a small moving target through a lot of brush, is at least more interesting than chopping trees.

And it's not something he's exactly unused to. Depending on how small these "small targets" are he'll get something between four and seven of them.

They're pretty small; probably best to go with the full seven, especially if he decides he'd like to share with Eutelia. Who is still absent, even after seven birds have been felled.