The forest remains where she left it. One of the sheep decides to follow her for reasons of its own, and bleats softly behind her at odd intervals.

The forest itself is mostly oak trees; as long as the trees she's hoping for are oak, then the forest has her covered. Other kinds of tree are in shorter supply, at least around here.

The berry bushes are completely covered in berries again, including the ones that she denuded earlier.

What a good sheep. She absently finger-combs the sheep as she walks.

Olivia munches on berries, has an idea, and trails a few of them off her fingers and into the dirt. She's curious if they'll sprout.

She scoops up a handful of acorns, with the vague notion of planting them later, or maybe trying to grind them into flour. 

With a full belly and a slightly fuller bag - acorns and wool-fluff - it's time to keep walking. The coastline is her best landmark, and she follows it further north as the sun climbs the sky (assuming, that is, that it doesn't bend around). How far to the far edge of the forest, and what new mystery lies beyond? 

As a matter of fact it does bend around a little, leading her northwest. The forest continues unchanged for about half a kilometer before giving way to a much richer grassland, more like where she initially appeared than her current house location.

The grass here is lush and green, dotted with flower bushes. If she has a particularly keen eye, she might recognize wild carrots. Without the obstruction of the trees, she is able to see much farther. To the north lies a tall, stony mountain. To the northeast the plains get hilly. To the east there is just more forest, of the same kind she has been walking through.

And right in front of her feet, coming upon her suddenly in the grass, is a great ravine. It neatly bisects the plains, going deep, deep into the earth. Visible at the bottom are pools of water and of lava, separated by expanses of black stone. The wall of the ravine is pierced at one point by a set of wooden mining supports that end abruptly, as though some intrepid miner came upon the unexpected geology and decided to give up and go back the other way.

Yikes? Yikes.

On the other hand, this does seem like a place one could try mining. A future, better equipped, more capable Olivia might try mining here; she's going to evince a sense of self preservation and not do that.

What does the outlet of the ravine look like, does it meet the ocean at roughly sea level or is there no longer a walkable beach on this stretch?

The beach here is gravely but passable. The ravine stops about five meters short of the water ... and in contravention of all Earthly hydrogeologic principles, the ocean seems fine with this, and has not seeped through the ground to fill the ravine. That end of the ravine is pretty steep and ends abruptly, but if she goes to check the other end, that one gets shallow enough that she could scramble down into it and then walk along the bottom of the ravine if she pleased. And probably climb back out again, even.

Does she want to check the other end of the ravine? It's an interesting question. On the one hand, her plan today was to explore up the coast, and she's filled with the desire to move and keep moving despite any obstacles and distractions. On the other hand, the ravine is the sort of thing she really should be exploring around and mapping, as a landmark and perhaps as a resource.

It is while considering this dilemma that she spots her first carrot. Carrots! That's perfect. Food that she can store, carry, and eat without much equipment is exactly what she needs to ease up pressure on the fish stock.

She's going to spend as long as it takes to fill her bag and pockets with carrots. If her meandering gathering takes her generally up the near edge of the ravine towards its source, so much the better, but the carrots have to be the focus right now.

There are not that many random carrots growing wild, but there are enough to fill her bag. By the time she's exhausted the local carrot-growing resources, the sun is starting its daily descent toward the horizon and her bag is heavy with root vegetables.

And so she heads home, heavily loaded with carrots and empty, or at least emptier, of worries.

Dinner today is more wheat porridge, this time with a little carrot added, and she's tucked away in her house before the night chorus begins.

The monsters really aren't particularly creative or adaptive. It's easy to see how one might start to find them more annoying than threatening once one has some static defenses.

At one point a skeleton riding on top of a giant spider scuttles by outside, but that's the most novel thing to occur all night.

Alas, Olivia entirely misses the mounted skeleton, because she is asleep.

She wakes up stiff, still lacking a bed and blanket, and regretfully concludes that she'll have to postpone more exploration today in favor of felt-making. Ow. The amethyst glass is not soft.

Felt isn't her only option. The ancient Egyptians carved pillows out of wood! Admittedly, it was a simpler time. And they wrapped them in linen, but still.

Does she have any particular approach to felting, here, other than "repeatedly poke collected wool with a tool of some variety"?

Unlike the Ancient Egyptians, she has neither the tools needed to carve wood, nor the time and knowledge to process flax; a linen-wrapped wooden pillow must wait until she's climbed at least few more rungs of the tech tree.

She's planning to soak the wool in the river, very gently heat it over the fire, and then poke it (with a small stick). Her recollection is that warm water is involved in felting, and it's easier to heat the water after it's in the wool than beforehand.

That process proves to work pretty much as intended. The fish watch curiously as she soaks the wool. Wool is naturally flame-retardant, and especially so when soaking wet, so she doesn't even singe any bits.

Eventually, she has a small (hot, wet) solid lump of felted wool in the rough shape of her choosing.

The shape of her desires is flat, thin, and vaguely rectangular. She leaves it to dry on one of the steps of her staircase and goes to comb another sheep.

"Baaaaah."

The sheep don't mind being combed. They're not obviously in favor of it, either, occasionally wandering off mid-combing to bite at some grass, but they allow her to accumulate plenty more wool.

Combing, felting, more combing, more felting. For lunch she ambles over to the forest berry patches, as much to give herself a rest break as to be gentle on her food supplies.

When (if) she finds a way back to Earth she is blacklisting every single homesteading blog in existence. Or at least the ones that start with machine-woven fabric. Come to think of it, she could really go for some soothing background video of sheep-wrangling. Her sheep are very silly but, not knowing anything about sheep really, she guesses they're friendlier than Earth sheep; all the other animals here seem to be.

Will she still feel that way when it turns out that the forest is Full of Wolves?

... well, probably. They only come up to a bit above her knees, and they seem to be mostly concerned with chasing a rabbit, which is deftly avoiding them by the expedient of running around and around a tree in circles.

Awwwww. Cute dogs. They seem to be enjoying themselves but she'll duck back out of the forest to grab a stick in case one of them wants to play, sure. With her, not with the rabbit that is about to become lunch and is presumably a lot more fun to chase in the meantime.

She is vindicated in her choice of scenic lunch picnic area.

Once they're done tearing apart the rabbit, they are indeed interested in her and her stick. The three of them trot over and sniff at her, reading the tale of her travel in her scent.

She has sure been so many places in these clothes since she last had the option of halfway decent laundry and soap. Including Earth, if they can sniff out the Earth city underneath everything that's happened since.

If these dogs don't mind her being in their space she will offer pets (cautiously, watching for signs of un-welcome).

They mostly find her puzzling, but they seem friendly enough. They do not wish to be touched at this time. One of them snoofles very hard at any places where she has touched fish.

Another of them is interested in the stick, but, being undomesticated, does not seem to understand the "bring the stick back" part once she throws it.

Oops, that figures. She goes to retrieve the stick herself, laughing.

If she wiggles the stick, can she entice and-or trick the interested one into playing tug-o-war? (Rope would be better for this, but she hasn't got any, alas.)

Yes, she can absolutely interest them in some tug of war! The wolf who is most interested in the stick does a play bow and grabs the other end of it, backing up and shaking his head vigorously to try and snap the stick's neck.

The wolf who was interested in the salmon smell is lying down and watching the whole affair consideringly. The other wolf is running around everyone and barking in general excitement, even if she doesn't really have any way to join in.

Olivia awkwardly copies the bow, wiggles excitedly, and attempts to lose tug of war slowly instead of immediately. (Look, she's down two whole feet and legs from her competition ...)

The game loosens up something tightly wound inside her. She hadn't been much of a dog person, before all this, but it's really nice right now. Humankind's best friend, indeed. 

The wolves will play with her for a little while, before deciding that they have had enough and wandering off in search of another rabbit. Other than the wolves, the forest is quiet. The wind rustles the tree branches.