Fortunately, he builds a shelter and remains safely inside it until the next morning, when the storm dissipates.
His first instinct was to restore his makeshift kitchen to its former glory–well, perhaps “glory” was the wrong word–but his good sense politely informed him that the rain would undo any such efforts. He would have to wait for the storm to abate.
He shivered. Splotches of rain impacted every square inch of his body, cold pinpricks robbing him of his body heat. He walked back to the shore, if only to warm himself up, and surveyed the coast.
The ocean had blurred into a vast collision of fresh and brackish water. Droplets bounced in tiny arcs, interrupted the arcs of their neighbors, and merged in split seconds. Lightning arced on the horizon, outshining the last of the day’s sunlight. He retreated back into the comparative shelter of the forest.
Animals endured storms with fur and feathers to protect them, and while a man could do the same without, it was his birthright to do better. He would have to build himself a house.
He set about searching for materials. Some of the largest, waxiest fronds available appealed to him as potential roofing; he pulled at these until their owners surrendered them. With his knife, he appropriated some long branches and sharpened their ends. He ferried his armful of foliage to the clearing that had been the nest of the demon birds and started assembling his fort.
He had formulated only vague plans in his mind, and that was probably for the best, since those plans failed at the outset. He plunged four of his sturdiest branches into the wet ground in a square, intent on balancing a grid of twigs and leaves upon them until he had a pavilion of sorts. Before he had added more than four branches to his starting columns, they tilted and collapsed. He bent over to examine the base of his structure. The dirt, he noted, was not firm enough to resist the leverage of so much weight so far from its fulcrum. Unless he could buttress it somehow, his house would not stay vertical.
For his second try, he dug up ground under each branch before staking it in, hoping to gain more traction. Lacking a shovel, he clawed at the ground with his fingers, then a stick, but even with rain-softened dirt it was slow going. Any depression he made in the forest floor quickly filled with water, and his hands had numbed under the bombardment of cold water. He stabbed the branches into the ground, but still they would not remain upright.
Hey, he thought. He was doing this the hard way. Weren’t trees already rooted in the ground?
He scooped up his construction materials and plopped them down next to the nearest tree. Wiping the rain from his eyes with the backs of his grimy hands, he rested a long branch in the crook of one of the tree’s lower limbs, its other end meeting the ground at a shallow angle. He laid several branches leaning perpendicular upon this first one, starting with very short ones near the lower end and working his way upward, alternating from which side the sticks met the main support. When he’d finished, he had created a shape like an oddly like triangular ribcage; the central stick was the backbone to an widening set of wooden ribs that ended in an opening near the base of the tree.
To this he began adding his collection of leaves, again starting at the base and slowly working his way upward. The waxy fronds he’d collected did an excellent job of blocking rainfall, though it took many attempts and all the finesse he could muster to shingle the entire structure with them. He took advantage of the natural creases in the leaves and the rough edges of the bark in balancing the first layer of greenery, and, after adding an extra layer, he found himself with a lopsided, muddy tent. Though it was by no means watertight, the rain did not enter it directly, and, for now, the winds had not threatened to dismantle it. He had only to try it out.
He crawled inside, feet first. His head rested between two of the tree’s roots, and his feet stopped just shy of the branches at the low end of the shelter. It smelled like a freshly cut lawn in here, and the enclosure did little to muffle the sound of the storm. He pulled off his muck-soaked shirt and wadded it up under his head. His skin, though wet, was not getting any wetter.
It seemed to be working.
He closed his eyes. Though his stomach was still empty, his clothes still soaked, and his plane still underwater, exhaustion pushed all thoughts from his mind. He listened to rain drum upon his roof until he fell asleep.