She immediately drops Wishbone and draws her knife, then stills.

This is... meat. Meat is good for survival and stuff. Getting ripped open by sharp teeth is bad for it, though.

It's very large. But she's very strong. And she's going to be in worse shape the longer she goes without anything substantive to eat.

She bites her lip and focuses on her breathing and decides to watch it for another few moments, to see if she can get a better sense of her odds of taking it down with just a knife.

Gronk. Huff. Huff.

The creature decides to relieve her of this dilemma by charging.

Well, then they'll fight!

She scoops Wishbone up and jumps out of the way in one fluid motion, drops Wishbone and tells him to run, and turns around to bury her knife in the creature's neck. Hopefully it's got arteries and stuff there.

Its thick neck turns out to be bulked out significantly by a ruff of stiff wiry hair, which absorbs most of the blow. Her knife scratches it but doesn't hit anything vital. It shakes its head and lunges, making angry Chewbacca noises.

Well, frick. She tries to dodge again, doesn't quite make it, and gets knocked off her feet.

She gets up and goes for its underbelly. It she can cut a big gash in one of its inner thighs or something then maybe it'll bleed to death.

The fur of the underbelly is softer, and her knife bites deep. It rakes her with its claws before it goes down, but it does go down.

She clutches her wound for a second, then parts the fur at its throat and finishes killing it as cleanly as she can.

Now she has approximately five times her weight in extradimensional moose meat. She probably won't need to worry about food for a while, assuming she can find a way to preserve and carry it.

She sits on the ground and leans against the moose-thing and suddenly feels the need to fight the urge to cry. 

She doesn't want to be here. She doesn't wanna have to try to figure out how to try to dry her kill out, just because she knows basic things like general poison-testing doesn't mean that she knows how to properly smoke meat so it turns into jerky. She doesn't wanna have to try to figure out how to tan the moose-thing hide so she doesn't feel wasteful, or figure out what you're supposed to do with moose-thing bones, or figure out how you cut a moose-thing up without making a mess of everything in the first place.

Wishbone trots over and snuggles her.

Very impressive. I feel very safe.

"Thanks." Pat pat pat. "Be super helpful if you could gather wood for a fire."

After a long couple minutes, she gets up, takes most of her clothes off to keep them from getting more blood on them, and sets to work trying to skin her moose-thing. She doesn't know what she's doing. It's messy. There's definitely a lot of meat, though, and even if she can't figure out preservation, she at least knows how to spear chunks of it and cook it over a fire.

Nothing bothers her while she's making a mess of the moose, nor while she's cooking and eating it afterward.

Then there will be nothing to distract her from her own incompetence. She wishes she'd paid more attention to, like, Oregon Trail memoirs, or how the kid does things in My Side Of The Mountain, or asked someone at superhero camp survival class about this situation, or something.

She eats as much as she can, and gives Wishbone as much as he wants, which is a lot for someone so small, honestly. She's not super sure how turning moose-thing meat into moose-thing jerky works, and isn't even sure she has a good enough idea how to do it to take a stab in the right direction, but she figures she's gotta try to make good use of what she has. She cuts some strips of moose-thing hide and uses them to hang some meat from a tree, then starts a second fire underneath it, aiming for something low and slow-burning. Maybe this'll cause dehydration. Maybe it'll ruin everything. Who knows.

Aiming to make a wooden rack to hold stuff high over a fire is a lot more frustrating. Stuff keeps breaking or falling apart as she works on it. She's not exactly afraid of dying in the next little while here, but she feels pretty stupid. 

She does manage to keep her moose-thing hide pretty close to whole in the process of removing it from the animal. She scrapes it off pretty well, but she's not sure how to tan it, and it'll probably start rotting at some point if it doesn't get preserved somehow. Maybe someone in town will know what to do with it, if she can get that far before her stuff rots. 

She works late into the night without feeling like anything she's doing has been unambiguously a good idea. At least she can have more meat for dinner. Could be worse. Theoretically.

(She misses Alex. Alex would know what to do with the moose-thing.)

In the morning she eats some now-slightly-suspicious cooked meat, packs up the scraped moose hide and teeth and a few bones and some suspicious-looking not-really-much-like-proper-jerky stuff, puts on some non-bloodstained clothes, and heads out. Be cool if she could keep the antlers, but they're big and hard to carry, and she has bigger problems. She leaves the rest of the body behind and sets the fastest pace she can sustainably manage. (This is pretty fast. The main limiting factor is the forest getting in the way, so she can't hit her normal running speeds.)

There's a lot of forest. It's hard to go in a straight line when the terrain is this rough and overgrown, but at least the trees stay sparse enough that there's still the sun to navigate by, mostly. And if she gets turned around, she can ask her spirit friend to point the way north; its sense of direction seems to be completely absolute.

A little before noon, when the sun is too high to guide her, she finally emerges from the trees. There's a hill directly ahead, and when she crests it, she can see down a long slope to a small town surrounded by low earthen walls. Honestly it might still be small enough to qualify as a village, but it is bigger than the last place.

Good enough. She heads into the village and looks for anything resembling a general store.

There are a few people out on the street; they universally give her distrustful looks and edge away as she approaches.

...except for the small child, of indeterminate age and gender, wearing an adult-size tunic whose sleeves extend well past the ends of their little arms, who runs up to her and says, "Hi! I'm Fen! What's your name?"

"I'm Karen! I just got here."

"Kaaaaaren. That's a nice name! Have you seen my mom? She's tall and pretty and she wears green and she has a shiny pebble necklace!"

"I don't think I have!"

"Oh." The kid slouches a little, disappointed. "Sorry to bother you. —Hey, is that a saber-tooth moose-lion hide?!"

"Um - I think so. It had saber teeth and antlers, so."

"Coooooool. You gotta show it to Bao! C'mon!"

The kid grabs her hand and pulls, trying to lead her along the street.

She'll follow, then. Easier than trying to figure out what to do with this stuff by herself.

She is hauled along the street and around a corner and up to the door of a small shabby house, where the kid finally lets go of her to bang on the door and yell, "Bao! Bao! This girl with a funny name found a whole entire saber-tooth moose-lion hide!!!"

The door opens.

A man peers out, medium-tall and wiry, with greying hair and a short bristly beard. "Eh? Come on, Fen, not another of your... oh!" His eyes go wide at the sight of Karen's bundle. "Amazing! How on earth did you come by that?"

" - lucky find, I guess," she says, after a half-second pause. Not like they can see the claw marks now that she's changed clothes. "Found a dead one on the side of the road and figured the hide was maybe valuable. I dunno how to tan it or anything, though, I was really hoping there'd be someone in town with a better sense of what to do with it than me."