Richter felt like he had almost everything he ever wanted. Life had been much harder when he was younger, when he'd felt he had to live in the city and money and success had felt like something always out of reach. He'd been to college, he'd studied business and tried to make it on the stock markets and genuinely he'd made a tidy little sum but it had brought with it the kinds of stress that had almost led him to ruin. He'd started to take drugs just to balance him out when every day was a mess of high stakes financial decisions one after the other. He'd been part of groups that had been involved in hostile takeovers, seen companies swallowed up by the people that hired men like him to find weaknesses to exploit, seen hard working men and women lose everything they had worked for, family businesses, their whole lives. At the time he'd used the rationalization that they had been paid what it was worth, they weren't ever left with nothing but the guilt still ate at him, it still felt like he was doing something wrong. It just wasn't the life for him...it was a cutthroat business, one he'd wanted to join, he wanted to make millions, start up his own business with the proceeds but he just wasn't a cutthroat man and it had eaten at him until a few years ago when he'd just had to stop.
Taking what he had made, he'd at least managed to buy himself some property. It was an odd duality that while living his life entirely in the city he had always wanted to own a house in the countryside and some land of his own so that's what he'd done, he'd bought a dilapidated old house with borders that stretched out deep into the nearby forest, several hours from the city, and a few homes in the suburbs that could earn him passive income through rent once he'd fixed them up too. It had been a project, he'd hired people to do most of the work on the majority of them of course but he'd insisted on visiting each one personally, he'd asked questions, he'd learned some of the tricks the builders used and he had taken that back to his new home and done most of the work there himself. It had taken over a year, it had wiped out his bank accounts and he'd even taken out a loan but it had paid off. A large house down a long driveway, with huge fields and around 100 acres of forest that all belonged to him. Some would call it a dream, he certainly did, and in the last couple of years since it had been finished it had become a far more relaxed life. The loan was all but paid off as the homes he'd fixed up were rented out and he didn't really have to work anymore. Sometimes he would rent out some of his land, the value of it had skyrocketed so of course he had to deal with offers from time to time but he shut them all down, none of that really caused him much stress but the poachers...they did. At least once a week he would venture into his forestland, repair any 'no entry' signs that had been damaged, destroy or decommission any traps that had been left behind as the entitled assholes snuck onto his land to hunt the plentiful game that lived there. He had the local sheriffs on speed dial after having to call them so often and it was a constant struggle, the only thing he hated about living here.
Today was another one of those days and he walked through the forest, shotgun tucked beneath his arm in case he ran into trouble. He'd been in already just a couple days ago but in the last night he'd heard engines and a gunshot, he knew somebody else had been on his land again and he was in a foul mood as he made his way through, finding obvious signs of a disturbance and following them. He was pretty deep into the forest when he found real evidence though...a fox. The poor animal had been shot in the leg, Richter had to follow a trail of blood the poachers probably hadn't been able to see in the dark, that or they hadn't cared about a fox when they were out hunting deer, and it had led to just beneath a tree where the poor creature wasn't moving. He felt a pang in his chest...one of the benefits of living here was the wildlife, it had turned out that he very much enjoyed it and he frequently went camping on his own land to enjoy being around nature, there was even a perfect little stream just not too far in that ran through most of his forest and finding an animal wounded like this for absolutely no reason made his hackles rise. He knelt down by the fox, assuming it had bled out and died but then he saw movement...just a little but it's chest was rising and falling. Putting it out of it's misery was an option of course, but Richter didn't like that, he didn't have the stomach for killing unless it was absolutely necessary and a gunshot wound to the leg, while fatal for any animal that lived in the wild when they needed to hunt for food and stay away from predators, didn't have to be nearly as fatal when he could deal with it himself. Seeing there was no point in venturing any deeper into the forest, the poachers seemingly long gone, he took off his plaid coat and carefully scooped up the fox. It was mercifully unconscious, good since it would have felt a lot of pain otherwise, and he began the long hike back to his home.
Once he was there he grabbed his medkit and got to work, placing the fox down on the table while he used tweezers to pull out the many pellets still embedded in it's leg. It took over an hour before he was satisfied he'd gotten it all, not wanting to leave anything behind. Another twenty minutes to clean the wound with anti-septic and alcohol and ten more to bandage it carefully. It would take some time to heal, some of the shot had penetrated pretty deep but that was okay, she would live, and he didn't mind taking care of her. Cleaning everything away, he took some cooked meat from the fridge and laid it out in a bowl, water in another, and laid both out on the floor. A few blankets made a make-shift dog bed that the animal could rest in and he gently placed her down in it with the bowls close enough that she didn't have to limp too far to reach them. He couldn't think of anything else he needed to do, so after that he set about making his own dinner, just a few sandwiches with the meat that was left, and he sat down in front of the television. Despite being so far away from civilization he did get cable, he had internet and everything he needed so the isolation wasn't really too bad. He poured himself a beer with his food and pulled up his favourite channel, settling down to watch a show.
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