This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Turbine-TF2 on 2026-08-05 02:16:57+00:00.

---

I shouldn’t have been out there that day. It was my weekend to go home, to bask in the air conditioning, sit on my couch, sip a beer, and watch baseball. Instead of this well deserved break, I was out in the oppressive heat guiding about two dozen middle schoolers up a three mile trail to a campsite, like a shepherd except the sheep ask stupid questions and make bad jokes.

There are worse jobs then a camp councilor I suppose, I could’ve been doing inventory in a warehouse again. My group had been angels that week, fourth graders who liked nothing more then to catch fish and frogs, eat s’mores, and build forts. This morning they packed up their bags, said goodbye to their new friends, and went to their respective buses. As I was beginning to gather my own things to head home for the first time in a month, my boss strolled up to me and pulled me aside.

“Hey Skip, hows it going? I have a proposition for you”

“Yeah?”

“We had a little incident last night with the teen campers, fight in the boys cabin, but that’s not the main issue”

“Yeah? Then what is?”

“Livy and Ethan where nowhere to be found and it took Zeke coming over from his cabin to break up the fight”

“No shit”

“They showed up an hour later smelling like skunk though, meaning I can drug test and finally fire those dumb asses, but that leaves the rest of their campers who weren’t involved with no councilors to take them on their tent campout up on the point.”

“You want me to do it”

“Time and a half skip, you’re a trooper and I know you’ll do it, John and Noel will meet you up there”

Mr. Kurtz had me there, and while I’ll complain about it, I’ll gladly take overtime pay to take some kids on their “rough wilderness campout” for 2 nights up on the point.

The day was hot, the July sun beat down on the wide brim of my hat, making it feel crisp to the touch. The air was oppressively still, not even giving the hint of a breeze for any relief. Taking a dink from my water bottle felt like taking a sip of soup, yet I still greedily drank, knowing soon we would arrive at the pump, and then soon our campsite. The pines towered above our heads, making the winding path seem as though a giant, winding maze. Between the trunks of the trees grew thick brambles and ferns, with the occasional new tree poking its head above the green tangled blanket.

Soon enough we arrived at the point. The campsite was a clearing on top of a ridge overlooking the lake far down below, the cloudless day made the water shimmer like a gemstone. All around the trees where like hairs on a head, blending together to form a unified, thick coating to nearly everything you could see. At the very edge of your vision you could see the silos of a few farms, standing like medieval watchtowers standing above all around them. The fire pit sat right on the edge of the drop, with a semicircle of benches like a classical theater sitting all around. The campers began to fan out in search of good spots to pitch tents and sling hammocks, breaking out into their respective cliques.

I sat in the shade on a rock, fanning my slick face with my hat, and waited for the inevitable calls for help to rise above the drone of the young teenagers talking and joking with their friends. Sure enough, I was only sitting for three minutes before I was going between every tent group helping them assemble their well worn tents. Improvisations had to be made between parts breaking and campers forgetting to grab what they where told too, but that might be my fault for only reminding them seven times. When the tents where all up, I sent the campers to collect wood for our fire. John and Noel would be here soon with the food for the weekend, and the sooner my belly was full of off brand chips and hot dogs, the better.

My coworkers rounded the corner soon enough, and the kids where tasked with setting up the fire before we lit it. Their arguments and discussions provided good chatter as a backdrop to our own gossip.

John fanned his face, taking off the hat emblazoned with the obscure collage mascot where he played football, his dark face speckled with sweat

“Why does management keep hiring such dumb people, Ethan and Liv where on thin ice as it is, and they thought they could get away for a smoke session with this group all alone?” He gestured his arm to the bickering kids.

Noel brushed her dark hair off from her face, pink from the heat and the sun.

“Kurtz is on the warpath now, he wants this place run like the navy but upper management keeps holding him back”

“I think I would welcome that at this point” I said “I have been here 3 summers in a row now and they always have me running around like a headless chicken fixing whatever for them, yeah it would suck not to goof off but some of these new hires just can’t get with the program”

The campers came over then to inform us that they had gotten the fire all ready to be lit, it did not catch the first time, and John and I had to struggle for another fifteen minutes to finally light the cooking fire. The kids soon crowded around the fire jockeying for position to cook their dinner. After they had some food and a desert of s’mores in them, They began settling down around the fire, with their side conversations slowly dyeing down as the sun sank lower into the July sky. Eventually one of them piped up.

“Can we here a story?”

A chorus followed in agreement, and we exchanged looks.

“I got one, its a scary one if that’s ok?” I said

Nods of agreement came from the kids

“What do you think we are, babies?”

“Ok ok, this is one I heard from my father and his father before him, its a real story of this area. You guys might not know this, but these woods are ancient, they have been here for thousands of years, but there was a time when they where young. The glaciers had just retreated at the end of the ice age, and people began living here in large numbers. While it was warmer then it was before, the winters where still bitter. One such band of people had had a lean year, and with the unforgiving cold approaching, they had to do something or they would surely die.

The chief gathered his two sons, and sent them out to try to find something, anything that would save them. They went out deep into the young woods, carrying the fate of their people on their backs. The elder brother was strong, yet this strength had made him arrogant, he would not listen to the thoughts and ideas of his younger brother. The younger brother was small, but his eyes where keen and his mind sharp, it was he who found the tracks of a heard of deer. They followed the tracks till they found the heard, thick as fleas on a dog, grazing in a clearing on the slope of a hill. The elder brother wanted to shoot as many deer as they could with their bows, but the younger brother had an idea, to get the deer to run themselves off the side of the steep hill into the rocks below.

The elder brother would not listen to his brother, and began to ready his bow, when the younger decided to act, knowing the elder would waste their tribes only chance at life. He ran like a man possessed, driving the deer off the side of the hill, just like he had said. The meat would be enough for the winter, they went back to the tribe and they rejoiced, for they had been delivered.

The chief was proud of his cleaver young son, and also distraught with the elder son’s bullheadedness. ‘A man who can not hear the ideas of others is no leader,’ and he gave the birthright to his younger son.

Rage and jealousy began curling around the young man’s heart like a snake, worming and weaving itself into every facet of his thoughts, until every waking thought was rage.

Eventually, years passed, and the chief died. As was the customs of their people, he would need to be wrapped in a new buckskin for his burial. This responsibility fell on the sons, and following the burial, the younger man would be chief. Jealousy had been building, like water behind a dam, and as the years had worn on the dam had grown frail, and as the brothers trekked into the woods, the leaks began to show.

It did not take the brothers long to track a deer, a large buck, with antlers like outstretched arms. They shot, and they shot true, and the deer fell. The young brother knelled over the deer, taking his knife out to give their pray a quick and dignified death. The back of his brothers head, the rock on the ground, the black heart, they all gave way. The stone smashed into the skull, and the kinslaying had been done.

Animals have spirits, and while not particularly good or bad, they wish to respect the order of things, honor and the natural law. Only a coward strikes a man in the back, and only a fiend spills the blood of his own family. The spirit of the deer, while fading, was still aware of what was happening around it, and the rage that filled the spirit was enough to bring it back to the mortal coil.

The blood of the deer began to flow back into its wounds, the arrows where pushed out and clattered to the ground. The beast stood on its legs and towered above the kinslayer, who stood in shock.

The beast came down on top of the brother, and they rolled, bit, scrambled, the man in a desperate attempt to escape the debt he now owed creation for his crimes. When it seemed like he was about to break free from the animal on top of him, the body of the beast became like thick mud, flowing and forming around the kinslayer until he was engulfed, and his...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1vfuctm/i_might_have_gotten_too_greedy_with_overtime_pay/