Filing off the serial numbers

1) You discover a human skeleton, one hand wrapped around a shining spear with a brilliant silver head -- plainly magical -- the other grasping a crumbled ball of deerhide. What's left of his clothing is badly raked and bloodstained, and one leg stretches out at a very unnatural angle. A moldy backpack is nearby, but not much in it is intact, although you find a hunting knife and matching hatchet that’s only slightly rusted and a handful of slightly tarnished silver pennies. Not too far away is the skeleton of a mountain lion. Unfolding the ball of deerhide, there are crude letters written in charcoal on it. "Hey stranger," it reads, "Being of sound mind and bust legs, I will all to whatever finds me.  Gods hope it ain’t no orc.  I gots the creetur what got me.  Hope I died game.  Buy the boyz down at the Post a drink on me. Anyway I am dead.  Yours, Hatchet Nath."

2) A vast crashing upslope ... and the startling sight is of a person screeching and waving a big sword, chasing a large bear, both whom dash past you without a second glance. Even more startling is about a half minute later, when you see the bear chasing the person back uphill!

3) There's a human head, at ground level, in the middle of the trail. Only it still seems attached to a living body, but ALL you can see is the head ... buried up to the chin.  The person sings out to you, cheerfully, as if lacking a care in the world.

4) The hamlet -- there were only a few homes -- was attacked and burned out yesterday, it seems. Pretty much everything portable was looted. There are no survivors, save for a child who's something like six or seven, numbed and mute with the things the child saw.

5) You encounter a small tribe of backcountry hunters, who despite a significant language barrier, have indicated that the hunting is good, that they're settling down for the evening, and you're invited to dinner. If you accept, there's no chicanery or ill-intent, and there's a pleasant feast and some singing (it turns out that you know a couple tunes in common, even if you have different words for the lyrics). When you wake up in the morning, you're informed that your own contributions to the feast require recompense.  You are now married to this cute nubile teenager (of your preferred sex, at least) over here, huzzah! Glowers and snarls are the result of any reaction on your part short of unqualified delight ... ("You turn down this gift, they'll slit you, me, Caleb and the horses from crotch to eyeball with a dull deer antler!")

6) Your path takes you through a sacred burial ground of the local indigs, where their deceased are exposed on platforms for so-called "sky burial" with their weapons and treasured possessions.  Frontier rumor informs you that your presence here is sacrilegious, but tall defiles make going around difficult, and near-impossible if you've got mounts.

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Now.  While this could be the start of a list of interesting wilderness encounters (and it comes from a forum thread of the same), the punchline is that I took the inspiration for all of them from a TV movie I saw in my youth: Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford as a mountain man in the Rockies in the mid-19th century.  Something of a labor of love on the part of Redford and director Sydney Pollock, it’s very evocative, well-done, and faithful to the hardships great and small of wilderness life.

It also had a bunch of pretty nifty “encounters,” which happened in the order I’ve put them, and drove a fair bit of the plot.  #6 set up this next encounter:

7) Your path takes you back through that sacred burial ground, a few days later ... only there’s a new addition.  A necklace and other trinkets, all of which you know full well: you gave them to the teenage spouse you acquired in Encounter #5.

This turns out about as well as you’re imagining it did.  Cue the plot of the whole rest of the movie.

Unless your players saw the movie (and the oldest of my players was 7 years old when this movie aired in 1972) you could just about run those encounters straight and they'd never know the difference.  The way #6 actually spun out in the movie is that Jeremiah’s asked to lead a cavalry detachment to Point B, the way goes through the burial ground, Jeremiah knows that it’s a bad idea, knows that the Crow will take deep offense, but the cavalry officer is insistent and wants to waste no more time breaking trail around the site.

Easy enough to file off the serial numbers, though, which the encounter as depicted above does.  And for what movie or book couldn’t you do that?