My mother told me to be good

John Connor was raised to be many things; he was never raised to be lazy.

After some research from a few field guides the bar provided, he spent two days acquiring a duffelbag full of warm weather clothes, another with a two week supply of canned food, a collapsible shovel, lantern, a tarp, and a tent in a bag.

He timed ordering them from Bar for when the bar was the least full, and played it casual. He ordered by note, and only a few people asked him questions—when they found he was Bound and was "just getting some stuff," though, they left it well enough alone (in an unsettlingly friendly way, in his opinion).

Since then he’s spent the last two weeks in shallow parts of the forest. After his first encounter with the wild life on his second day in the bar, he decided to dig as much of a hole as he could before nightfall. It was difficult, the ground frozen and harder than he’d ever come across before. He stopped at maybe four in the afternoon, the light quickly falling, with a hole about three feet deep and six across. He put the food into it and covered the hole with the tarp. He set up his tent where he thought he’d get the least wind, and prepared for the night.

John’d never been snow camping before. When he woke up his little tent was half-collapsed from the snowfall, and the tarp had fallen into the hole in the ground. He spent the first hour fixing the damage that’d been done over the night and eating breakfast, before making his way back out of the woods by a different route and making his way to a storage shed he’d seen, earlier, hoping to find some free wood.

It was there, and it didn’t look like anyone was using it—not great quality, probably the leftover unusable bits from the weird look boat sitting underneath the shelter. He stacked the boards and carried them back to the hole two at a time—it took three trips. After some thought John tacked a note (that said Sorry) onto one of the wooden struts.
After digging the hole another two feet deeper, John laid the tarp over it, and the slats over that, hoping it would hold.

Over time the cache started to take shape, John going back to the bar by different routes to get duffel bags of cinderblocks and wood, expanding the dug-out on the bottom. Once he felt it was structurally sound and a good enough size for the moment, he roofed it with the tarp and wooden planks, covering the leftover foot at the top with dirt again.

Now that he’s finished, all that’s visible of the cache is a rope tucked under a boulder, and the unsettled dirt that will soon smooth out. The tracks in the snow have been obscured as much as possible, and softened by new snowfall.

Knowing he can’t work too much more on it, now, and ready for a hot bath and sleeping a week in a real bed, John heads back to the bar for the last time after re-stocking it with canned goods. It’s been a long time since he’s last made a cache.