The knot in the tree is a panoply of goodies, clearly several week of a popular Tribute's stash or the collections of several allies: a boiling pot, a desalination kit, weapons, food, a tent and a sleeping bag all rolled up. Tom's left it for the moment, having pulled himself away and out of the tree and stretching his legs, which he's finally ripped and cracked out of the mound of boughs and leaves and mulch that has been making up his lower half for the last few weeks. Unlike his usual flesh, his current form's dark and covered in strange ripples and knots, rings and lines of discoloration as if he were carved from the inside of a trunk itself. He breathes heavily, each pant causing sap and saliva to drip in sticky, heavy globs from his chin.

Outside of the tree, he cannot, at the moment, sense that Kurt and Gary are approaching his and Arya's cache of supplies. Instead, he finds a deer that died earlier in the Arena, one which he strangled with thick chokeweed and brambles, and starts to rip into it with his clawed fingers, tearing away bloody hunks of flesh with his hands and shoving them through his mossy beard into his crag of a mouth. The blood, semi-coagulated by now, dribbles down between ravines of bark down his chest and between his fingers. With a crack, he pulls off an entire flank from the deer and starts to shove it into his gullet like a snake devouring something larger than he is. He makes little hacking sounds and the bones inside his throat splinter and are swallowed down.

He pauses when he thinks he hears something over by his cache, and so still dripping blood he rises and starts to stagger back towards the knot.