favourite waste of time....

Yesterday evening, I spent a good couple of hours trying to kill a pair of woolly mammoths.  It was a spontaneous thing, really.  There I was, on my way to meet up with someone on a quest to prove my worth and my honour to the Companions, when I bumped into a couple of the hairy beasts in the beautiful countryside some way out of Whiterun.

Some time before, I'd picked up a quest from someone who had asked me to get them a mammoth tusk to help them set up business with a trading caravan.  I'd agreed to help, but as I was busy chasing after dragons and suchlike, it wasn't really top of my "to do" list.  Besides, all the mammoths I'd seen up until then were usually being herded by giants, and I've learned from bitter experience not to mess with those guys.

Anyway, I was making a beeline towards my destination when I spotted a couple of unsupervised mammoths.  Well, this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, so I thought I'd have a go at acquiring that tusk and ticking another task off the list.

Well, let me tell you, that's a whole lot easier said than done.

There weren't any giants around, but neither of the hairy beasts was going to let me take them down without a fight, and - at my lowly level - it only takes a couple of hits by those tusks and it was curtains for me.  I successfully increased my skill level in archery by standing on rocks where they couldn't reach me and taking pot-shots, but before long realised that this was going to take more arrows than I had in my possession and so I was going to have to get down-and-dirty, man to mammoth, using the double-handed sword that I had earlier liberated from a zombie whilst tomb raiding.

All to get my negotiation skills improved in Whiterun in exchange for the tusk!

Hours of fun.  Literally.

Let this be a warning to you: do not start playing Skyrim if you wish to continue with your normal life and enjoy activities like socialising, eating and sleeping..... or, indeed, if you don't want to be the guy who regales everyone in the office with tales of his mammoth killing when asked what he got up to over the weekend.

Good times.