Chapter 19

Sometimes things just turn out for the best. I'd gone light with the sauce and held off to moderate on the hickory smoke and while the Bar-B-Que was a little milder than I usually cooked, it was a good thing. None of them ended up with an upset stomach or a mouth hot enough to make them want to drink gallons of water and every one of them wanted to thank me on the furs. Hell, I let 'em.

We didn't have any bacon ready for the next morning of course, but we made do with thin sliced aurochs and we had plenty of eggs and biscuits. There was no big rush to get going this morning, but we had the smokehouse to build and so we didn't really tarry. Of course I did at least take time for coffee first.

I intended to build the smoke house log cabin style and so we had logs to fetch. I didn't want really big ones, but still we had it to do. My first thought was to head out into the woods near the cave and get started, but I changed my mind. I liked having the wooded section near our front door and moving felled logs wasn't a big onerous chore for us, so I decided to harvest our materials from afar.

We saddled up, leaving out with one travois to carry the chainsaw, some axes, and some hatchets. Most of the trees on what I thought of as our shelf were really too big so we went into the first valley I'd caught horses in and found plenty of suspects in the beginning edge of forest in there. After looking things over for a few minutes I yanked the chainsaw's chord and started felling.

Shayta, Layta, and Leita took over the limbing duties while Nanita hitched ready to go logs to Dolly's harness and took off back toward the cave with them. Catla rode guard duty for the trip just to make sure nothing came around and caused trouble. Keeta, who'd caught onto dealing with the horses quickly, used Bonehead to skid logs out of the woods after they were limbed and cut to length.

They were logs, but small ones. I tried to stay near eight-inch diameters or less. I also cut them fairly short. I only wanted about a twelve by twelve smokehouse, so we weren't working with any one log which weighed very much. Still, it took most of the day to get enough of them back to the cave.

At least one day of logging provided plenty of material. The girls were amazed the next day after I'd cut out some notches and began stacking our smoke house together. I used a big bison skin for the door. I left the roof high on the canyon wall side nearest our entrance and sloped down from there, hoping the canyon cliff side would keep the wind from getting under my roofing and ripping it off.

The remaining sheets of plastic from my initial pallet's walls made up the actual roofing material. It was the best thing we had available and I hadn't thought up any other use for it so far. We didn't bother to mix up mud to caulk the cracks yet, since as the wood dried any dried mud caulking would probably fall out. After a couple of months we could give caulking a try before winter set in.

Catla put a circle of stones in the center of the floor for me and I built a hickory fire to get things going after we had our hams and pork bellies hanging from the ceiling by twine. Hell, it looked finished to me and we left it to its job. We'd have to keep coming back and adding wood, but it wouldn't be a big job since we didn't really need much of a fire.

We spent two more days tidying up around the place and keeping as close an eye as we could on the guineas. By the third morning I started fretting over cutting Routata out of his horse lessons and I knew we needed to make at least a short trip over there to get him started.

My new mates needed some shooting lessons too and it finally dawned on me we had six more rifles we weren't even using at all. The big fifty calibers wouldn't be fit for traveling and were too big for the girls anyway, but I was sure Catla, Shayta, and Nanita could handle the REC7s just fine, especially since the 6.8 mm cartridges should produce a lot less recoil than the 35 Remingtons they were currently using.

We took a day for teaching the newbies how to shoot the Marlins and for letting Catla, Nanita, and Shayta become accustomed to their assault rifles. It went better than I expected and they all seemed to learn so much I took another day for more training, including teaching them and all the saddle trained horses what firing off a horse's back was like. On the last day we did a lot of riding around in our fenced in woods looking for predators and pest, but we didn't see any.

We left early after breakfast the next morning. All the horses we weren't using were just loose inside our fenced and walled off shelf area now and even our new jackass was getting used to us. I had made a mistake by only bringing him along without any of his females.

In my plans he was the only donkey I needed. His presence was so I could end up with some mules by and by. I had completely ignored any feelings he might have about the matter. Apparently the seeming loneliness wasn't a crushing disability for him, but his behavior was troublesome in other ways.

He was a male and as far as he was concerned he was supposed to be leading a band of females. Since I'd taken over the lead stallion of the first band of mares for my use, the big donkey had decided he would fight for leadership of the remaining mares, and actually he had a good chance to come out on top since there were no more mature stallions around.

The wall blocking off everything else we could keep out ended up helping him, sorta. We hadn't done anything with the horses in the next canyon except pile up refuse from the logging operation to mostly block them in. Jack, the big donkey, was much more nimble than a horse and he had no trouble getting in or out of the second canyon.

Of course the band still had their lead stallion. Jack didn't recognize his authority though. The stallion was much bigger than Jack, but he wasn't as smart. In the short time before we took off to visit Routata's camp Jack had discovered he could sneak into the canyon for a familiarization raid and then get back out through the makeshift barrier we'd put up before the stallion could do him serious damage.

Something would have to be done to settle the Jack dilemma before long, but we were headed out for more traveling and Jack's problem would be between him and the other stallion until we came back and sorted it out. Meanwhile we headed down the sloping path, crossed the shallow river, and headed off for our visit.

We reached Routata's camp by early afternoon and they all welcomed us. I saw Growlett's former hut was still being saved for our use and while I talked to Routata the girls made us at home in it.

He told me they had sent someone up to let me know they were ready to try catching horses about a week or so ago, but the man had come back saying he was sure he'd found our cave, but hadn't found us there.

I explained what had happened to us on our previous journey, but told him I was ready to get started as soon as they were. He encouraged me to ride over and check their work in the canyon where we were going to try catching horses.

It was a short ride and since my women all seemed busy I told Catla what I was going to do and then rode off. Hell, Routata and his men had done a bang up job. They had the canyon's mouth blocked off with a stout fence and they'd also built a catch pen and prepared several snubbing trees.

There were also plenty of horses penned up in the canyon. The girls and I could come over in the morning, pen the stock using our horses, and get started catching and training right away.

Since the look around didn't take long I left the canyon and instead of riding back to camp I started along the edge of the cliff base heading almost directly away from the camp. It was mostly open ground, but not exactly. There were large trees occasionally and smaller ones coming back in slowly.

There were also some very old burned off stumps and my best guess was I was riding in what was once a very mature section of forest which had been burned out a good while ago. Apparently the large trees still living hadn't quite been killed by the fire and had recovered somewhat in the twenty or so years since.