Chapter 11

(Spring of Year Three)

We had a big party that night. For the first time ever in this world music played really quietly under those stars. When I picked out all my supplies all that time ago, I'd also added a low voltage turntable and some half-speed master recordings. I specified this old fashioned technology because even if I never got very far up the technology curve, a needle and a disk would produce sound from the records. That night I was very glad of the choices I'd made. I spent some time hanging low voltage lighting, and I set up my battery re-charger. My night scopes and lots of odds and ends got recharged and then I stored the batteries away. The family ate and drank, and we talked about Bountiful and the new babies. DeadAndBack and his two wives Luscious and LittleStinker partied with us. After most of a year in my camp, we'd gotten the captive women up to an acceptable level of hygiene, and DeadAndBack had well and truly gotten religion about clean women and tooth brushing.

After everyone had gone to bed, Julie and I stayed up to wait and see if our captors would make a visit on the night we turned on the electricity. We sat and talked the night away, Julie mostly talking about her abusive past with her dad, her time in Hawaii, and her lost dreams of being a doctor. We snuggled under the night sky and were happy.

"Josh?"

"Uh huh?"

"What about educating the babies?"

"I have a plan for that."

"You do? What is it?"

"You're going to do it." I laughed.

She poked me in the side and grinned. "No, really?"

"Yes, really ... You're plenty smart enough, and back there ... in the supply dump, I have a very special titanium crate just for you."

"Oh really, Mr. GreatOne? And just what's in it?"

"It's sealed tighter than a drum, and in it is ... ready?"

"Um."

"Hooked on phonics, several sets ... stored in a nitrogen atmosphere. Civics books are in there, basic readers, math books, a full grade twelve education. And best of all..."

"Best of all, oh GreatOne?" Her hand snuck into my pants.

"Urgh. Best OF ALL... " My voice cracked as she found what she went looking for. "Best of all is a set of thirty 'One Laptop Per Child' kids computers."

"What are those, Josh?" She stopped for a moment and asked, excited.

"A guy from MIT, Nicholas Negroponte, he had this new laptop made for kids. Runs on solar power, networks together, ruggedized, rubber covered keys, and full of educational software for kids. He sells them for $200 each, and when an American buys two, a kid in the third world gets one of them for free[1]."

She kissed me softly, but really well and for a long time. We made love out by the fire that night. Without intending to, we both fell asleep. When I sat up afterwards, our gifts from our 'benefactors' had silently arrived.

The cage was the same size as before, but this time it had a couple of new titanium crates in it, and a big stack of plastic pet carriers. I yelled in delight, and opened the cage door. Inside the pet carriers were eight Border Collie pups, eight beautiful Suffolk lambs, and a brace of Delaware hens and roosters. To say I was delighted would be an understatement.

In the new titanium shipping containers were big stacks of books, each sealed in a thick atmosphere and weather proof plastic case. The books were medical manuals, engineering manuals, technical manuals, you name it. There were dozens of them, and all the pages were laminated against the elements. On top of the pile was a set of maps. The maps were amazingly detailed scale maps of the world we were living in, the geology around us, the mineral deposits around us, the oil and gas deposits, you name it. The top of the stack of maps was a large scale map of the nearest couple of thousand miles or so. And on the page underneath it was a much less defined overlay of 'areas'. As I puzzled out the overlay, it finally dawned on me that I was looking at settlement areas. Maps of where people were living.

The scale of the map was large, so the actual location would be hard to pin down, but that map and a good compass would get me within dead reckoning range of where people were living. The overlays used an unknown symbology, and there was no legend to decode it for me. Still, it was a delight.

As I looked at the maps, it slowly began to dawn on me that we were living in an alpine climate. Less than a thousand miles away, according to the map, there was something that was a little like Italy, a peninsula out into the ocean, with a good river not just a stream, and well down into a more temperate zone. If I read the climate markings, a move of about eight hundred miles would address most of my survival concerns. Just a few hundred miles away, if I read the maps right, the soil was dramatically richer, the weather was far more temperate, and ... it looked like ... it was geologically far richer. It was almost like someone'd drawn a bulls-eye on that area. While I found that very interesting, and would think on it a lot in the coming days, it was of no use to me now.

I suddenly had a problem with space. I needed space for the livestock, space for a kennel, and certainly, I'd need space for the old family group. I sat down while Julie went through the packages, exclaiming over them, and I did some very rough calculations. In order to pasture the sheep, I was going to very quickly need literally dozens of acres under pasture. There were going to be very few options. One would be to train the cavemen as shepherds, but that damned near seemed like a lost cause to start with, and I was certain I'd lose a few Cro-Magnons to smilodon or cave bear or cave lion, if nothing else. Another approach would be to try to find an enclosed or 'box' canyon with very high ridgelines, move the family and our entire operation, fortify the canyon, and start all over again. That seemed like hell to me. A third option would be to try open pasturing, and working diligently to cull the predators. The last option seemed to me to be building more goddamned wall.

Staring at the map brought me no good answers, so Julie and I gave all the critters some food and water, left them in their cages for the rest of the night, and we went back to bed. I'd decided to sleep on the problem. The next morning I was no more brilliant than when I'd gone to sleep. So, I called over Julie, the wives and the rest of the girls, and DeadAndBack.

I introduced them to the animals, and let them know that these animals were not for food. I pointed out that in fact, the dogs would be our companions against wolves and lions and bears. They all seemed skeptical, but trusted me on it. I explained about how the lambs would give us wool and meat, and how the chickens would provide eggs. They liked that.

Then I started in on the problems. As long as we kept the chickens out of the vegetable patch, they could free range to start, and later I could fence an area off and make a coop. That would all work as long as the dogs stayed away from the chickens. Next, the lambs could pasture down by the river with the chickens, but not for too long. We'd need a lot more land for them, and we'd need it soon. They were amazing prey for the predators, so if we cut them loose, we'd lose them all.

As I'd looked the map over, I had slowly formed the opinion that it might be possible to change the way we did the wall building. In the current compound, we'd logged off fourteen to sixteen inch logs, usually about thirty feet long, and driven them six feet to ten feet into the soil with the giant granite pile driver. I'd had those logs driven up as close to each other as possible.

Something like that could certainly work, but staking out just a hundred acres would require a 2010 foot by 2010 foot square, or roughly eight thousand linear feet of log wall. That's six thousand logs to be cut, processed, dragged, and driven. Not impossible, but certainly insane. Even at the crazy rate of eight logs a day, it would take nearly three years of work to fence that in.

The real core of the problem were the apex predators. Out there were cave lions, smilodons, bears, wolves, you name it. It would only be possible for my poor little lambs to survive and turn into a herd, if I could dramatically cull the predator population and train the dogs to herd and protect. The border collies were of course perfect for this, but I knew we'd all need to learn how to work with them. At least Julie and I could read and provide guidance.

No, the space problem was close to insoluble. The gang didn't have many suggestions for me that went much beyond 'calling down the mighty thunder' or 'invoking the god of big walls'. Very helpful stuff. Here's what I had to face up to. In the immediate future, we had some babies to raise, additional cave morons to get cleaned up and semi-civilized, some more wall to build, a chicken coop to create, dogs to train, and food to grow. I was aware that the lambs might well have to become food. It would be a shame.

One relatively short term solution would be to wall off another couple of acres and move the families in. They could live with the lambs, and I could show them how to do some haying to get the lambs fed through the summer and winter. After that though, in the next couple of years, it would really come down pretty quickly to moving far south and setting up shop there all over again, or dealing with the long term issues that this place we were in now presented. Either solution had challenges.

I hated the idea of moving, but the area down south would be far more survivable in the long run, and resources would be more plentiful. Staying here would be easy, but survival was harder, and security would always be harder here.

I worked the problem over all day that day, like a dog worries a bone. While I gnawed on it, the girls and I set up some basic fencing to keep the dogs out of the chickens, and I slapped together some off the ground crating not far from the granary for the chicken coop. Temporary green plastic fencing kept them out of the garden. That took care of the chickens for that moment. Next, we set the puppies and lambs up in the same area together, on the floor of the old drying shed. I wanted those dogs and lambs to all grow up together. Lacking milk for the pups and lambs, we made up a cereal gruel. I taught the camp girls how to feed the lambs, and the pups were happy lapping it up from a pan. That took care of all our livestock issues for a few weeks, but it would be a close thing.

Toward sunset that evening, Julie walked over with SpringFlower sleeping in her sling. Julie had an odd expression on her face. "Josh." She smiled at me. "I think I have your answer..."

Her pause was drawn out for a long moment as I drew her into a hug and then a kiss. Seeing the kiss, Ashes and Shining both came over with the babies, and we all kissed and cooed over the boys as well as SpringFlower.

"I'd be damned glad to know it, Julie."

"Maybe not, Josh. I know you try to be a good guy, but this would not be so nice ... it'd work though."

"How not nice? Really not nice, or not so bad not nice?"

"Well my man." She looked down. "Someplace in between I guess. But it would work, and solve all our problems."

I laughed. "You're so serious ... how many will I have to kill to get you to smile?"

She looked me straight in the eyes. "I don't know. Maybe a hundred or two of the hard heads."

"What?"

"Josh ... religion. You need to become a god. For real. No kidding."

"Um?" I asked, quite intelligently.

She stepped back a step to give us a little space. "I'm serious, Josh. Religion. People will do all kinds of crazy shit and change in all kinds of ways for their religion."

Ashes nodded. "You good God for people."

Julie patted the log seat next to us. "Sit down, let me explain."

I shook my head, but sat anyway.

"Joshie ... I know you want to be a good guy. I know you just want to raise a family and help us all to make it here. But face it, please. We're alone here. If anything happens to you."

I must have pulled a face, because she slapped me on the chest and got very serious.

"Josh! If ANYTHING happens to you, anything ... we all end up back in a cave. These people are okay, but they're idiots. They didn't even know enough to keep their own shit out of their food ... if you die, if anything happens, your kids, our family..."

"PrettyButBitchy right, GreatOne." That was Shining chiming in.

I nodded, upset. I could feel my guts knotting up. I had thought about it some, but not enough.

"Josh. You have to face it. You need to organize a lot of people, educate them, train them, get them food and water, medical care. You can't do that. But the GreatOne can. Look at the way DeadAndBack is with you. He worships you. I mean he really worships you."

"Now, you're just teasing, Julie. No he doesn't."

"Yes Josh, he does. So do they, the women ... and Ashes and Shining. I'll show you." She stood and then pulled me to my feet, and walked me toward the bunkhouse. Inside the door, she showed me a painted auroch skin on one wall. At the foot of the skin was a pile of skulls and teeth and claws. All of them were daubed with red pigment. I'd seen them before, but never paid much attention. I'd just thought they were more caveman nonsense.

"Look at the painted skin, Josh." She pointed at it. "Tell him, ColorOfAshes."

Julie's caveman language skills were improving rapidly.

Ashes handed baby River to Shining, who promptly put him on her other nipple. Then Ashes pointed to a corner of the skin, where lines had been drawn with charcoal and colored with red daub. As she talked, her fingers traced over figures and expressions made on the skin. As she talked, her speaking became more rhythmic and chant like.

As Ashes had chanted, the spiral of figures worked around a full circle in on herself, and moved toward the center. Then her voice grew more passionate.

She was pointing now to a figure on the painting, red ochre at its hands and head.

Then she pointed to another figure.

Then GreatSpirit sends down to his Son a bride from the sky people.

GreatOne tames the sky bride.

Julie chuckled under her breath. "Tamed my ass, more like it."

As she finished her chanting, I noticed finally that the crowd had grown to include the entire camp. When she said the final phrase in her chant, everyone else joined in, including Julie. "We are blessed."

I asked Ashes. "What did you mean, 'goes from grey to black, walks yesterday backward'?"

Ashes reached out a hand and stroked my beard and sideburns.

"When you come to us, GreatOne ... you have white hair of death in your head. Now you walk with black hair. You walk backwards in time."

"I'll be fucked sideways." They all looked at me.

Julie spoke up again then. "See, Josh. You're a God to them, for real. This is their real deal. You are their salvation from the caves. You want to build anything, you want to move anywhere, you want anything ... anything, Josh..."

She held my cheek in her hand and looked at me.

"You want anything Josh, anything ... you have to become ... I dunno ... like those guys on the History Channel, Pharaoh or Solomon, you know?"

I snorted.

"Lead your people to the promised lands, build a mighty nation, gather together the tribes. They won't listen to each other, but they will listen to you."

It was preposterous. It was outrageous. I was freaked out at even the thought of becoming some god-king. But, she was right. It would work. I stormed out of the bunkhouse, not speaking to anyone. I went into the old compound and closed the gate behind me, and climbed up on the box, resting in place where the tent had originally been.