Chapter 38

What I told Vicky was true. Emma and Linda had decided not to do anymore work on the permanent dwelling until next spring. In that time, they were going to sit and work on the design plans that our 'benefactors' had provided them. They'd decided they'd rather build with adobe brick instead of recycled tires. The project as designed by our 'benefactors' would still require millions of bricks but the construction would be more traditional, while still meeting what our 'benefactors' had originally intended for us to live in. Since the arrival of the mobile homes and everything else that our 'benefactors' had delivered to us recently, I wasn't arguing the point. Besides, it was their job, not mine.

There were still other jobs that had to be done on a daily basis about the settlement. The stock needed to be cared for and we were still maintaining a sentry even though we hadn't spotted any further sign of predators in and about the settlement. As well, there was some busy work. A team of my nieces still went to the wood lot south of the settlement and spent a few hours everyday cutting wood. It was a laborious process but people did it to keep active now that the drive to construct the permanent dwelling had faded.

That was something that tickled my mind and made me wonder. Since rescuing Pebble and Shell, the impulse to do things had faded. There was no urgent push to go work on the dwelling and there was no nagging, pestering feeling in the back of my head that demanded that I should go exploring. The patrolling that I did was out of the desire to protect my family and our stock. I did it because I knew it had to be done.

The one big job that did need getting done was the harvesting of our vegetable garden. Over the last month or so, some of it had already been picked. Most of that had supplemented our food supplies provided by our 'benefactors', but a lot of it had gone into jars of salsas, relishes, and tomato sauce. Betty took over this chore with the help of her daughters. It started well before we even ordered up the mobile homes. To store what they'd preserved so far and everything that they were planning to put down for the winter, I had ordered them up a thirty foot shipping container with built in shelves. I had our 'benefactors' drop it down behind the kitchen area.

Still there was a ton of food left in our garden and when the last of the mobile homes was assembled, Sally decided it was time to get to work picking it. Naturally, I was an integral part of this job; not as a picker but as the go to man when the actual workers needed something to get the job done. The first thing I ordered up was two more storage containers.

Sally wanted a container like I'd given Betty for her preserves. The only difference was that Sally wanted a container that was refrigerated so that she had a climatically controlled storage facility for all our root vegetables. I had our 'benefactors' put two twenty foot modules down beside the garden for her. I made certain that they came with floor to ceiling shelving and built in sliding bins for anything that didn't end up in a sack. Our carrots and turnips could go into them, layered in a bed of woodchips and sawdust to help keep moisture off of them. I ended up ordering Sally sacks, bushel baskets, woodchips and sawdust and anything else that she needed to get the vegetables picked and stored.

Of course, if it didn't go into one of the refrigerated modules it went up to the kitchen and into the care of Betty and her team of helping hands. We had rows upon rows of food that needed to be canned and Betty dealt with it as it got picked. We soon had hundreds of jars of pickled cauliflower, beets, baby onions, and cucumbers stacked neatly in the storage container. We also had preserved tomatoes, beans, peas, and baby carrots, and more jars of salsa, relishes, and tomato sauce. It required a hell of a lot of mason jars and canning supplies.

Interestingly, as the weather changed and harvesting got into full swing, I got the urge to go hunting. Like I said a while back, it was something that I'd done as a kid with my father and having very little on my plate to deal with, besides ordering up things for the people who were actually working, I started feeling nostalgic.

We didn't need food. My fear that our 'benefactors' would pull the plug on us when we least expected them to had faded when all the other urges had disappeared. Still, the thought of heading out and bagging a deer had an appeal that just wouldn't go away. Thus, when the demand for me to order stuff for Sally and Betty dwindled to a halt, I decided it was time to grab a rifle and take a trip.

I took Tilly and Lizzy with me the first time I went out. I'd never taken the two of them out together and I thought it would be fun. Lizzy and Tilly thought so too. Tilly wasn't big on hunting, but the thought of hot kinky sex in the back of a trailer won out against any objections that she might have had. Lizzy was just happy to be with her Daddy.

I planned on heading west again and camping out overnight on the shelf overlooking the valley. My reasons for going in that direction were two-fold. The first was that I knew that there was game in that direction. The herds were smaller and less varied than on the plains north of us, but the area west was closer. We wouldn't have to drive all day to get there. The second reason was that it had been over two months since I'd been there and I was interested in seeing if our 'benefactors' had made any changes. Deep down I also wanted to see if our 'benefactors' would let me go there. The last time I'd tried going west, our 'benefactors' had sent me south.

I'd wanted to take a horse but decided not to after thinking things through. The campsite on the shelf was over sixty miles away. My overnight trip would turn into several days long if I rode there, even if I pushed the mare to a gallop, which I had no intentions of doing. For now we'd just do what we always did. Lizzy, Tilly and I packed up our three Argos' and trailers and headed out at dawn one morning. By now the daytime temperatures had dropped to a point that it was comfortable, but cool. We all wore jackets on this ride.

The ride itself proved uneventful though informative. Once we hit the tree line, we noticed that our 'benefactors' had indeed been busy. What had been a thinning wall of impenetrable forest had been replaced by sparse woodlands, thickets, and underbrush. There were all kinds of trails and tracks meandering from the open grasslands into the woods, and we disturbed plenty of game along the way. Deer fled from grazing in the open as we drove by and game birds took to flight. We didn't stop and shoot anything. I wanted to camp first and then see what we could spot closer to the valley's edge.

Our big surprise came when we finally reached the shelf and our old campsite. I was in the lead, followed by Tilly, and then Lizzy. The area about the campsite had thinned considerably, but there were still plenty of trees and rocks and the trail down to the shelf still broke into the open with little warning. We knew this but as Bethany had said over a month ago, we'd become complacent in our acceptance that everything would remain the same. While our campsite and the surrounding area hadn't changed drastically, we soon learned that it wasn't ours anymore. A great big cat was sunning itself on the shelf just opposite the stones that had been our fire pit. It was a male sabre-toothed tiger.

My first instinct on seeing it was to turn my Argo to the right and try and keep away from the big cat. I was able to do it, but Tilly didn't follow me. She continued into the clearing for another ten feet before slamming on the brakes. Obviously, she hadn't seen the big cat like I had. Lizzy ended up turning left. It was a total mess and it had gotten the attention of the cat.

It rose up from where it had been lying and it stretched itself before doing anything else. It was clear that the creature didn't see us as a threat. It cleared its throat and then let out a loud rumble, letting us know that it was annoyed. That rumble sent Tilly scrambling out of her seat and onto the back deck of her Argo. It also got Lizzy and me into action.

I had the big rifle with me. As I realized what was going on, I piled out of my Argo on the passenger side of the vehicle, taking the Barrett with me. When I was out, I jacked a round into the chamber and popped the bipod free from the stock. Quickly I took up a firing position across the hood of the Argo. I sighted in on the cat and then took my shot.

The cat hadn't left the shelf. It had rumbled a couple of times and it had paced back and forth letting everyone know that it wasn't happy, but it hadn't gone after Tilly. When my round slammed into it, it went in one side of its head and out the other. The force of the impact snapped it about and flipped it on its side. That's how it hit the ground. We waited five minutes to make certain it wasn't getting up and then we went and took a look at it. By then Tilly had reclaimed her carbine and she was looking less surprised and more aware of what was going on. I was pleased to note that Lizzy was keeping an eye on our back trail, just in case something tried to sneak up on us.

We found out why the cat hadn't attacked us when we arrived. Lying out on the shelf near where it had been sunning itself was the remains of a young 'Knob Head' calf. Obviously, the big cat had gorged itself on the animal earlier that morning and it had been happily sunning itself when we'd disturbed it. Full and not feeling threatened by either our vehicles or ourselves, the cat had chosen to just warn us off with a display of its ferocious roar. It was a mistake that it wouldn't make twice.

The fact that the big cat had been in our campsite had us spooked. Before doing anything else we walked the perimeter to make certain there weren't any other surprises waiting for us to stumble across. There weren't any and in truth, I hadn't really expected it. I doubted that anything else would have dared to hang about in the vicinity of a young sabre-tooth cat, but the walkabout had a reassuring affect on Tilly. It also helped me come down from the adrenalin high that I'd gotten when I'd scrambled out of my Argo and I'd picked up the rifle with every intention of using it. I think it helped Lizzy as well.

The aftermath of the encounter demanded that we rethink our plans for camping out. Again I wasn't overly concerned with other visitors, considering what we'd seen during our sweep of the area. From all the sign we spotted, it was obvious that the big cat had been camping on the ledge for a while. There was ample bones scattered about indicating that the cat had liked eating his kills out there and in the brush and tree line on the far side of the clearing, we'd found plenty of his droppings. The chances were good that the area stunk with his scent. It meant that nothing but another big cat would even think about coming around to challenge him for ownership of this patch of woods. Still common sense told us to be careful.

The first thing we did was to park the three Argos and the two cargo trailers in a semi-circle, between the edge of the shelf and the tree line. Then we set up the tent trailer inside the semi-circle on the flat rock of the shelf. That way we would have some kind of barrier between anything that against all odds came snooping about. We also built two new fire pits. We put one in front of my Argo where a gap stood between it and the edge of the valley wall and we put the other behind Lizzy's trailer where another gap existed. These we'd light before heading off to bed and we'd try and keep going through the night. Finally we cleaned up the old fire pit that we'd built the first time we'd camped here so we'd have some place to cook our meals.

It took us time to gather wood for the three fires. Previous visits here had picked the area clean of any deadfall. What little we found went was quickly gathered up and distributed amongst the three fire pits as kindling. To keep the fires going we were forced to cut down several green saplings. There was no helping it. I did all the cutting and removing of the limbs in the woods while Lizzy and Tilly stood watch and then with the help of Tilly, I carried the trunks of the saplings back to our campsite so that I could cut them up there. We ended up taking down sixteen trees that were about four inches in diameter. I ended up spending most of the afternoon turning it into logs.

Before starting we all sat down and ate our packed lunches and had a beer. We needed it. We also called back to the settlement. It caused a bit of a stir when we informed them about our encounter with the big cat, but not as much as we'd gotten before. After explaining all the precautions that we were taking, we got a mild warning of 'be careful' and then a reminder to call before dusk. All three of us sighed when the settlement finally let us go which was funny, at least to me, considering that Tilly had always been the biggest worrier. Of course, I kept my mouth shut about that. I still planned to fuck her later that night.

While I cut wood and Tilly stood guard, Lizzy took over the skinning of the big cat. Like always, just the touching of a knife and the cat at the same time told Lizzy what she needed to do to skin it properly. It only took her ten minutes to get it done. Then she disposed of the cat's carcass and the 'Knob Head' remains over the side of the cliff. She needed my help to shift both animals. Both were pretty big, awkward, and heavy. Once that was done she quickly cleaned up all the bones that were lying about just so that the area was clean of debris. Finally, Lizzy spent the remainder of the time that I was working, building a rack to stretch the skin on so that it would dry.