Chapter 5: Civilization

The first few weeks of life in the caves was a mess of hard labor, boring schedules, and a crash course in prehistoric education. Mostly this was a lot of carrying, lifting, gathering, and chopping, but there were some highlights.

I taught myself how to turn a log into a sort of lumber using just the ax and saws I was provided. I was trying to build a door, or at least some more substantial protection for my new home. As with most of my experiments in primitive living, my first attempt was terrible. I understood how to saw a log, but I couldn’t drag large enough ones to my cave to saw, so most of my wood supply was six to nine centimeters in diameter. Trees that thin also tapered quite a bit, so I ended up sawing some of the larger logs in half as crosspieces, and sandwiching them around some tightly packed smaller sticks. I did, however, learn how to make a sort of cord or rope from tree bark, limiting my use of the precious rope I had brought. My future plans were to set up a lumber yard in the forest and drag the more manageable boards back to the cave, but I wasn’t ready to spend that much time away from safety at the moment. The door ended up as a sort of hard-to-move platform that leaned up against the cave opening. I would be replacing most of my initial constructions once I had secured a supply of decent lumber. In the meantime I labored to drag my portal open every morning and closed every evening.

I also successfully hunted my first deer. I had spent a few days each week as a break from my lumber misadventures scouting in various directions away from the caves, getting to know my surroundings. I stumbled across lots of small animals, some deer, and even the occasional elk on these trips, and eventually decided to attempt to harvest one. I spent that evening quizzing my interface on how to clean, quarter, and preserve a deer hide. The next morning I set out to the southeast where the forest thinned and the deer gathered in the large clearings. I managed to creep up to within what I considered shooting range without any of them getting suspicious. I let the herd wander in my direction before shooting one of the bucks nearest me.

That was a phenomenal mistake. Do you have any idea how much even a young buck weighs? Dragging a several-hundred kilo corpse to the nearest large tree and trying to string it up might be the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. The next hours were bloody and surprising. Skinning an animal was much easier than expected, while cleaning and quartering took far more finesse than I had anticipated. It was an exhausted, dirty, and starving Chester that finally drug his spoils into camp that afternoon. I set a haunch roasting over the fire and the rest, wrapped in it’s hide, I placed in my chiller, hoping for the best. I managed a sort of sailors bath in the garage stream, ate some badly-cooked venison, before collapsing into bed.

The major event that marked my transition from survival to homesteading happened during one of my scouting trips into the nearby areas. I had planned on an overnight trip and was carrying my full pack as a result. The plan was to scout south along the river, past where I had been dropped off. I had limited my travels to only a few hours both so that I could make it back the same day, and because there was a tribe of locals a long day’s hike south of me. The maps showed scattered tribes one to three days distance from each other throughout areas near rivers and in populated game areas. I eventually wanted to make contact with one of these groups, but planned on a bit of spying and intelligence gathering before that happened.

I had made it just south of my arrival point along the river when I heard a mix of shouting and screams, two distinctly human noises. I dropped my pack and with my rifle at the ready, crouch-walked toward the sounds, trying to simultaneously keep out of sight of whatever was ahead and still get in a position to see what was going on. Moving from tree to tree I made it into visual range after the commotion had settled into what sounded like a single individual’s screams. It was hard to completely understand what I was seeing, but easy to understand that something was very wrong. The area was a thin spot in the canopy that was a little brighter than its surroundings. The environment had allowed a thicket of bushes to flourish, bushes that I recognized from my “Edible Plants of New Terra” guide. Near the bushes, were several overturned baskets containing the fruit from those bushes. More disturbingly was the nearby body of a native male laying on his side with a spear sticking out of his chest. He was recently dead or fast on his way there as the blood was still pumping from the large wound. I had only moments to take this all in before my attention was drawn to the two living natives. One male and one female. It was her I was hearing screaming, and for good reason. Mr. native had her pressed up against a tree and from the torn clothing and his erect state, he was either in the middle of or just about to start raping her.

As a fan of science fiction I had read quite a bit about the dangers of interfering with different cultures, the prime directive, and the dangers of imposing your own morality on a foreign situation about which you may not have a complete understanding, however there are some scenarios that bypass all logic and rational thought and directly stimulate a base area of one’s persona. I imagine what I felt at that moment was akin to the fight or flight response, something primal and unavoidable. To be brief, it took all of three seconds for me to put the crosshairs of my scope on that bastard’s chest and make him Mr. dead native.

This didn’t turn out the way I had planned, not that I had a specific plan when I pulled the trigger. While Mr. native dropped to the ground with a rather pleasant look of confusion permanently etched on his face, Mrs. native just screamed harder and started running in circles looking at the sky. I waited a minute or so to make sure Mr. native didn’t have any friends looking for revenge before creeping into the open. My first stop was the dead native, at least the first dead native, impaled on the spear. It was too late; he was missing a pulse and what looked like the better part of his blood supply.