Chapter 31: Confirmation

Four hours later I was dutifully awoken by the alarm, I was still tired and more than a little confused, but I pulled myself out of bed to commence the morning chores.

I stumbled out of the tent and headed to let the chickens out, but the door was already open; the dogs were out also. I peered around me and realized it wasn’t morning. It was full daylight and while the sun in the sky said it was somewhere around noon, my watch claimed that it was really 5AM.

It all came flooding back, I sat down in my chair with a thump, cursing loudly and at length; heads popped out of doors with sleepy looks of confused alarm on their faces.

“It wasn’t a fucking dream!” I stated.

I was joined minutes later by three shivering women and I decided to bump the fire up into high gear. I mentioned to Sonya we could all probably use some soup about now, her and Matilda wandered off to the kitchen to pull something together. What we got was a dutch oven on the fire with bread cooking in it and a kettle hanging over the center of the fire with a stew starting to assemble inside. It was like watching a cooking show on the internet.

I had to do a few things right away, I had to get heat into all of the sleeping areas and needed to find out the extent of our situation. I asked Michelle to check on our livestock feed situation and to possibly long tether the seven animals out in the pasture, Sonya went to help her.

Matilda helped me dig deep into the storage room to find the rest of my winter camping supplies, I didn’t know what the weather was going to do but freezing during the night was not something I enjoyed. After extensive shuffling I found my micro wood stoves and the stove pipes, we pulled those out and I went back in to fetch one other item I had noticed that might be helpful.