Chapter 3

The rain continued through most of the night, sometimes in torrents, before stopping just before dawn. The cave had remained dry but smelled strongly of wood smoke despite the natural draft blowing out the front. Sometimes, when the wind changed during the storm, it forced the smoke back inside, making the cave stifling.

As the dawn brightened into full day, Mack stood with a hand propped against the entrance while leaning forward to check out the muddy path and the multiple small streams of water rushing down the bluffs. Worried that the cat would find him, he had spent the night sitting with his back against the wall, lightly dozing with his spear beside him, starting at every sound. I must have slept some, but I certainly don’t feel like it.

Every thirty minutes or so, he had tended the fire in the hope that it would keep out any predator that might decide to investigate his cave and the human smell. He thought it had been fortuitous that the storm had struck when it did, reasoning that, perhaps, the cat would not hunt in such bad weather. Shuddering at the thought of fighting one of those cats with nothing but a crude spear, he was relieved that he had heard little during the night other than the thunder, rain and the crackling of the fire.

The trail downward was slick with mud and crisscrossed with small streams trickling out of the water-laden bluff face. The way was treacherous in the extreme, but he needed to get moving before he succumbed to his tired brain. After making it to the bottom without incident, he stood looking at the now rushing and somewhat muddy stream before kneeling on a rock at the water’s edge to drink. The taste isn’t as bad as I expected, but it’s a far cry from yesterday’s crystal-clear water. Oh well, a little dirt won’t kill me, he thought as he filled his belly.

His thirst quenched, he decided to search for more of the larger limbs, since the big pieces had certainly worked well last night. Unfortunately, keeping a big fire going used up a lot of firewood. Today, he would again concentrate on building his stock of larger firewood. There were plenty of smaller downed trees within easy walking distance, many of which were hardwood. Also, there was an abundance of dead limbs that had fallen from some of the more gigantic trees. He spent a couple of hours breaking off branches and dragging them to the base of the bluff. Yesterday, he had used a natural damn to cross the stream, but with the amount of rain that fell, the big stones that composed the damn were submerged, which prevented him from crossing. A few hundred feet to the east, the stream turned into the woods, which allowed him access to more area, but it was farther from the cave.

I have to drag or carry my wood farther, but the one thing I have plenty of is time, he thought sarcastically. He stood looking at a downed tree that would make excellent firewood — if he could cut it into small enough pieces. Not going to happen with a pocketknife, he thought grimly. Nevertheless, he wrestled with a large limb until he finally managed to break it off next to the trunk. It was almost more than he could drag, but he persevered. Sooner or later, I’ll make an axe and be able to cut the limb into pieces small enough to drag up the steep slope.

With a couple of hours of steady work, he had a large pile of bigger limbs and even a small tree that had been broken off when a larger tree had fallen across it.

I really need an axe.

Resignedly, he began the trek up the steep slope while dragging a six-foot-long limb that was too thick to break. I’ll put it across the entrance tonight. When it burns through in the center, I’ll move the ends into the fire. I can only catnap until I can secure the entrance, anyway.

He had meant to get a drink of water and bring up a limb or two for firewood, but once started gathering the wood, he had just continued until his stomach demanded sustenance. Back inside the cave, he put a chunk of meat on his spit to warm but didn’t bother cooking one of the vegetables yet.

As he sat leaning against the cave wall with his legs stretched out in front of him, he fought sleep while his mind wandered. In his late teens and interested in wilderness survival, he and a friend had spent two weeks of their summer vacation from school living off the land. They had allowed themselves only bows and arrows, hunting knives and fishing equipment.

Both had returned to civilization several pounds lighter with a new respect for the insect repellent that his mom had insisted they take with them, but of course, they had refused. They fared relatively well, everything considered, but the survival books hadn’t adequately conveyed just how hard it is to make a fire with flint or bow, especially after a two-day rain.

While joking that people paid high prices for sushi, the two were forced to eat their fish raw for two days, but eventually, they succeeded in making a fire from the still-damp wood.

At least I have a lighter to start my fires and a cave for shelter. I would hate to have spent last night in a tree drenched by the rain.

When he finished eating, Mack brought up more of the wood, stacking it on the side of the cave not far from the entrance. Winded from his multiple trips up the slope while laden with firewood, even sometimes dragging pieces that were too big to carry, he decided to do something a little less strenuous. After laying out his arrow blanks on the cave floor, he selected one, drew the tip of it to his right cheek, extended his left arm as if he were drawing a bow, and marked the blank at the end of his index finger. After cutting his other arrow blanks to the same length, he stripped the bark off them.

He used a stick to move a fairly large and rounded stone from the coals, then rolled the first arrow blank across the smooth surface of the rock, particularly the areas where the blank was not quite straight. This soon started to blister his skin, so he cut pieces from the animal hide and wrapped them around his hands. As soon as the green wood became hot, it was easily bent (just as he remembered from his experience making arrows as a teenager). When he held it in that position until it was cool, the arrow blank generally retained the new shape. After repeated heating and straightening of the blank, he heated it yet again, attached a rock to the end and hung the partially made arrow near the fire to dry and finish straightening.

If it isn’t straight enough, I’ll heat it again and work with it until it is. Now, I have to find flint and a source of hair, or better yet, use the tendon I removed from the backstrap of the animal yesterday.

The animal’s body was relatively long compared to its height, which was a plus as far as Mack was concerned, because the backstrap would be longer, and consequently so would the piece of tendon that was attached to that same long piece of meat. After carefully removing the sinew/tendon from the backstrap and scraping off the meat until the sinew was clear, he hung the long piece up with a small rock attached to keep it from curling. He wished he had something flat to lay the sinew on as it dried, but he didn’t. Once dry, he would separate off strands of the sinew and weave the strips into a bowstring, just as he and Mike had done when they were teenagers.

He and his buddy had watched a tutorial on flintknapping and eagerly tried their hand at making arrowheads — with mixed results. They quickly found that the instructor had been correct about flint shards being sharp. Time to get out the gloves. Mack didn’t have any now, but he planned to put a hide pad on his thigh and wrap hide around his left hand — the hand he would use to hold the flint piece against his thigh as he struck the flint with the hammer stone.

For now, he needed to bring up more wood. While he had dragged limbs to the base of the bluff earlier, he noticed two stones at the edge of the stream that he was almost certain were flint. One was the size of his fists pushed together, and the other was only a little smaller. Later, he found several, much-larger chunks of flint.

Grinning, he remembered how naive the two of them had been. Oh, they knew it was a learned process, but still, they hadn’t realized just how difficult it actually was or how sharp a shard could be. Mack remembered that one of the hammerstones the flintknapper had used was round and roughly fist-sized. He wasn’t sure what the stone was, but it seemed dense and was approximately the correct size. Either it would work, or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, there were thousands of stones along the stream to choose from.

Despite their naiveté, the teenagers had managed to make a passable arrowhead from each stone, but the instructor on the vid would probably have been able to make several from each. Eventually, they showed their finished bow and arrows, complete with flint arrowheads, to their friends. But the friends, having no idea how difficult flintknapping was, weren’t impressed by the razor-sharp arrowheads and suggested that the two just purchase some real arrows.

Mack had once watched a man repairing an old violin, and the man told him that the glue used in making old instruments was much easier to work with, and in his opinion, much better than modern glue. He had shown Mack how he took the top off the violin by heating the edge until the glue turned back to a liquid.

The person said the glue took about a minute to set back up, and that setup time could be used for the final alignment of the parts. If the alignment was still imperfect, the process could be repeated as many times as necessary. He said it was harder to find hide glue now, but you could still purchase it as flakes or pellets that could be dissolved in warm water to produce the semi-liquid glue of old. Also, there were synthetic substitutes, but the luthier said he didn’t like them as much as the original glue. I wonder if the animal hide I have can be used to make glue. I have to have glue of some kind; an arrow won’t fly true without fletching.

Once he had an axe of sorts, he could cut enough poles to make a door for his cave entrance. Until then, he had no choice but to sleep lightly and keep a fire burning.

By midday, he had all eight of his arrows drying near the fire. Tired of working with them, he went to the stream for a drink. As he stood back up, he noticed a stone that had a surface that sloped toward its center. The stone was small, only weighing five pounds or so, but it should do for one of his projects — if it didn’t crack when heated. The recess gave him pause. I wonder if I can find a larger rock with more of a recess. I seem to remember noticing something like that.

Although, he had ranged along the stream for several hundred yards in either direction, he couldn’t remember where he had seen the stone with the bigger recess. Twenty minutes later, he found it in a pile of rocks that had been washed together. It wasn’t a large cavity, just an area that sloped toward the center of the stone, but it should hold a couple of quarts of liquid — if the stone didn’t crack when heated. He would heat it very slowly and hope.

He washed both stones in the stream and took the smaller one up to the cave, then returned for the much larger stone.

I still need something that will allow me to take water to the cave. The only thing I can think of is going to be crude at best, and I’ll have to be careful not to break my knife.

A little later, he sat in his cave with a piece of driftwood he had noticed lodged between some rocks along the stream bank. It was a broken-off piece of what must once have been a thick limb or tree trunk. Hmmm. One end is charred. I wonder if this came from a tree that was struck by lightning.

It took thirty minutes just to cut the charred end off before starting the actual work. By late afternoon, he had hollowed out the center of the piece to form his “bucket.”

My bucket looks more like a two-foot-long canoe than anything else. At least no one can see it.

He had thought about trying to cut out the interior starting from an end, which would have made something that looked more like a bucket, but after thinking about it, he decided that working from the end would stress his knife blade more as he pried the wood out.

After carving and prying out all the wood he dared, he used a piece of sandstone to smooth out the interior. He repeatedly rinsed out the inside of his bucket before filling it with water. His return trip up the slope was arduous while trying to balance his bucket full of water, but he got to the cave with most of the water. It tasted a bit “woody,” but at least he could get a drink without going to the stream every time.

The two stones he had put near the fire were hot to the touch, so perhaps the preheating had worked, since neither had cracked — yet. He cut a small piece of hide into tiny pieces, put them into his smaller rock pot and covered them with water before moving the pot a little closer to the fire. He hoped that preheating the rock pot would keep it from cracking. If it breaks, I’ll do something else.

He was frustrated by how long the water took to come to a boil, then it boiled much faster than he wanted it to. Regulating the heat certainly wasn’t as easy as it had been with his Coleman stove, but he eventually got the water to simmering. He had no idea how long the hide pieces should be heated, or if there was something that should be added. Time would tell.

Still worried about not having enough wood stored in his cave, Mack spent the rest of the daylight hours bringing up wood and stacking it at the back of the cave. He had found a fallen hardwood tree about two hundred yards into the woods that ran by the base of the bluffs. He broke off all the limbs small enough for him to break, and now had most of them in the cave with several larger logs from softer wood that had blown down. Surely that’s enough wood to last me for several days. Maybe by then, I’ll have a usable axe.

The meat seemed to be thoroughly smoked and cooked. The jerky was dry and hard, but then, it was supposed to be. If he decided to explore away from the cave, he could carry jerky with him without fear of it spoiling. He had saved back several sizable chunks of smoked meat when he had thin-sliced the rest for jerky. One of these now sizzled as it warmed over the fire.