Chapter 11

I get up and go to the outhouse for my leak. I get some hot water and make a cup of tea and sit out front while I wait for everyone to get a good start on the morning. In no time flat, the dogs and chickens have been cared for and eggs are being sacrificed to the mighty god of hunger.

I tell the women that we are starting on the new house and that they should go gathering. They each get a digging stick from the woodpile and head out.

I get my two shovels and lead Algossi to the home site, where I show him how to dig into the hill. Luckily we don't run into any big rocks and have it half dug by the time lunch is served.

Lunch is a vegetable stew made with the other half of the haunch. I decide I will teach the women how to make flat bread at supper time.

We return to our digging, cutting the hole so that the ceiling is slanted up towards the front opening. I want to put a small fire pit in here, and I don't want the smoke to stay inside the room. By early afternoon we finish digging out the big hole and wedge in a few beams at the ceiling to keep the majority of it up.

The women find some berry bushes. I decide we are going to have cobbler for desert. We take a quick dip because we have all been working hard.

After we dress, I go to the pod and cut a piece of polyvinyl tarp just a little bit larger than the top of the table. I ask the women to come inside the house and they watch curiously as I show them how to tie that piece of tarp onto the table. Then I tell them that I am going to teach them how to make bread with magic. Magic? Yeah, I'm messing with them.

I take a couple cups of whole grain flour and dump it into a large saucepan on the table. I make a hole in the middle of the flour and pour a couple tablespoons of olive oil in it, several shakes of salt, an egg, and some warm water. I start swirling this mess around in the middle with my fingers, working it larger and larger until I have a large ball of the right consistency.

I start kneading this concoction on the table top. I don't know exactly what kneading does; I do know that if you don't knead the bread it will be horrible. We don't have yeast, so this is going to be a flat bread. The soda in the self-rising flour gives a little rise, but not very much. So much for magic.

I make several small balls from the dough and the women copy my flattening and patting them into six inch pancake shapes. We start frying them in the frying pan with a little oil. The four of us share the first one for a taste, and save the rest for supper.

For the cobbler, I take the berries and mash about half of them and mix in several teaspoons of white granulated sugar. I take a cup of biscuit mix and add a little sugar to it before adding an egg and a little warm water as a substitute for milk. I mix the mashed and unmashed berries together and spoon the mixture into a small cook pot. I spoon the dough over the berries, move the pot to a medium heat area, and cover it. Meanwhile, the girls continue frying up the bread.

The tea, as usual by now, has been steeping on the back of the stove. Everyone declares the bread and cobbler meal delicious. A couple pieces of the bread are blackened, but it adds to the experience.

By now, the women have declared the plastic sheet to be a very useful tool, indeed. After cleaning it, they find a place to keep this important thing away from the dogs curious noses.

The next morning we start on the tunnel. We assemble the framework for the tunnel and have boards on top so we just push it into the hole. This will hold for now; we need to build their house first.

In the afternoon we get a good start on home construction. As I did before, we build the rough frame inside, fitting the pieces as we go. We take the roof assembly outside and attach a thick piece of polyvinyl tarp to the top with roofing nails. We slide — if you want to call it that - the roof assembly into the hole just before supper time.

We all have a nice dip after supper and go to sleep.

Small trees of the right diameter are getting hard to find close to the camp. We have to drag each tree, branch, and sapling quite a distance now. Constructing the walls is boring and tedious work, but Algossi quickly catches on to my lessons on doweling and knot-tying. It's a little tedious working around the hole to the tunnel, but that turns out OK. It takes two days to finish the back wall and the side walls.

The next morning I decide we need a break from the construction. The women go gathering and I take Algossi hunting. We go up to where I know that rabbit lives. I see several little rabbits up there. We shoot a big one and I let Algossi clean it there. No use leaving a bunch of entrails around camp.

We bring the rabbit back and give it to the women. We are too late for them to cook it for lunch, so they skin it and put it into the stew pot for supper with some local stuff from their gatherings.

Since we are all late getting back for lunch, we just snack on what they have gathered and some jerky.

I figure after we finish the house, we will need to do some serious hunting. I am tired of eating the same thing. I grab the fishing pole and Algossi and I go to see if we can drown that rubber worm. We go downstream this time. I show him how to cast and retrieve it. After a couple tries he is doing well. I show him where the fish usually hide. He catches a couple twelve-inchers. We clean them there and take them back. After cleaning, the fish are too small for a whole meal, so our supper will be the fish and the stew. At least our meals are no longer one dimensional.

In the evening, we spend about an hour splitting boards for the interior fixtures of the house. The smaller end pieces I set aside for the root cellar box which will go into a hole in the floor.

The following day we finish cutting and splitting the boards we need for the shelves and the root cellar. We attach the shelves to the inside walls from floor to ceiling. Since I can't just hang the shelves with brackets from a local hardware store, I have to make a frame to support each section as we put it up.