Chapter 391

The Prison Planet

After scraping the pig hide, Morales slung it over his shoulder and trudged down to the stream. “This fucking thing is filthy, not to mention smelly,” he muttered while sniffing, “but I’ve read that you can make just about anything out of pig hide that you can from any other type of animal hide, and most of the time, the pig hide is thicker. I have no idea if that’s true, but I’m going to get it clean and see if I can do something with it. Besides, I’ll eventually need door hinges as well as gloves, and one of these days, my boots are going to be worn out. Might as well get started experimenting before I have to depend on what I make. If I screw up and make something that turns out to be useless, it won’t matter much now, but in the middle of winter with worn out boots...”

Just below his pool, he dropped the filthy hide in and began scrubbing on it, the water spooling off it turning muddy. I read that pigs’ hair is generally too short to keep the sun off them properly, and their skin tends to get sore because of it, so they roll in mud to coat themselves. Sounded like bullshit to me, but this one surely had a good coating of grime built up.

As more and more of the crud came off, the underlying skin began showing through until he could tell the skin would be an off-white if he ever got it clean. “Shit,” he muttered, “she must have had ten pounds of dirt on her.”

It soon became obvious that he wasn’t going to get the hide anywhere near clean without soap, and he wasn’t going to use up his precious dish detergent to clean the thing, so he anchored it with heavy rocks in the swiftest part of the stream to let it soak and maybe wash cleaner.

Turning to Lobo who was lying on the bank sunning himself while guarding his partner, Morales pointed to their pool. “Come on, Big Boy. Hell, if anything, you smell worse than I do. It’s been several days since we’ve taken a real bath, so get down to your birthday suit and come on in,” he finished with a grin.

Morales took his clothes off, mostly wet now, anyway, and tossed them into the shallows of the pool. “While they’re soaking, I’ll wash you,” he told the wolf.

Lobo stood, but whined at his partner. “Come on,” Morales encouraged. “If I have to bathe, so do you.”

With an almost human sigh, Lobo gathered himself and leapt into the pool. After surfacing, he headed for the bank. “Lobo,” Morales called out. “You know that’s not going to work.”

Resignedly, Lobo came over to Morales and stretched out in the shallows.

As Morales tried to scrub the dirt out of the wolf’s hair, he continued as if Lobo understood every word he spoke. “Soap is my next project. Trying to bathe you without soap with all that long hair is damn near useless, but at least the bath should dilute the dirt a bit,” he finished with a laugh.

Lobo didn’t seem to be amused, but nevertheless, allowed Morales to turn him from side to side, even let the human pull the brambles out of his fur.

“Yep,” Morales muttered, “gotta make us some soap.”

Back at the cave, Morales hung his clothes on a bush, but remained nude for the time being, since he was going to be working with the meat and would get any clothes he put on bloody. After tossing the chickens some of the lettuce and cabbage, he cut out the tenderloin and put a big chunk on to cook, then went about sectioning and cutting the hog up in preparation for salting. He had been checking his other pork each time he cut more bacon off, making sure salt was well worked in around the bones or any other indentation that might be missed and thus cause spoiling.

Some of the articles said to leave the meat in salt, others said to wipe the excess off after the moisture was drawn out of the meat by the salt, roughly two weeks, and then to hang the meat up. Trying to be certain of a supply of food for the winter, he was using both techniques – maybe one would work. He loved smoked pork, and pork didn’t come any better than sugar-cured ham. He didn’t have sugar, other than a small amount of white sugar, and no brown sugar at all, honey, nor any sorghum syrup, nor even enough black pepper to give the meat extra flavor, but if it remained edible throughout the winter, he would have accomplished his goal. Maybe one day he would have a smokehouse and be able to experiment with different ways to flavor the meat.

At least he had the paper articles sent with him, as well as numerous articles and videos on the computer to guide him, albeit, some seemed to contradict others. Hell, maybe both ways will work, he thought with a mental laugh.

Taking time out from his butchering and salting, he sat with Lobo to enjoy the wonderful taste of fresh tenderloin with a big helping of dried beans on the side. I need to remember to put on another pot of dried limas to soak overnight, he told himself.

He had worried that the fish would not dry before dark, so he cut the meat into strips and hung it over a smoldering fire inside the cave.

After carefully rubbing salt into the pork shoulders, ribs, hams, etc., he coated his shelves in the meat storage area with a layer of salt before putting the meat on them to begin the curing process. When the fish was done, he kept some out to eat with his breakfast, before storing the remainder on the shelves well away from the pork.

In the cooler section of what he had begun calling the lower cave, he held the lantern high as he surveyed his stash of fish, pork and jerked meats from the animals he had killed. He hadn’t eaten much of the first hog, and although he had made inroads into the jerky from his other kills, his supplies were accumulating nicely – if they didn’t spoil. The articles I’ve read claim that the meat and vegetables will last for a long time, but what if I’ve screwed something up? “Then you will starve,” he said aloud.

Just before starting back to the entrance area where his main camp was, he again held the lamp up to see as far as he could down the slope as the cave continued on into blackness. I should explore some more, but that constant downslope gives me the creeps. Where does that cool air come from? I keep expecting a drop-off into nothingness around the next turn. How can it be cool in here and hot as hell outside? And the farther I go, the cooler it seems to get. Gotta read more about caves, but there’s so much other stuff I need to learn about, too.

Back at his camp, he absently chewed a mouthful of jerked fish while he stared at the entrance, the intense taste of the fish making him smile unconsciously. It’s going to take one hell of a lot of sawing to get enough lumber to wall off the entrance. Then I’ll have to chink the cracks with mud, or maybe a mud and straw mixture so it will stay in better, and I will still have to stretch hides over the whole thing to give me more insulation against the cold.

“Frontier people,” he lectured Lobo, “tended to build log cabins if they were around a source of timber. At least that’s what I’ve read. I guess they built houses out of adobe on the plains where there were no trees, but trees are something I have in abundance. Once there were sawmills, they used lumber, of course. Without sawmills, they built with logs, but I don’t have anyone to help me lift logs into place. Could I build a wall out of logs, anyway? The logs would have to be roughly fifteen feet long to span the whole thing from wall to wall. Oh, that rock plugs most of the entrance, but there’s no way to attach logs to the rock, so I think I need to build the wall all the way across, even behind the rock.

“Hmmm, I wonder how big the logs really need to be. I could flatten the mating surfaces, then bore and dowel the logs together, couldn’t I?” He walked over to stand where he envisioned the wall would be. “I could sink posts every few feet for additional support. If I did it right, nothing could push the wall over. I could put in a door just wide enough for the cases to pass through, and use thick leather for hinges to swing the door on, with a couple of stout bars to lock it closed at night.“

When Lobo seemed to lose interest, Morales went on mentally. I don’t know if anything I could build would stand up to a continued assault by that cave bear, but I’ll bet I could make him bleed out before he managed to tear down my wall – especially since he’ll have to dig a good bit to widen the entrance before he could even get to my wall. I would have to leave firing ports that I could shoot through, but that should be easy enough to do.

There’s a stand of tall, straight pines not more than a hundred yards away and generally uphill. Tomorrow, I will cut one down and see if I can handle a fifteen-foot section of it. Guess I’ll try one that’s six inches or so in diameter and see what happens. Hmmm, maybe I could cut poles and lay them down for the logs to roll or slide on. Then again, the wheels and axles are supposed to be dual-purposed. Maybe I could put the front end of the log on a set of wheels. That should make dragging the small logs easier. If the wheels don’t work, maybe I could fashion skis to fit under the front. That should give the log something to slide on. Need to think about my alternatives.

He would start on the new project tomorrow morning, but he wasn’t sleepy yet, so he decided to work on his soap project before going to bed.

Over the last few days, he had been putting hardwood ashes in a stainless steel boiler, covering the ashes with spring water, and boiling the mixture. After it boiled down and the ashes had settled to the bottom, he had poured the resulting weak lye solution into another boiler until he had accumulated an amount of the lye. Per the instructions, he repeated the process until the lye solution was strong enough to begin to destroy a feather dipped into it.

With pieces of wood as straight and smooth as he could get them, he doweled and glued together a small box roughly three inches wide, two inches deep and a foot long. Taking several chunks of his tallow, he slowly heated it until it became liquid. With the lye solution bubbling, he cautiously poured the liquid tallow in, stirring it as he reread the directions one last time. Adding a guessed-at amount of salt to – hopefully – allow the soap to form into firmer bars, he stirred some more, the mixture gradually changing into a thick, dark-beige mush.

After carefully pouring the soft soap (he hoped it was soap) into the mold, he sat back to stare at the result.

Lobo came over and sniffed, then sent a questioning look to the human.

“Well, it doesn’t smell too bad,” he told the big wolf. “When it cools a bit more, I’ll cut it into sections. By morning, it should be as hard as it’s going to get. But hard enough to form into bars or not, it should still be soap. Whether it’s strong enough to do any good, though – well, that’s another thing we’ll have to discover, but the lye attacked the chicken feather. From what I’ve read, if the lye is strong enough, the soap makes a great laundry detergent. With all the crap I get on my clothes and hands, a strong soap is just what I need.” If it’s too strong, it might not work well on tender areas, he thought with a grimace. Oh, well, in that case, I can always make more with weaker lye. I’ll get it right sooner or later.

It was late, but he’d had a long, productive day. Chick tucked against his side, and the wolf lying only a few feet away, Morales drifted into a deep sleep, dreaming of what he would do tomorrow.

“Bueeccckkkak!”

Morales opened his eyes, not even bothering to be pissed at the loud hen, a grin spreading across his face as he stretched.