Chapter 396

The Prison Planet

... As if he understood, Lobo came over to sniff, then tentatively dug at the sand where the entrance would be.

“Yeah, I think you’re right. Let’s give it a whirl, anyway. If the inside doesn’t seem dry enough, I’ll pack the sand back in and wait a couple more days.”

Morales dropped to his knees a few moments later and dug the sand out with his hands. “Well, Lobo, I already see one thing I did wrong. I should have made some provision for raising the oven well off the ground. Now, I’m going to have to be on my knees every time I put something in or take it out. Oh, well; live and learn, but if I ever build another one, I’m going to have it off the floor.”

Carefully, he continued digging the sand out of the center of the oven. When he had most of it removed, he rubbed his hand around the inside of the dome, wiping it as clean as he could. After bringing his lantern over so he could see better, he inspected the inside in detail.

“A few hairline cracks, Boy. Nothing of any consequence, but I’m going to fill them anyway.”

While Morales was mixing sand, clay and water into the correct consistency, Lobo hunkered down and stuck his head into the oven for a moment before backing out and grinning at the human.

With the mixture ready, Morales worked it into the fine cracks and smoothed them up. After a final inspection, he sat back. “I don’t think I really had to do that, but I don’t want to risk those small cracks getting bigger and screwing up all my work.”

Though worried that he might not have waited long enough, he, nevertheless, decided to go ahead and chance a drying fire inside the oven. “If I accelerate the drying too much, there’s a possibility that I’ll screw things up and have some major cracks, but after a couple of days, the people on the video used a small fire inside their oven to complete the drying. If it worked for them, it should work for me, but I’m still going to be cautious about it.”

Instead of building a fire inside the oven, he gathered a shovelful of hot coals from his cook fire and carefully placed them in the floor of his new oven, scattering them around so the heat would be evenly distributed, but not very intense to begin with. After putting the flat rock back across the oven’s entrance, he stood looking at his work. “I’ll let it stay like that for an hour or so, then add more hot coals. Maybe, if I’m patient, the mud will continue to dry slowly enough that there won’t be any major cracks. More hassle, but dammit, I want an oven so I can bake some bread.”

“No matter what I do, it seems I have to do something else first. Fuck,” he muttered as he stood, “it’s like picking myself up by my bootstraps, as the saying goes.” Then, with a grin he added, “I can all but smell the bread Mom used to bake, but almost every bread recipe I look at on the computer calls for yeast. Oh, there are a number of ways to make yeast, but they usually require something I don’t have, or else they have a bunch of weird steps, or both. I wasn’t really that interested when I read through the articles before, but now that I will soon have an oven, I need to study. Surely there’s a way to make yeast that’s fairly simple and doesn’t take forever.”

Back at the computer, he reread several articles on how to make sourdough starter to use in place of yeast. One of the methods caught his eye because it was so simple, but regrettably, it called for pineapple juice, which, of course, he didn’t have. Another approach used potatoes and sugar. He had plenty of potatoes and he did have a bag of sugar, but he wasn’t going to waste it making sourdough starter. If his oven worked, he might be able to bake a cake one day, so he would hoard the sugar for very special occasions.

Finally, he found something that might work, but ... it started out with Whole Wheat flour, then when more flour was added to the mixture, they used All Purpose. “Now why in the fuck did they do that?” he muttered. “What’s the difference in Whole Wheat and All Purpose? Well, I don’t have All Purpose, nor any other kind of flour at the moment. The first thing I have to do is figure out how to make flour out of the wheat in that field.”

Morales went back to the research on harvesting wheat.

After reading about wheat for the next hour and comparing what he had learned there to the few handfuls of wheat he had brought back with him, he decided that it was ready to harvest. “Oh, great,” he told Lobo. “With all I have to do, now I have to stop and harvest the wheat before it gets blown down and ruined by the rain. But, by damn, I can live off nothing but bread for weeks or months if I have to, and the wheat should stay good throughout the winter if I store it here in our cave. If I can come up with some sourdough starter in place of yeast, I can have real bread any time I want – provided my oven doesn’t fall apart.”

Shutting down his computer, he walked over to where he had stored the various items that came with his and Robertson’s cases. Taking one of the scythe blades, he sat, thinking. He had already seen pictures of scythes on the computer, and there was even a video of someone using one, but the scythe handle wasn’t going to be as simple as the other handles he had made.

There were several designs, but basically they all had a slight bow to a long handle with two smaller handles attached to the main stem and spaced a couple of feet apart. The blade of the scythe was swung in an arc parallel to the ground to cut the wheat stalks, hence the long, bowed handle.

He noted that the scythe blade had a clamp that would allow easy attachment to the bottom end of the long handle, but putting the two handholds onto the main part of the handle would require a little work. Nothing he couldn’t do, but it would take some time.

I’ll have to do a bit of searching, but I should be able to find a hardwood limb that has a bow that would be acceptable for my needs. Well, I can’t do it tonight, so I suppose I’ll work on my arrows for a while. I’ll put out the rest of the blueberries in the morning if I can find enough flat rocks to dry them on. From what I have read, it will take several days for them to dry in the sun, but all the drying boards I have in here are full, so...

Then it hit him. “Shit,” he snarled out, startling Lobo. “What the fuck is the matter with me? I have the equivalent of a freezer now. Hell, I used to buy frozen blueberries. When they’re thawed, they were just as good as fresh. I don’t have to worry about drying all of these,” he said, motioning to the berries still in his rolling case. “I can fucking freeze them. Hot damn. We’re gonna have fresh blueberries all winter, Boy,” he finished with a laugh.

Lobo showed his teeth and chuffed.

“But ... I don’t want to tie up my buckets, so I need to make something to keep the berries in. I guess I’ll saw out enough boards to make a box big enough to store them in. Yeah, that will be the first thing on my agenda tomorrow morning.”

He had several arrow shafts ready to be fletched and have the arrowheads attached. By what he guessed to be midnight, he had two arrows completed and ready to go in his quiver. He proudly held them up to the light, then one at a time, sighted down them. I can’t see the slightest crook in either one, the fletching seems perfect, and I’m damn proud of both of the arrowheads. He tentatively touched the almost razor sharp edges of the arrowheads. “That’ll get the job done,” he told Lobo, proudly. “Oh, I know the edges will chip and the tip will probably break as soon as it hits a substantial bone, but I just about have the hang of chipping flint. I should have plenty of time this winter to chip more arrowheads, and I suspect I’ll learn more and get faster with time.”

He positioned the two arrows in his quiver, making sure they were next to the one he had already tested. (He had replaced the arrowhead on his first homemade arrow because the tip had been chipped when he fired it into the bank while testing the arrow.)

Frustrated at seeming always to have something else to do before he could do anything, he sat worrying. “I need to get my wall built. I need to get the blueberries in before they rot or something happens to them. I need to get the wheat harvested before the rain and wind destroys most of it, and I need to get the corn in. Of course, I can also add that I need to bring in all the meat I can before the animals migrate – if they migrate. Shit! Every one of those things is a priority.”

He peed in his piss/brain bucket, undressed and joined the chick who groggily snuggled to Morales’ side, cheeped quietly a couple of times and was back asleep in seconds, but even though it was very late, sleep was slow in coming for the worried and frustrated human.

Robinson, he railed mentally, if you had been a halfway decent partner, we could have had a good life here, and working together, everything would have been easier. But, oh, no, you had to be an arrogant prick who wouldn’t face reality. But, fuck you; I’m glad I killed your ass before your stupidity got me killed. Lobo doesn’t have hands, but he’s still ten times the partner you would ever have been – on your best day. I just fucking wish I had some help with all the work.

He was up before daylight and made sure to wake the hen, who squawked and glared at him when he nudged her with a boot. “Up and at ‘em, Gertrude,” he said with a laugh. The baby chick opened an eye for a moment, cheeped a couple of times and went back to sleep.

By the time the sun was up, the chickens had been fed and Morales and Lobo had eaten. A little later, Morales was industriously sawing at another log for his wall. When he had it down and ready to go to the cave, he went looking for a suitable handle for the scythe. He remembered seeing a small hardwood tree a couple of inches in diameter that had been left with a long crook in its trunk, the damage apparently the result of a storm.

It took only a few minutes to down the small tree and cut out the section he wanted, plus two smaller in diameter pieces as well. With everything tied to his log and the wheels to help, he had the log inside the cave, along with the makings of a scythe handle, as well. But the main stem of the handle was going to need a little work before he could attach the blade to it.

After stripping the bark and smoothing several rough places, he again checked the picture on the computer before marking the areas where the side handles would attach onto the main stem. With the appropriate size bit, he drilled two holes in the main stem, spaced at what he hoped would be the proper distance and angles.

After stripping the two small pieces of hardwood, he smoothed and cut them to equal lengths of approximately ten inches each. The smaller handles were a little too big around for the holes he had drilled in the main handle, but he worked a couple inches of each down until they were the proper size. With a liberal amount of hide glue on the mating surfaces, he drove the short handles into the stem of the main, long handle, then attached the blade to the end of that. The resulting scythe handle certainly wasn’t an exact duplicate of the one pictured in the article, but as Morales stood swinging the heavy blade, it felt right in his hands, and he knew it would work.

He still had the blueberries to deal with, which meant sawing out enough lumber and building a box. That took another couple of hours of his day. He tied the box on top of the rolling case, which still had half the blueberries in it, and started for his freezer.