Chapter 401

The Prison Planet

Morales really wanted to try threshing some of the wheat, but it was late, and after his frantic race to get another log on the new wall, he was really bushed. Junior had eventually given up on him and had snuggled with the other baby chickens under the mother hen. Stripping off, Morales washed the worst of the grime off before falling into bed. Before he managed to turn the light out, the chick came running. Chuckling, he pulled the tiny chicken against him and flipped the switch that plunged the cave into darkness.

Much later, he awoke to the wolf’s quiet rumbling growl. Easing out of bed, Morales pulled on his pants and sat waiting, crossbow in hand. There was faint moonlight partially illuminating the passageway, but he saw no movement there – heard nothing. After a time, Lobo quit growling.

His first thought was that it had been a false alarm, but he knew Lobo better than that. If the wolf said there was something out there, then there was. He supposed that whatever it was had either smelled or sensed the wolf and decided to leave, which suited Morales just fine. He hoped that it had left the whole area, too. He had already survived enough narrow escapes to last him for the rest of his life.

“Vwaack!”

As usual, the overly-loud racket seemed to make the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “Dinner. Chicken dinner,” Morales threatened as he glared in the direction of the barely-seen hen in the first rays of daylight. “I always wake at dawn, but you push it. And besides that, don’t you have a quieter squawk?” he grumbled as he turned the light on and found his pants.

With one leg in, he hopped around trying to get the other foot to go down the wadded up other leg of his pants. He finally accomplished it without falling on his butt, still muttering. “Dammit, all I used to have to do was turn on a coffee maker that I had primed the night before. Now, I have to build a fire. Well, at least I have the coffee and water in the percolator, but I still have to build the damn fire.”

His luck was better than he expected, and he was able to retrieve some hot coals from the small fire he tried to maintain under the blueberries he was drying. By the time he had the coffee pot perking, the chickens fed and the drying fire going again under the berries, he was awake and in a better mood – once he remembered that he had real eggs for breakfast.

Looking at the two really large eggs, he hoped that they would taste good. He had tried duck eggs once, and only once. They looked like overly-large chicken eggs, and to him, the taste was roughly the same, only intensified. He supposed he could have gotten used to them over time – maybe. These eggs were even bigger than the biggest duck eggs he had ever seen, but he hoped for a less intense taste.

The wolf, interested in what Morales was doing, walked over to watch as the man cracked the eggs into a hot skillet. “Shit, they’re big. I’ll bet ol’ Gertrude sighs with relief when she drops one of these.” Glancing back at the chicken that would give an Earth chicken a complex, he grinned. “Girl, if these things are edible, all your squawking will be forgiven. Well, mostly,” he amended. “You still need a muffler for your mouth. That has to be the loudest squawk on the planet.”

With a plate piled high with bacon, fried potatoes and a sunny side up egg, he sat to try out Gertrude’s offering. The wolf downed his egg in two gulps, then lapped up the rest of the yoke, its bright yellow coloring his lips. Shortly, he was attacking his potatoes.

Well, it seems to have passed the wolf test, but then again, I can’t remember him turning anything down. Then, after a bit, Damn, I wish I had some toast to dip in the egg yolk, he thought, as he took a forkful of egg into his mouth. After waiting a second, a grin spread across his face as he swallowed. The taste is a little more intense, but after having only freeze-dried eggs for so long, it might be that I’m just not used to real eggs any longer.

After a couple of bites of the great bacon, he took another bite of egg. Hot damn; this is good. I need some more chickens, though. Hmmm. I wonder if I could make some kind of trap that would work on them. If they’re all as smart as Gertrude, I might have a problem trapping them.

Looking over at the chicken as she scratched for the last morsel of her morning corn, he knew he would be providing food and a warm place this winter for as many chickens as he could trap. I need to get Gertrude out in the chicken pen and get her used to it. That way, she can add to her diet with bugs, worms, grubs and other things she can catch and eat, as well as the corn I can provide for her. The article said that range fed chickens don’t need nearly as much protein provided for them as chickens kept up in a house. After I bring in more of the hens, I guess I could always expand the brush fence to give more room for them. More and more things to do, but dammit, fresh eggs are worth it.

“You like the eggs?” he asked the wolf.

Lobo chuffed and licked his lips while Morales chuckled. “Yeah, me too. Guess we need to figure out how to get a few more hens, huh, Boy. Well, that means that we need to bring in a lot more of the dried corn. Hey, come to think of it, we can grind up some corn for corn meal and have cornbread. Mom could make some that would melt in your mouth, but I’ve never eaten any in a restaurant that was worth a shit. It was always dry and tasted wrong as well. I’m pretty sure I remember how she made it. I certainly watched her do it enough.

“And thinking about her cooking reminds me, yet again, of her biscuits. I doubt that I’ll ever have the perfect ingredients to make any as good as hers, but I’m gonna have some flour soon – I hope. Of course, one thing going for me is that I haven’t tasted her biscuits in so long that I won’t have their taste firmly in mind when I taste mine. Then again, that sounds like I’ve already given up. Fuck it. I’m going to have biscuits one of these days.”

Lobo turned his head to the side and stared at the human.

“Yeah, yeah. I know, but you just watch. Sooner or later we’re going to have some good stuff. And just wait until you taste honey. But no way am I going to approach that bee tree in the summer with those bees active. Maybe on a cold night, we’ll try to saw into that tree – after I make me some protection. I don’t know how much honeybee stings hurt, but the one bumblebee that stung me in that park hurt worse than I could believe. It made me have a very strong respect for them. Those guys don’t fool around. You ever been stung by a bee, Boy?”

Lobo shook his head and snorted. “There you go again. Well, I’ll be damned. I think you know what I’m talking about. Now, how do you do that? No way, can you know English. Are you reading my mind, or somehow understanding me some other way?”

The wolf just looked at him.

“Dammit. It seems to work just one way. You understand an awful lot of what I say, but I don’t seem to have a clue what you’re thinking.” Then remembering his absolute confidence that Lobo sensed something outside during the night, “Hmmm. Or do I? Maybe I need to pay more attention to what you’re doing.”

For the second time, the wolf made a sound other than growls or chuffs, and maybe that one other time that he howled in the distance when he was herding the deer – if it had been him making the sound. Morales stared at Lobo. This wasn’t a sound that the man had ever heard before, but it sounded like... “No. I’m imagining things. It was just an accident,” he said to himself.

Shaking his head, he stared at the wolf who chuffed and stared back at him.

“Shit,” he grumbled. “I need to get to work.”

Sometimes when he awakened momentarily at night, he would go over the things he needed to do, or try to think through whatever was bothering him at the time. Last night, it was the wheat. He had read several articles about primitive societies and their ways of getting the grains/berries from the stalk and free of the chaff. Some cut the wheat heads off the stalk, put the heads into a sack, then stomped on the sack. Some even drafted their children to stomp on the wheat heads while piled on the hard ground. Others grabbed a handful of the stalks and whacked them over a rock; still others used different types of flails to pound the wheat berries from the stalk. And, of course, there were the modern methods where giant combines rolled across the fields with a truck or trailer beside them to receive the perfectly prepared grain.

But I’m stuck with primitive – very primitive, he thought. One method appealed to him. It wasn’t any faster, but at least he could sit while doing it.

Breakfast over, he cut out a piece of hardwood that was almost a cube, save that it was a little taller than its other dimensions. It was six inches tall, four inches deep and four inches wide, forming the head of a wooden hammer. After drilling a two-inch hole through the center, he fashioned a handle about sixteen inches long, and wedged and glued it in. Basically, he had a wooden mallet.

Utilizing the post he used to stretch his hides over, he covered the top with a piece of hide, then spread a hide on the ground all around the post. With a handful of the stalks in his left hand, he used the mallet to repeatedly hit the seed heads, adjusting the force of the blows as he learned. Emphasis on repeatedly, he thought as the process quickly became monotonous.

But it did work, albeit much slower than he had hoped.

An hour later, finished with the wheat he had brought from the field, he stopped to gather up the hide and pour the grain and chaff into a big bucket. “Son of a bitch,” he moaned. “At this rate, it will take me all winter to get the grains, berries, or whatever the hell they call them, off the stalks, and I have to wait for a windy day to winnow the chaff out.” But he did have a large pile of wheat stalks already. “Now if he could just figure out a way to use them.” Shit, if nothing else, I’ll save them to burn come winter. The straw probably won’t last very long, but it should make a hot fire, and hey, it might work for kindling. Might even make a decent mattress if I can figure out how to keep the straw from sticking me.

“Fuck it,” he groused aloud. “Maybe there’s enough wind to clean a few handfuls so I can try grinding some of the wheat.”

Outside, he placed one of his biggest hides on the ground by a big rock, climbed onto the rock and gradually poured the wheat out of the bucket. Amazing him, he realized that most of the chaff was hitting to the side, and if the wind were blowing harder, he assumed that little of the chaff would land on the hide.

When the bucket was empty, he brushed the chaff off the side of the hide, then poured the grain back into the bucket. After repeating the process several times, it seemed that all that was left in his bucket was wheat grains.

Hefting the bucket, he thought he had several pounds of wheat berries, but as he sifted them through his hands, he realized that there were a few grains that were still in their husks.

“Shit,” he mumbled, “nothing to do but go through it and pick them out by hand.”

He knew what he needed, but no strainer had been included in his supplies. Back inside, he moved his lantern close, and handful by handful picked through the wheat berries. The boring job left his mind free to think. By the time he had finished picking through the grain, he knew how to make a rough strainer. It would be flat, instead of cupped, which meant he would have to add sides, and he didn’t know if it would work properly, but he was going to give it a try one night when he grew tired of doing anything else.

“Fuck,” he groaned aloud, then spoke to Lobo. “I need a table. It sure would be nice to have one to eat on, but even better, I could use it while building projects. Shit, back to the same thing. I always need something before I can build something else. Maybe one of these days, I’ll have the somethings all made so I can build the things I want. Dammit, you asshole General. I need a vise, but I need a strong table to mount it on, and I need a hundred other things that you didn’t see fit to send with me. How do I rob those bees without getting stung on my face, or in my eyes? How do I make anything without the ability to work with metal – metal I don’t have.