Chapter 403

The Prison Planet

Morales wanted to try grinding some wheat, but he had vowed to make every effort to put a log on his wall daily, so first he set about stripping the bark and preparing to put another log up.

When he was finally done, he stood back to check out what he had accomplished. “Not much, yet, and I wish I could have used bigger logs, but without help, I just can’t drag bigger ones to the cave, let alone get them up on the wall,” he told the wolf. “But it is beginning to look like a wall. Still, there’s one hell of a lot of work left to do.”

As he gave himself a rough bath to wash off some of the dirt and grime, he looked over at the hen and her brood. “Crap, I meant to put them outside today, but I didn’t get around to it. I hope the bitch doesn’t give me as much shit moving her outside as she did when I caught her. Oh, well, we’ll see.”

As he settled in for the night, Junior came over to snuggle against him. With a fingertip, he stroked the little chicken and smiled as it arched its back, obviously enjoying the sensation. “Shit, I guess I’m going to miss you, but I can’t have a chicken sleeping with me forever. Besides, you’ll enjoy all that room outside.”

With the yellow ball – considerably bigger than it was a couple of days ago – snuggled against his side, Morales switched off the light and drifted to sleep.

Just before daylight, he woke. With faint tendrils of moonlight still leaking into the cave, he crept across the floor until he was bending over the sleeping hen, and at the top of his lungs, screamed into her ear, “WAKE UP AND PISS! THE WORLD’S ON FIRE!”

He had thought that Gertrude’s squawk was loud before, but it paled in comparison to what she emitted this time. Chicks scattered in every direction, and the hen, flapping her wings wildly, flew/ran a few feet before she realized she wasn’t under attack. It was a good thing it was mostly dark in the cave, he decided, or her stare might have caused him to die on the spot.

As the dust, bits of straw and chicken feathers began to settle, a laughing Morales collapsed on his ass. Even Lobo chuckled for some time.

Slapping the dust from the seat of his pants, Morales staggered to his feet still chuckling occasionally as he switched the lantern on. “Vwaaannkkk,” he squawked out, trying to imitate the hen’s squawks.

She emitted a muffled and barely heard response, then strutted over and made a production of shitting in the middle of the cave floor. After glaring at him again, she gathered her brood about her and settled back on her nest.

“What’s the matter? It’s only funny when you scare the shit out of me? I personally thought it was hilarious.”

Gertrude turned her head and refused to look at him.

After hanging the lantern on its hook, he was readying the percolator when the thought struck him. Didn’t I read somewhere that hens would stop laying if they were badly stressed? Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. That egg was damn sure great, but have I fucked up my egg factory? Not only did I scare the shit out of her, but she might just be a wee bit pissed too? But he couldn’t stop thinking about her squawking as she scrambled away, and the grin just wouldn’t leave his face.

As soon as the coffeepot was primed, he put it on the fire, then hurried to get the hen’s breakfast. In addition to the corn, he got a couple of handfuls of the now almost dried blueberries and put them on a flat rock near her.

Gertrude glared at him, then stood looking at the blueberries, making it obvious that she hadn’t forgotten or forgiven. While she was making up her mind, the chicks ran over and attacked the berries. With a look first at the human, then back at her brood gobbling the treat, she decided to get her part before her chicks ate everything.

Morales used his shovel to put the fresh chicken shit on the manure pile, then covered it with a thin layer of dirt before continuing to work on breakfast. Lobo lay watching the chickens eat Morales’ peace offering, then glanced at the man. “Don’t you say a thing,” Morales warned, but he heard a faint chuffing coming from the wolf, anyway.

As he sat to peel and slice their morning potatoes, Morales turned to Lobo who was now sitting close by staring into the cook fire much as a human would. “More things to do, Boy. What am I going to do with the wheat berries after I thresh them? Even though that fucking General did send me a number of buckets, one stuck inside the other, that’s really all the storage containers I have free. Every time I use one of the buckets for long-term storage, I limit myself. I need more storage containers, and the only way I’ll ever have more is to make them myself.

“Oh, wooden boxes work okay for some things, but surely there are better ways. Unfortunately, I don’t have those better ways with me. I watched a woman on the video weaving baskets out of cane, and they work well for several things, but I also need containers that will hold liquids, and I don’t really want to put the dried blueberries in a wooden box. Besides, I’ve accumulated a considerable amount of jerky, and I need something to store it in. I have some stacked on shelves, even some hanging on fishing lines, and I’ll keep doing that, but what if some animal gets in here while we’re gone? The bars will keep a bigger animal out, but something smaller could squeeze between them. Not to mention what will happen if the chickens get into my food stocks. They’re going outside soon, but I’ll probably have to bring them in when the weather gets really cold. If the jerky was stored in jars or something with a lid on it, I would feel a lot better.

“More or less, considering my options, that just leaves pottery. Boy, I don’t know shit about making pottery, but then again, when I got here, I didn’t know shit about most of the things I’ve done since then. They sent a bunch of those articles with me that show how to do things, and there are videos on the computer that help enormously. Problem is, there are many ways to do some of these things, and I have to decide which way works best for me.

“I watched a video that showed people in Africa using various methods of making and firing pottery. Shit, the stuff was beautiful when they got through with it, and they had practically nothing to work with. On one of the videos, kids dug hard clay out of a bank, then beat it into powder with a kind of big mortar and pestle thing. Their mortar was just the broken bottom half of a big jar like thing, and they used a big stick for the pestle. They put the hard clay in and kept jamming the stick into it until all the lumps were broken up and it was mostly powder. Then they strained the lumps out of that. The woman beat pieces of broken pottery into powder or used sand to mix with the clay powder so the resulting pottery would fire more evenly. How the hell did they learn to do that, huh?

“Then this lady used a sloping hole she had dug in the hard ground as a pattern to work the thick clay against to form the beginning shape of a big clay jar. Once she had the bottom third of the jar formed, she turned the new jar-to-be on edge and kept working it around and around in the sloping hole, adding more thick mud as she needed it. By the time she was done, she had a big, potbellied jar that would hold maybe five gallons. It even had handles and a rim around the top for a lid to fit on.

“After the pottery had dried, she and all the women in the village took their pottery out to a great big shallow hole – more like a depression – that they had dug. After putting in a thick layer of this tall grass that grew in their area, they carefully set all those dozens of jugs down together. Then they took more of the tall grass and laid it several feet thick over all their pottery before setting the grass on fire. They kept splashing water on the fire to keep it from burning too furiously, but it burned a long time.

“Finally, they let the fire burn down and the pottery cool somewhat before taking it out and submerging it in very hot water with some kind of seeds boiled into it. As the pottery gradually cooled, it turned a shiny black. The jugs could now be used to cook in and store liquids in. Guess how many lifetimes it would take me to learn to do that, hmmm.”

Lobo stared at the human as if he were fascinated with what Morales was saying.

“I have plenty of red clay and sand down by the stream. And, I saw a bank of light gray clay near where we fish. I don’t know enough to have the slightest idea whether either will work or not, but I need something to store things in.

“Then I watched a video where this guy showed how he made crude pottery in his back yard – and I do mean crude. After he and his students had made about twenty pieces, they dug a hole and did their own version of firing the pottery. Half of it broke and looked like shit. Of course, it looked like shit before they put it in the fire, too. That’s probably what mine will look like – if I can get any to survive the firing. But what the hell, I need something to store my wheat and flour in. Not to mention the jerky, blueberries and all the other stuff from the field.

“Which reminds me. As soon as we eat, I need to check out the oven to see if it withstood the fire.”

With breakfast over and his meager cleanup completed, he used a stick to drag out the charred wood and ashes from the small fire he had made in the oven. Then, with a piece of hide, he wiped the floor of the oven as clean as he could so that he wouldn’t have to lie in soot and ashes to check for cracks. Amazing him, there were none.

Do I dare build a full-size fire in it? he asked himself. Then, Why push it? I don’t have any flour ready and even if I did, I don’t have any yeast or sourdough. Hell, I wonder if sourdough would really work instead of yeast. But I can’t make the sourdough without flour, so I’m back to spinning my wheels. No use taking the risk with the oven until I’m ready to bake some bread, so I’ll play it safe and start another small fire in it to continue the drying process.

Again, he started a fire well spread out across the floor of the oven, then placed the flat rock over the entrance to hold the heat in. A careful examination of the outside of the rounded dome showed it to be entirely crack free, even of spider cracks. “Hot damn,” he told Lobo. “This might actually work. If I can grind some acceptable flour, and if I can come up with something to substitute for yeast. If. If. If.

“Now what the fuck am I going to use for the sourdough to do its thing in? I’ve found several different ways to make it, but most won’t work for me because they use yeast to get the sourdough started. And I don’t have any yeast. But there are several methods that use only flour and water. I’ll have the flour when I grind some of the wheat, but ... I don’t have a container with a lid – well that I want to give up, that is. I guess I could use one of my pans and put a piece of hide over it, but I used the pan to cook in, and sourdough has to be fed and continued if I’m going to have bread on a regular basis.

“Fuck it. I don’t have any choice. I have to make at least some pottery, and it will have to be fired so it will hold liquids.”

After buckling on his weapon belt, he and Lobo went down to the stream. I don’t know whether this clay will work or not, but it did great for my oven. Maybe it will work for the pottery too.

Over time, the stream had cut into the clay bank, leaving the bank, at least in the summer, well above water level. With a bucketful of the hard clay, they went back to the cave. When he had used the clay for the oven, he had just picked out the occasional small stone and gravel by hand, but he suspected the women on the videos had strained their clay through a screen for a reason. Same problem again. He didn’t have any kind of strainer that would work for this.

“Might as well get it over with,” he told the wolf. “Problem is, how do I get the bottom of my strainer thin enough. I can saw it to roughly a half inch in thickness, but if I get thinner than that, chances are I’ll screw up and ruin the piece.”

He had a somewhat flat sandstone rock that he had been working with to flatten by chipping off the high places, then smoothing the rock more with harder stones. Now he set about the chore of further flattening the rock. An hour later, it wasn’t perfect, but it looked flat to the naked eye.

After cutting out a piece of hardwood roughly a foot square and a little less than a half inch thick, he tried several drills until he thought he had the holes the right size to sift the hard clay. Shit. Do I want to sift my wheat through the same strainer that I use for dirt? And besides, the holes in the strainer need to be bigger for the wheat. Crap. Might as well get it done with one go.

After cutting out another board, he played with the drill sizes until the wheat berries would drop through while catching most of the chaff. With a straightedge, he marked out a grid on both boards, then set about drilling all those holes to make two strainers.