Chapter 685

Dessie and Phillip at The Waterfall Campsite

They had awakened early, and after their morning constitutional, had prepared breakfast using one of their freeze-dried meals each. Dessie felt lazy and a bit tired this morning, so after cleanup, she dug out her pad and checked its charge. Phillip had used his saw to cut two short sections off a log for seats. There was also one near the campfire that was long enough for both of them to sit together while they ate.

Dessie rolled one of the makeshift seats over to a nearby tree, sat and leaned back as she began to read her novel.

Phillip had walked over to the small lake that the waterfall formed. Then, having noticed several flat stones he thought would work, he began skipping them across the water toward the opposite shore. It didn’t take long for him to become bored, and he briefly wondered if Dessie would be interested in a little play, but he saw that she seemed comfortable as she read from her pad, so he decided not to bother her. Skipping the stone, however, had reminded him of one of their pastimes back in the states.

When Phillip was a kid, he and his parents had lived on a manicured ten-acre estate with many trees and a small stream running through the property. Indeed, his parents still lived there. At ten, he had talked his mother into buying him a slingshot. It wasn’t long before his buddy, who was the same age, talked his parents into one as well. In the summers, they had spent practically every daylight hour in those woods. By the time a year had gone by, they could hit, almost without thought, anything within twenty yards, whether it was moving or not.

They had found several wasp nests and had eventually picked off most of the wasps. They also found a hornet nest. They knew what a sting from a hornet would entail, so they very carefully shot the hornets as they slowed to approach the nest. However, one boy miscalculated and hit the nest — but that’s another story.

Eventually, Phillip’s mother saw him knock a bird out of the sky, which led to an upheaval in the household — and his friend’s parents were informed as well. The two boys practically suffered from withdrawal when the slingshots were put up for a month.

The brook was several feet deep, and five years earlier, Phillip’s father had stocked it with fish, then mostly forgot about it. Phillip and his friend had fried fish over a campfire while camping out — fish that his mother thought had been given to them by the chef.

When Phillip and Dessie started dating, he introduced her to a slingshot, and they spent many afternoons in the woods with the slingshots. Sometimes, they even shot them. After they married, occasionally, while visiting Phillip’s parents, the two would dig their slingshots out and spend an afternoon in the woods shooting burs off trees and generally practicing. Eventually, they joined a slingshot club, and for several years, met once a year at a campsite to compete with other like-minded individuals.

One event was a “Woods Trail’ where a group, supervised by a scorekeeper, would walk through a deeply wooded area where metal targets were positioned out to twenty-five yards. The targets varied, but most were under four inches in diameter and were sometimes barely visible in the thick foliage. If it was a solid hit, the ring of the pellet hitting was easily discernible. You only got one try per target.

Shooters could use clay, a or lead pellets to shoot at the distant targets. There were other events, some requiring rapid-fire or shooting at almost impossibly tiny targets. At the end of three days, the scores were totaled to determine the grand winner. First, second and third place winners were given a cheap trophy that was valued by the shooter far beyond its actual worth. Phillip had come in second place twice and third place once. To her frustration, Dessie had won second place in three different tournaments, but neither had ever managed to win the number one slot. There were also children’s events, but the main competitions ranged from sixteen to sixty, and sometimes even beyond that.

The event managers allowed you to camp on their property for free, but there were no facilities other than a central bathhouse. There was, however, a small town nearby with a motel and stores where you could replenish your food supply.

There were representatives from most of the slingshot manufacturers, and a top-of-the-line slingshot was also given as a prize, plus a cash award. Parts such as bands and the paraphernalia to cut them as you built your own slingshot were prevalent on vendor tables.

Phillip and Dessie had wanted to bring their slingshots when they left on their extended vacation, but they were both certain the slingshots wouldn’t be allowed even in checked luggage on an international flight. Some countries called them toys, while other areas listed them under weapons. Neither knew whether they were legal in Germany or not, but they assumed they would be prohibited in the cities, anyway. No problem, anyone could make a slingshot. They used the flat bands to secure their rolled clothing in their luggage, and a good-size piece of leather they could use to cut out pockets couldn’t harm anyone.

With his small saw in hand and his knife on his belt, Phillip went looking for wood to make stocks for their slingshots. It didn’t take long to locate a hickory tree with low limbs of the proper size. A few minutes later, he had limbs cut for each of them to form the near-perfect “Y” of the stocks. The slingshot would be crude compared to manufactured slingshots, but the accuracy of the pellet was due more to the shooter than how nice the slingshot looked.

Back at the campsite, Dessie noticed him stripping the bark off before he began shaping the “Y” into something that would fit his hand.

“You are going to make me one, too?” she asked/insisted.

“You know it, Babe.”

“You aren’t going to kill any of those rabbits we’ve been seeing, are you?” she asked, concerned.

Phillip chuckled. “I put that behind me long ago. Thank goodness my parents never found out that Ted and I had ‘Shish Kabob’ rabbit cooked over a campfire sometimes when we camped out. They would have burned our slingshots for sure — not to mention our asses. Besides, we should have plenty of targets without even leaving the campsite. Just look at all the tiny burs on the tree there,” he said, pointing, “and there are hundreds on the ground that we could put on a low-hanging limb for timed row targets.

“Here,” he said as he handed her one of the forks he had cut out of the junction of two limbs, “you can shape your stock to fit your hand as well as I can. These will never be as fancy as our bought ones, but with a little practice, they should work just as well.”

Although Dessie had at first refused to wear the hunting knife they had bought at the sporting goods store, seeing how many times Phillip used his convinced her to attach the sheath to her belt and keep the knife with her while they hiked. She found herself using the razor-sharp blade to shave wood to use in starting a fire and for cutting limbs and vines out of the way in the deep woods.

A little later, they had the stocks roughed out and were scraping them smooth.

“We brought a pair of scissors, didn’t we?” Phillip asked.

“They’re in my emergency sewing kit in the right side of my backpack,” she reminded him.

Phillip had an outline of the missile pouch from their bought slingshots, and he used it to trace the shape of it on the leather. It only took a moment to cut the pouch out, then duplicate it for her.

Back in the states, they had the equipment to cut the bands perfectly as well as several thicknesses of the material to experiment with. They had brought several of the bands to secure their tightly rolled-up casual clothes in their bags, then did the same with their extra clothing on the trail. Use of the bands was practical and allowed their extra clothing to take up far less space than any other method they had ever tried. Nothing had even been said by Airport Security, and this method of saving space was practical. If the bands ever got confiscated by overly zealous Security, there was no great loss because the material was cheap. Getting all their casual clothing back into their bags without the bands might be a problem, though.

With his stock shaped and scraped smooth, Phillip attached the pouch to the bands before tying them to the stock. Dessie’s slingshot was almost complete, and he helped her tie the bands on her stock.

Out of habit, they both worked the bands back and forth to test their strength and help get the “feel” of the slingshot. “Good enough to start?” he asked his wife.

“I might need to shorten my bands a bit, but I’ll go with this for the time being.” After a slight pause, she went on, “I wish we had some real pellets, but we’ve shot rocks plenty of times after we ran out of pellets.”

Dessie hesitated for a moment. “Remember when we experimented with making our own clay shot?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I noticed a long bank of red clay back at the washout. It might be fun to try the clay out.”

(Near-perfect hardened clay shot of varying sizes are sold for slingshots, but a cruder version can be made by rolling the wetted clay between the palms until it forms a ball, then baking the ball to form a very hard clay shot that hits with a lot of force and usually explodes into tiny bits. They didn’t have to worry about birds eating the clay shot, and there was no fuss and no muss afterward.)

“And how would we bake the shot? The only thing we have made of metal is your cookware. Hmmm. I suppose we could put a flat rock in the fire and bake the balls on that. The clay balls just need the water baked out, so it really doesn’t have to be that hot, anyway.”

“The titanium will wash, and I can sterilize it afterward. Besides, I like to see the clay balls hit. There are certainly enough big boulders around here to hang our targets on. The first rain that comes will wash off any mark the exploding clay shot might make, so we won’t be damaging anything for future hikers.”

“We’ve certainly shot thousands of rocks when we ran out of bought shot. There must be literally tons of polished river rocks over there,” Phillip said, pointing. “They wouldn’t be perfectly round like the clay balls, but they’re plentiful even if they might not shoot as straight at a distance as the formed and baked clay.”

Dessie smiled as she told her husband to look at his feet. “Looks as if the flash floods have caused the rocks to be everywhere around here.”

“We could experiment with the best rounded stones against the best of our clay shot. I can’t wait to try out our new slingshots. Let’s get a few dozen of the best stones and see if we can hit anything with our new toys.”

The Retreat

Jeff had been with the General all day and didn’t get to check on his Clan Queen before supper. After procuring his food from the hot bar, he slid into his seat at the head of their table in the dining hall. Diana frequently sat at the other end of the table to give her sister-wives a chance to sit near her husband, but tonight, she slid into the seat on his right.