Chapter 3

I'd been dreaming of Reanna when I woke, a little before false dawn, and I got up to watch the sunrise. I think it was the first time I'd ever seen it and the hell of it was I didn't even know if it was actually sunrise on earth. I know it made sense it was, but how in the hell could I know? It looked like the same old sun I was used to, but who really pays that much attention to what the sun looks like?

Hell, it was just a big light in the sky and in the first place it hurt to look at. I already knew there was only one moon here and it seemed a lot like the one I was used to, but it was the same story as with the sun. I'd never spent a lot of time looking at the moon or the night sky. I couldn't even remember ever looking for the Big Dipper and didn't have the first clue about finding it, if that even mattered.

Anyway, the sunrise was nice enough and I was up early to start my day. Fat lot of good it did me. I didn't have the first clue about what my next move was. I faked it by catching another catfish and fixing a meal. After eating and then doing my business way away from my camp again, I took a walk back downstream and paid strict attention to what things looked like in detail. I don't even know why I did it, but with nothing else on my mind I decided it would be better to know more about my surroundings than I did.

I probably wasn't five hundred yards from my camp when I came across a place that was obviously a crossing for animals, or at least a place they came to drink. There were prints all over the damp ground. Mostly deer, but also some smaller ones I didn't recognize and some that I thought might be wolves, though only a very few.

I even saw a couple that I thought must be for some type of fairly large cat. By fairly large I mean they looked a little like prints a house cat might make, but were at least three or four times as large. At least I didn't see anything that let me think there were lions, tigers, or bears around. It wasn't proof there weren't any, it just didn't prove there were.

About two miles from camp I came to a stretch where the stream had cut through a big hill over the years. I remembered it from my original trek upstream, but I hadn't paid it a bit of attention at that time, mostly because I was bitching about climbing the damned hill. Looking down into the gash the stream had cut showed me some of it was limestone and that triggered a memory of Jack Tolison.

Jack had a sporting goods store in the town where I was raised. He fancied himself an expert on Indians that had been in our area before white men came and ran them off or killed them or whatever.

Jack's store was comprised of about half sporting good (rifles, pistols, shotguns, compound bows, and such) along with fishing gear and camping stuff, but fully half of the floorspace was devoted to Indian artifacts he'd found or dug up and a lot of literature about them. Hell he'd even written two books about them.

Jack's books had been printed by vanity publishers, since Indian history written by a guy who'd never been to college weren't likely to make it to the best seller's list, but Jack did manage to sell nearly out of both books he'd had printed, so someone must have been paying attention to what he wrote. He was even invited to the local community college to give talks to American History classes a couple of times each year.

The part that mattered to me now though was Jack had thousands of flint arrowheads, knives, axes, and such. Several times when I was a teenager, while I'd been looking around at a rifle or pistol I'd wanted badly, Jack had filled the background noise with instructions on making things out of flint and explained exactly how the Indians did it, as if he really knew.

I did remember he'd said they started with a chunk of flint, or sometimes he called it chert, and they whacked it with a bigger harder stone to break off what he called flakes. These flakes were just thinner pieces of the flint. Later they'd tap it with pieces of antler or dried hardwood to shape it and to get it sharp again after a little use.

Right about now I wished I could go to his store for a couple of hours and listen to him again, paying more attention this time. Even if he'd been full of pure bullshit, which was likely, he'd sounded like he knew enough about it to at least get me started trying it myself. What the hell, if I could wish something like that up I'd just wish I was back home and all this shit was over.

Here and now though, it had me looking hard at the limestone walls of this mini-gorge and hoping I saw some flint in there somewhere. I did remember Jack said flint was often formed in limestone and that sometimes there'd be small pockets visible in places like this where a stream or river had cut its way through. Then the other shoe dropped for me. He'd also said downstream of places like this pieces of flint would be scattered sometimes after being washed out of the limestone.

Downstream was where I needed to go then, because as far as I knew flint was the only thing I'd have to make any kind of decent weapon out of. It didn't take many examples like the deer I wounded the other day to let me know a spear with a flint point would do one hell of a lot better job.

By now it was already way past noon so the flint rush was off until tomorrow at the earliest. I made my way back to my camp to catch an evening fish, cursing myself all the way for not bringing my fishing line and hook with me. Hell, I could have caught a fish right here just as easily probably, and after all there was no shortage of poles around.

Turning my dumb ass right back around I found a good enough place to make another camp, bent another nail into a fish hook, and walked far enough so the bank was closer to the water to start looking for grubs. It didn't take but a few minutes to find one and start fishing. I caught about a three pound small mouth bass this time and even cooking it the old way, with a stick over the fire, beat hell out of walking all the way back to my main camp.

After gathering enough wood for the night, I scraped some leaves into a pile and lay down. I dreamed of the Indians riding around the buffalo and killing them with arrows from horseback again that night, but not all night. My next dream was of Reeana welcoming me back to our Tepee, cutting up the buffalo and cooking me a big steak.

When I woke the next morning I decided the dream was stupid. I didn't have a horse or even know if there were any around here anywhere. I didn't have a bow or arrows and I sure as hell didn't have a saddle.

No matter if the Indians did it or not, I wasn't about to go tearassing around a buffalo herd bareback, with a bow and arrows to keep up with. Not to mention trying to stay on a horse that probably didn't want to do any of that shit either. As for the part about Reanna cooking me a buffalo steak, I'd worry about killing the steak material after she showed up.

Finding some flint was on my mind now though and I didn't even bother to catch breakfast. At least I brought my new hook and line with me this time before I went traipsing downstream looking for flint.

Half a mile downstream of the hill I came to a wide spot. Even better, there was a depression in the land around it for another half mile or so and it looked as if this was one of those spots that came up when the stream spread out during high water, like in the springtime. I figured looking around here would beat the shit out of wading in the stream.

For once I was right about something. In less than an hour I'd found more flint than I could carry back to my camp in one trip. Thankfully I realized how dumb that would be right away, carrying the flint back to camp that is. The only thing back at my original camp that was worth walking back there for was the first fishhook I'd made from a nail and even though I knew nails were going to be scarce here, I didn't think it was worth the trip for one bent example. I decided it was time to try a little flint knapping.

Finding a big rock to sit on was the first step and it wasn't too hard. I took hold of the biggest piece of flint I'd found then, grabbed my plumb sixteen ounce claw hammer and gave the flint a sharp whack about dead center. Of course it broke right in half and that wasn't a bad thing. My next lesson was to be damned careful handling these flakes I broke off. I cut my thumb right away on the sharp edge that was left.

Oh well, the cut was a very small one and I figured it was a cheap enough price for the lesson. I gave the part still in my hand a lighter tap, near the edge that had been formed when the thing split and this time I got what I considered a real flake. The things had started out roughly ten inches long, six wide, and four thick. I now had two rough halves and the flake. The flake was still about ten inches long, but was maybe three inches wide and probably only half an inch thick. This was going to take some work.

I took a lunch break, since it was at least an hour past noon and I hadn't bothered with breakfast. I got another catfish this time and it made me remember what else I'd left at my first real camp. My cooking rock. I spent half an hour trying to find another one as well suited but couldn't get it done. I settled for cooking small pieces over the open flames by putting a stick through them and holding them in the flames until done. They didn't taste as good this way either. No matter, it was filling so it was good enough.

Back to the old flint knapping grind was next and I kept fucking with it and fucking with it all afternoon. I didn't have one thing I considered useful from my work yet either. I wasn't really trying for anything like that though. Mostly I was hitting rocks with different strength blows and in different places to see what would happen. Experimentation was all I had to go on. I knew for sure that useful things could be made out of flint and all I needed to do was keep whacking on it until I figured out a good method.

The next day, after breakfast and about an hour of trying, I made a breakthrough. The hammer was just too big for doing anything except breaking big pieces of flint into rough halves. I had a small, about six inches long, ball peen hammer that I never really used as a hammer. It was a sort of rudimentary gadget. The hammer head and about two inches of the handle were all one piece, but the rest of the handle was a set of nested screwdrivers with brass handles. It was threaded and the brass part fit up into the hammer head part and you screwed them together to form a hammer and handle. Inside it were other smaller screwdrivers that did the same, getting smaller with each step, until the last one was only about an inch long.

Now I had a use for the hammer part and I started right away. It still wasn't easy, but I did discover I had more control. By the end of the day I had made my first knife, sort of. It was actually just an oval that was fairly dull on one side and very sharp on the other. I guess it was really more of a scraper. I was proud of it though and used it on the next fish to scrape the scales off after gutting it. Hell, it actually seemed to work better for this than my Case Shark's Tooth folding sheath knife.