Chapter 5

By the time they had finished building the house, Julie was beginning to show a slightly pooched belly. She insisted that this was not enough to slow her down, so Jeff didn't make a big issue of it. There was one more thing that Julie wanted if she could get it, namely, she wanted an enclosed outhouse. That way, she felt that she could visit it without waking Jeff. She was sure that she would have to piss one or more times during the night as her belly began to swell enough to put pressure on her bladder. She thought that she could take her crossbow with her and be perfectly safe getting to and from the outhouse. Once she was inside and the door was closed, she was sure that she could withstand any sort of curious or hungry bug.

She wanted a little house 2½ feet on a side and seven or eight feet tall, so that it would be tall enough that they could vent it. Jeff agreed to build one more house with her help, and then he would have to go on a serious program of hunting enough meat to tide them over. They got busy and had the outhouse built in a very short time. They hinged the door with the second pair of hinges salvaged from the car door. This structure took three weeks to build, not counting the digging of the cesspit under the seat. That took a week, since it had to be dug essentially by hand. They were able to use a small carapace as a shovel, but it was only useful for lifting loose dirt. Jeff had to dig with the hatchet and used the small carapace to lift the dirt into another, larger carapace to haul the dirt to the outside of the outhouse. The outhouse had been designed so that it could be moved without completely disassembling it, so they were prepared for that necessity when it finally happened.

They still had not built the birthing chair, but Jeff felt that they needed to start on collecting meat and what edible plants they had found before Julie got to big to help. He could build the chair by himself if he had to, but hunting the quantity of meat he wanted really needed two people to haul it home.

They decided that they really preferred dragon fly meat, though, of course, they would eat most anything if they had to. They were now having to range farther afield to find meat; they had pretty well hunted out the near neighborhood. They hoped that the insects would come back as soon as the hunting pressure fell off when Julie was confined to the house.

They had gone about a mile from home, following the stream in an upstream direction. This was the first time they had gone in this exact direction, so they were not sure what they would find, but they hoped that there would be edible bugs along the water in an area they had not yet hunted. They were keeping a close lookout for bugs when Jeff, who was in the lead, spotted a white splotch of ground about 100 yards ahead of them. He called it to Julie's attention, and they decided to investigate.

When they got there, they were overjoyed to find a deposit of chalk. This could be converted into lime that they could use in their outhouse, and it could be made into a kind of low grade concrete, too. They both shouted for joy when they understood what they had found. "Jeff, I just remembered that flint occurs in beds of chalk. Maybe we can find some here."

"Yeah, you're right. Let's see what I can find if I dig a bit with the hatchet. I'll have to be careful, since I don't want to damage the cutting edge." Jeff began to cut away some of the chalk face of the low cliff by gently chopping on it with the hatchet. On his third chop, he felt and heard the steel blade strike something very hard. He carefully dug away and found a lump of material that definitely was not chalk, but he was not sure what it was. It was a grayish color, definitely not what he expected flint to look like.

He laid the strange rock on the ground and hit it with the butt end of the hatchet blade. Nothing except that the gray coating flaked off where he had struck the blow to reveal a vaguely greenish colored layer. He looked at Julie and they both shrugged their shoulders. Not knowing what else to do, Jeff struck the stone again in the same place as hard as he could with the hatchet butt. Sparks flew everywhere and the stone shattered into several very sharp flakes and a couple of longish pieces. One end of each of the long pieces had a relatively sharp edge.

Jeff picked up a flake and handed it to Julie, saying, "Look out, the edge looks very sharp." Julie told him to stand still, she wanted to try something. By now, Jeff had a beard which neither one of them liked, but he had no way to shave it off. Julie had been sort of hacking at it with the pocket knife to keep it short enough that it didn't get in Jeff's way, but both had said that they wished that he had a razor. Julie spit in her hand and touched the edge of the rock sliver to the water in her hand. Then she dragged it over Jeff's left cheek and cut the whiskers away very smoothly.

Julie shouted, "EUREKA!" and showed Jeff the whiskers that she had cut away. He was equally pleased, both to have found a way to get rid of his beard and to have found flint at last. He switched to one of the larger pieces of flint and began chipping away at the chalk in earnest. It was not long before he had found a dozen pieces of flint in various sizes. This was put into a shoulder bag that Julie was carrying, and they set it aside to pick up on their way back from hunting.

They were in luck this day because they soon found a dragon fly that they killed and began hauling back toward home. They stopped off to pick up the bag of flint and hurried home as fast as they could go without dragging the dragon fly on the ground and ruining its skin.

The first thing they did when they got home was to butcher the dragon fly. Julie tried using one of the flint chips and found that it was much sharper than the pocket knife. Once she learned how to hold the flint shard, she was able to butcher the dragon fly much faster than she had done with the knife. Her comment was that the job would be easy if she could fashion a handle for the chip so that it was easier to hold. Jeff was putting the meat on the drying rack over the smoky fire while she was doing the butchering. He turned to see what she meant, and marveled at ease of her cutting. Jeff picked up a flint chip and tried it himself. He agreed that the flint was much sharper than the knife.

Neither one of them had ever done any flint knapping, nor ever seen it done live. All they had ever seen was on TV, so they really didn't know what they were doing. At first, Jeff tried banging on the flint with the butt of the hatchet, but all he succeeded in doing was making little pieces of flint out of bigger pieces. He quickly abandoned that effort in frustration and stared at the piece of flint he was holding in disgust.

For some reason that he was never able to figure out, he pushed the edge of the flint against the handle of the hatchet, and a tiny chip of flint flew off. Perfect! That was the action he was looking for! "What did you do?" Jeff showed her with another perfectly removed chip of flint. "Please let me try." Jeff handed her the flint nodule and the hatchet, and Julie had exactly the same result when she pressed with the flint. They quickly tired of passing the hatchet back and forth, so Jeff picked up two small logs from the woodpile and they tried those. They worked as well as the hatchet handle, so Jeff set it aside, and they continued with the two pieces of wood.

It wasn't long before Julie had a small point made in the size needed for her crossbow bolts. It was a long way from perfectly shaped, but it was in the general form she wanted and sharp as a razor. She stopped her knapping and tried to figure out the best way to attach the point to a bolt. She tried splitting the end of the bolt and pushing the point into the crack. All this accomplished was to split the wood so far that the bolt was rendered useless.