Chapter 13

(The Fall of Year Three through that Winter)

The fall was crisp and cold earlier than expected. With hundreds of willing hands available, we dug out a new underground food storage pit. This one would be the last we'd need. It was dug twelve feet deep, and it measured thirty by thirty feet. We made the floor of a couple of inches of crushed granite stone, on top of which we floated a mortar bed and then tiled the floor in the thick tiles we'd been using for the safety walls out in the plains. For the walls, we set thick oak timbers, then mortared over them and then tiled over that. For the roof, we set strong and dry oak eight by eight beams in place, and then planking. Over the top of the planking we laid more of the plastic tarping, and then more planks. Over that we built up a three foot earthen roof and then tamped it down. Once the pit was built, it was remarkably cool inside all season long, not too hot and not too cold. While it did get damp in there from condensation, it never flooded and we kept the meat up off the ground. It worked well.

The work crews on the big fences kept at it until the ground froze. With new people drifting into camp we were able to add to the crews from time to time, and were even able to create a new crew or two. As a result, we ended up with close to four hundred acres either completely under walls, or mostly. That let us graze the lambs until late in the season and then move them into one of the smaller grazing enclosures. The far end of the plains side of the wall was still unbuilt, and we'd get wolves coming in from the hills from time to time, but that was fine as we could always use the pelts.

The chickens had taken to the new hen houses and were laying well. We made sure to incubate many of the eggs, and by fall we had nearly a hundred new birds that would all be laying come spring. The rest of the eggs went for food, and I was damned happy of that.

I had a couple of haying scythes, and I worked with DeadAndBack to forge a few new ones. He was making great progress as a blacksmith, and we ended up with a couple of serviceable scythes before winter came. Haying was new work to the folks, but it went fast enough, and a lot of people can hay out an entire field in no time at all. Once we'd hayed the fields, stacking and drying in a new shed virtually ensured the survival of the flock through the winter. I talked it over with the wives, and I was also prepared to have the lambs quarter with people if we had to.

That led us to a series of fall hunts. In the past, we'd played catch as catch can with our meats, but I sure as hell wanted to see if we couldn't do better than that this year. The hunts were a complete riot. See, I was still completely crappy as a primitive hunter. Here I was, completely surrounded by deadly silent ninja bastard cavemen who could sneak up on game and stick it with a spear, and I was out lummoxing around as the great hunter. So, I'd announce that we were hunting for say 'pig', and off we'd go. The archers would wander off, and the gang and I would head to where the scouts told us to go. I'd arrive, and the archers would have already decimated the local population of pigs. Why? Because you see, for them the advantage of having a forty or fifty yard range as compared to sticking distance was just a completely unfair lever. So, we'd declare the hunt a success and march back.

The only exception to this was when we would go hunting for the cats and bears. I knew that the local population of wild cats was growing. There was more than one time that we'd left behind big kills, multiple auroch or pigs, and especially the mammoth massacre. As a result, I could tell that there was a lot of scavenging going on. I wanted to cut back on those scavengers, and I wanted those skins. The moment a cat hunt was announced, it was all up to me. I was dead up against their to-the-bone fear of the monsters. One fine morning a group of us set off for a cat hunt. There were fifteen of us. From the old group I had with me Quietly and Farts. Julie didn't come along as she was slowing down from the pregnancy, but Luscious did come, and she'd been making great progress as an archer. The remaining folks were all men from the new tribes, archers and scouts.

I'd asked about the location of cats, and one of the scouts volunteered this.

"GreatOne ... there are many DeathThatWalks and many FangedDeath that live in caves and holes nearby." He looked at me like I was supposed to change my mind at this news.

"Well, where are there the most of them?"

He sort of stared at me for a moment, thinking. "At the foot of the far hills, GreatOne. In a cave there. There are many DeathThatWalks."

"Great!" I said. "Let's go."

So the group of us walk off. I'm looking forward to the hunt, and they're behaving like we're off to a funeral. Only Quietly and Farts were in a different mood, and with them it was more like a resigned fatalism. Sort of like a 'we can't talk him out of this, so let's get it over with' kind of mood. We camped out that night and made a big fire. We talked and laughed at silly stuff, lubricated by a little of my good vodka from the still. The hunters told lies about their prowess, and I was careful to be polite to them. They were working themselves up for facing the hunt, I knew.

We walked all the next day, and came to a low range of hills that came down from the northern range. Where they met the plains, the terrain grew broken and semi-wooded. It was in this oddly mixed geography that I was pointed to the caves that the Cave Lions called home. As we approached, the wind was in our favor, but I didn't take that for granted. Once we got a good sight of the caves themselves, I got all of us up into the trees and situated for the day and if need be, even the night. From my perch in the tree, I set out a small sand bag as a rifle rest and had Quietly do my spotting. I'd trained the scouts in how use the binoculars to help me spot game, and that's what we did now.

From where we were situated in the big oak I'd selected, I could see a few lions through my scope.

"One, Two, Three..." Quietly counted softly under his breath. I'd worked with him and a few others from the original tribe on how to count. Once he got much above ten it was hopeless, and zero was a lost cause. However, counting was a start. "Eleven, Twelvfteen, Thirty Seven..."

"Okay, that's good. Let's take a few out, okay Quietly?" I looked up at his higher perch in the tree. He nodded at me. "Yes, GreatOne."

So I sighted in and shot the first one. Long gone were the days of me being a terrible shot. By that time, I might not have been world class, but I tended to hit what I aimed at through a good scope out to about three hundred yards or more. A five hundred yard shot was still pretty much luck with me, but given three shots even at five hundred yards, I'd hit something. Out on the plain below the caves, watching the local wildlife or deer and auroch, were at least fifteen cave lions. They were big, fat, lazy bastards who clearly didn't have to work all that hard to eat. I set out to change all that. In the first pride I could see that there were one senior male lion and two beta males, both clearly young. With them were at least eight to ten big females and half a dozen sturdy cubs heading into their first winter. The lead male went to the happy hunting ground, and after him his two sons. They all left this life a good three hundred yards out from us, and as they exited this veil of tears, I could hear the hunters around me hooting softly. I hated that hooting crap.

Once the males were done for, I started in on the females. That took longer, and after a couple went down the scent of blood seemed to spook them and several got lost to our sight in the big weeds as they looked around for the source of the trouble. The silence after so many gunshots was pretty stark, and we all just sat waiting. After a long time, I could see a couple of the females emerge, and I poached them. That was about as well as it would go the rest of that day.

There were two more lion prides out there, and they were spooked by the gun fire. I didn't manage to pick off more than two from each group that day. All in all, that left a bunch more lions out there milling around, kind of nervous.

"I count maybe eleventy seven of them left, GreatOne. Maybe we should leave and come back again later?"

"Naah, Quietly ... we're pretty far off here, we'll be okay."

"Yes, GreatOne, but what about the ones that are coming this way?'

"How many are coming this way?"

"Only eleventy."

"Oh, great!" I nodded in false enthusiasm.

The wind had shifted, and the lions could now smell cave man. In this day and age, cave man was a perfectly acceptable source of daily nutrition, and besides ... something had gotten their blood up. Luckily, the light intensifying scope was a latest generation unit, and it featured IR signature even during daylight. This allowed me to pick out a few shadows in the tall weeds that I blasted away at. As I got them, Quietly counted nonsense until he got under eight, and then he stayed pretty much on track number wise.

Once we got down to five lions, I could hear the bows start to twang from some of the hunters, but far more distressingly, I heard a couple of the newer guys jump out of the trees and try to run away.

"NO!" I yelled, but it was too late.

We got all five of the big bastards, but it was too late for three of the scouts. If they'd stayed up in the trees, we could have avoided most of the cluster fuck. As always, I felt really bad that we lost people. It always messed with me that the sheer stupidity of their thinking was so deadly. If we didn't break the back of this, it would bite me in the ass sooner or later, and I knew it.

We completed the hunt over the next two days and brought home with us the skulls and skins. Between the three cave complexes and the lions on the plains, we took home thirty three skins. We also brought home our dead. The hunters seemed to think I was pretty amazing shit, to only have lost a couple of our number. I was of course far less happy. Regardless, we achieved our goal, and over the next three hunts, we pretty much decimated the local sabre-tooth and cave lion population. I didn't consider the cave bears to be as big a threat, and I didn't go looking for that trouble.

When we got home, the wives read me the fucking riot act for endangering myself. I didn't complain. There wasn't much I could do about it, and the lions needed culling. They were well and truly culled. An additional benefit was seen when we arrived with the skins. As we marched in triumph, skins held aloft, the entire compound grew quiet as the sheer number of skins was apparent. It was crap like that that made the legend of The Great One grow beyond all recognition. I will say however that the skins made for a warm winter for a lot of families.

During the fall, I ran some simple experiments in making glass. In theory, glass is easy enough to make. You grind and powder fine white river sand, mix in a little filtered oak ash, and then a little lime. If you get the portions right and can control the heat well, you will get a good flow of relatively clear glass. To get the glass, you have to bake it with very even heat for hours. In reality it took a lot of work. I set up an oven in a kiln, and used a titanium box as the pour table. It wouldn't yield ripple-free glass, but having a reliable source of thick green glass was far better than not having glass at all.

One glaring lapse in my technology arsenal was the absence of working high temperature thermometers. It was damned near a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to make and temper pure materials, I needed good temperature controls, and in order to have good temperature controls based on thermometer readings, I needed to make pure materials to make the thermometers. What I ended up using for the most part was a lot of 'rule of thumb' measurements about changes in material properties at temperature, and a lot of guessing. Modern civilization is based on accurate measurement. I'd known this in making sure I had good calipers and other physical measurement, but I'd forgotten about temperature. The answer was is my books, of course but I couldn't find it.

We used the clearest glass we could produce to create a better roof and walls for the greenhouse. The best we were able to do that fall was a semi-clear light green glass. It cut the admitted light by a lot, but it worked well to replace the side walls of the greenhouse. The biggest sheets we could produce were two foot by two foot, but that was plenty big.

As fall descended on us everyone moved into a set of winter quarters. These buildings had been produced over the summer. We built each building as a set of big long houses. Each house was designed to shelter a minimum of twenty people, and the biggest houses would shelter over fifty. The houses were built up from concrete footings we buried in a three foot wide, seven foot deep hole. Because we had a working blacksmith now, each footing ended eighteen inches over the grade level in a wrought iron U shaped clamp. These clamps held the oak beams we used to build the foundation. The beams were cut and notched to make a grid and then iron nailed in place. Above the beams we built a floor of wide oak planking, gapped about one quarter inch for expansion. Set at cross angles to that was another layer of flooring, set close and sealed. The framing was done with ten inch by ten inch oak beams. Each beam was set ten feet apart and cross tied to similar beams. I know that the engineering was gross overkill, but I didn't want the roof collapsing under any possible snow load. We built the walls close to eleven foot tall.