Chapter 14

(The Late Winter Of Year Three To The Early Spring Of Year Four)

As I've said, it was a hard winter. The snows came one on top of another, and by

January, we'd seen many feet of it. The compounds all stayed mostly dry thanks to the runoff system we'd installed at such great labor the prior summer, but it was still cold and wet for a long time. We wasted some time making snow shoes and practicing with them, and I even flirted with skis, but it was a wasted effort both for my comrades and for me. It was however, a load of laughs to see us all struggling on the snow.

I know I've mentioned the treadle sewing machine before, but it got a lot of use that winter. Julie and I showed the women in our inner camp how to use it, and after a few sewn fingers, and one stitched nipple (don't even ask me how that happened), the women fell right in love with the machine. By working with DeadAndBack as our blacksmith, between the three of us, Dead, Julie, and I, we managed to get a few larger gauge needles made out of iron. Dead would forge the needles as small square nails, and I would cheat and use a tiny hand-drill bit and lots of oil to drill the hole for the thread down at the end. This then allowed the women to sew with very rough hand spun thread, and not just the good stuff.

The girls had also taken to spinning thread on a wheel. It is fairly easy to make thread out of wool, but we only had a tiny amount of that. So, as a substitute for wool, the girls were forced to use stuff like fur and hair, and even an occasional bit of flax that we could come across. As a result of all the progress on the sewing front, lots of folks ended up with felted socks to fit inside their mammoth hide moccasins. The combination provided excellent warmth and lasted a long time. Between the socks, moccasins, leather trousers, good felt underwear, hair shirts and suede vests and coats, we looked pretty much alike, kinda like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction meets Clan of the Cave Bear. What can I say though, it all worked and that's what mattered.

Over this winter, one of my hobbies became making paper. It's actually a large mess to make paper, but it's a lot of fun. Here's how you do it. Take the soft inner heartwood of pines and firs, and hack them up into small pieces. Boil the crap out of the wood and pound it out into a mass of fibers. Break up the big clumps and boil it all again, but this time add some limestone dust to the boil. Mash it again. Repeat this until you have a gruel-like soup of tiny fibers suspended in boiling limed water. Once this mass is ready, pour it out into trays into which screens the size of the paper you want are suspended. Let the water evaporate and cool. As the water evaporates and the fibers settle out, pour off the clear water and press. The harder you can press, the tighter the grain of the paper. Doing this will give you very rough grained non-bleached and non-acidic paper. And that was all we needed for the camp. Once again, it wasn't pretty but it worked.

Now, pressing that rough paper out over a flat bottomed cone form and then shellacking it with the hide glue allowed me to make speaker cones. Glue the lip of the cone into a frame, then glue a fat round dowel to the base of the cone and wrap the dowel in wire. When that's done, drill a hole slightly larger than the dowel in the middle of a magnet, and glue the magnet to the frame with the dowel poking out of the hole in the magnet. If you've done that right, when you apply a tone from a music or sound source, you have a working speaker. At least, that's how I made them. They worked fine, and making ten of them allowed me to make the Sunday sermons more impressive. They distorted my voice some, but I liked the Wizard of Oz effect.

You're probably wondering about the microphone and the amp I used. As a part of my supplies, I had added a fair amount of basic electronic components. I'd set aside a small but full box of power rectifiers, a selection of resistors, a bunch of capacitors, and other basics like that. I'd done it just in case I was able to generate electricity using the windmill. The table in the 'wake up' room I'd been in specified no supplies that 'directly' generated electricity. So I brought magnets. It's pretty simple for an engineer to make a transformer and slightly amplify the voltage to power the bigger speakers. That's how I did it. The locals were impressed.

"Ungowa!" I shouted one Sunday morning through the cheap speaker setup. I could hear the cones buzz with my amplified voice.

"UNGOWA!" The assembled mass of cold but still fed cave bastards yelled back.

"I am Josh, the Great and Powerful!" It rang out through the buzzing speaker cones.

From the side, I could hear Julie suppress a laugh of recognition as I did the Oz routine.

The worst of the winter came in early February. The river froze solid, and while the piping we used from the base of the stream still pumped us some water, it was a trickle, and for a good month we had to fetch from the river. That was a massive pain in the ass. We suffered very little loss to the piping or the buildings, and the walls stayed mostly intact. There were a few places where the walls cracked, but they were easily repaired. Later in the spring, I decided to extend the piping up the river to a deep pool where it would not be frozen, thus ensuring a permanent supply.

Three times we got called out to the pasture, where predators had come in. Twice it was wolves that had come in through cracks in the heaved walls, and once it was a pair of smilodons. Their pelts came in handy. One time the scouts didn't even call for me and just killed the wolves with bow-fire, the cocky bastards. I didn't mind all that much, to tell the truth.

The shamans and some of the women made great progress on their reading and writing over the winter, and using the worst of the long cold dark days as 'secret' school days was fun. By the middle of February, I routinely had nine shaman in my classes, and Julie had as many as twenty women and kids in hers. The beginning of the classes had been simple. "A makes an Ah sound" kind of lessons. Flash card drills on letter sounds and shapes led to free sweets and small gifts. The sweets became popular, and we had to cut back on them before we ran out. Competition among the women became fierce, and more than once Julie had to settle ruffled feathers. For the shaman, the competition was more subtle, and since all our meetings were secret society sessions, what was at stake was prestige. Once they could all recite the shapes and sounds of letters, we worked on two letter combinations and then three. When the day came that SeeksWisdom and DeadAndBack both read their first book, I threw a celebration amongst the secret initiates.

Seeks struggled out the words. "but Father can read big words too. Like"

Dead added for him. "Constantinople and Timbuktu!"

"HURRAY!" I yelled, and we closed the small book. I hugged both men, one after the other, and then the rest of the men came over and embraced them, one by one.

I walked over and got out the old GodLight. I held it over Dead's head, and then Seeks. Both times, amazingly, the light came on and flashed.

"Today, you men have entered the sacred land of the hidden knowledge. I welcome you as my brothers."

DeadAndBack burst out in tears, and SeeksWisdom didn't look too far behind him. The other men gathered close to share in the moment. One young man, only recently become a shaman named EyesThatSee, looked at them both with such admiration and hero worship that I could tell he was going to progress quickly.

"And now, we will mark you forever as men of the Secret Wisdom." I held up a small box of medical supplies and a needle and ink. Laying each man down on a rug on the floor, I shaved a small section of left shoulder, right over the shoulder blade. I washed the shaved section with an antiseptic, and then traced out the tattoo design in ballpoint pen. I'd previously taken the guts of a wind up toy and a bit of broken sewing needle and soldered up a tattoo gun from them. It was my first set of tattoos, and I went slowly. Perhaps I pressed too hard, but I had to stop every little while and wipe up a little blood from the tattoo.

When I was all done with the tattooing, both men had a perfectly recognizable slightly lopsided striped hat permanently marking them as wise tricksters for all to see. Later tattoos would follow this theme. I had picked the hat symbol because the character I was acknowledging was a tricky as a shaman, but still wise. It suited. The men gathered to admire the tattoos, and from that day forward, they all worked harder to learn the secret knowledge. Tattoos would become sexy for the shamans, and I knew for a fact that it'd get them laid. Julie laughed at my underhandedness, but sure as hell, she copied it for the senior women. But they ended up getting their tattoos in other places. We held another party that night. The moon was bright, up in the cold sky. We hung lanterns to illuminate the feast and since a light breeze was blowing, I had power to play music by. We danced to the sounds of the people pounding on drums in time with my mp3 player playing a Tahitian band called Fenua chanting out their own tribal cadences. The cavemen loved Fenua.

...

Julie's labor started that night, not long after we all fell asleep. Somewhere in the middle of the night, she woke up and made a small fire in the fire pit. Her water broke not long after, and she sat in the crude rocker I'd made and passed the time. Ashes woke me up before dawn to find all three of them preparing for the birth. This time we'd all been through it a couple of times and I was more emotionally ready for the fear and uncertainty. There was already a sterile laboring area prepared, and all my medical supplies were at hand.

Julie labored lightly throughout the morning, and as noon approached the heavy labor began. There wasn't a lot I could do for the pain except to be there for her. Luckily, amazingly, her labor was not terribly painful, and it was brief. WinterBlossom was born just after one PM. She came out smiling and peaceful, and Shining and I washed her clean in a tub of warm water. She got antibiotic drops in her eyes like the other babies had, and when she was cleaned up, she was as beautiful as any child I'd ever seen. WinterBlossom was born with a perfectly full head of white blond hair and a pretty strawberry birthmark on her hip. From the second I held her for the first time, I knew she'd break hearts as a teenager.

Ashes and Shining helped Julie finish her labor and delivered the placenta. There was no after birth bleeding, and she didn't even need stitches. It was an amazingly successful birth. The entire labor had lasted less than eight hours, and the last stage had been less than one hour. Even so, we were all exhausted. Julie held Winter to her breast and she latched on immediately.

Julie squealed slightly. "She has TEETH!"

We discovered that Winter had been born with two small but present tooth nubs in front. That too was unusually developed. We all slept throughout the rest of the day. Miller, River, and Spring all came back from time with their 'Aunties' the next day, and were very curious about the new baby. The house was full of life and love. I reflected on my life a little that next day.

I knew that in a couple of months, I would have been in that place for four years. When I passed out in my SUV on highway seventeen, I had been a fifty three year old man, unattached to anyone in life. I'd been married and divorced. I had no kids, and aside from a couple of elderly parents in a retirement community in Florida, when I went under the mud, there was no one to really miss me. As I looked at my life in the compound, in the new world, I realized that in many ways all my dreams of a better life had come true.

All my life, my first life, I had chased the dreams of my peers. I'd gotten a good education, married a decent women, bought a house and worked hard. I had a new car, a good career, and a flat screen television. I went on vacation to Alaska and Mexico on expensive cruise ships with a wife that I had grown distant from, and I used to ask myself if this was all there was to my life. I remembered being a boy. I remembered waking up on a summer morning and being full of fire, full of passion for what was going to happen in the next minute. I couldn't wait to eat my breakfast of sugar bombs and race out of the house to go play in the fields, dig holes, climb walls, and run screaming through the neighborhood with my friends. Every moment was full of adventure. Then somewhere in middle school I'd lost some of that passion for living when Mary Spitzen kissed Tom Black just one day after I'd given her a friends-forever ring. It died a little more when my high school guidance counselor Mrs. Blalock informed me that I just wasn't cut out to be an Astronaut, no matter how high my math scores were. And finally, by the time I was thirty, I was reconciled to a life of survival and small victories. I remember advising younger friends to be more practical and more patient in their careers.

And then, there I was. I was standing in the overhang of a wood cabin in the deep woods, dressed in ash tanned leathers, a pistol at one hip and a knife at the other. I was married to three beautiful women, and the father of four amazingly, heart-breakingly beautiful kids. I was the sole hope of civilization for hundreds, if not thousands of men and women who looked at the sky at night and were afraid of the noises in the darkness. I was young again, I was fit again, and the blood and passion of my life pounded in my body like the hammering of a drum, calling out to wildness. Enough? It was more than enough. For every moment I had cursed the beings that had sent me here, I silently apologized. For every curse, for every evil thought, for every vile aspersion I had cast on their motives, I repented. Oh, in my heart I knew that I would curse them again, probably in mere moments when something broke, or someone hurt themselves, but in that moment ... In that divine moment of grace and reconciliation with my own heart, I thanked them. I felt my heart grow three sizes that morning. I hope that you who are reading this ... I hope you have such a moment in your life every once in a while. I have become profoundly grateful for the moments of life I am granted. I hope you can experience the same.