Chapter 15

(May Of Year Four to August of Year Four)

I got together a group of seven scouts and myself and set off immediately. I had with me QuietlySneaky from the old cave as my right hand hominid. It took us two days of full-out hiking to make it to the outpost. We'd left in the early morning of the first day, and we arrived just after dusk on the second day. We approached the outpost very quietly, but all that caution was unnecessary. When we got there, what we found that had so disturbed the men of the outpost was yet another gift from my 'hosts'. There, not more than twenty yards from the outpost building was another steel and iron cage. This one was huge however, and it contained nothing less than two pairs of male and female Percheron draft horses. The men of the outpost had neglected to water them, out of total fear of the 'monsters', but had also neglected to spear them to death, so we were able to water the horses and save them. The cage came equipped with more of the steel basins, just like the prior cages, but the horses had drunk the water dry over the last two days and looked very much the worse for wear. When I reached through the bars to refill the basin, one of the horses kind of 'whickered' at me a little, but there wasn't much other reaction from them.

In between running around trying to get them watered and fed, I didn't have a lot of time to be very elated, but oh man was I. Once everything settled down a little, I tried to examine the horses and the crates that came with them. As far as I could tell the horses were already used to humans, as they demonstrated no fear of me or the other men. Inside the cage, the horses were tied to their stalls by some kind of bridle thing over their heads. I'm going to stop and remind you right now that I didn't know crap about horses. I didn't know what the various pieces of tack were, or how to use them. I didn't know how to ride a horse, or even how to saddle one. Clear? Something else too, Percherons are big. I mean that these horses were BIG. The line of the back on these massive beasts was at head height, almost six foot tall. And, they weren't skinny. Those lovely bastards were massively muscled work horses.

Anyway, using some spare supplies and some timber from the construction site at the outpost, we were able to lash together a rough corral for the horses to walk into. All the cave fools were scared to death of the giant monster horses, so it was up to me to move them. When I opened the cage and approached the first horse, it didn't even blink an eye.

I put my hand on its hind-quarters and said something useful, like.

"There now, boy."

The horse didn't respond much, other than to turn its head a little and look at me. So, screwing up my courage, I entered the stall and untied the head-halter thing from the stall. The horse just looked at me. So, I stepped backward. The horse stepped backwards. I took a couple more steps, and so did the horse. When I was out of the cage, I almost expected it to bolt off and drag me along. It didn't, it just stood there and looked at me. So, I ran my hand over his muzzle. He made that sound again, and then pushed his nose into my hand for more rubbing. That was one tame horse. So, I led him to the makeshift corral. He walked right in and stood there. I tied his bridle to a post, and he stood there. Then I led the other horses out, one by one. They were all as gentle as lambs. More gentle. The lambs nibbled and bit a little. These giants just wanted to be rubbed down and fed. I swear to god if they could have purred, they would have.

In the cage were more crates. In the crates was some horse tack, bridles and bits and stuff like that. There were also more books, mostly on farm management and managing livestock. Some of it was even stuff I had access to already. As I looked it over, it was almost as if the 'people' running this little experiment had a set protocol for the gifts, and what I needed or wanted didn't even seem to matter. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me. For all I knew the 'gifts' were fully automated, and simply waited on me achieving certain goals toward long term survival. The horses would make my life easier, but didn't contribute directly to our survival. On the earlier gifts, the same rule seemed to hold true as well. Hell, even Julie didn't contribute directly to my survival, though she and all the other gifts contributed to the quality of life tremendously.

Once the horses were watered and fed, the men and I journeyed back to the main encampment. I led and rode all four horses one after the other, and they were as placid and calm as any horse I'd ever been near. They seemed to positively thrive on my attention. Each night I hobbled them and kept them as close to camp as possible. I didn't sleep much, fearing predators in the night, but fire and the men kept the predators at bay. When we arrived at camp, the stinky bastards all basically freaked out. Apparently very few of them had ever seen horses, and I had to do a whole song and dance about horses not being food. It helped that I rode one into camp. Me being suddenly nine feet tall and having six legs, four on the ground and two growing out of my sides seemed to impress them. Very few had the courage to check the horses out. I led them to the smaller pasture, and I had a couple of the carpenters get to work on a large stable for them at night.

I swear to god that those horses were smarter than many of my stupider stinkers. Each night after work or grazing they made their own way in to the lean-to stable, and were very content to be the target of cave man training on how to clean them and shoe them. Because of their presence, I was able to bring the plows and other horse drawn stuff out of storage and mess around with it. They sped up the dragging of logs, the dragging of clay and tile, the plowing of the pastures, you name it. They were a freaking godsend. I am certain that I drilled the value I placed on those horses into a lot of brains that summer. They were treated with a lot of reverence by the higher ranking stinky bastards. Once I even told a group of guys that I valued the horses more than them, and that if they didn't keep the stalls clean they'd end up in the river as fish food. Don't ask me if I meant that ... I probably did at the time.

...

In order to make the move to the sea happen, I had known for a long time that we'd need wagons. The design I settled on was a modified version of the prairie schooner, the kind of wagon that American settlers had used to cross the continent. These wagons were flat bottomed, and water tight to allow them to be floated. They had large hoops over the wagon bed that were covered with cloth to protect the interior from the elements. They also had a large drop leaf style rear end that could be covered with a fly and used almost as a tent when not in use as the family table. My revised design incorporated all of those elements, but I decided to change the design of the axle and suspension. I wanted to use a partially-floating axle suspension made by forging a pair of bowed leaf-springs, and then welding them together into a sort of oval shape. The axle would ride on the bottom side and the bed of the wagon on the top side. I'd also decided to go to the extra work of having independent suspension for each of the four wheels instead of two long axles. The way I looked at it, the spare parts would actually be easier to manage than having a bunch of long and heavy axles.

Since we didn't have cloth yet, the coverings would be our thinnest split hide leather treated and stretched to a damned near transparent rawhide. It wouldn't be waterproof, but the hoop design of the roof would shed most of the water quickly. Using the split axle design allowed me to set up the wagons with a lower than expected center of gravity, and I also made the wagons wider than the originals. All of these design changes made the first couple of wagons much harder to fabricate, but proved to be worth it on the trail. After getting a couple of wagons built, I did change the design to add a couple of big coil springs inset between the leaf springs above the rear axles. This led to a much smoother ride on the big wagons. In order to haul the wagons, we'd need draft animals, and there was no way in hell I was going to use the amazing percherons to do that. No, we needed oxen. Lacking proper domestic oxen in this day and age, I was going to have to use aurochs. This then led to the great auroch operatic-massacre.

The auroch operatic-massacre began innocuously enough with the building of feed pens and a stout corral. We covered one end of it with a decent shake roof, and made the corral itself relatively small. Once all was ready, and once we had plenty of wild grasses hayed and safe in a drying shed, we went auroch hunting. We killed off the bulls and cows and captured the youngest possible calves that weren't still nursing. Once captured, all but one of the males were gelded. Now see, this is where the operatic massacre part happens. That may sound like not too big a deal, but let me tell you, the difference between explaining what we were going to do to my crew of stinky morons and actually doing it is the difference between explaining a ballet, and watching the Three Stooges do Swan Lake.

A couple of the bravest men piled onto a small auroch steer, and tried to wrestle it to the ground. It resisted, and dragged some poor fool off into the pasture with a couple of men following. They went off and wrestled the steer. Meanwhile, a couple more guys got the idea, but they RUSHED the small herd of cattle, provoking a mini-stampede. The rest of the morons all started shrieking and running around, making the cattle more upset. If you can imagine terrified midget clowns shrieking and running mindlessly around, chased by upset but mostly harmless cattle, you're in the right ball park. In the end, we got it done. I got kicked in the chest once, possibly breaking a rib, certainly bruising it, and one poor bastard will wear a hoof mark on his dented forehead for as long as he lives ... but he doesn't seem to mind much. Hell, that poor guy doesn't seem to mind anything much anymore.

Finally though, brute strength and rope won out over hooves and bellowing, and we got our newly gelded males out to pasture with the young females. We kept them harnessed all spring and summer long, and trained them to be led to water and to food. It was a long time working out, but it did. Also, we had to de-horn them, both male and female before the summer ended, but it didn't prove to be as big a cluster-fuck as the gelding had been. We'd learned by that time to use a cattle press to hold them in place as we worked.

I stood by the corral one day and listed to one of the younger guys lie to a couple of girls.

"Yes, I helped the GreatOne." He pointed out the cattle.

"What did you do, HairInKnots?"

"GreatOne showed us how to punch the auroch in the fuck-sack."

"Oooh."

"Yes! GreatOne made me a Cow-Poker."

When I told Julie that he was proud of punching a cow in the fuck-sack, she about died.

By late summer, the 'tamed' aurochs had even spent a little time pulling sledges as preparation for the wagons. It would do. In addition, we ended up with a lot of good moo out of the deal. It was a win for everyone involved, except the dead moo of course. Another step of preparation we had to take was extremely time consuming. We had to forge a trail south to our new home, scout a location, and prepare for our arrival. In order to make the trip as safe as possible, we were going to need a set of supply caches along the way that would provide access to clean water and safe food. The outpost we built was about forty miles along the way, but our goal was closer to a thousand miles. If we built caches every forty to fifty miles, we'd have to build twenty of them. Frankly, to me twenty caches didn't seem like too many.

The trail work that spring and summer was long, hot, difficult, and exhausting for the men involved. I had wagons to build and work to get done on other projects, so I had to entrust the scouting work and trail blazing work to Quietly and Farts. Before I could send them out, I had to train them to read a map and use a compass. It wasn't easy.

"Okay Quietly..." I said to him, as we started the training for the trip. "This is a compass."

"Hello, A-Compass." He said, smiling and raising his hand in greeting to the compass.

"It doesn't talk."

"Oh. I am sorry that you cannot talk, A-Compass."

I shook my head. "See the red mark?"

"Yes, GreatOne, I see the red mark."

"Good, now hold the compass in your hand, like..." I set it flat on his palm. "Like this."

"Yes, GreatOne."

"See the red mark on the needle?"

"There's a needle here?"

"Yes, there ... see?"

"Will it stick me? I don't like your needles. You stuck me with a needle once, and it hurt."

"No, this needle is stuck behind the glass, see?" I tapped the glass cover.

"Good. I don't like you needle." He said to the compass.

I sighed. "Okay, see the needle?"

"Yes, GreatOne. I see the evil needle."

"Argh."

"It's name is Argh?"

"No."

"Oh, okay. What's its name?"

"Compass."

"Oh, I knew that, Great One."

I sighed again. "See that there's a red mark on that needle?"

"Yes, it's blood from some person the evil needle has stuck, isn't it?" He glowered at the needle on the compass.

"No, it's not. It's paint."

"Oh? GreatOne, why is the evil needle pretending to be covered in blood?"

"Fuck. No, it's not pretending. It's just fucking paint, okay?"

"Okay, but I still don't like it Great One."

I could feel my eyes rolling. "See that the needle sort of points to that hill over there?"

"It points? How, it doesn't have fingers!"

"ARGH."

"Argh!" He agreed, getting into the spirit of things with me.

That went on for a long time. Eventually he sort of got the concept of North. How?

"Far away, there is a land of ice. In the center of that land is a pole. A giant pole."

"Like a sacred tree, GreatOne?"

"Yes, but only bigger than the biggest tree."

"Ah, then it is truly big."

"Yes, Quietly. And this compass comes from that land, and wants to go home."

"OH! And that is why the evil red needle that pretends to be wounded so that I will pity it and set it free and then it will poke me and run away, but you are too clever and have it trapped in glass ... that's why it points to the PoleOfNorth?"

"Yes, that's why."

"Oh, now I understand, GreatOne."

Then I tried to explain a map. Jesus. I am such an idiot. Quietly is one of the smart ones, and still he ended up standing on the map, seeing if it would magically transport him to the land near the ocean. Later, he wanted to eat the fucking thing to gain its magical power to predict the terrain. Even later on, after he had 'sort of' gotten the idea of the lines on the paper being correlated to the terrain ahead, he developed a superstitious fear of the process and wanted to sacrifice animals to the map before exposing it to the evil influence of the blood-covered-evil-needle-seeking-pole-of-north. That night I came into the family house and just rested my head in Julie's lap as she rocked and fed Winter.

"He tried to eat my map, Julie."

"Who did?"

"Quietly."

"Oh, he wanted its mojo?"

"Yes."

"That's nothing darling. One of the women in camp sacrifices prairie dogs to the windmill."

"Dare I ask why?"

"She has noticed that when the windmill becomes angry and stops waving its arms, the wind stops blowing. So, in order to keep the WindGod happy, she sacrifices to it, and the wind blows again."

"Ah." What else can you say?

Eventually, after spending some time hiking around with Quietly and Farts, they began to get the idea of using a map to navigate. The both could read a tiny bit, and I made detailed tracings of the 'gift' maps for them to use. As an initial test, I set them the task of navigating using the maps to places I could spot them from the windmill tower or from the outpost in the mountains. When they passed all of those tests, I gave them initiation tattoos, just like I had for the shamans. The scout initiation tattoo was compass legend with N S E W stenciled just outside crossed arrows. They were very proud and showed off to the ladies.