Chapter 3

(Late Summer through Winter of Year One)

With that determination made, I entered onto the hardest working week of my life. I'd begun to lose a lot of fat and had started to feel better since I was working from dawn to dusk most days, felling trees, dragging game, and playing poke the cervix with three women. But that improvement wasn't even close to how damned hard I ended up working. In order to bring the river over to me, I had to split and dredge out about fifteen feet by six feet by three of granite boulder, and then dam the flow of the stream to use the new channel. At the time, I thought I had a handle on it.

There are a few ways to break up boulders. One is to use a diamond tipped rotary hammer drill to make the demolition holes, and then either use TNT or a similar explosive to crack the boulder open, or use one of the newer chemical reagents that expand and crystallize, cracking the boulder open. A second way is to drill the hole by hand, using a steel star drill and a maul, and then crack the boulder with explosives or with a set of tools called wedges and feathers. The final way is to use expansive wood wedges that you soak in water to expand existing cracks. Then you move the broken out rock by hand.

So, I had the three girls take turns watching me work, looking for predators, and tending a fire to keep them away. While they busied themselves working on hides and similar Neolithic occupations, I went to work on the granite in my way. A fair amount of the surface layers and some deeper stuff I could crack out with the wedge and feathers. Basically, first you insert the 'feathers' into a crack. The feathers are sort of half round, long pieces of steel that narrow down and have an 'L' shaped handle. You drive the feathers into the crack, setting them pretty firmly, then you push the steel wedge down between the two feathers, forcing pressure on the crack. Then you use the maul to pound the living hell out of the wedge, until the rock gives way. Then you clear out the broken rock and repeat. If you're lucky, there's a big deep crack, and when the rock splits off, you can break it down further without much effort. The big boulder I had to work my way past was nestled in place between two larger fingers of granite. Once I had broken it up, the really hard part would be done. I was lucky enough to find several large cracks in the periphery of the boulder, but none in the middle section. I spent several really long, tough days cracking that rock out, then smashing cracked out portions into smaller pieces, and carrying the pieces out of the way. It sucked. My hands were damned near numb, my back ached, I felt used and abused.

When all of the easy parts had been done, I was left with a pretty damned big and monolithic hunk of granite. I'd cleared away both sides for several feet, but the stream would overflow and take a more southerly route, even if I dammed it up above, unless I could get that boulder broken down. In the end, I spent three days of my life holding a maul in one hand, a steel 'star drill' in the other, and hitting the drill, then turning it a quarter turn, and repeating that ... again and again and again until I had a deep hole into the granite. When the hole got deep enough, I had to switch out to a longer drill and continue. Ten holes along one side, and ten along the other. When those three days were over, I was so sore and numb, I took two days off, ate painkillers, and felt sorry for myself. The girls showed surprisingly nice levels of sympathy, but I suspect that they kept me in bed longer to avoid the river and their baths.

Almost spent some time with me on my next trip out to the rock, trying to understand what the holy hell I was doing, working so hard to break rocks. From her point of view, and it seemed pretty damned valid to me, her man had gone stupid, and had decided to break big rocks into smaller ones as a hobby. I walked back and forth, between the river and the depression, pointing out that the fingers of rock would aim the river at the depression, if only that boulder was gone. She looked dubious, so I walked back and forth some more, waving my arms and going BOOM here and there, and then making whoooooosh noises and running around some more. She just stood there and looked at me, then at the sun, then at me, then tried to get me to sit under a tree and drink water. Sunstroke my ass. When I dropped a blasting charge down the holes, ran the fuses together, and then led her off, she continued to look dubious. We walked back to camp, gathered the other two, and I led them to the boulder. I put the red light of Truth and Justice on my head, and turned it on. Leading them a few feet back, I lit the fuses. I'll take a moment to tell you that I was using Primasheet and safety fusing from Norabel, with the booster charges. So, I led them back a few feet, as I said, lit the fuse, and then stood up proud and held my arms out wide. If you're of a certain age, you've seen the old movie "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid". In that movie, their explosives use on a safe during a train robbery was so overdone that it blew up the railroad car, the safe, and the money ... got the picture? Okay well. See, I didn't up until that moment really know how much explosive charge to use. So, I just made the rolls as big as the holes would hold. This was a significant mistake.

Ka-Fucking-Blammo, the boulder turned into nine billion hunks of flying razor sharp rock, I threw myself on top of the girls, we got a crapload of small cuts and contusions from the rock, the air was filled with a falling rain of granite debris and dust, and we all went rolling into the depression in a screaming pile. We all lay there concussed for a minute or two, and then the girls all looked at each other, and then me, and started jabbering. They yelled at each other for a few seconds, and Titties seemed to make a valid point of some kind. Then, they all looked at me and Almost started running back to the camp at about ten billion miles an hour. I can't run after her, the other girls started patting me on the sides and fawning on me, looking so scared it's actually kinda weird, and jabbered at me the whole time. I'd gone deaf as a post, and my ears were bleeding slightly. I picked up the semi-dented Red Light of Doom, put it in my pack, and Almost came running back carrying something. The other two looked at me, said something in jabber, and then they all ran up over the river bank and jumped into the river.

When I walked over the top of the embankment, all three were in the river, stripping as fast as they could, and beginning to soap up. Then, they washed each other off, and started in on the shaving. Of course, they all cut themselves on the legs and armpits and coochies, but I didn't say a word. Apparently, my ladies had decided that I was going to blow them the fuck up, like that big assed rock, if they didn't get more obedient about cleanliness. After a moment I started laughing. I laughed so damn hard I lost my breath. When they were all clean and shaved and cut up, they came over and started in on kissing on me. They were extremely happy to help me wash off in the river, and when we made it back to the tent, all three were more than willing to screw the hell out of me. They may have had the completely wrong idea, but I was gonna be damned if I was going to say a word about it. While I was attempting to push Titties' cervix out of her spine, the rest of the family all showed up at the camp and lots of hooting and gesturing began. After a moment, Shy walked out of the tent, stood on the edge of the supply box, and just out and out yelled at them. They looked astonished at what they heard, a few wandered off, and Shy yelled some more. My impression of the conversation was something like.

"Look you idiots, this crazy bastard just caused a giant earthquake and made the earth go BOOM. We're desperately trying to screw him into submission! Get out of here and wish us luck. Oh yeah, and this weird pervert has a thing for us all being wet and smelling like dead flowers. Back away slowly and don't make him mad. Shoo!"

The next day, when I made it back down to the cut off at the river, an extremely slow flow of damp mud had started to creep toward the blasted rock gully from the river embankment. I knew right then that I was running quickly out of time to get the big rock fragments out of the new river bed, and I worked damned hard that day to make progress. That night, all three girls were clean and pretty again. It was amazing. Apparently, the threat of being blown to hell had a good effect on them. I resolved to remember this. I used the logging saw to cut a few logs down to a manageable eight foot length, and cut a point into the end. I used the heavy maul to drive these log spikes into the river just at the bend. I drove them in at an angle, to resist the flow of the river, and spaced them a foot apart. It was a lot of work to drive them into the riverbed, and I had to stop from time to time to get warm at the fire. The river was turning very cold on me. Once I had an arc of the log spikes driven in, I started placing smaller hunks of rock from the boulder into the gaps. This made a coarse dam. As the water flowed down, it brought vegetation and debris with it, and I counted on this filling the smaller gaps over time. Once the dam was roughly placed, I went to work on the clay mud between the fingers of granite. It would be pleasing to report that the river opened up with a single roar, but that didn't happen. All that happened is that the depression started to run with thick mud, then wet mud, then muddy water, then just plain water. Back at the dam, the water had only dropped a little. I spent another two days back filling behind the pilings with large rubble and gravel from the boulder. This eventually led to ninety five percent of the river being diverted down the depression. It was a big deal to me to be able to walk back to camp and walk along the new course of the river for most of the way. I'd succeeded in bringing the river within fifty feet of the camp, and where the depression flattened out was downhill from my camp, leaving us high and dry.

This called for a celebration. When I walked back to camp that first free flowing day, Titties had been with me, and she called out to Shy and Almost. They were all interested to see the river flow close to camp, but after I led them back to the river bend, pointed at the dam and hooted some, then made more whooshing noises, and then led them to camp, the light went on for all of them. They all figured out that their man had murdered trees, blown the earth up, destroyed a boulder, and moved a river. This seemed to impress them to no end. For the next couple of days, my girls led their family on guided tours of the new river. The family seemed pretty amazed as well.

About this time I figured it was closing in on the beginning of November. The nights were getting longer, and it was raining or drizzling more often than not. The nights were getting colder, and I could tell that it would not be too much longer before the cold really started setting in. I was beginning to run out of time before winter. I sat down with a pen and paper and began to review where I was in being able to get through the winter. Now that the river had been diverted, water wasn't going to be an issue, and given the fuels I had access to, burning firewood would remain possible all winter long. On the food front, I had plenty of MREs for my small family, and a fair amount of dried meat and fish stored up. If hard winter was going to last from December through March, four months for four people would roughly be fifteen hundred meals. We weren't going to be doing a lot of hard labor all winter long, so each meal didn't have to be more than about 1200 calories on average. That worked out to about 2 million kilo calories. Each pound of venison has about 850 kilocals in it, so a pure meat diet would require about twenty five hundred pounds of dressed out meat. Each medium deer carcass would dress out to about sixty to seventy percent of its gross weight. That was going to be something like fifty to seventy pounds of meat per deer, and something approaching near a thousand pounds of meat per auroch. The real issue was going to be preserving all that meat. One approach that the family had apparently been using was the ages old method of drying over a warm fire into jerky. This works of course, but pickling and packing also work. The problem with pickling was how much salt was going to be required ... literally hundreds of pounds. Salt in this place and day was rare and difficult to come by. In order to make any amount of salt, I'd need to find a seep. A seep is some spot where the spring water tastes very salty. I hadn't found one yet, and we didn't seem to be near a salt sea or ocean.

So, we were going to need a lot of meat, probably two or three fully dressed out cows plus another twenty or so deer. That was for us. For the family, who I was certain was going to come around hungry and mooching, I'd want to double that amount. I wanted to try packing the meat in charcoal. I'd read about the process, basically heating it up over an open flame, searing the outside, then packing it on a bed of at least an inch of charcoal, and packing an inch of charcoal on all sides. A couple of thousand pounds of meat was going to require a large storage spot, and it would need a lot of charcoal. I had plenty of room in the supply box to store the jerked meat, but not enough room to pack much of the charcoal preserved meat. I was going to need to dig a storage pit.

The next stuff is just all kinds of boring. I dug a pit, about nine feet down, with sloped sides, and ten feet across. I lined the floor with shards of broken granite, and I made the top out of dropped trees. I covered the trees with a thick layer of branches, then I back covered the top with a compacted mantle of dirt a couple of feet thick. That was a lot of work. While I was getting all that done, I also built a charcoal cooker, which isn't that hard to make. It's basically just an air deprived vessel that's filled with wood and then heated. The wood turns to charcoal when it can't combust. I used a couple of the titanium boxes lashed together for the smoker, and I could turn out a couple of hundred pounds of the stuff at a go. Smash that up into a powder, roll and then pack the braised meat in the charcoal, cover with plastic tarps, and then back fill with dirt. I kept the entire family busy with the dead moo. Every once in a while, I'd spot a porker and I was damned certain to add those tasty little bastards to the larder.

Snow was starting to fall fairly often by the time I had a lot of meat laid in, and I could see ice starting to crust on the relocated river. It was time to make winter camp. I hadn't made the progress I wanted to on the wall, being all by myself, so I punted. What I ended up doing was clearing out a large space in the box itself, and building a fire grate in there, making a ventilated top and crude chimney out of hand worked sheet steel. I laid logs at a slant over the roofing, just in case of a really heavy snowfall, I didn't want the roof collapsing. I took down the tent of course, and moved what supplies I could into what I thought of as safe spots.

I had a lot of dead moo near me, a lot of dropped timber that had aged a month or more, a local supply of water, and a lot of firepower. It was going to have to do.

...

The first real snow fall was a heavy one, and came down wet and sticky. The temperature dropped and a lot of that snow turned to ice. Just as the snow started a slow melt, it got colder and more snow dropped, this time dry and stingy. I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I didn't much feel like hunting, and aside from spending some time cooking, and showing the girls how I liked to cook, there wasn't a lot to do other than fetch water every so often. A project I started during this time was felting. "What the hell is felting?" you may ask. Well, if you carefully cut the hair off of a skin, comb it out and lay it left to right, then do the same in another layer going top to bottom, and grease up each layer with soap, and repeat this a few times, you can then pound and rub the hell out of that soggy mass. When you're done, let it dry out well and you have a good, warm, thick felt. But, I can hear you saying, you need soap for that! True, and I didn't want to use my good soap. So, I had to practice making crude soaps. That stuff was a smelly, evil mess. You start with wood ash, from a fire, and put a screen at the bottom of a barrel. Line that with some straw and then add the ash. Over that you pour some water, and out comes wood lye. Wood lye. Jesus, I ruined two good sets of pants and shirts on that crap, I also got a few nasty burns from it. Anyway, once you have wood lye in a ceramic vessel, then you move to rendering the fat. Rendering the fat is one stinky, horrible business. You boil all your animal fats, drippings, etc with equal parts water, and let it cool slowly. That yellowish cake on the top that's left is the rendered fats. Then you boil the lye and fat together in the right proportion — and that takes a lot of experimenting, until it boils up in a froth. When that cools down, if your proportions are right, and mostly mine weren't, you have a mushy brown liquid soap left. But, damned if that stuff doesn't foam up and clean stuff. It also works like magic to make felt.

Now, why was I so damned set on making felt? Well, I wanted good fur felted blankets to be available, come spring, and the best way I knew to get past the furs and hides stage was to go to felt. When the girls figured out that I was spending all this time making soap, they sort of talked to each other about it again, and I could tell that it just confirmed their view that I was some kind of a soap pervert. However, I did have one thing going for me. After about a month of winter setting in, and once I'd gotten some soap worked out, I set up a regime of warm water sponge baths from a boiled kettle once a week. I'd gone through a long shit storm of stinky lye boiling and fat boiling and rendering and what not, making terrible messes, and failing a lot. When I started being able to reliably produce decent soap that foamed, but wasn't too harsh, I was able to get back to making sure all the dishes got cleaned every night. Following that, I set up a bathing stall outside the main entrance. It wasn't much of a stall at all really, just a flat spot that sloped away from the supply box, and that had a heavy split wood roof to it. When the first semi-warm winter day came along, say maybe 37 to 40 plus degrees, I grabbed Shy and dragged her outside. I set up one of the titanium boxes on a small fire near the entrance, and I warmed up some water in it. She didn't put up much of a fuss when I stripped her, but the sensation of warm soapy water all over her skin contrasted against the cold outdoor air seemed to really wake her up, and she made cooing noises at how great it felt. When I washed her hair for her, I thought she was gonna melt. I wrapped her in one of my heavy towels, and sent her back inside. Long before the next batch of warm water was ready, Almost and Titties were out and helping me. After that day, we got a bath in every week or so. It was generally followed by some friendly sex.

Anyway, back to my point ... After I'd gotten that process underway a couple of times, the rest of the family came to visit. We're all hanging out under the lean to connected to the box, a light snow coming down, hooting around the fire, when what should I see, but the wind shifts, and I see Almost get a whiff of FartsALot, and in an extremely magical moment for me, she wrinkles up her nose and moves closer to me! I'd won, you bastards. Score one for good smelling women and hygiene over gross stinking cave creeps. Later, I heard Titties and Almost talking. From that day forth, the hygiene in my camp stayed improved.

Winter passed slowly, and I began to learn a lot of cave talk. The vocabulary wasn't huge, and the syntax wasn't all that complicated, but it had its weirdnesses. Here's one for ya. Most of their speech is in present tense, with very little past tense usage, and almost no future tense. Also, talking about the future was difficult. Basically, you could talk about yesterday ... that's any time other than today that has already happened, today, or tomorrow. Tomorrow was anything that hasn't happened yet. English isn't good at expressing it, so I'll try to give some examples. After this, when you read them talking and it sounds odd ... too bad.

Almost says, talking about her father. "Yesterday the auroch walk over him." I say, "The yesterday the auroch walk over your father, you are this big?" I hold my hand up to her full height. She says. "Yesterday I am this tall." And she holds her hand up for about the size of a ten year old. Odd, right?

Shy says. "Tomorrow I sleep in the dirt with you." This is extremely romantic talk for Shy. What is she saying? She's saying. "When you die, I want to be buried alive at your side." Nice.

Titties says. "Today we hunt auroch, bring home new skin, I make you new pants." This is not Titties talking about 'today' today. This is Titties talking about something that needs doing. Someday, maybe today, maybe not. Who can tell? She's not concerned, there's no rush.

Now, for names. Titties' name is Janika, pronounced Ja-nI-qwa. What does that mean? Two guesses. It means Bountiful. Hello? Bountiful? Titties. Yes, her name is Titties. What about Almost? Her name is Fahre, pronounced "Faire". And that means? Color of ashes — Blonde. And finally, Shy. Her name is Antas, that's pronounced An-Tas. And Antas means Shining. So, I missed Shy for shining. Two out of three aint bad.