Chapter 7

(Summer to Fall Year Two)

When I woke up the next morning, I stretched and rolled out of bed in the tent on top of the supply box. I carefully made my way past the sleeping girls and climbed down the ladder to go take a piss. When I turned around, I took one look and yelled.

"Mother Fucker!"

There, in the middle of my camp was a massive cage of iron and steel latticework. In the cage was a stainless steel and high grade iron sleeping cot, two large steel pans, and a naked, beautiful blonde woman. I walked over and looked the cage over carefully.

"Girls!" I yelled. "Get up and come look at this!"

They came climbing down from the tent.

"Isn't that amazing?" I asked, as they arrived. "Beautiful, and amazing, no?"

Bountiful, as always spoke up first. "Yes, GreatOne, she is beautiful."

I held onto the cage with both hands, and slowly opened the door. Inside, the woman began to awaken. "Amazing ... stellar." I said, completely captivated. As she began moving, I helped the blonde girl out of the cage and had her sit on a nearby log to begin to get her bearings. I turned back to the cage, admiring the beautiful stainless steel and the hinges some more. It was nearly double the current amount of high grade chromium steel I had remaining.

"This is an amazing gift, girls." I pointed to the iron lattice. "That much iron will allow me to build a foundation for our new home! And look! All this stainless steel. We must have made someone happy."

For some reason, the girls took a moment to figure out that I was happy about the new metal. Apparently, they thought I was talking about the blonde girl that had been in the cage. Odd. In any case, I was so excited that I immediately got out my tools and began to dismantle the cage. When it was fully dismantled, I'd gotten close to two tons of new iron bar and stainless angle work, and a set of three new stainless heavy duty hinges and a clever metal lockset. I spent the entire day grinning.

"Where am I?" The blonde girl said, in English. As I looked over at her, I guessed that she was somewhere between eighteen and twenty five. She had pretty green eyes, and her ass was really cute. Her tits were really big as well, and perky. As I looked at her, she squeeked a little and covered up with her arms. Shining handed her a felted robe. The woman looked at it like it was something disgusting, but still covered up with it.

"Hi" I said.

"Who the hell are you?" She looked around, visibly upset.

DeadAndBack hobbled over on his new wooden leg and looked her over.

"She speaks the god tongue, too." Said Dead to Ashes.

"You're in Earth's past, I guess. At least so far as I can figure out."

She stood up and looked around, her alarm growing. "I said, who the fuck are you, buddy? And where the hell are my clothes? And what is this place, a goddamned ranch or something? Get me a phone. Now. I have to call for a taxi."

I started laughing. After a few moments, it just got funnier, and I laughed harder. The others just looked at the both of us, from one to the other and back again. I laughed so hard I had to sit down. Tears leaked out of my eyes. The longer I laughed, the madder she got, until I could see her positively steaming. So, she started talking to the girls, asking the same questions, and then yelling at Dead.

When I got my breath back, I said. "Look, I'm sorry. I don't know who you are or how you got here, but this place ... this time." I struggled for the words. "You're in the past, I think. Earth's past, I guess."

She looked at me blankly.

"I'm Josh." I stuck out my hand, and she shook it. "Who are you?"

She paused for a long moment. "I'm Cinnamon."

I blinked at the fake sounding name. "Well, welcome to my camp, Cinnamon."

"Will he put the white mating powder on her face soon?" asked Shining to Bountiful.

"I don't know. The GodLight may need to decide." Bountiful stared at the girl.

"Her hips are wide. She will be good for breeding. The GodLight should choose her." Shining nodded in agreement with her own comment.

"Where's the goddamned phone?" Cinnamon asked me.

"Don't have one."

"Do you have any clothes? Where's the bathroom?"

"Yep, Shining will get you some fatigues. And there's no bathroom. The slit-trench is over there." I pointed to the latrine.

"You're kidding me?"

I told Shining to bring Cinnamon a T-shirt and a pair of fatigue pants.

"Nope." I smiled, but her language and attitude was starting to get on my nerves a little.

She stood up and kind of walked around just a little, but very gingerly, trying not to walk on any mud or leaves in her bare feet.

"Umm, do you have any goddamned shoes? Hello?" She looked at me, annoyed. "And I'll need to shower off this fucking mud. Where's the shower?"

"Ashes, bring her some boots from the supply, if we have any that fit. If not, never mind."

I turned back to her. "The cold water tub is over there. Pour it in that bucket on top to have a cold shower."

"Cold water?" She looked daggers at me. "You're fucking kidding me!"

"Nope."

She stormed over to the shower, washed her feet off in the stall, and then put on the boots she'd been brought.

"Who are these women anyway, and why are all their teeth bad?" She yelled at me while dressing in the stall. "And they smell too. Are they foreigners? They look like shit."

"Those are my wives." I said.

Just a second later, I heard a snicker from her, and then she laughed. "Where am I, Hee Haw?"

And at that moment, it became enough. I walked over to the shower stall, reached in, and dragged her out by her hair. She screamed "WHAT THE FUCK?" at me, but I ignored her. As I dragged her toward the main gate, I stripped the clothes off of her, ripping the T shirt in the process. I pushed her down and pulled the boots and pants off of her. When she was naked again, I shoved her out of the main gate and closed it.

Ignoring the screaming and yelling that was coming from the gate, I went back to the supply dump and grabbed a few supplies. I motioned to Bountiful to follow me, and I grabbed the rifle. We opened the gate, and I grabbed cinnamon again. It took some slapping, some dragging, and some yelling, but I got her to walk in front of me all the way to the old cave. Once we were there, I yelled out to the camp.

"Hey SeeksWisdom" I said. He sat up from grinding up something disgusting in a wooden bowl. "Yes, GreatOne?"

"I'm giving you this woman. Her name is Cinnamon, and she comes from my land in the Sky. She's mean though. Don't kill her. I'll bring over more food for her, but you train her in the ways of the people, okay?"

He looked her over and smiled. "Her hips are wide, good for bearing children."

I nodded. "Probably, but I think she will be too angry to fuck. And, she might kill you in your sleep if you try."

He frowned. "Well, can she at least scrape hides?"

"Only if you teach her."

He looked a tiny bit put out. "Well, if you say so, GreatOne."

I turned to her. "Okay Cinnamon, look."

She slapped my hand away from her arm and yelled. "Get off of my ass, FUCKER! Wait until the cops get here!"

"I'm leaving you here with them. Don't follow me back." I pulled the pistol. "You insulted me and my wives. You're not welcome until you're civilized ... Or rather, you're not welcome until you're polite."

I walked away slowly, not turning my back on her. She made one run at me, hands raised, but I merely had to dodge aside and she fell in the mud. Then she started to cry. We left.

Every once in a while that summer, SeeksWisdom would come by and I'd give him some extra food and we'd talk about WrinkledEvil and Cinnamon. Cinnamon ran away a couple of times, but each time she got rescued before being eaten by something big. When she finally saw a smilodon hunting out on the plain, something in her attitude changed. With WrinkledEvil around to push her face into the mud every time she was insulting or rude or stupid, I had to laugh as Seeks told me the stories. Frankly, I didn't care all that much. It may make me an insensitive bastard, but still ... she was fed and clothed by them. She learned to survive, mostly. It may have been hard for her, but hell ... it had been hard for me too. I saw her a couple of times, out gathering with the women. Often as not, she'd have a black eye or a busted lip. She was starting to look as dirty and smelly as the rest of my family. I had to smile.

Meanwhile, back at the compound, I was one busy prospective daddy. In order to not use up all of my precious iron rod when I started in on the family house I didn't pour a foundation. Instead, I dug and filled a set of six foot deep footings. Each footing came up sixteen inches above the ground, and I mounted large oak blocks on top of each footing. Above the footings, I mounted a set of big oak beams. I used a big hand powered drill and glued in pegs to lay them up straight and square. The hide glue worked well, and was very water tight.

The house I laid out was designed to be expanded. I started with a simple square design, forty feet on a side. The roof would be held up with a series of massive beams, fourteen by fourteen. I had decided to set the beams in place green, and let them dry in side, protected from the weather. I figured I would have a better chance at getting them to dry straight that way. The floor beams and the wall uprights I machined on the mill, but I only minimally processed the roof beams to get two flat sides. I used the wall-building 'A' frame to help me place the beams, and DeadAndBack was a huge help working as my ground floor spotter. Once the beams were up, it was very fast work to cut and place long oak roof boards. I left a ¼" gap between the boards to allow for expansion. And I smiled as I mitered and glued the crown boards in place. Once the roof boards were up, I broke out one of the big rolls of four mm. Visquine plastic and tacked it down on the roof. The plastic would substitute for tar paper well enough, and as long as the roof boards were ventilated underneath, the roof wouldn't rot. Next came splitting the shakes. I'd read about this, and spent a lot of time with an axe over the last year, so I was very familiar with logging, but making shakes requires a good eye.

To make roofing shakes, the books all told me that I need to work with straight grained logs, and to practice splitting them with a froe. I had a couple of those in storage, so I broke them out and started practicing. It took me several hours to get the hang of splitting the shakes off the log chunks, and I never did learn to see which logs had good grain ahead of time. Regardless though, after a few hours of practice, I began producing usable roofing shakes. After two long days of work, I had more than enough set aside. I bundled them up in crossed pairs and let them season. As they dried, I went back to work on the house.

For the walls, I had long ago decided to use an approach called wattle and daub. The 'wattles' are basketlike woven squares made out of reeds and branches, then cushioned with fill material. By dividing the walls into small segments with beams and vertical segments, I could make almost all of the wattles to be the same size. Once the wattles were built and fitted, then we could make up the daub. Daub is like the plastering step. You make up a thick clay that has been expanded with sawdust or other binders, then plaster it in over the wattles. Once it dried, I could then seal and whitewash it with a lime powder and glue solution. Most of the wattle and daub work would be stuff that I could farm out to the girls. So, I roughed out the door and window openings and left the detail work to the women to work on.

Meanwhile, I could go back to work on the mill. There remained lots of work to be done on the water wheel, on the mill building, and on the mill itself. In order to make all my plans work as I wanted, what I was going to need to build was a large horizontal shaft that would be the main driveshaft for all of the equipment I would run off of it. Along its horizontal length, it would start at the vertical drive point, and then run the length of the main mill. It would then leave the mill building itself near the ceiling and run outside to the entrance of the other building I would build eventually, the wood working shed. By making all the equipment run off of one shaft, I would be able to avoid multiple gearings, each of which would lose me efficiency and energy. I'd decided to build the horizontal shaft out of barrel style staves, glued up along its length. I spent a considerable amount of time building that shaft and gluing it up, but when it was built and mounted, I was quite happy with it. I was able to suspend it in a pair of large ball bearing races that were indoors and protected from the weather. As long as I kept them relatively clean, they would be a highly efficient way to transfer the energy. Where the ball bearing races went, I built some bracing temporarily, knowing that I would replace it with Y braces hanging from the roof rafters once the mill and woodworking sheds were built. The mill building itself would not need to be enclosed, as there would be very little grain to mill this season.