Chapter 90: A Long Cold Winter

The next morning the hunters and bush beaters ate a quick breakfast and we loaded up in the truck and wagon. I drove to the fork of where Sotar’s Stream and the Mari River merged and dropped off the beaters. We then drove back upstream to the entrance of the swampy area where the hogs lived. We ventured in about 50 yards and found good perches to shoot from. Meanwhile the beaters had been making a lot of noise and beating the bushes and trees with some rebar I had given them for beaters and as a walking stick to help them get through the swampy areas.

Not long after we got set, a couple of sows with piglets came by, but I had everyone hold their fire. We wanted these to grow up to be bigger ones for later. About a half hour later we could tell the beaters were getting closer and two hogs came out of the brush and three shots later we had 2 dead hogs. Suddenly about twenty hogs came out running all over. I think we wounded several, but we killed four for sure. I called off the beaters and told them to go to the stream and get across and we would pick them up after we dragged the 6 hogs back out. Once everything calmed down and several hogs run back through our area going to where they came from, we ventured down from our perches and found some stout 2 to 3 inch saplings and I used my bowie knife to chop them down. I cut them to be about 12’ long.

While Harlou and I were cutting the saplings, Olnafot and Valkorla were gutting the hogs and cleaning out the insides. Once we were all done with our jobs, we tied the feet together on each hog and then slid the poles we had cut under the ties and Val and Olnafot put a pole on each shoulder and took two hogs back to the truck. Harlou and I waited and got the other four hogs ready. As we waited another wounded hog came back through. It was limping badly from a front shoulder wound, so I pulled my Colt and shot it just at the lower portion of the front belly. It dropped where it was. There was a lot of blood from the wound so I figured it was a heart shot. The blood was bright red and not frothy.

While Harlou kept watch for any other stragglers I gutted the hog and cleaned him out as best I could with very little water. By the time Val and Olnafot came back they brought Haritof and Olaffer back with them, and the first two poles. We loaded up the remaining five hogs and headed back out. Olnafot had found a better way out as they came in and it was much easier than the first time coming in.

When we got to the truck we saw the first two hogs washed clean and in the truck on a tarp. We dropped the other five hogs in the stream and Outher, Nonatao, Hentor, and Hathor cleaned them up while the rest of us had a short break. I think everyone saw why I had brought the Neanderthals with us this time, as the extra muscle really helped when lugging dead hogs around were concerned.

We returned to the camp cold, wet and hungry. As we started to unload the hogs, we were told to go eat, dry off and then come to help. We did as we were told; we went into the main cave and were greeted but warm stew and hot coffee or hot cocoa. Boy oh boy did that ever taste good. When I finished eating, I took a hot shower and redressed in warm clothes and went back to the garage to help with the butchering of the hogs. The hide is not good for much, however if boiled and stretched it can be used as a very primitive armor because of its toughness. The bristles are used in many things, like pig bristle brushes for painting, or pig bristle dart boards. But since we have none of those things here or even a need for them the hides are pretty much useless. It took us another five hours to get all 7 hogs butchered, skinned and packaged for the freezer. I did get several nice sections of bacon from the underbelly and jowls sections of the pig. The rear section is ham and the front section is pork shoulder and neck chops, I don’t know why it is called that, but it just is. Then you have the center section which is divided up from top to bottom as: fatback, the solid slab of hard fat across the back of the hog; loin chops, the most valuable section. The rear loin will have the psoas muscle or tenderloin, included under the backbone; the ribs or pork ribs, great for barbequing; and finally the belly portion or bacon.

After processing everything we could use, it was a treat to have bison steaks and a kind of bean that tastes like green beans, but is actually a reddish yellow color, boiled purple potatoes and cold milk or a hot drink of coffee or cocoa. Then it was off to bed for a well deserved rest.

Fred was wrong about the 25 days before snow. He was off by 15 days, but I can’t fault him much, the snow didn’t stay; the ground was still too warm and wet from all the rain. But two days later we got a cold snap that dropped the temperature down to freezing and then we got snow. Boy did we get snow. It snowed solid for six days and at the end of that snow storm we had 2 feet of snow and drifts almost up to the top of the windows in the hide doors. There was a gap of about 4 inches between the door and the snow which was where the barrier was. The children loved it. We dressed them in their new winter clothes and let them play outside. I still had some plastic garbage bags left and I pulled them out and let the kids slide on them down the hill from the cave entrance to the meadow.

The children loved it, but so did several of the adults. Fretonto was I think the biggest kid of them all. He really enjoyed sliding down the hill. Teront came to me and said, “Thank you again for giving me back my father. He is enjoying himself very much, being a part of this camp. He has told stories of the many times and things from his past. Fred has made recordings of this so we can continue the stories of our ancestors to tell the children of the future. I don’t know how I can repay you for all the happiness you have brought to my family. Also I am with child, if it is a boy I would like to name him Robert Fretonto after you and my father.”

“Well if it is a girl you can always use Roberta; that is the girls name from Robert. I would be greatly honored if you did that, but you do not have to do this. I am only trying to help all of our camp.”

“Bob, your help is so much more than we could ever hope for. To be here in this camp is such a blessing; our children will have a chance to live longer and be happier than any child ever before. Their future is without limits, because of you and your friends we may have our people in the heavens, being Sky Spirits for some other poor people who were as we were, before you came here. That was never even a dream for us before, but now it can become a reality.”

I guess I would have to discuss with Fred how she could come to those conclusions. “Yes Teront our children have a very bright future ahead of them.”

She kissed my cheek and ran to her father as he was getting tired, but still wanted to slide. She took Fretonto inside to warm him up and let him rest, I overheard her say, “Yes you can go back out and play after you have rested father.”

For the next month and a half it snowed off and on until we had about 8 foot of snow in the meadow. The Sno-Cat came in very handy as promised, although late for the snow by 2 weeks. We had used the truck and a couple of places we had to winch the truck along through the drifts, but pretty soon we had a fairly well packed road back to the animal caves. They did get friendlier, except for the deer. They still kept their distance, but the horses and aurochs let us fed them by hand, after about two months. The Sno-Cat sure lived up to its reputation. There was nowhere we went that we had problems, even with a winch front and back, we hadn’t used since we got the Cat.

It was getting on towards the time to go mammoth hunting when we heard back from Snart. He was headed this way in his new ship the Second Chances. I asked if he thought he would like to tromp through the snow, and shoot some mammoth. He said he would stay in his warm ship or my warm cave and wait to eat mammoth afterwards. Being reptilian in nature he was cold-blooded and therefore not adapted to the cold weather. I said we would keep him warm in our home cave then.

We set up our trek to the north with Valkorla and Thorf as guides and hunters and since no one from the Cro-Magnon tribes had ever hunted mammoth before. We took Eriken, Heglina, Swendtra, Bernita, and Ourthan for our butchers and skinners. Of course I drove as the most experienced driver, especially of the Sno-Cat. We set out early one morning at sunrise; we traveled north and found the steep climb to the plateau out of Bear Canyon. The Sno-Cat performed beautifully. We stayed warm, the wagon followed perfectly and we had fun as well, telling stories. I had my portable tape recorder with me so we could save the stories and write them down later.

Because we were using the fuel driven engine, we didn’t have to stop at night, but I didn’t drive past 7:00 at night and we arose with the sun. We arrived at a crest of a hill of ice about 2:00 the next afternoon and there before us was a herd of mammoths. There had to be several hundred of them from a huge bull with tusks about 20’ long to several baby ones that were only about 6’ tall. The big bull had to be about 12’ tall and 14’ long, and he probably weighed in at around 10 tons. But we were interested mainly in a couple of the young bulls running in the 3-4 ton range, about 8’ tall and 8’ long. We saw several. I had gotten Fred to have 2 more Barretts so all three hunters could have one. We would need the stopping power of these guns for the mammoths. We drove down to about the tail end of the herd and got out to shoot one of the younger ones. Valkorla, said some words softly and looked to the heavens and said some more. I guess he was telling the Sky Spirits that we only needed one of the small ones and we would leave the rest alone for now. I couldn’t hear him because of the wind, but I saw in his mind the prayer he was saying. This was an old Neanderthal custom. Then we picked our animal and shot for the brain, right between the eyes. We were less than 50 yards away and the young bull dropped like a rock from the shots from each of us. A couple of the other females came over to him and nudged him and then waited. After a couple of minutes, they went on with the herd and left the one on the frozen ground. We drove over to it and cut his throat and got a blood bath for it. Then we gutted him and tried to clean out as much of the insides as possible. We then used the new boom hoist on the wagon to load this behemoth into the wagon. By then it was getting pretty dark, so I drove away, so we could get far away from the mess we had made, that might bring predators. The outside temperature dropped to 20 below once the sun set and we drove about 25 miles from where we shot the young bull. There we turned the heater up a little and settled in for the night.

Because the wagon was as high up as it was and the 4’ high sides, we felt we were safe from predators getting into our kill. We did have a couple of lights on in front and behind the Sno-Cat to ward off predators, plus with the diesel engine running, we made a bit of noise. I did hear some wolf howls during the night but nothing that I know of came close to us. I woke early, about 6:00am and looked at the outside temperature, 37 degrees below zero. There was an anemometer on the rig too so the wind chill was a very chilly 52 below. I knew I was not going outside right now, so I started waking everyone up and we headed out for home. It had snowed a little but I could still see our tracks from earlier coming up and I followed them back as far as I could and then they just disappeared. It had been snowing much more down here. In fact it was still snowing quite hard. Thank goodness I had made sure we had a GPS installed plus a TAC radio. I called George mentally to see if he could figure out where we were. I turned on the locator beacon and he found us right away. We were about 25 miles from home and he was going to send the information to our GPS. George and then Caroline stayed with us the whole way to the meadow where the snow slowed down considerably. We got home just after lunch time, but we managed to get a hot meal in us as we waited for the mammoth to thaw out some, in the garage. We had closed off the garage with some more hide doors and it made it quite a bit warmer in there.

The women started cutting huge chunks out of the mammoth and using the hoist to bring it over to the processing benches. I asked that they try to keep the hide intact as much as possible. I said we could use the hair and the skin later on. The one foot tusks were kept as well and I asked the carver to see if he could carve some nice animals for the kids from the ivory. He said he would try but was more familiar with wood.

The hide came off in seven pieces; the head, the legs and then the four quarters of the rest of the animal. We saved the fat for candles and cut up the rest and packaged it for later. It took all of three days for the mammoth to thaw, be skinned and cut up for processing. I wanted candles because I was unsure if the solar panels and the windmill could stand up to this harsh winter, with the snow and the wind. I wanted to be prepared for the worst.

Snart, Carmaletta, and Harold showed up a couple of days after we came back from the mammoth hunt. I had Fred add a heater for the rooms for Snart and Carmaletta and the room Harold used as well. They had trouble sleeping in a constant 70 degree environment. With the added heaters they could take the temperature up to about 80 for sleeping, but otherwise with clothes on 70 degrees was fine for them.

Harold found out he had one or two of the unmated women from Menten’s old tribe very interested in him and he pursued each of them equally. I think we may have a wedding to attend to soon. I think the two of them kept Harold warm at night. We also had weddings soon to be set for some of the other men as well. Teanar, Kolstar, Conpire, Heglina, and Valkerita had all told their men that they were getting new wives this winter; it was just a matter of who, of the available unmated women, they were going to choose.