Chapter 4

We got through the winter with considerable ease, everything considered. There never was any snow, and the temperature dropped to freezing only on one night. Other than spending more time in the cave, our winter was very little different from our summer. We did spend a lot of time getting to know our home cave. We followed every one of the branching tunnels to the end, and those ends were often holes that were simply too small for us to get through.

We even explored the "cellar," which was what we called that rough section nearly four meters down over that interior cliff. Now that the weather had cooled off, we could feel that it was much warmer down one of those passages. It was something of a struggle to reach it, but we found a hot spring bubbling up from down in the guts of the mountain. Furthermore, there was sulfur deposited on the banks of the pool. A sample of the water was run through our chemical analyzer and showed up a lot of useful compounds, none of which we could yet use, but which might be very useful later on.

Well, we could make charcoal, so now we had what we needed for gunpowder. As much out of scientific curiosity as anything else, Eve had been running samples of the internal organs of all of the animals we could find through the chemical analyzer. She found that a strange organ on one of the moderate size animals was chock full of potassium chlorate. Don't ask me how it got there, but I was not going to complain. This was as powerful an oxidizer as potassium nitrate and should work very well in a version of gunpowder.

Our diet was a little monotonous for a while as we concentrated on killing enough of those beasts, which we called "oxy," until I had enough potassium chlorate to begin experimenting on a black powder formulation. We mashed up the organ of interest and extracted the soluble portion with hot water and let the water evaporate. The chemical analyzer said that we had a mixture of 95% potassium chlorate, 4% of sodium chlorate, and 1% of various and sundry other chemicals.

I started out with the classic gunpowder mixture, and got a decent bang, but I started playing around with the formulation until I got something a little more potent than the old gunpowder in that it burned noticeably faster, though it did need a slightly higher percentage of potassium chlorate. I made an igniter by using the principle that made a diesel engine work, so I had my ignition system. The next step was to work up a design for an RPG of our own manufacture.

Hopefully, we could still use the launcher that we had, so that we only needed to build the rockets, themselves. Well, it took nearly six months of experimentation to solve that problem, but I finally did. I couldn't get an adequate substitute for the fin stabilizers, so I went for spin-stabilization, instead. I put four vents on the rocket part of the device to make the rocket spin around its long dimension in flight, and that seemed to make for an adequate stabilizing system. It worked something like the spin of a bullet caused by the barrel rifling. These were not highly accurate weapons, but the explosive warhead made up for that discrepancy.

We actually had a chance to test my RPG design in the field one day. I had started venturing out with my design, but with a couple of the original rockets as emergency backup. We had gone into the valley on a general exploration trip when we encountered a new predator.

This was an animal that was about 8-9 meters long and 2 meters in diameter. From the looks of the thing, it was a close relative of the hammerhead shark. It had a monster-size mouth with close to a zillion teeth. It spotted us and "swam" over to investigate. It actually did look like it was swimming as it undulated closer to us.

We were too scared of the thing to take a chance, so I loaded up my RPG with one of my rockets and fired at the land shark. OK, I admit it, I was too lucky to believe, but my rocket impacted and exploded against the beast between its too eyes. The land shark continued to move toward us purely on its own momentum, and we had to jump out of the way to keep from being hit by the carcass as it slid by. The beast's head had simply disappeared, leaving behind a shredded mass of flesh and bone.

It was obvious that my crude efforts at a shaped charge had worked well enough to be more than adequate. I didn't even know for sure that the shaped charge of powder would hold together during a firing, but it had, much to my relief.

We both had to sit down to recover from the adrenalin rush that had flooded our bodies. It took us 15 minutes, at least, to recover. That was a little too intense to be fun. One chomp with those jaws would have been enough to cut us to pieces, and this land shark could have swallowed either one of us in only one bite.

The skin on this animal was very valuable as an abrasive. The "scales" were actually the same as its teeth, but smaller. We had to be careful, but we finally managed to remove the skin that we could reach, but the damned thing was too big and heavy for us to roll over, so we lost about a third of the skin. Oh, well, be thankful for very large favors.

We had not expected to need the wagon, so we had left Linda, Belinda, and the wagon at home. We had Lucy and a couple of her pups with us, but no beast of burden. The shark skin that we had been able to salvage made too big a bundle to carry, so we made up a crude travois and used that to carry the skin home. This had been enough adventure for one day, so home we went.

Eve and I discussed the question of children. We felt that we had progressed far enough that she could stop taking her birth control medicine this coming winter. She was using the injectable form of birth control every three months, so she would quit after the next shot. Thus she should be fertile after the middle of the winter. We were both looking forward to the blessed event.

Eve had given me the time to establish a herd of meat animals so that I would not be forced to hunt during her pregnancy and after. This place was so dangerous for one person to be out alone that neither one of us wanted me to do any solo hunting. We wanted to use this autumn and winter as a learning time for running a herd of "pigs." I hoped that Lucy and her pups, who were no longer puppies, but were young adult dogs, would be able to control the herd and keep them from wandering off.

There was no way I could construct a fence that would keep predators away from the herd. We decided to use the main cavern as our stable and keep the pigs in there at night. My plan was for the dogs to drive the pigs out to graze during the day and bring them home at night. By now, we had three of the smaller rooms fixed up for our own use and were keeping the animals in the large room, anyway, so this was not going to make a big difference in the way we lived.

Fortunately, a sledge hammer and stone chisel had been included with our supplies, so I was able to make connecting doors wherever we needed them. The gunpowder, in small quantities had worked well as blasting powder for those situations when the wall was just too thick for me to break through with only the hammer and chisel.

This also gave me the raw material I needed to make concrete. A small electric blower had been included with the goodies sent with us from Auburn, so I was able to get enough heat to convert the limestone to lime and go from there to concrete. I made us a bathtub, large enough for two people, by casting the concrete. I raised the bottom off the floor high enough so that a fire could be built under the tub to heat the bath water. The tub was lined with some of the thick plastic film so we didn't have to worry about abraded skin from rough concrete. That tub full of hot water was truly a decadent pleasure that Eve and I enjoyed, usually together. No grapes or wine, yet, but we had high hopes.

Believe it or not, but I actually had some spare time, so I devoted a lot of that to working on a crossbow bolt with an explosive warhead. I had good luck from the first by scaling down the RPG round to something that would work on the crossbow. I was not too ambitious, but went for something with a maximum range of about 70-75 meters. I was limited by the amount of force that could be harnessed from our crossbows.