Chapter 1: Fucked and Dumped

Oh, Christ, I hurt. Breathing is agonizing and I don't even want to think about moving but I've got to piss. Oh, shit, that hurt. I can feel my knees and elbows grinding inside my skin. The feelings in my hips and shoulders make me wish for death. Oh, god, Oh, god. Kill me now.

It's the next morning. I was shivering in the morning dew. I hurt but it was bearable. I was somewhere deep inside a hardwood forest. I had no idea how the hell I got here.

The last thing I knew I was on my leased hunting area consisting of a forested pine reach in Minnesota. I'd been checking up on the salt blocks and baits for the fall deer season. Suddenly I was lying on my side wondering why the hell the entire vegetation profile changed and why the ground's suddenly damp. I was wearing my Carhartt barn coat and canvas pants for rough country work. I had a canteen on my hip, a GPS in my pocket and a big fucking wart-hog field knife on my belt for slashing scrub.

That night I stood in a glade and breathed in the air. It was like drinking cold spring water. The stars stood above me in their glory like I'd never seen before. There were rewards to this gig.

I'm Ishmael Jones. (Blame my parents, not me dammit.) I'm a re-enactor and practiacal history buff. I began by treating this as a little vacation as I acclimated. In other words I screwed around a couple of days until I figured out that something was really wrong. Nobody was around but me. There were NO jet contrails. My GPS was gibbering, unable to give me any data. I didn't know where I was but sitting around on my dumb ass wasn't going to get me anywhere. I headed towards some hills I saw to the south-west. (I figured out the natural directions from where the sun set.) I came upon a low series of limestone outcroppings. Hmm. Let's look for caves. I found a couple but they were occupied--and the residents were belligerent. Right indignant, they were. I found two fucking CAVE BEARS! now this put a whole new perspective on things. Shit. The only thing between fish bait and me was my brain. I had to come up with something to level the playing field. I decided to re-create the hedge-hog--a medieval war device designed to fuck up any attacker depending on raw offense such as a horse charge. With the benefit of a LOT of work I started a fire, then cut many 2 inch thick saplings, cut them to a point, burned their tips hard and bound them against a log using vines. I threw several burning faggots (vine bundled fistfuls of squaw wood) into the cave and ran as fast as I could behind my surprise, where I jumped up and down and screamed like a monkey on speed to attract the attention of the fucking bears. It worked! They came at me like god striking down Gomorrah and impaled themselves on the stakes. Two hours later I had a new home. I peeled the skins off their carcasses and carved out their tenderloins. I barbecued myself a truly satisfying meal. I saved some of the charcoal and charred leaves for the next fire I'd have to make, hopefully without a damned fire plow. (you scrape a stick against a flat board so fast and so many times that you make a coal, then go on from there. It's damned hard work.)

The next day I started in on scraping down the hides. they were HUGE. It took me over a week per hide. Between cleaning the crap and rotten game out of the cave that the bears had left as a welcome-to-the-neighborhod gift, drying bear meat over wooden frames as well as scraping down and tanning the hides I was pretty well burnt.

I moved the hedge-hog just outside the cave entrance to face out of the cave and kept a small fire burning just inside the entrance each night. I didn't know what was out there and really didn't want to know, up close and personal-like. The ancestors of bobcats were probably saber-toothed tigers. I realized that I was NOT at the top of the food chain and tried to take appropriate measures. The cave was pretty smoky with a fire burning inside but a little draft was present. If I hunkered down on the hides or lay down the air was breathable.

I salvaged the stomachs, bladders and intestines of the bears, rinsed and boiled them out. I used bear kidney fat to make them supple and hopefully keep them that way. Without them I had nothing to cook in. I couldn't make soup, stew or tea without them so I took the native american way out. I cut open the top of the stomach and perforated it around the opening, then hung it by a tripod. I cooked in it by dropping in rocks I'd heated in the fire. I carefully examined the area for streams and rivers. I wanted to find a clay deposit and flint nodules. (big honkin' chunks of chert that would fracture into sharp edges). It's real edgy to move around as a defenseles little human when the neighborhood sports cave bears, something like hyenas and whatever the hell was out there that wanted an easy meal. I found chert. I found clay. It took two weeks to carve a shovel out of dry wood. I dug a four foot deep pit kiln with a flat bottom, formed clay into cups, lamps, straws and bowls and placed them along the edges of the pit bottom, built a big fire in the center of the pit then fired the hell out of them and let them sit for a week with a lid of branches and dirt over the pit. I had black-glazed cups, lamps, straws and bowls How do you make stone-age straws? dip a reed in clay slip three or four times and let it thoroughly dry, then burn the reed out of it while firing. A lamp is a broad cup with a pulled-away lip used to support the wick. That ate up over a month. With more clay and dried grasses I made big flat bricks. After drying them in the sun I built a wall to cover the entrance to my cave with a passage-way that I could just squeeze through without turning sideways, about four feet tall. Behind the outer layer of bricks I stacked river rocks and bound them together with clay. The whole wall ended up about four feet thick. Building the whole thing out of brick would have been a waste of time and resources. Then I stacked dry firewood around the whole shebang, inside, outside and filled the passageway. After firing it that mess wasn't going anywhere without a lot of concerted effort. I felt a lot safer after that.

Next on my list of wants was thread and rope. I tried a lot of different vines and weeds until I hit on a tall ragweed-like plant. I cut them down by the hundreds with (thank god I carried) my knife and soaked them in a shallow pond until they mostly rotted, leaving the tough structural strands. I built a plains indian mat loom and began weaving fiber mats. Winter would come very soon and I needed insulation. All the time I could spare from hunting I spent weaving those damned mats.

I realized that I had to have baskets to keep food stores in. Many grass-like plants grew near the cave. Several proved tough enough to weave with and not splinter away to flinders. I taught myself how to weave baskets God, the first attempts were horrible travesties. Soon I had decent baskets. Some of my best proved 'almost' water-tight. I learned to split peeled green saplings the hard way and bind the edges of the baskets between the halved saplings. I used a digging stick to gather root vegetables. I gathered anything resembling nuts and grain. I knew that if I lived through the winter I'd have to gather seed crops and sow fields. I had to kick-start agriculture somehow. I remembered that the american indians used the three sisters; corn, beans and squash grown together to support each other, but I had to find analogs of all three to succeed. It was a wet, messy fall. When the ground was wet I used drawn-tight ropes between a small tree and a large one, then jumped on the rope to gradually pull the smaller one out of the ground. I was trying to clear a small field for planting the next year. Out came the bushes and trees, in went rows of the small tubers I'd found elsewhere. It got me some firewood for the winter as well. I gathered lots of 'wands' three feet long as thick as my finger. Tying them together in a long continuous mat gives you some insulation. A loop tied at one end propped up by a small tripod gives you an indian 'recliner'. Lay it flat and put a pole under each end and you'll have a sprung bed up off the cold rock of the cave floor. It still needs hides over it to keep you off the sticks but it's quite an improvement.

That winter I used the butt of my wart-hog as a hammer to chip out many decent flint blades and knives. These I fastened to long shafts with sinew and boiled hoof glue then fletched them with pieces of boiled skin that were later oiled. I shaped an alatl thrower fashioned of osage orange--the toughest goddamned wood I could find. I considered myself one dangerous damned son of a bitch for the times. Another winter occupation was felting. Did you know that felt was a stone-age invention? You cut or pull the hair off of the hides of the animals you killed for food. Collect them in a depression in the floor. Add a little water and 'muddle' the hairs together with a tough, smooth piece of wood. Once they cohere into a layer add a little hide glue and keep muddling until it's almost dry. Longer hair works best, obviously. The yurts of the russian plains were made of felt. I used the hides to make booties over felt to keep my feet warm. I also cut long strips of hide for cord Some I kept as rawhide, some tanned and oiled to stay supple after getting wet.

In my travels hunting for game I came upon a small village. They were the first people I'd seen since coming to this period. Their compound was near the shore of a broad river, their shelters made of woven reed shelters.

I came upon them from up-river. As they became aware of my they panicked, then clustered and came forward to confront me. I dipped my hands into the water and poured it over my head and face, then made the 'praying hands' before me. I bowed to them and they replied in kind. A little girl squealed and ran to me, much to the panic of her parents. I caught her up and hugged her to me, making her squirm and giggle. I hugged her to me and gently let her down. I guess that I done good as I was accepted into the tribe. I was two heads taller than the best of them.

I couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand me. I shrugged my shoulders sat down and got busy making things. I started out breaking a flint nodule into usable pieces and pressure flaking scrapers and knives. I talked to myself as I worked and soon had an audience. The kids showed up first, then the younger adults. Soon just about everyone stopped by once in a while to watch the strange white-skinned tall guy do strange things that seemed to work. I'd point to something and say what I thought it was. They replied 'no, dammit, that's xxxx'.

They had no fucking idea as to how to work with flint. I taught them how to make thread and rope. I taught them how to weave cloth and an easier way to make reed mats. That mat loom was a hit. I taught them by demonstration how to pressure-flake arrow heads as well as make and throw an Atl-Atl. In the process I somehow found myself the husband of two young women after trading flint scrapers and spearheads.

Oh, yes, I had my problems. One young buck tried to kill me for my wives. As he tried to stab me in the back I spun about and smacked him in the temple with a stone axe. Exit one dead hoodlum. Nobody said a word as I pissed on the face of his corpse. Some villagers ignored me and others were actively hostile; notably their old shaman. We came to blows one day when I caught him sniffing around my cave. I contemplated skinning out what was left of him but gave it a pass in the name of harmony with my wives. As far as everyone except his cronies were concerned he wandered off and dissappeared one day. I ended up adopting the old bastard's wives to keep them fed.

I gained enough fluency in the local language to get along. However, I didn't want to give up English. I gradually taught my wives English, or rather a pidgin version of it, and later my children.

I asked around from enough people to find where a salt sea was. We needed lots of salt to preserve meat and it was a hell of a trading resource. That spring I led a train of people that trusted me enough to follow my lead to the South. We found the Atlantic or Mediterranean. I'd guessed that I'd been left in the south of France, sometime back in pre-history. We used the sun to evaporate salt water in black basaltic stone pans to leave a skin of salt, then scraped and packed them away in animal bladders for future use. We harvested over two hundred pounds of salt before calling it quits.

I introduced the travois to haul loads. One person could haul the amount that four people could before with a fraction of the effort. I knew that I was someone's hero after that--every woman in the crew took their time to treat me like a king for a couple of weeks.

When I returned to the tribe I was treated as a medicine man. I had gone into the wild for months and came back successful in my quest--and alive. I taught several young men AND WOMEN how to pressure flake flint into knives, scrapers and arrow heads. We built a successful trading combine in short order.

Food was the driving animal. We needed food for the tribe. The Atl-Atl dramatically improved our hunting ability by extending the range of a hunter's throw. The leather vanes at the rear of the dart stabilized the thing in the air much better than a spear ever did. One elk could feed quite a few people for a couple of days.

Using the hedge-hog device we cleared out several caves near my initial homestead. The native predators had little or no defense against the field of spears. We had those cave bears cut down to handy pieces before you could say holy shit! The new chert scrapers were a hit working on the huge, tough bear hides. Soon we had over forty people under our mantle. Food again became a problem. Since the river was within a half-day's walk we made permanent fish traps/weirs in the river with rocks and stakes. That helped quite a bit.

I recalled that fish nets were made by the most primitive people. I figured out how they worked. Weaving fish nets was almost mindless. We spun thread to make cloth, to make nets and to make traps. We spun the thread and wove it into cloth. I have to repeat this-- we made cloth.

We built a smoke-house. It's a bitch cutting down trees with stone-age tools. We burned the damned things down! A controlled fire at the base of each tree would eventually take it down. It just demands patience to keep the fire to coals and not burn the bastard to flinders. We were then able to smoke and dry fish and game for the winter. Once they saw the volume of preserved meat and fish that came out of that thing compared to using drying racks they all got busy making baskets. Again, we made many, many goddamned baskets to hold the preserved meats. I won the local popularity contest again. We didn't limit ourselves to one smoke-house, either.

It took a couple of years to get enough seed together of a grass something like wheat to plant a respectable field. Each year I'd carefully winnow the heads and save the kernels for the next year.

I found cattails! With them we had a virtually unending supply of tubers (Okay, they're rhizomes.) to eat and (once we started saving the tallow from our kills to soak them) a virtually unending supply of torches. The fluff from mature cattail heads was called kapok in the 1940s and was used to stuff life preservers. I figured that it would make a great insulation material between layers of cloth. The reeds made great mats once woven together, as well. They didn't last long but they kept the mud under control in wet weather and several stacked together make sleeping a much nicer affair. The pollen makes a piss-poor flour but it will thicken a stew.