Chapter 4: the homestead, the castle

The ground was hard. Fall was almost over. I showed Josie what I could do with my gifts. She could see the changes happening in the kitchen knife that I 'improved', but couldn't do it herself. She caught right on to compressing wood to strengthen and preserve it. I showed her how to use her mind to drill a hole in two pieces of wood, then drive in a peg to hold them together. Her response was, "Now, why didn't I think of that?" We had sturdy, comfortable chairs by dinner time. We had to 'drill out' the pegs and take them apart though. She didn't know about gluing them up and they squeaked atrociously. She thought better of me when I said "It's but a tiny problem and easily fixed." She taught me how to rub fast and repeatedly over a wood surface to polish it. Neat trick! Since we were so far north I was surprised that she'd never heard of preserving vegetables in vinegar--pickling. Seeing as pickled cabbage and beets were favorites of mine she was quite happy to note the recipe down in her book. Our difficulty lay in finding vinegar...

I reminded Josie that her parent's cabin and all the rest of the homestead still belonged to her. What did she want to do with it? The painfully collected and preserved food in the larder would just go bad sitting there, being of use to nobody. She wanted to salvage what we could. The problem was, there was no trail out there that was wide enough for a wagon. My solution was to borrow or buy as many barrels as I could find. I then peeled and split two trees that had fallen, each eight to twelve inches across. I roped these to the barrels to make a long, firm 'summer toboggan' that I could float along with my TK. With Josie riding atop a barrel I managed to get us to her homestead in half a day. There she and I filled the barrels with bedding, cooking gear, preserved food, spices, tools and a small library that she was quite protective of. I left the door un-barred but braced the windows closed If someone needed to get in out of the weather then they could. Plenty of firewood was stacked beside the cabin. Just before we left, Josie use her talent to write "In memory of Miriam and John Tails, killed by wild pigs. The pigs are destroyed but Miriam's and John's memories live on. Written by their daughter, Josie." deep in the stone mantle above the fireplace. In this way any future folk that took refuge in the cabin or even took it over to live there would know who their benefactors were.

The 'barrel line' worked famously to get everything back to Two Rivers.

Josie was working the fields and zapping the animals that were eating our crops before they were ripe. I found that she had a fine control over her high-speed TK, much better than I did. Her sight at a distance and micro-vision were extremely well-trained too. I didn't put it all together until she decided to accompany me to the Sheriff's holding for my semiannual report.

There was a light skiff of snow on the ground, mostly caught up in the vegetation. It was a well-known, well-traveled trail. We were near a constriction in the land where a river split a narrow valley. We were attacked by nearly thirty men in uniforms, each with a sword, a bow and quiver. Josie thrust her hand into a bag of coarse sand and scattered it into the air with a twist of her wrist. I heard a sound like a continuous tearing of cloth. Over forty mature trees were falling. All the soldiers were bloody messes on the ground. There was a heavy mist of blood and shredded foliage on the wind that quickly drifted down-wind. I stood aghast. My little wife was a war machine.

I took a deep breath, then examined the situation from a third-party viewpoint. She'd been perfectly within her rights to annihilate them. The woods had been allowed to grow back too close to the trail. She came back with a perfect judgement on all facets. I gathered her into my arms and tossed her into the air, only to catch her and laugh. "You did the absolute best you could have in a combat situation. Perfect. We do have a responsibility to clean up the tall stumps though, as they now would provide cover for archers or crossbow men."

I used my TK to trim all the stumps right to the ground, then cut and stacked the remaining trunks into short rows back near the new tree line. There would be some prime firewood found along that trail in a year.

We didn't see any more trouble on our way to castle yellowstone. As you might infer, it was built of multi-ton blocks of riverine limestone, tinted yellow by the tiny life forms that died and sank to the bottom, only to contribute to the stone's formation over time. I greeted many of my old friends and introduced my wife. She was so cute she immediately gained friends. I was very happy for her. We had a great dinner in the main hall that evening. Afterwards a Yeti-form woman came up to introduce herself. "Hi. I'm Cathy. I understand that you've met my grand-daughter, Ruth. I taught her before she went out to the villages.

Josie brightened up considerably. "I love Ruth! She taught me so much! She said that I might be able to work with plants! Annuals, perennials, bushes and trees. I'd love to be able to find out what a field needed and supply it, or to be able to direct bushes to form hedges. She told me that if I proved out I might be able to bury a row of trifoliate oranges and have an impenetrable fence within two months. Now THAT's a respectable talent!"

Cathy thought a bit then responded. "That's only one aspect of the talent. Remember, you must succor and support before you can demand. Remember that the composite mind of the woods may seem simple to you, but it is much older than any of us. It has a purpose that despite all we have tried is a force unto itself and with a simple flex of its will can overcome and swallow the best of us in a flash. I suggest that you carefully inspect the vows you would adhere to before giving them your voice." She nodded at me, hugged Josie and left. What a strange woman. She was quite old from what I understood. I made the connection then. She was our master healer.

I made my report to the sheriff's scribes. They always worked in teams so as not to lose anything or misunderstand. Then I spent some time with a teacher that picked up the way I made the china and the barrel line from my brain. With my moving into the area and having generated a new industry there I found that plans were being evaluated to dredge the larger river to the south that drained the confluence making up Two Rivers, so that keel boats might begin trading that far north and west. Many factors had to be evaluated before such a high-impact plan was to be implemented. The balance wasn't just a good idea. It was the prime deciding factor in our lives. Our ecology was not as robust as it was a thousand years before. Many species were missing. The destruction of just one critical species could spell doom for large areas of the planet.