Gateway What Lies BeyondChapter 58
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The next three weeks were work, work and more work for my little community. While on the trek back to the cave, I had learned that it was early summer in the region. That meant we still had time to establish ourselves as a community. However, every day was important. We needed to gather food for the coming winter, we needed to gather firewood to keep us warm, and we needed to protect ourselves from both the elements and any predators that might turn an eye in our direction.
Clara, Gabby, and Ramie took over the food aspect of our long term needs. This effort didn’t just include foraging and drying any meat that I brought in to preserve it for use over the winter; it also included finding or making containers that could be used to store the food, so it wouldn’t spoil. While the women did that, the men joined me in resolving the rest of our needs.
The first thing we did, was to dig a latrine and build an outhouse to go over it. I’d spotted one at the village while we had been there. It had been an unwholesome looking affair. It had stood off towards the fence, to the northeast side of the hill where the village stood. It actually could be seen from the communal hearth. That was one of the big problems with it. It was visible to anyone and everyone in the village, whenever they looked in that direction. That meant no one had any privacy when they used it. In fact, all it was were two tree trunks suspended on wooden pylons over an open hole in the ground. While it was better than shitting behind a tree in the woods (which was what I’d been doing since getting stranded, here), I could certainly build something better than that.
I’d like to point out from the beginning that the culture shock for the locals was minimal as far as I could tell. Yes the lanterns in the cave were a marvel to them, and I’ll admit that Clara, Gabby, and I didn’t even try to explain how they worked. The thing is that the locals quickly accepted them as just being there. They were a light source like a fire. They were special and they worked differently, but once the locals got over the initial shock of seeing them for the first time, they moved on. That was what life was like for them. They were a lot more accepting of what is than the culture that nurtured Clara, Gabby, and me.
It did help that I didn’t really expose them to too much in the way of new technology. We used metal pots for cooking in and we ate out of metal dishes, but they were just containers to the locals. They used skin bags, bone plates, bark cups, and other natural products for their day to day needs, but that was really the only difference. We used metal and they used whatever was on hand. The same went for the tools we used in our construction. The axes, shovels, saws, and adze were all just tools to the men. Uttar and Vedic had the least problems accepting them, especially once Uttar saw my stone axe. The leap wasn’t that hard from stone to metal for him.
The big shocker to them culturally wasn’t our technology, but it was how I interacted with the men and women. I explained everything and I listened to everyone. Even Ramie’s old mate hadn’t done that very often. The other shocker was the way I thought. The men quickly realized that I thought outside their box on all matters. These people knew how to build latrines and protective walls, but they had never seen the way I built them. That took some getting used to for them; much more time than accepting the lanterns or the fact that my combat knife was made of metal instead of flint.
It took three days to create my masterpiece with the help of every male in our group. We cut down trees in the nearby woods and hauled them down to the flat open area in front of the caves. Then we got to work. While Rugar, Uttar, and Vedic dug the latrine using my shovel, I started splitting logs.
The end product could seat three at a time. I built the whole thing on skids. When the latrine the men were digging became full, we could just pull the outhouse to another location and use it again. We wouldn’t have to build a new one, unless the old one fell down.
The big plus to what I designed and built, was the fact that I created cubicles. It meant that people using the outhouse had a little privacy. It also meant that people weren’t exposed to the elements, particularly during the rainy season or winter. According to the locals, the winters around here got very cold.
To make the outhouse both private and weatherproof, my team wove branches about the frame on the top and all the sides; except where people entered, and the bottom, where the waste fell away. Then they covered the sides with daub to make it as wind resistant as possible. When they finished doing that, we lined each cubicle with some of the animal hides we had recycled from the huts that were disassembled back in the village. That helped make them even snugger, for when the wind started to blow. Finally, we put doors on every cubicle.
The doors were framed rectangles that covered the opening into each cubicle. More skins were tied to the frames to act as the actual door. I suspended them using rawhide hinges. I also fitted them with latches to keep them closed while a person was using the facility. I put in doorstops, to keep people from pushing the door inward instead of swinging it outwards to get in. With a thatched roof over the woven branches on top, it was a fine looking toilet. It certainly had the locals impressed.
The remaining part of the three weeks was taken up with building a palisade around the cave complex. While we did have Gort’s rapidly growing wolf pup, now that we were feeding it; the pup was not enough to guarantee that we didn’t get attacked in the night by an uninvited visitor. Since there were only four men and two boys in the community, so far; standing watch every night was an option none of us relished. The men agreed with me when I told them that a little hard work now would give us many nights of unworried sleep.
The reason the palisade took time was because I wanted it large enough to enclose not only our freshly built outhouse, but to enclose a few more buildings that I wanted to construct as time went by and we settled into a routine in this time and place. I still wanted a horse; or, to be more accurate, I wanted horses. I wanted at least one for Clara, Gabby, and me. If I acquired them, I would need somewhere to house them. A stable inside the palisade would work for me.
The rest of the first week was spent felling trees, delimbing them, and dragging them down to the clearing in front of the caves. This was quickly becoming my principal work area. Once the wood was there, I started to work.
The first job was putting in the corner posts. I marked where I wanted each of them. Thank god Kim had giving me a posthole digger in our gear. It came in handy. Once the corner posts were planted and tamped down nice and snug, we pulled out the plumb, the level, and the string from the toolbox. We started lining up the rest of the posts I needed to put in.
We didn’t build a true palisade. Certainly nothing like what I grew up seeing on television whenever I watched a western where the cavalry were involved. Instead we build a hybrid barrier which was more of a fence, than anything else. After the corner posts went in, I put in the two gate posts. After they were up and firmly planted, I marked off a pair of postholes every five feet between the corner posts as well as the gate posts. My team then planted a pair of posts similar in size to the corner posts in those locations. Once these posts were up and tamped down we reinforced them with posts braced up against them from the interior side. From that point on the real work began.
The real work was the job of putting up rails between each five foot gap in the palisades wall. I’d spent hours splitting six inch diameter logs into rails that were five and a half feet long. I drilled holes in each rail, putting one drill hole at each end of the rail. Then with the help of two of the men I put the rail on the exterior side of the gap and I drilled a corresponding hole into the post. Finally I pegged the rail into place. The pegs were one inch saplings that had been cut into peg sized lengths and then whittled down like old style wooden stakes. I hammered them into place with my mallet, and then did it again and again until all the walls were enclosed. Even with help, it was a lot of work.
The final thing to go up was the gate. It went into a space facing the river. The gate was only five feet wide, but it was wide enough for two men to pull a sled through it with ease. That was all it would accomodate, though. The gate was unique. I chose to suspend it from braces mounted to the gate posts instead of trying to have it swing outward like a real door. I had no faith in rawhide hinges holding any real weight for any length of time. My solution overcame any concern about the gate accidently coming down.
The gate was made much like the walls of the outhouse. It was a big frame that had one inch saplings tied to it. The upper and lower rail of the frame was longer than the gap was wide and the ends of the rail fitted into the brackets attached to the gate posts. It would take at least two grown men to shift the gate, even given its lightweight construction. It helped that once the gate was in place, wedges were fitted into the brackets so that the gate couldn’t be opened from the outside.
The fence wouldn’t keep an army out if one tried to get in, however it would keep a pack of roving wolves or hyenas outside, at least until my people were alerted to the animals’ presence. By then my people would hopefully be able to deal with them, and then that would be that.
In the end we had several hundred square feet in front of our cave system enclosed. The only vulnerable point was from above, where the overhang gave access to the interior of our enclosure. It was an issue I would have to address, eventually; but for now, I was simply concentrating on finishing the palisade. I’d work on the overhang, later.
The last two items we built during that period were the stable that I wanted for my horses (if I got any) and a real smokehouse. The stable turned out to be basically a large lean-to placed against the front wall, to the left of the gate as you went out. I built it large enough to stable six full grown horses. I was planning ahead. The smokehouse was another story altogether.
I built the smokehouse like a small log cabin. It was basically a very tall, narrow box. I made it taller than I am. I rigged a fire box at the base using stones and improvised mortar. I even dug it down into the ground by a foot, so that the fire in it wouldn’t reach the leather covering I put over it, to trap the smoke and channel it into the smokehouse. I had to test it a couple of times to make certain that the whole thing wouldn’t catch fire.
The big issue beyond the fire box was the front door. The smokehouse needed it to be snug, so that the smoke hole in the roof would draw the smoke out of the fire box, through the smokehouse and out the chimney hole. It took packing every crack and crevasse with old skins and pelts to make it work. It also took caulking the walls with daub to seal the whole thing up.
A lot more got done during those three weeks of hard work than just putting up a fence and a couple of buildings. Every night was a time for sitting down and completing a task. Everyone in the cave had something to do, especially me. If it involved wood, I was working on it.
For the first little while, my evenings after supper revolved around making bows and making arrow shafts. I finished off Gort’s bow first. That amounted to sanding the rough cut shape down into something usable. I’d already taken my woodworking chisels to the bow in an attempt to even out the arms and smooth any rough spots that detracted from the design. I’d then taken a rough edged stone and I’d rubbed the bow down with it. It had helped remove some of the rough spots that the chisels couldn’t remove without damaging the bow. My final effort had devolved into rubbing the bow with a piece of rawhide containing grit from the river bed. God I missed sandpaper. It was one of the few items that I really wished I had. Without it, sanding things down was going to take time and a lot of perseverance.
Still, I prevailed. By the time the outhouse was completed, so was Gort’s bow. The next job was getting to work on making arrows.
The fortunate thing about going out and cutting down trees to build stuff is that you often come across stuff you need for other jobs. I found a couple of trees that were perfect for making bows out of so I cut them down and brought them back to the cave. There I took the time to section the wood so I could carve out the bows and strip the bark off of them. I then set them to dry while I went back to other jobs.
The same went for arrow shafts. When I came across wood perfect for making arrow shafts, I gathered it up and took it back to the cave. I went to making them once I was done with Gort’s bow. It took a lot of work churning them out, having never done the job before. Fortunately, I proved to be a quick learner.
I wasn’t the only man sitting around and working every night after supper. Uttar and Vedic were busy as well. Uttar was making the arrow heads that we needed for the shafts I was turning out. He was also working on stone hand axes based upon the stone axe that Quantum had given me when I’d come to this place and time. As I’d surmised talking to Gort, while the villagers could put a haft onto a flint knife, they had never considered putting a haft on a hand axe. Seeing mine for the first time was like a light bulb going on for the older man. Within days he’d made half a dozen of the stone axes, one for each man, other than me, and one for Uma to use while butchering kills. He kept two for trade. He, too, was thinking ahead.
While I played with wood and Uttar played with stone, Vedic played with all sorts of things making string, and rope. He manufactured a bowstring out of sinew for Gort’s bow and attached it when I was finally finished sanding the bow down. It was a good bowstring. I actually took the bow and tested it out with one of my arrows. I had to be careful not to draw back too hard, given that the bow wasn’t scaled to me and the string wasn’t of the same quality as mine. Still, I was able to loose an arrow with it out to about eighty yards. To me it wasn’t bad given that the weapon was just a carved stick with a string attached to it. Perhaps over time I could work on making something better, like a compound bow. Only time would tell.
Weapons were not the only things that I made in the three weeks that we focused on building and protecting ourselves. I also made furniture for those who wanted me to make something. The first thing I made was a collapsible camp stool. Again it was the matter of finding the right wood, cutting out the basic shape and carving or whittling the pieces down into what I wanted them to look like. Then, of course, I sanded off the rough parts. I then used pegs to put everything together. Once the frame was assembled, I handed it over to Ramie and the other women to put a seat onto it. Here Clara took over, while I went back to making more frames. I made a dozen frames during that time period and the women put seats on all of them using the old skins. We were quickly running out of skins!
In addition to seats, I made spoons and forks for all the locals, whittling the basic shapes out of a chunk of wood and then handing the smoothing and sanding job over to Gort and Tabor to do. It was something to keep them busy as they sat about the hearth listening to us chat about what we would be doing the next day.
Another piece of furniture I built was a stacked set of shelves, where storage containers could be placed. Basically I took a tree and turned it into lumber. The lumber I cut into boards using my saw and my splitting wedges. I then mounted the boards onto rungs suspended in a frame. The frame was made of posts, held together with cross braces at the back. It wasn’t pretty but it worked. I ended up making three for Ramie and the women so they could get their baskets of foodstuffs off of the ground, and a much smaller one for my sleeping area to act as a clothes cupboard. I planned on making better ones in the future, once I’d had the time to season the wood that I was working with. Regrettably, using green wood in most of our construction would one day come back to haunt me. However, at that moment it couldn’t be helped.
The palisade, the smokehouse, the outhouse, and all the rest wasn’t the only thing being built during those three weeks of backbreaking labour. Relationships were being formed.
The men and I had bonded through our joint labour, through our after hours socializing, through communicating with each other, and through hunting. Every couple of days we would take a break and go out and hunt fresh meat for the cooking pot. Usually, I took Gort and Tabor with me, along with Gort’s wolf pup. Rugar would tag along as well, though not on every trip, and occasionally I’d bring Uttar or Vedic along. The hunting trips were never long or arduous. It helped that there was usually a herd nearby whenever we went out. It helped speed up the process. We’d quickly jog to a point close to where the herd was grazing and then I’d drop a couple of animals with my bow. Once I let Rugar try and another time I allowed Uttar and Vedic the opportunity to make the kill. It made both men ecstatic to return to the cave able to declare that they had hunted successfully that day. That process became more common as the weeks dragged on and I completed their bows and their arrows. Once the two men were fitted out and they had practiced with their new weapons, keeping them in the cave when I went hunting proved to be impossible. The same applied to Gort. When he made his first kill with his own bow, we had a celebration for the young man. Even Rugar had to admit that Gort was no longer just a boy. He was now a hunter of the cave.
While my relationship with the men grew, so did my relationship with the women in our community. To be specific, my relationship with Clara and then Gabby blossomed. Naturally my relationship with them led to my relationship with Ramie, and then to the rest of the women that I’d inherited during my visit to the village.
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