Weathering The Storm
Cabin Fever
When the storms hit, everyone turned to indoor activities. Down in the village, basket production became the name of the game. While up at the castle, the men focused on using spring pole grind stones to fashion bone spear and arrow points as well as stone axes and new horn bows. The ladies, as usual, had their hands full taking care of the animal, both the two-legged variety as well as the four-legged kind. To say nothing of fixing meals and sewing new boots and clothing.
Dag actually enjoyed storm season. It felt good to sit inside and work on projects rather than be out in the elements gathering in food and other resources. The small gaps of good weather were usually spent playing in the over flowing baths or the larger than usual waves.
He enjoyed it for the first week that is. After that, the young ones were under foot, and the women who were so happy to have them home for a change were tired of having them underfoot now. Dag too was only too happy to retreat to the space set aside as the men’s workshop. He did love Lavern, but the truth was, there was only so much time they could spend together before they started grating on each other. He wondered if that was a universal situation, because he remembered his own father’s difficulties in dealing with retirement. He supposed it was another case of be careful what you wish for.
By the end, he was glad to see the last of the storms. It wasn’t that their food supplies had gotten low, but he was really tired of every bite being dried, smoked, or salted... often all three. It became bad enough one day about two weeks into storm season that he risked a dive, just to bring back a little fresh fish to share.
The water quality had been rough. The heavy surf above stirred up the mud and sand below enough to cloud the water, and of course the overcast skies limited the light available even at reasonably shallow depths. The time under the waves did at least fully recharge his batteries. Not for the first time did he wish that the little dive computer built into the suit was more of a general purpose computer, or he knew more about how to reprogram it so it was. As things stood, it did a fantastic job of keeping track of pressure, decompression times, and even a bit of sonar navigation, but for anything else, it was practically useless.
The fresh fish had been appreciated. Roasted on a spit out by the baths, the afternoon of plenty quickly got rained out, and everyone returned under their various roofs to escape the downpour. Dag couldn’t help but wish that they would get this rain in nice gentle showers throughout the year, but that wasn’t to be. Light spring rains and the river flood from the meltwater from distant mountains, followed by months of hot and dry, followed by a winter monsoon. That was what he had to deal with, and wishing it otherwise wasn’t going to change a thing.
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Storm Gifts
As the storms were finally breaking off, Dag began to take long walks along the beach. As much to have an excuse to get out of the house, as his public stated goal of inspecting for damage. When he stumbled on the recently beached whale, his heart leapt. Examining it closer, he could see that it was still alive, but wouldn’t be for long. At a dead run, he headed back to the castle.
It was an all hands on deck evolution. Harvesting the whale took everyone working together. Even toddlers pulled small travois loaded with meat to those who would cut it into strips for salting and smoking. That was just to process the meat. Boiling down all the blubber into useful oils would take another two days, and the first job that fell almost exclusively to Dag, that of skinning the great beast would take weeks to turn into a decent leather.
When it was done, however, he found himself in possession of two strips of thin rubbery leather that were ten foot wide, by twenty foot long. A couple thousand pounds of meat and oil, and enough bone to make tools for a hundred people. The gift from the sea was bountiful. Dag didn’t want to see a scrap of it go to waste.
It wasn’t until several weeks later that he went to work on the most valuable gift the whale had granted them. Whale leather is notoriously thick and was often used for boot soles. So properly tanning it, wasn’t an easy task, but while it was yet wet and pliable, Dag had formed two canoe frames from the spare cedar poles brought back from the last gathering. Then he wrapped and pegged the skins to the canoe frames. By the time the leather was dry and had hardened into place, he had a pair of the sturdiest boats he had ever constructed. Easily able to take ten men and supplies each, they were perfect for his future plans.
These boats would haul them up river at the time of the Gathering, and eventually carry them far up river for greater exploration once the floods receded, but in the meantime, they would sit out in the harsh sun, drying to rock hardness. Each day to be oiled with a heavy layer of either its own blubber oil or coconut oil, depending on which they had in excess at the moment.
Dag found himself looking forward to the Gathering this year. The looks on their faces when they saw the boats should be entertaining. He just needed to be ready in case they sought to take them by force. Dag thumbed his axe at his side, and thought to himself, ‘let ‘em try’. The boats were going to revolutionize cargo transport.
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Ahead Of The Flood
Dag decided to leave for the Gathering early this year. Leaving behind two hunters and two of the younger archers to guard the castle, and Lavern and Shirley to keep an eye on the little ones, he packed Oona and one of her cronies in one of the boats. Then tied the now much larger calf to one travois, and a pair of sheep to each of the smaller travois, leaving one of Jill’s crew to lead them, and one of Jack’s crew and one hunter to guard each. Then he, Jack, and Ajax loaded into the boats, taking up position forward and aft to defend it from any overly aggressive crocodiles. He gave each of the women a paddle, and soon they were off.
The hardest part was keeping the travois and the boats to roughly the same speed. With the boats taking time to do a little net fishing while the travois were struggling over uneven ground, and the ‘guards’ on the travois taking a little time to do some hunting when the current slowed the boats.
The camp sites that they selected along the river bank were always in the most defensible positions that Dag could find. Even if it meant that they didn’t get to take full advantage of daylight that day. They were always high points that were unlikely to flood, at least not in normal years, so that Dag could mark them for later supply posts.
He had decided that he needed to take more advantage of the river to explore and transport goods. To do this effectively, he needed places where they could camp, hunt, and do any repairs. This meant leaving caches of supplies, and they could only do that effectively if they built small forts at each of these places... eventually. He knew in practical terms, he was still years off from having one at each of the rest sites on their way to the Gathering, much less all up and down the river as he envisioned. Still, the first step was selecting locations, and he could do that fairly easily on this trip.
What he really wanted was a couple of trained oxen and a heavy box scraper to level out some roads on the sides of the river. Unfortunately, he wasn’t likely to have that for several years, either. The dream of being able to toss a tow rope to a team of animals on the bank and not have to row the boats up stream sounded better and better every time he watched the women struggling against the current. However, it wasn’t like he and the other men could take over for them, twice on the first day they had needed to repel crocodiles that decided they might be tasty, and a snake larger than anything that Dag had believed lived in these parts.
Even with these issues though, the trip took less time, carried more supplies, and was overall easier than any trip to the Gathering before it. He decided to be grateful for improvements rather than resentful over challenges, but it was hard to do as tired as they all were on that first day of pulling themselves into the gently rolling hills that the clans all used to shelter from the floods.
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Out Post
Packing everyone into the small enclosure that they had made, along with the gear and the animals made for a tight fit. Even after spending a lot of the day repairing the small stockade Dag was realizing that it simply wasn’t large enough for everyone to stay here the whole time without causing complications he didn’t need. His little clan had just gotten too used to having more space and having a much more comfortable place to live.
So starting early in the morning, he took all the men off to hunt recently fallen trees. It wasn’t easy, even to simply de-limb them using the stone axes. Picking them up unaided was out of the question. Fortunately for Dag, he had made a study of the megalithic builders and all of the ways postulated for them to have been able to build them, given the only tools known to them. These logs, big as they were, still weren’t multi-ton stone blocks, so he assumed that it could be done.
Starting with an A-frame of smaller logs, and a stout rope, he showed the men how to use the A-frame as a lever to make moving the tree back to camp much easier. Ok, so ‘much’ is a relative term, but with five grown man working together along with four half-grown boys, they made reasonable progress and at least had the four main support posts of his tower back to camp by the time the light had faded too much to continue working.
Dag was starving and exhausted, but he had what would become the primary support posts for a large tower he planned to build to guard the gate of their little stockade. The poles were a little more than fifty feet long, but would need to be sunk ten foot in the ground for stability’s sake. So, Dag assumed he could get four floors out of it. That would be plenty to house them, and still have room for the animals in the open stockade, and storage space for their goods on the first floor.
It would be a big project, but they would get at least ten years of use out of it, so he thought it would be worth it. When the other clans began to show up, he would see about hiring some of them to gather more lumber for him. Much like last year, but instead of burning most of it for charcoal, he could build the tower. He might even need to talk a small group into manning it between Gatherings. It would allow for continual charcoal production, and using at least one of the boats to ferry supplies back and forth would mean that no one would have to be out here for the whole year.
Either way, the realization that using the boats would allow for more travel between the sites made the decision for him. The tower here was going to be large, and as comfortable as they could make it. Flowing water here on the top of this hill was unlikely, but short of that, he would make it as close to being back in the village as he could. Anyone out here for two or three months, shouldn’t view it as punishment duty.
Clan Gathering
Clans Arrive
On their third day at the site, the first of the other clans began to arrive. The waters must have been rising fast this year, as the people were all mud caked and looked to have seen better days. It made Dag happy that they had made the trip earlier, he wouldn’t have wanted to risk the boats in the river as it was now. There was a ton of debris flooding down river like a wrecking ball.
Dag greeted them with a coconut shell full of hot broth. It was a big hit, given the condition that they were all in. Even the presence of the log tower now standing astride the gateway to the little stockade only brought a few murmurs instead of the loud complaints that might have been heard at the end of the last gathering. Dad wasn’t sure if it was gratitude for the hot broth, or grudging acceptance of the situation, but either way, he was happy not to have to fight to defend himself just yet.
Dag noticed that the murmurs all seemed to be from old men who were not good chiefs, and younger single men who had not yet attracted a mate. He knew what that meant, they were all afraid that they couldn’t compete with him. Either for hunters/laborers or for mates. Dag didn’t know how to tell them that their mates were all safe from him until they learned to wash regularly. Unfortunately, the river was too wild at the moment to encourage anyone to venture into it.
Jack and Ajax decided to hang back closer to camp now that more people were showing up. It wasn’t so much that they thought that there would be trouble, as they thought that their might be, and they didn’t want to be away from the mess if it started. Both boys knew that you only gained renown by doing something, and if they were off hunting when important things needed doing... They weren’t going to fall into that trap. Ajax may have Shirley, but Jack had not really settled on Pipi. He thought maybe it was time to look at some of the girls of the other clans. Enticing them to join him now wouldn’t be difficult.
Naturally, all of the other young men suspected that Jack was right, and began to watch their young women much more closely. Where as they had once had free run of the Gathering, to mix and mingle and exchange knowledge. This season however, parents and chiefs were much more restrictive. Holding in both young women and young men much more than ever before. The Gathering was more subdued over all. Almost as if the leaders of the other clans were scared of Dag’s crew, yet more scared to offend them unnecessarily.
Trade at least seemed to be a concept that caught on. The clans still didn’t have much beyond their own tools, but they had learned that they could make more, and trading them off for items that they couldn’t make themselves was worth the effort. Dag wished that he could convince them to make more than they needed so that they could trade from surplus instead of trading one form of deprivation for another, but it wasn’t something he had control over.
