He started the cabin the next morning, locating it in the hollow where lay the cave. The cave, in fact, would be his initial dwelling, although he wouldn’t do much improving on it right away. The cabin would be built over the cave’s mouth. Or, at any rate, it would be built at some point after he’d finished building the tools. Another of those weight related problems.
He wanted foremost, a defensible position, just in case. To that end, he got the axe out and began felling trees. Everything closer than forty or so yards would go. He figured that would be spear range. He’d thin out the better trees out to one hundred. He didn’t want a giant open slash in the forest to give him away, but he did want a good, long look at anybody getting close.
The sound of the axe was dangerous, as it would carry a long way in the cold air. Hopefully, the mass of the trees would mix it up enough that tracing it back to him wouldn’t be easy nor quick. He did as much as he could with the homemade bucksaw he’d cobbled together and rigged with one of the blades he’d brought, but you couldn’t cut down a tree with a bucksaw, so there was still chopping to do. And even a bucksaw made a certain amount of noise.
One thing was in his favor. The hardwoods and other deciduous trees were dormant this time of year, so he wouldn’t have to spend weeks or months drying them. So long as he hurried. He figured he had about three weeks or a month before everything started thawing out.
Pine was another matter. It remained pitchy and wet throughout the winter. The majority of the pine, therefore, would be used for firewood, charcoal, harvesting sap, and making pine tar. Oh, some of it, he’d slab and stack to dry, but he needed the glue and tar far more at this point than he needed a splintery couch.
He took his time, striving to take the trees in the best order. He’d read about guys getting killed screwing up the felling of a tree. Between the cut going wrong and having the thing fall on their heads, to having the tree cut loose and break off at the wrong end, swinging the working end up and into the logger’s face, to the poor bastard cutting clean through the trunk and having the tree just stand there and mock him because it was tangled up in some other tree. That last one was maybe even more dangerous, because now you had to cut the other one down while worrying about them both.
With a horse or steer or ox, there were ways to mitigate all of those dangers. Hell, with a couple of other guys to help. Alone, he had to take triple care. He couldn’t skip any steps or take any shortcuts.
Then, too, he stopped chopping every half hour or so to take up the rifle and take a swing around, just in case he’d been wrong about it being difficult to track the noise.
It was arduous work, chopping through the half frozen wood, and hard on the axe, even stopping every hour or so to tune up the edge. He averaged four trees a day if he was lucky. More often three. Oh, cutting them down didn’t take all that long, but limbing, peeling, and bucking them was a general pain in the ass, and time consuming, particularly as he was trying to separate the fatwood out of the trimmings.
The evenings he spent figuring out the whole pine tar manufacturing process, using the lead melting pot as a catch pan. This was where the second lid for the five gallon pot came in. In the videos he’d seen, the method was to poke holes into the bottom of the wood vessel to allow the tar to drip out. Of course, that ruined the vessel for about everything else.
His idea had been to poke the holes in the lid and flip the pot upside down, using the weight of the pot to maintain the seal and the perforated lid to allow the escape of the tar. He hadn’t had time to test the theory, though. In the event, it took a couple of heavy rocks on top of the pot to keep things sealed, but it had worked eventually. Now all he’d need to do was build some sort of container to hold the stuff.
The sap glue was easier, since he could just wad it up on sticks and stab them into the floor of the cave with the glue side up.
On the fourth day, he took a break from building. He needed to find some game before he ran out of food rather than after. This time he’d travel light. Basic survival tools and the pack frame without pack. He was also bringing the tablet and all three batteries.
He was planning on going out a ways before he took anything so as not to leave a hunting ring around his camp to lead visitors in, and once again, he’d be doing the lion’s share of his actual hunting in the dark.
That meant holing up during the day, during which time he may as well accomplish something. He hadn’t been doing much journaling up to now, so he figured it was about time to start. For his own benefit if for nothing else. He’d also start mapping the local territory, take some pictures, make some notes. This was going to be his neighborhood for awhile, and he needed to be familiar with it.
He spent the morning and early afternoon stowing gear and working to diminish traces of his presence. It wouldn’t be possible to completely hide his work. Axe cut stumps kind of stood out in this day of stone axes. The cave entrance he piled with limbs and boughs from the trees he’d felled. Anybody going right up to it would know what it was, but maybe not from a distance. He’d make a door at some point, but hadn’t yet.
Throughout the afternoon, he dozed in the shade atop the hill where he’d have a decent view of anyone coming up from the east, waking occasionally to look around.
He quit the camp just before dusk, as the sun was throwing shadows along the treetops. He’d head south tonight and check out some of the streams and ponds. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he stumbled onto anything before midnight. On the one hand, he didn’t want to take any game from too close in. On the other, he didn’t want to starve.
He needn’t have worried. He spent the night wandering without success and the following day hidden in a deadfall writing, sleeping, and studying.
Nightfall found him on the trail again, this time sweeping north. This time, he had better luck. He happened across another fresh trail. Shucking his pack, he got himself ten feet or so up a nearby tree and leaned out, hanging from the trunk, scanning the forest for heat signatures. Something, maybe.
Down on the ground, he shouldered the pack frame and moved out. It took him most of the night, but he managed to get within a hundred yards. They were definitely deer, but they were hunkered down in a copse of trees too thick to offer him a good count of their numbers.
He sat back for a moment or two, thinking about where he was. Man, but wouldn’t a GPS signal be nice about now. If he had his own location correct, he was in the area he’d seen hunters encamped. Not altogether close, but within a general sort of triangle.
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Did he take more than one? He didn’t want to waste the animal even more than he didn’t want to waste the shots. He’d brought a grand total of seven hundred-fifty rounds for the rifle that had to last him his entire journey. Of those, only two hundred-fifty had been hunting rounds. Two-forty-eight, now. Every single one was precious.
What’s more, where would he leave it? He looked around, scanning his surroundings. He was already looking at a laborious task hauling whatever he shot for himself all the way back. He wasn’t looking forward to extra work. Leaving it here in dense forest wasn’t a plan. Nobody would find it, even with smoke. He’d have to drag the damned thing into a clearing or something.
Or the bank of a stream. There had been a stream back about half a mile or so. Overgrown with trees, but with a bit of a wide spot. Fixing his position in his mind, he faded back and verified the place was as he’d remembered it. It was, but it was closer to three-quarters of a mile. Damn. He wasn’t dragging a hundred plus pounds of meat that far for people he didn’t even know. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t have to.
The deer were still there when he got back. The wind hadn’t changed, and he’d been careful to keep on the proper side of it.
They were hunkered in close. He could see now, and there were four of them, all bucks. Well, now....
The stalk wasn’t easy. He wanted to get within fifty yards or so, at minimum, to get a better shot than snippets of fur between tree trunks. And once again, he was getting close to morning. Maybe he could work with that, too.
One of them stood, and Sam froze. It seemed to look directly at him, swinging its head to and fro, but then it moved a pace or two and settled back down. Within ten or so minutes, the others repeated the drill. Sam figured he was about as close as he was going to get. Sixty five yards, he called it.
Sitting on his backside, he got a good sling wrap and settled his elbows on his knees. He drew down on the biggest buck first, since it offered the best shot. Pantomiming the trigger pull, he swung the rifle to bear on the next. This would be a quartering shot, not quite as good. He pantomimed the pull and swung to number three. He wasn’t sure he’d even get a shot at this one, and even if he did, the thing would probably be moving and aiming to get the hell out of there. He probably needn’t bother with the fourth. That boy would be long gone by the time Sam got around to him. But he went through the motions anyway. Then he did it again. And again.
Four times, he mimicked shooting. The wet was soaking through his pants and he had to pee, but he took a few deep, cleansing breaths, and centered the hollow circle inside the crosshairs on the big buck again.
The pop of the silenced rifle startled the three surviving deer, but the second pop followed so close on the heels of the first that the target had barely registered his peril before he was flopping back onto the ground. The third buck managed to lunge to his feet and start to turn away when the bullet went in behind his right shoulder and through his lungs and heart before passing out his chest. He took a staggering five paces and nosed into the dirty snow. As predicted, lucky number four had already made himself scarce by the time the muzzle swung his way.
Sam gathered up his brass —easily seen in the NVGs through the heat it was radiating— and moved to check on his kills before relieving his bladder.
He’d take the second largest for himself. He figured it would dress out at north of one-fifty with the hide, particularly with having to bring the organs and loins. That was plenty to hump the ten or twelve miles he had to go. That one he’d dress out for hauling.
The two others, the big one and smallest one, he’d gut, cut, and hang. And, bonus, he’d remembered the Nalgene gloves this time.
Sam spent the morning in the cluster of trees, dealing with the animals. He’d not skin his own buck until he returned to the cabin site, and hope that he wasn’t ruining the hide.
The other two, he hung from a frame made by chopping a sapling and running it between the branches of two larger trees, hanging it about six feet up. Getting the far end up, even with the aid of the heavy rope required a considerable amount of sweat.
The plan had originally been to travel only at night, but he’d have to chance the daylight. Leaving a signal smoke burning in the dark would do no one any good.
He made it to the stream okay, and built his fire. There was a long sliver of what might have been an island had the body of water been more than six or eight feet wide. He built his fire there, using long, heavy wood beneath a lighter framework. The idea was that the thick wood would burn long enough for the natives to find it. Whether it would work or not, he could only guess.
He left an arrow of river stones pointing the way to the hanging deer, cut a nice wide blaze with the hatchet in the nearest tree to the arrow’s point, and more blazes all the way back to the animals themselves. The watch was pinging and flashing again, so he wrapped it over with a bandana. He needed neither extra noise nor flashing lights.
Shouldering the pack with some effort, he headed south. He was increasing his travel distance considerably, and the terrain wasn’t exactly favorable for slipping through with a deer lashed to the pack frame, but he needed to be clear before anybody answered the signal, and he didn’t know how far off they might be.
He stopped a couple of miles from where he’d left the gifts. The current rig was just too ungainly. So, after all, he ended up butchering the carcass, at least partially, wrapping the meat in the dripping hide and lashing the hide to the frame.
By the time he was done, he had a much more manageable load, although it still fell far short of being ideal.
He was dead beat by the time he made it back to the cabin site and scouted around to reassure himself that nothing had been touched, and the hide was already stiffening. This time, though, he’d made some preparations before setting out on the hunt. He had a bowl hollowed out in the dirt and tamped, large enough to hold the hide while he washed it. Although his trip to the water was farther than his previous camp, and he had yet to build anything to hold more water than his two camp pots. He’d also managed some small supply of pine tar soap prior to his shift in domiciles, so the washing was easier. He’d also made a couple of stretching racks.
The quarters, he hung in the cave, along with the ribs. The loins went into the game bag until he built better containers. The brain went into some more of the salvaged shrink wrap and into a pile of snow just outside the cave mouth. He’d brought the snow up from below, near the creek and packed it into ice slush.
He should be okay, as the temperature hadn’t gone above thirty-five in days. It stayed colder inland as a rule, he was noticing. That wouldn’t last, though. He’d been here a couple of months, now, and it was starting to be March.
First things first. He set the liver in the sun to dry, laying it on the intact lid for the five gallon pot.
Fleshing the hide seemed to take forever, but he didn’t dare leave it go. He wasn’t anywhere he could render salt easily, and hadn’t enough to do the job. That would be another trip he’d have to make here shortly.
It was well into mid-morning by the time he’d finished to his bleary-eyed satisfaction, stretched the hide, and oozed down to the river to clean up and bring up another batch of water.
He didn’t like the idea of sleeping during the day here, and particularly not when he was so dog tired. In the bush, he didn’t really sleep so much as he dozed. The least noise would rouse him that way. Here... tired as he was? A bear might not wake him up until it had taken the third or fourth bite.
He’d rigged the area around the camp with spider wire trip wires and noise makers, although none of them would help if he slept through the hundred-thirty decibel alarm. Well, he smiled to himself, always assuming that whatever the hell had tripped them didn’t shit itself and head for some other hills.
His one saving grace was that everything but the logs, the buck’s liver, and brain was inside the cave, and the cave entrance he could sort of block. Not yet so solidly that nobody could get in, but solid enough that he’d hear it.
There were five more oaks within the range he’d assigned as his clear cut. He took the next day and a half to fell and dress them. After that, he’d have to think about where he was going. He needed containers to put all of the supplies he was making into, but needed tools to make them. But he also needed to get the trees down before they started to wake up from their dormancy and require months of drying before they could be used without warping into unusability.
As a compromise, he decided he’d spend the days until mid afternoon being a logger, and the remaining time laying groundwork for the actual build.