I was up before the dawn, I think I actually beat the rooster out of bed this morning. It seems that I was eager to get out on my own travelling again, solitude had been hard for me to come by in recent months. I was definitely looking forward to getting out on the trail and on my own for a while. Michelle had taken me to bed early and it wasn’t just for a good night’s sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Matilda squeezed in and cried for a bit while I held her, there was still a girl in there somewhere. I still slept well nonetheless.

I took a long hot shower knowing that it would be a while before I would have that luxury again; I was surprised to find that we were now using handmade soap, Matilda never ceased to surprise me. Cleansed and now dressed in my 19th century travel garb it was time to eat and hit the road. Yes Michelle had a long conversation with me about clothing and we pulled together something that wouldn’t make me stand out too much. The good news was that they had two shirts that the girls had put together for me from Matilda’s cloth hoard and I was allowed to wear a pair of my blue jeans. I had a handmade leather coat to wear and my old beater cowboy hat, my boots were modern but they would pass casual inspection without a problem.

I had a .22 auto stashed on my boot and the M1911 in a shoulder holster, the double barrel was in the rifle sheath and the breech loader was rolled up in my blanket roll. The muskets were in the pommel holsters in front of me as was a portion of the ammo for all the firearms. I had my knife on my belt and the woodsman ax on a horse pack.

Michelle went through the pack load-out for each of the pack horses, everything was distributed and they both carried a very light load; I doubted that would be the case on my return journey. The bottles and jars were each swaddled in burlap wraps that were stuffed with wool and hay; the girls had whipped those up in less than an hour, Matilda was brilliant and training them well. I was shown my food pack and camping utensils and not allowed to look at the food until I was on the trail, apparently they had packed some surprises. My utensils were what I had bought precisely for this type of camping/hunting excursion, it was all modern and pack fitted taking up very little space. I even had an ember bucket designed to carry hot coals from the previous fire through to the next evening’s fire. Amos had a separate pack of small kindling for me mostly I think to remind me that I sucked at starting fires from scratch, nice gesture and very nice dig coming from a kid who was scared of his own shadow just a month ago.

They overloaded me at breakfast and I ate until almost bursting, I had private conversations with everyone after to remind them of the role they were expected to play while I was gone. Michelle was left in charge and Holder was to provide camp security. Everyone knew where their weapons were and where they were supposed to go in case of emergency, the rendezvous point was set in the grove near the orchard. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

I mounted up and rode off with the pack horses trailing behind and Brin leading the way. Brin was a great traveling companion, his nose and ears were far better than mine by a long shot and he never went rabbit crazy and crashed out into the brush chasing fantasies. If something worried him he would stop dead and I would follow suit, if he skirted an area then I did also; I know for a fact that we dodged at least one rattler that way.

We followed the game trails and when we came to a fork we always bore north-by-northwest, I knew we had rivers ahead of us that we would need to cross and the further west we went the easier it would be. Brin waited at every fork while I took compass readings and updated my maps, I could only measure the distance traveled by time until we came to major geographic feature that was noted on my maps. The maps I had found on this area were incredibly vague and sometimes of dubious origin, folks in the early 1800s seemed to have had different concepts of distances than someone like me who grew up in the modern world.

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We made it to the edge of the forest in just under two hours, it was slower going trailing the pack horses and I wasn’t taking the most direct route out to the prairie. My plan was to make a circular journey until I crossed the Platte and then head due east, I knew I had to cross the Little Nemaha and the Saline River before I got to the Platte. The further west I was when I attempted those crossings the easier it would be, I decided to stay within the tree-line today and break northwest tomorrow morning.

The tree-line wasn’t abrupt here like it was at a river or our cosmically altered compound, it was usually about a half mile area where the trees and bushes slowly thinned and the prairie grass started to take over. It was a very pleasant ride with only occasional creeks or groves to conquer, any major obstacles could easily be circumvented.

I took my mid-day meal near a small brook and allowed the horses to graze and drink while I sat down to explore the lunch the girls had sent along for me. I sat down and got comfortable and then opened my lunch-bag and pulled everything out, I spread it out in front of me and then started laughing. I laughed so hard that I rolled over holding my sides with Brin standing over me worrying about my sanity. Brin’s tongue brought me back to reality so I sat up straight again and gave Brin one of the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches that they had sent along for my mid-day dinner; Brin got the one with the smiley dog face drawn on the paper wrapping.

So yeah, the girls had sent me a kids school lunch, I had a couple of PB&Js, a bag of chips, some carrot sticks, an apple, and a juice box. Of course everything had smiley faces drawn on them. The juice was my own fault, I always took a case of it on my expeditions in case someone got sick, it was shelf stable and easy to transport; sickly sweet but still it was mostly juice and it helped when a person was ill. The chips reminded me that I needed to hide my private chip stash better or I’d be out before too long, at the same time I doubted that I could hide anything around that compound without them finding it. I definitely needed to build a workshop when I got back.

Saving the juice box was an easy decision, I didn’t need that sickly sweet taste in my mouth right now and clear cold creek water tasted just fine in the warm spring sun. Summer was heading our direction and the daytime weather was getting warm. One thing that did surprise me is that my sinuses weren’t a problem this year, normally I was miserable in the spring with all of the flowers starting to bloom but it didn’t seem to affect me this time what-so-ever. On the other hand Sonya and Matilda had become snot machines and every time a new flower popped they went on sneezing fits all over again.

Riding along gives one to time to think about such things, I didn’t ponder long however and decided that since I’d grown up near here I was immune to these plants; Matilda and Sonya however were a long way from their birthplaces and the pollen here was kryptonite to them for now. I rode along slowly, staying ever vigilant but also allowing my mind to process and wander a bit. Brin kept a steady circle around me about twenty-five yards out, it looked like he was comfortable exploring that far as we moved along at this pace. He had long since given up on trying to mark every tree we came across but still managed to hit one once in a while, it was interesting to watch him in action.

I decided that if I was going to be so laid back I should probably do so with a weapon in my hands so I pulled out my double-barrel and loaded it up being careful to relax both of the hammers back down to avoid an accidental misfire.

So there I was ambling along peacefully in the late afternoon sun just looking for a favorable camp site when I started to realize that I could see a man-made tree-line in the distance ahead of me. The man-made part was easy, at a certain point there just were no more trees. Not a tapering off just a line of trees and a bunch of stumps beyond them.

Well that put a damper on my day.