The next few days were a flutter of activity. Instead of being terrified and traumatized by the encounters with the two prehistoric predators, I was filled with frantic energy and focus. The rain stopped as suddenly as it started. I restocked the bonfires around my camp feeding them with fatwood and greased sticks. I grew accustomed to the acrid stench of smoke, but it seemed to have scared off the wildlife, which was fine by me.
My priority was to preserve the meat of the elk. I thought it would be disrespectful just to let it go bad. I carved out as much meat as I could, and cut it into thin strips. I knew I could just cut one strip and smoke that, and then duplicate it endlessly but I couldn't accept the rest of the animal going to waste.
My makeshift shelter turned out to be a perfect smoker. I hung strips of meat on strings and let them soak-in the smoke. I might have overdone the heat, because on top of being smoked the meat was also cooked and dried, becoming hard as wood and very difficult to chew, but I assumed it would preserve better that way.
Meat, however, was only one of the resources I have extracted from the elk. I melted all the fat and tallow out of it. In its pure form it would easily go rancid, so I mixed it thoroughly with pine pitch. The resulting mass had the consistency of wax and burnt very well. I dug a small hole in the ground and filled it with the flammable goop, then put a bit of bracket fungus in the middle. When I ignited it, it became a big candle with a high flame. I erected a tall tent over it to protect it from the weather.
Now I had an 'eternal' flame that would burn for days even if the bonfires got extinguished.
By the time I finished, the remains of the elk started to go off. but I was not deterred. Using a sharp bit of flint and a stick for a pry bar, I skinned the hide off the animal. It was gruesome and grueling work. I was both amazed and annoyed by how thick the hide was, and how difficult it was to pull it off the flesh.
In the end, my bounty was a ragged rectangle taken off the back, flank, and belly of it. The rest was an unsalvageable mess. I had no idea how to tan a hide, so I just scraped it clean on the inside, and rubbed it with ash, to clean off the bits of meat and fat. Unexpectedly, when the hide dried it became as stiff as a board. I soaked it in the river to make it pliable again, but when it dried for the second time it stiffened even worse!
Disheartened, I threw it into the tent where the meat smoked. At least, the smoke would keep it from rotting until I figured out how to tan it. At that point, the carcass smelled so foul I could barely touch it. But it still had plenty of uses.
I knew bones, tendons, and cartilage could be turned into glue. I have used bone glue as a carpenter many times. I knew all I had to do was boil the crushed bones until they turned into a sticky pudding. That was the theory at least. I never made glue from scratch, only from already-made powder. But for boiling, I needed a real pot and I needed it right now before I had the time to invent pottery.
Luckily for me, the dead elk provided for that as well. At first, I tried to crack open its skull and use it as a pot, but it turned out to be completely unsuitable for the task. However, the giant flat shoulder blade was a perfect pan. I saved one shoulder bone as a future spade, and hung the other one over hot coals, to boil a mixture of chopped-up tendons, crushed small bones, and cartilage in it. The smell was rather unpleasant, to say the least, but after a few hours of patiently mixing, adding, and stirring, I had a thick, yellow-gray paste that smelled of jelly and a corpse. The bones had not dissolved as I hoped, but the boiled cartilage, tendons, and bits of hide and hoof did. It was definitely... sticky, and in a few hours, hardened into a glassy, resin-like lump. I dubbed it elk glue, for it had bits from all over the animal.
Finally, I took the unused remains of the calf and dragged them to the mouth of the ravine, leading the way with a giant torch that dripped burning fat and threatened impromptu arson. No animals dared come near, as far as I could tell.
I tossed the carcass to the hedgehogs, which swarmed over it greedily. I reasoned, that they were too small to bite through the bones, but they will clean them up nicely, without me having to mess with rotten meat and risking infections. I still wanted the bones back though. The ribs, the femurs, the leg bones, the mandibles, all of them could have their uses as tools, spearheads, maybe even arrowheads in the future.
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Having done what I could with my unexpected first kill, I focused on the last remaining issues, shelter and water.
Of the two, water was easier. I walked back up the gulch until I found the source from which the stream sprung. I used the elk’s shoulder blade as a trench tool and dug a small basin right under it, which I tiled with rocks. I stuck several sticks under the crack from which the water poured, so it broke over like a small waterfall. In an hour of work, I had a makeshift sink to wash myself and drink from with minimal risk of swallowing dirt or contaminants. Visiting this place soon became my morning and evening routine.
As for the bathroom, I took a cue from the wolverine, and marked my territory in a wide half-circle around my camp, the willows by the delta, and up to the end of the ravine. I reasoned I had no way to mask my scent completely, so I might just as well do the opposite and make it a bold statement and thus discourage creatures from encroaching on my turf. Regardless, I carried lit torches everywhere I went, and started small bonfires at various places, reasoning that the smell of smoke is naturally a deterrent to animals, and would make them feel even less welcome.
The previous night, I slept under the stars because my old shelter smelled reeked of smoke. I had to build a new one from scratch. This time I foregoed the idea of a teepee, it was not sturdy enough with the neighbors I had, and the winds that I could expect here.
I dragged a fallen maple, about as thick at the base as my thigh, to my camp. It took me ages to cut it into a log. At first, I used a lump of flint that I had broken in half as a hand-ax of sorts, but it was extremely ineffective. Eventually, I just dragged the log over a bonfire, and burned off its roots and crown. Now I had a beam of wood about eight meters long.
I put one end into a hollow in a riverside willow, and the other I supported with a thick, pronged pole I cut from the nearby tree and dug-in deeply into the soft soil of the clearing. The shoulder-blade trench tool was godsent for such tasks. Over the next day, I added some extra prongs to support it, and tied countless poles to the sides, giving the resulting shelter sloped walls. Now I had a long hut, triangular in cross-section.
The day after, I covered the whole hut in several layers of silk canvas, liberally slathered with pine pitch. While the pitch was still sticky, I piled as many bushels of reeds on it as I could, and before nightfall, I had a thick, well-insulated roof over my head. Sure, the hut was missing the back and front walls, so technically it was just a corridor, but I was proud of myself. It was a far cry from the log cabin I dreamed of, but it was still a real shelter. I was no longer homeless.
I started yet another fire, this time inside, and sat by it wrapped in blankets. As every night, I reminisced about my family and my old life.
Was I dead? At least, was I dead in the old world, the one I was stolen from? This place did not look like the afterlife, but again, nothing about my presence here conformed to any known science or logic, so I might as well consider myself sent to Hell.
If I was dead, or at least completely gone from my world, my family must have been distraught. When I disappeared, I was going over one hundred kilometers per hour, rolling down a highway. I could not think which option was more awful, one that my suddenly driverless car crashed and no body was ever found, or that another me died in the crash, when the pain paralyzed him. Or maybe, just maybe, I was duplicated, and the other me got home safely? Maybe Michaś and Staś still have a Dad, maybe he is holding my wife in his arms right now?
Lucky bastard.
The existence of the duplication pools hinted at the last option, as absurd as it might have been. I seized that thought, because if it was so, maybe I was the only human being suffering in this situation, the unfortunate guy who teleported into a pine notwithstanding.