Mercifully, the trip back to my camp was uneventful. No other beasts leaped at my terrified and unarmed self. I guessed the airhorn of doom the terror birds sounded out, must have scared the crap out of everything in a ten-kilometer radius, so the animals laid low.

Back home, I multiplied firewood and stoked my fires as high as possible. Surrounded by flames, a palisade, and layers of caltrops and snares, I felt marginally safer. My fortifications would not stop one of the terror birds, now I knew that for sure. But I hoped that they were now well fed, and would not risk trying to pry me out of my fort, if an easier meal was already by their feet.

So, I calmed myself to focus, how about some metal smelting? Surely, It cannot be all that complicated. And the day was still young, my terrifying adventure in the swamp ended well before noon.

I did not know the next thing about smelting metal, but I did some occasional blacksmithing, and lots of welding, usually when I had to repair rust damage on my excuse for a truck. From what I knew, was that to weld steel I needed way over one thousand degrees Celsius, closer to fifteen hundred, and I expected I would need just as much to smelt ore.

How would I get the ore that hot? It was time to roll up the sleeves, literally as well, so as not to burn them, and do some experiments.

I carefully extracted the rusty sliver of iron off the ore chunk, and multiplied it until I had a dozen big handfuls. Then I poured it over the biggest of my bonfires. The pile started burning, releasing colorful flames and stinking fumes. The fire died down a bit, so I started blowing at it, and when my lungs failed the task, wafting at it with a flat piece of bark.

About an hour later, exhausted and angry, I tossed away the bark, which proved useless. The fire burned brightly, and the temperature seemed high, as it singed the hair off my arms at a distance, but the ore only blackened. I sifted through the embers, and had not found any molten clumps of metal I hoped for. I even took the ore and washed it in the river, in a faint hope of finding a bit of fused metal in the mess, but to no avail.

The silver lining, or well the soot colored lining actually, was that burning the ore seemed to get rid of all the bits of sand, clay, and soil in it, leaving only blackened ore mixed with ashes and chunks of charcoal. So at the very least, it was a step in the right direction.

I sat down to rethink my strategy. I needed a far greater temperature, that was certain. I was not a physicist, but it stood to reason that to get higher heat, I needed better fuel, more oxygen, and probably some way to insulate the whole pile, so that the hard-won heat would not just fly away uselessly into the air. After all, in principle this was not different from barbecuing sausages, something I was perfectly familiar with, the difference was just in the intensity.

I set the ore aside, and started my preparations. Of the three requirements for higher temperature, fuel was the easiest. I needed to replace wood with charcoal, which, luckily, I already had plenty of due to keeping my fires lit at all times. I picked several handfuls of the best and driest-looking bits of charcoal, and multiplied them until I had a pile up to my waist. Better to have too much of it than too little, and be forced to make more in the middle of the smelting process.

Now, insulation. This was trickier. I knew what a blacksmith’s forge looked like, but not how a smelter’s furnace did.

Finally, I decided simplicity was likely my best option. I worked some clay and water into a pliable mass, added some grass and silk fiber for structure, and formed a rectangular brick. After multiplying the bricks many times, I had a stack about as big as my coal heap. Then I cleared a bit of the ground free of grass, and built a hollow brick tower on it. I glued the bricks together with wet clay, and slathered more over the walls to make it as airproof as possible. I could not make it taller than up to my armpits, because at this height it kept leaning, threatening to collapse. I could also not figure out a way to close the top. Building a dome out of mud bricks always led to failure, and roofing it with wood would not be very useful.

In the end, I had a crooked rectangular furnace the size of a municipal trash can. It was still wet, but I assumed the heat would dry it out relatively quickly. I shoveled the embers of one of the bonfires into it, threw in a lot of dry wood on top, and let it burn out to preheat the furnace.

That quickly led to several discoveries. For one, I forgot to add an opening at the bottom, to allow air in, and had to carve it out quickly. This almost collapsed my carefully built brick tower. Second, starting a huge fire inside a hollow chute of wet bricks, caused them to steam up, and explode with cracks, when the trapped steam had nowhere to go. My furnace started leaking heat from the cracks, and nearly fell apart, and I had to hastily repair it with fresh clay.

Careless with hurry, I tried to spread the mortar over the cracks with my bare hand, immediately burning my palm on the hot bricks.

Roaring and cursing in rage, I almost kicked the furnace, and barely restrained myself from ruining my work and likely setting myself on fire in the process.

Abandoning it, I ran to the river to cool my hand in the water. Luckily, the burns, while annoying and painful, did not seem to be worse than first-degree. It did mean though, that, for at least a while, my left hand was of limited use.

I walked back to the burning stack. The flames settled down, and while the structure was covered in a spiderweb of cracks, It did not seem to be getting any worse, and contained heat into a cone of undulating air shooting from its top.

Begrudgingly, I accepted that this was likely the best thing I could build, and I should look for improvements elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I refueled the furnace, and returned to the river to check on my hook.

Sure enough, I had a new catch, this time not spoiled by otters munching on it. The fish guts wrapped around the hook attracted a decent-sized eel, who in its gluttony, swallowed the giant hook whole, slurped in a meter of a silk thread, and ate the sinker as well.

I butchered it quickly, and using sharpened reeds as skeweristicks, placed eel filet shish kabobs over the furnace. For once, I could eat a meal that was not burnt to a crisp and raw inside, as it usually happens over a bonfire, but gently roasted-through with hot air

Snacking on eel bits, I considered my final challenge. I needed to pump oxygen into the furnace. The bottom hole sucked in air, but not fast enough to accomplish what I wanted. Ancient blacksmiths used bellows, at least that's what I remembered from movies about the Medieval Age. But I had only a vague idea of how to make them. I had enough leather to make an air bag, and could pump the air out of it into the furnace, but this did not seem particularly efficient, especially since I needed to keep pumping for hours until the ore smelted.

Then I remembered that the modern smith I was friends with, did not use bellows at all. He simply had an electric air blower with a fan, continuously blowing air into the forge. I did not have electricity, but making a fan rotor and spinning it should not be that difficult, right?

I let the furnace cool down. There was really no point in keeping it hot while I worked on something else. It was time for experiments and I did not think they would yield results soon enough.

I sat down with a piece of silk to draw on, with a charcoal pencil in hand. This time, rather than experimenting blindly, I decided to draw some designs first. I did not know how a forge blower worked, but I assumed it was not much different from a hair dryer, just oversized. Basically, a spinning fan encased in a tube which directed the blow forward.

Having no electricity, it would have to be hand-operated. The blower the blacksmith had was relatively small, but I assumed mine had to be much larger to push the same volume of air with only my feeble hands to power it.

With that in mind, I set out to create the first prototype. I multiplied the bark sheets then tied them to a stick to create a fan. Tying a small crank to the opposite end of the stick allowed me to spin it relatively easily. The problem was, however, that at the speed required for it to create any kind of appreciable blow, the flimsy fan blades simply snapped-off rocketing in random directions.

The bark was no good for that purpose. I needed something sturdier.

But I did, in fact, have had something sturdier. I had lots of stiff leather I could not find a purpose for, until now.

Cutting the leather into shape using a crude stone axe turned out to be rather challenging, but I managed, after soaking the leather in water for a little while. Gluing it onto the central axle was even harder, because the glue was just not good enough to hold against the centrifugal force when I spun it.

Finally I had to sacrifice another hour to painstakingly drill holes in the leatherer and sew it to the stick with silk thread. I hammered several stakes in front of the furnace and installed the fan on top of them. The resulting contraption looked like a miniature Dutch windmill.

I spun the crank, eager to see the results, and was thoroughly disappointed. It did produce a gust of wind, but it went in all directions in front of the fan. I had to direct it somehow.

I’ve spent the rest of the day trying to build a funnel out of leather panels. It was another disappointing failure. A cone of leather that had to be built between the mouth of the furnace and the fan was just too big. it leaked air, and kept collapsing on itself. Trying to replace it with a cloth cone led to even worse results. No matter how tightly I wrapped the contraption with different materials the air would always escape somehow, mostly in the opposite direction that I wanted it to, or even sideways.

Wait, maybe that was a feature not a flaw? I insisted on using the turbine like a fan, to push the air forward, but that wasn't the only option wasn't it? Maybe instead of angled fan blades I could use leather paddles at a right angle, to push air completely sideways? it would be just as efficient but far easier to encase in leather.

By the time I figured it out and drew a new design, it was long after dark. Nevertheless, I was determined to make it work. Even if I have to spend the whole night doing it.

I kept running between the river and the duplication pools, soaking various bits of leather, copying them, and then promptly tossing them away to consider a different design. Only after my third or fourth run, I noticed that some of the leather sheets I submerged in the water were gone.

Looking around, I quickly found the thief. Or rather thieves.

The giant otters stared at me from the darkness. One was swimming belly-up, playing with a dark rectangle that I assumed was my property.

My first instinct was to run, but I squashed it. The otters had many opportunities to hurt me, and haven’t. Even if they were predators, either I was not looking tasty enough, or worth the fight. Or maybe my daily sacrifices of fish guts and meal leftovers appeased them. I sat down for a second and just enjoyed looking at the magnificent creatures frolicking in the water and using their disturbingly humanlike front paws to handle the leather. After the last confrontation with the wolverine, and the encounter with the terror bird, I could not muster the energy to be afraid of anything else. It almost felt like I became one of the animals, my fight and flight instinct only kicking in when necessary, but otherwise dormant.

The nearest otter swam closer, eyeing me with curiosity. Its eyes kept darting to the piece of leather I held. It could easily catch up to me and rip it out of my hands. Or even rip off my hands. Instead, it just waited patiently.

“Alright pal,” I said, “this one's for you. But keep your paws off the rest, ok? I really need them for a do-it-yourself project.”

I reached out slowly, and held the wet rectangle as close to the animal as I dared. It got to it in one swift move, silent and graceful like a wet shadow. I felt a tug, and the otter, along with its prize, disappeared, only to resurface much further away, among its brethren.

“You guys have fun. If I ever have a slow afternoon, I’ll make you a ball and we’ll play fetch.”

Well. I made friends that night. Or at least, established a nonviolent relationship with a pack of wolf-sized predators that each could easily tear me limb from limb. Unlike the damned wolverine, these creatures did not radiate malice, just playful curiosity. Suddenly the prospect of crossing the river did not seem like entering a warzone anymore.

Back to work then. This time, instead of trying to shape the leather casing into a funnel, I had a far simpler task. I cut out two tear-drop shapes, that would make the top and the bottom of the blower, then a continuous strip to make the sides. The rotor went flat between the top and the bottom, with its axle threaded through center holes in each piece.

After painstakingly sewing the leather casing together, and sealing it with pitch, I gave the rotor a spin. Nothing! Not a fart’s worth of air came out of the blower.

Of course, dang it!

I forgot to add any kind of intake hole, so the air had no way to get into the blower before being pushed out.

A moment later I made one, now the contraption blew air with tremendous force whenever I spun the crank. I could easily clear my camp of dry leaves if I wanted to. It also made an awful lot of noise, so I added a liberal glob of grease to the axle and the paddles, to stop the fiendish scraping sounds.

“Having problems starting your furnace, a campfire, or a barbecue grill? Not anymore, with Primitive Blower Extreme!” I announced happily. I tested the device on my bonfires, which exploded into tall bright flames. It was definitely long after midnight, but I was willing to burn the candle at both ends, especially since I could fan the flames now.

It took me another hour or so to restart the furnace, and connect the blower to it with a makeshift pipe made of clay.

Spinning the crank wildly, I turned the top of the furnace into a lance of bright yellow fire. The initial load of wood burned to nothing quickly, making room for the ore and charcoal. I was not sure how to add each, so I mixed them thoroughly, with two parts of charcoal for every part of iron, and filled the furnace almost to the brim. To capture more heat, I covered the top with more bricks, leaving only a small opening right in the middle.

This proved to be a bad idea, the heat immediately died down due to the lack of oxygen. I spun the crank, but I could not make the rotor spin fast enough, or hard enough to push the air through the giant pile of fuel. Desperate, I wrapped my firebow around the axle, and started to spin it back and forth. The flame started to roar and…

Boom!

The intake hole of the blower belched dark flames and black smoke, setting my hair on fire and singeing my eyebrows. I fell back, rolling on the ground to douse the flames.

Idiot!

Foiled again by the laws of physics!

Of course, spinning the fan backwards, plus the pressure building in the furnace, just sucked flammable fumes into the blower, turning it into an impromptu flamethrower.

Which, I realised, was still smoldering.

I ripped it off its harness, and ran to the river to dunk it into the water.

The otters did not react to my stupid antics, but I still felt the silent judgment in their button-like eyes.

“Yeah. Like you never make any mistakes.” I pointed at the nearest one. “I’d like to see any of your kind inventing metallurgy from scratch. Huh? No takers? So how about a round of applause for the magnificent homo sapiens, who is actually trying?”

My outburst was met with beady-eyed stares and silence.

Oh well. Back to work. I tossed the soggy blower next to the slowly burning furnace. What was I doing wrong?

I was facing two problems.

One, is that spinning the fan back and forth momentarily reversed the flow of air, sucking the fire into the blower. Two, the pressure of burning fumes inside the furnace was actually higher than the one I could produce with my blower, so the moment I allowed the air to rush back, it did with tremendous force.

The momentary flow reversal could not be really prevented while spinning the rotor with a bow, but what if I could stop the backflow from happening?

Valves!

The answer was valves. I kept experimenting with various designs, but again, simplicity was key. I put flaps on the outflow and inflow holes, making them a bit bigger than the holes themselves, so that they could only open one way, to let air move forward. When the air started being sucked back into the blower and out of the top hole, the same air would slam the flaps closed. A second later, the air flowing the correct way opened them up again.

In effect, the flow was almost seamless, only momentarily stopped while the bowing direction changed.

It was near dawn when I was done, so I left the furnace to smolder and fell on my bed, exhausted.

By the time I woke up, it was nearly noon. What I would give for a cup of coffee! After a day and night of back-breaking labor, quite literally every muscle I had ached, and I had a tremendous hangover from all the smoke and fumes I inhaled.

“Good morning nature!” I yelled and yawned. The woods were noisy with bird calls. The frantic pace of the last month's events prevented me from paying attention to the changes in the world around me. The cattails exploded with fluff, coating the riverbank with fake snow. Acorns on the nearby oaks grew brown and big, and dropped when I rustled the branches. I even found some hazelnuts, though they were not yet fully grown.

It made me consider that I might need to hurry, and rethink my plans before the coming winter. I did not want to keep tinkering with non-essential stuff when the real snow started falling. But without iron, and thus, without proper tools, I could not imagine surviving until spring. Everything from building a better shelter, to improved food gathering, and from making better clothes to making weapons to fend off deadly wildlife, required good tools.

Munching on a cold cut of barbecued eel, and some overripe cranberries I learned to hate, I approached the furnace. Amazingly, it was still hot, when I peered into the bottom hole, it still glowed dull red. Most of the coal burned to ash, but the iron, slag, and embers fused at the bottom into a shapeless mass, that I could barely break apart with a stick. Decided not to remove it, but threw more coal and iron on top of it, and connected the blower to the bottom hole with a clay tube.

I was about to start bowing to blow air into it, when a thought hit me. Even if I managed to smelt some iron, what then, exactly? How am I going to remove it? How will I work it?

For a change, I decided to think first and act later, to avoid another flaming surprise.

I saw documentaries about ironworks, where they made the metal flow like water, but I doubted I could smelt it into a freely flowing liquid. Most likely, it will just become pliable. Which means, I would need to hammer it to shape. I had a hammer, but it was tiny. I also had no anvil, no tongs, and no other tools, all of which would normally be made of steel. The steel I ostensibly did not have. How to break the Catch-22 loop?

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Tongs were easy, I just split a stick, put a wedge into it, and tied it over with a string, creating giant tweezers. As for a hammer, the only thing I could think of was to use a piece of branch to bludgeon it with. Both tools would immediately burn, but I hoped they will last long enough, especially since I could multiply them.

As for the anvil I had to take a trip to the ravine again, to find a big enough rock. I changed my tactics when it came to going into the woods. Instead of arming myself with torches, and making lots of noise, I skulked around armed only with a spear, and smeared all over with green algae gunk and brown mud. The creatures I feared the most, the terror birds, would not be deterred with a torch. Their behavior indicated high aggression and immediately going after any moving prey they could see, so I opted to try become invisible, or at least, less visible.

Which in my case, meant skulking around in a half-crouch, darting from one bush to another, and carefully scrutinizing the wilderness for signs of their presence.

Going into the ravine was the most unnerving part since it made me unable to see a predator approaching, and I was trapped in it with only one way out. Luckily, I found a big piece of granite just next to the hedgehog den. Carrying it back meant I could not be as sneaky as I wanted, and I had to drop the spear to use two hands.

I was almost back at my camp, when I heard an unmistakable sound from the bushes in front of me.

The guttural growling of my old friend.

I froze. I had no weapons, and it stood between me and safety. So I did the only thing I could think of, I stood up and lifted the heavy stone over my head, ready to strike.

It hobbled out from the shrubbery, nursing the stump of its right paw. It looked gnawed off right above the point where the silk rope held it. The wound was scabbed over, and the animal looked sickly and malnourished.

“Hi Logan. Hi boy. Who’s a gooood boy? Whooo’s a gooood boy?” I crooned at it sweetly, backing off. the stone felt impossibly heavy, threatening to fall on my head instead Logan's. Luckily, the wolverine was either too confused with my babytalk, or too weakened, and instead of attacking it started barking at me half threateningly, half in desperation. I took a few steps back and lowered the stone. If I wanted to smash its head, the time has passed.

I kept backing off, and the animal kept gimping along, never quite getting close enough to threaten me, but not leaving me alone.

Finally, after a thousand years, I reached my fortifications and hopped over it. Logan snorted, miffed with my disappearance. I heard it circling my encampment, trying to break through my palisade from the side of the river.

Fuck! That part of the palisade was not closed, I left it open when I went to muddy myself up for camouflage. I ran straight to my hut to grab some spears and a torch, when another idea hit me. This could be solved without violence. I veered towards the multiplication pools, and made a whole heap of roasted eel. Then I exited the palisade through the main gate, and whistled at the wolverine.

“Here boy. Ps-ps-ps! Uh, huh, you’re not a cat, so… Here boy, here, Logan!” I called and whistled. When the wolverine ambled back towards me, I tossed a piece of eel towards it. Despite its handicap, it got to it immediately and swallowed without chewing.

“You like fish, don’t you, you pirate bastard? Come come, hobble on, I have more…” I kept dropping bits of fish, leading it away from my camp and towards the bramble bushes. step by step, we passed the fallen pine, when I heard another terrifying sound, this time coming out of the river.

It was the most unholy noise, that would be hilarious in other circumstances. It was as if a bunch of Muppets laughed angrily, ending each bark of laughter with a screech of a record scratch. Logan responded with a barking growl and puffed up its hunches until it stood almost twice as big, with its fur standing on end. Immediately, a swarm of dark brown shapes slithered out of the reeds, baring teeth and undulating like giant cobras ready to strike. Only now I saw exactly how big the otters were. Each one was at least as big as the wolverine, easily twice my size and mass, and seemed to be built out of taut muscle. Logan was about to be torn to shreds, and likely so was I, for being right in the middle of a mustelid battle, armed with nothing but a sharp stick and an apron full of eel…

Huh.

Making sure not to make any sudden moves, I crouched down, and started tossing bits of fish towards the otters, and away from the wolverine, which also got a few bits tossed its direction. One by one, the animals stopped their racket, intrigued by the smell. The otters started nosing their morsels, without taking eyes off their opponent. Logan, true to his namesake, did not back down, but stared them back and meticulously cleaned his heap of fish.

“Logan, you foolhardy moron, shoo!” I whispered in his general direction. Even though the damn beast nearly killed me twice, and scared the crap out of me, I did not want to see it die. Nor did I wanted the magnificent otters to get hurt, because I knew the wolverine would not go down without a fight.

I took the last morsel of fish and tossed it far to the right, trying to lure him away from the river. Logan eyed me for a second, then swept a daring gaze over the otters, and nonchalantly backed away to get it. Watching him strut away, I almost burst into laughter. Somehow, the sickly, mangy, three-pawed abomination radiated more menace and confidence than an entire pack of predators bigger than it was.

I never believed in the whole Alpha-male, king-of-the-hill macho badass crap, but if it was true, this guy had it. Its furry balls were likely made of better iron than I could ever create in my furnace.

The otters almost immediately lost interest in their opponent, and transformed, from murderous aquatic wolves, back to adorable plush toys. One slithered closer to me, trying to find out if I had more eel on me.

I stood completely still, and let it sniff me all over. It effortlessly bowled me over in its enthusiasm. I’ve been subjected to a thorough search, and the front of my shirt had been licked clean off the bits of fish that I wrapped in it. Next thing I knew, the lead otter, followed by two flunkies, snaked its way through the back gate and I heard it rummaging in my camp. I ran after them, and saw them first take care of all the leftover fried fish, then explore the smoker where the last bits of smoked venison were devoured, then they helped themselves to some of my leather as well. Finally, one of them tried to pry away the freshly reinstalled forge blower, so I had to put a stop to it. I snuck around the furnace, and threw a spare brick into it, causing a burst of flames and black smoke to come out of both ends.

The thief yelped and backed away from the fire, sneezing and complaining loudly in its cartoonish mewling.

Seconds later, the trio slithered away, moving quicker on their bellies than I could sprint. I locked the gate behind them and sighed. This was already a long day, and it was barely noon!

“Well, sure guys, help yourselves to my food. And my stuff. I guess, I'm technically squatting in the middle of your home so…”, the pack was already gone, however.

I went out of the main gate again, but this time I was armed to the teeth, and had my travois and a spear. I thought myself so clever, trying to appease the local wildlife with gifts of food, but that introduced problems of its own. Neither the wolverine, which I previously presumed dead, nor the otters would ever leave me alone now. They expected their free meal, and lost all fear of humans if they ever had it. Even the fear of fire did not seem to deter them all that well, if it ever did. After all, the otter came a step away from a roaring furnace, and only backed off when I blew smoke in its face.

Those were dangerous wild animals that now considered me a food source. All the time when I thought I was taming them, they were actually taming me. Or in the case of the otters, they now ran a protection racket, fending off other predators in exchange for fish? I had to establish some boundaries, and by boundaries I meant actual ones, starting withpatching the holes in my palisade so that thieves and mustelid mafia could not just waltz in so easily.

Mulling it over, I finally reached the stone I dropped and loaded it on the travois. Logan did not come after me this time, but I expected another neighborly visit from him soon. He was visibly malnourished, his fur was mangy, dirty, and sickly looking, and though the stump of his paw looked healed, it was badly handicapped. An animal like this, an ambush predator that relies on wrestling its prey and holding it down for a kill, will be severely disadvantaged, and desperate to find food by other means.

I vowed to put a pile of food for it on the far end of the bramble patch, and another for the otters near the jetty. This way, I would keep them away from each other, and away from my own stocks.

Comes winter though, when animals grow desperate with hunger… I would have to figure something out.

But I had to focus on the task at hand. Hammer. Nails. Well, no nails yet, but a nice heavy anvil. I gathered all the tools I thought I could need, another pile of coal and iron ore, and a dozen spare tongs. Remembering my previous mishap, I put on a kerchief over my head and face, and mittens to protect my hands.

With everything ready, I ran to the river and soaked myself in water, to become less flammable and less likely to overheat during work. I also drank a lot of rainwater I learned to collect and multiply, as an alternative to boiling it continuously.

It was time to smelt some metal. I refilled the furnace again, a task I was becoming quite adept at. Gave the blower a few spins, noting it worked great, the flaps opened and closed with organic precision.

What I was not ready for, is how long it would take. After what felt like two or three hours of intermittently bowing at the axle of the blower, laying on the ground in exhaustion, cursing, refueling the furnace, and bowing again, I noticed a trickle of lava-like substance, come out of a crack at the bottom, glowing brightly even in the midday sun. I immediately scooped it on a stick and threw it into a leather tray filled with water. It hissed, boiled the water and burned a hole in the container, but it cooled enough for a careful inspection.

Well. Crap. Whatever it was, it was not iron. Looked like a snot of slag with globs of green-black glass in it. When I cracked it, it had sharp edges, which at least could have some use, but it was not what I was after. I priedthe crack in the furnace open and let the mysterious lava out. Carefully, to avoid splashing water onto the furnace itself, I cooled the trickle and examined it.

No iron. On the bright side, I might have invented glassmaking, though the lumpy beads were yet far away from anything I could pour Scotch into.

I crawled as close to the new bottom hole as I dared. The whole opening was bright yellow with heat, and when I stuck a spear in there, it immediately burnt. The prodding did lead to another discovery though, there was some big, heavy lump in there, and it yielded to pressure. Could that be the iron? I tried to peer into it through the top hole, but could not see anything without leaning too close and roasting my eyeballs.

After yet another day of hard labor I was not prepared for, my muscles screamed. But what else could I do now but continue?

I gave it another two hours of spinning the blower. In the end, the work came to an end not by my decision but by accident. The molten slag somehow flowed into the clay pipe connected to the blower, and burned off the muff. I had to extinguish the blower yet again.

I could not wait any longer. My body would soon give up with exhaustion, and the furnace would simply cool off again.

Heedless of the heat, I took a hammer to its wall and knocked off several bricks.

The white-hot coals and the liquid slag spilled out, and in the middle of it, sat a glowing, porous lump about the size and shape of a cauliflower head. I knew that was it, my precious iron!

TO not waste any more time gawking, I grabbed it with the makeshift tongs and put it on top of the rock. When I hit it with a wooden club, it started shedding chunks, but the main body became slightly flattened.

I kept clubbing it until it grew dark orange and no longer yielded. I tossed it back into the furnace, ripped the blower off its harness, and blew air directly under the bloom, only stopping, every once in a while, to throw some fresh charcoal on top. When it reached bright orange, I took it out again, and hammered it some more, trying, and failing to flatten it into a rectangular shape.

Both my tongs and my wooden mace had to be replaced constantly as they burned to uselessness. In my clumsiness, I had dropped the bloom on the grass many times and watched it hiss and cool. Once, I barely stopped myself from reaching for it with a mittened hand.

Rinse, repeat, heat, and clobber, my mind retreated into a happy place where I could no longer feel the agony of my tortured arms, and just marvel at the thing taking shape. The last few repeats, I replaced the club with a small stone hammer I made earlier.

In the end, I have simply become too tired to even swing it. But by the time that happened, I was holding a slowly cooling piece of dull gray snot the size and shape of a carrot. With the last of my strength, I scraped it over the rock several times to file-off the top scale.

It revealed a shiny, metallic interior!

I'm not ashamed to admit, I cried. Not just out of sheer exhaustion, because by goodness, that too, but out of joy and triumph. I haven’t been happier holding anything in my hands so much since I held my newborn sons. This unassuming bit of iron was my greatest victory since I was stranded here. It meant weapons. Good tools. Goddamn nails! This was a chance to be bullied by nature no longer, but to fight back.

I have spent the next day and a half relaxing and recuperating my strength. Every muscle fiber I had, had been tortured to uselessness, and I inhaled so much smoke and noxious fumes that I felt drunk. I only permitted myself enough work to restock my food supplies, and keep the protective bonfires lit, though I started to doubt their actual effectiveness.

When I was done laying in bed and feeling sorry for myself, I took a spear and a backpack, and went exploring, looking for food. The otters had cleaned my pantry so thoroughly, that I had nothing to multiply. The duplication pools were a cornucopia, but they needed something to start with.

I picked several cranberries, begrudgingly. Over the last weeks I went from loving them to hating them passionately, though I needed them for the sugar and the vitamins anyway. I could no longer stomach them raw, so I just put them in a shard of a small clay bowl and boiled them to a thick marmalade. I haven’t yet got around to making actual useful pottery, because all my attempts at making pots failed, but I thought this might change when I rebuilt the furnace. For now, I just used a shard of a failed pot and a flat stone to cook small bits of food, and then multiplied it.

I needed to expand my diet, considering the inevitable coming of the winter, and the fact that I had thieves hungry for meat and fish that could easily sneak into my pantry.

First off, I collected all the nuts and seeds I could find, as long as they looked familiar enough. I had plenty of unripe hazelnuts around, which I assumed would keep well in storage, unless I would be assaulted by squirrels or chipmunks, which for all I knew could have been a real possibility. I also found early pine nuts, which I decided to carefully test by eating a few a day. I saw some yew berries, which I stayed clear of. I knew the berries themselves were edible, but the seeds inside were dangerous, and I was not about to play Russian Roulette with my stomach.

Most importantly, I found plenty of acorns of various shapes, sizes, and colors. It seemed like the woods around me had every type and species of oak growing in it, including ones I have never seen on my Earth. I tasted the acorns, which were bitter as hell, like a stale espresso with a hint of a raw potato. I stored some for later experiments. Who knows, maybe if I boiled them, or washed them, or roasted them they could become more edible?

I was about to go back, when I stumbled on the most joyful discovery yet. As I was hacking my way through the riverside growth, I pushed aside a maple sapling, which smeared sticky droplets all over my face. I absentmindedly licked my lips, and discovered the smear was sweet. Of course! Maple produced sweet juices that bugs concentrated into honeydew, and humans boiled into maple syrup.

I did not need to waste time working on making the syrup itself, because the aphids did most of the work for me. I just gently scraped tiny droplets of honeydew off the leaves, rolled them into a tiny sweet pearl, and multiplied it until I had a bag full of, essentially, candy. On a whim I decided to boil some of it to make molasses-like mass, taffy, and finally dark caramel. Mixing the mass with crushed, roasted hazelnuts, dried berries and a few roasted acorns for a hint of a bitter kick, resulted in dense energy bars that packed all the calories I could ever need. Just this one discovery meant I would never again have to worry about starvation, only about tooth cavities from all the sugar. Better still, when I distilled and concentrated the taffy into hard caramel, It likely became impervious to spoiling. It was essentially edible pitch that would last through the winter.

I even found some use for the acorns. Roasted to dark brown and boiled, they produced a brew that could almost be mistaken for coffee. In color at least, because the actual taste was closer to roasted peanuts, If one was being generous, or to burnt potatoes, if not. Still, despite the lack of caffeine in it, the acorn coffee had enough of a placebo effect to slap me awake.

Nourished and fully lucid, I forced my aching body through a set of stretching exercises. Some of the muscle cramps finally loosened, and I no longer felt like I was eighty years old. But this was not the end of my self-care that day. If I wanted to foray into actual blacksmithing, the next morning, I needed to put my body and mind into the best shape I could achieve.

I stripped, and tossed my soot-soiled clothes into the fire. I could always duplicate a spare, so washing it made no sense. Besides, as I noticed wrinkling my nose, it stank. And so did I. Up to that point, my hygiene consisted of a quick washcloth scrub now and then, because I was not brave enough to get into the river, where I would be helpless.

But seeing how the otters did not seem to see me as prey, and there was unlikely to be another predator lurking in their territory, I decided to give it a try.

I had no soap or shampoo, so I took a piece of coarse slag to use as a pumice, and a handful of ash to scrub myself with. Sitting on the end of the pine jetty, I abraded away layers upon layers of dirt. My legs were a map of small cuts and scrapes caked with mud. My hands were pretty much tattooed with soot and dirt. I had so many ticks and mysterious critters gnawing at me, that I no longer worried about removing them safely, just scrubbed them off with a sharp stone. If they carried borreliosis, Lyme disease, or another kind of nasty, I already had it ten times over, and there was nothing to be done about it.

I leaned over the water and examined myself critically. Over nearly two months after becoming a castaway in this strange land, I lost most of my body fat, making me lean and wiry. My beard grew bushy and my hair, previously kept neat, now formed a sparse dirt-blond halo. The only part of me that did not look like it belonged to a deranged hobo were my teeth which I tried to keep as clean as I could with a cloth scrub. I knew that if I got a rotten tooth it would be the end of me, as I would have no way to extract it without making it much worse.

there was one thing I could have done to make myself feel less like a savage. Shaving.

The flint shards I made were not sharp enough, but the bits of glass I accidentally made in the furnace could be broken into extremely sharp edges. Using the water surface as a mirror, I cut off my beard, tuft after tuft, and cropped my hair shorter. Now I looked less like a homeless man, and more like a client of a blind barber. At the very least, It made getting rid of the ticks on my head easier. Trimming my fingernails and toenails the same way was much trickier, but I managed it without losing any digits.

All that grooming made me think of the mystery of my appearance here once again. Whatever force had deposited, or copied me into this reality, seemed to follow no scientific logic in its actions. Why exactly was it necessary to dump me here? And why now? Was it a punishment, or some way to preserve my life? Some manner of resurrection? Did I die in my old reality? I did not remember it. I was driving down a motorway when I suddenly vanished and reappeared here, with no conservation of velocity or momentum. Weirder still, the unseen force made sure I was recreated in a way that made me immune to local germs, but somehow insisted on me being nude, and thus, helpless. It did not copy the dead matter of my clothes, shoes, and the content of my pockets, but it copied my equally dead hair and fingernail tips faithfully.

It was as if someone or something wanted to preserve the raw idea of me, rather than actual physical me as I was, and disregarded every scientific principle to have it so. In fact, how do I even know I was preserved exactly? Maybe whatever force instantiated me here just skipped over minor details? Or even major ones? How could I know that any of my memories from my life before were real?

Somehow, this disturbing line of thought did not make me feel worse, but better. The existential dread of the possibility of not being a real person was infinitely better than the fear of being real and forever separated from my family.