I was up before dawn the next day, and filled with a sense of restlessness I couldn’t seem to shake. I ended up jogging up towards the cliff face trying to burn energy instead of taking my usual casual walk. I got there as the first gray hints of sunlight were just penetrating the deeper shadows and I strolled over to talk to Kenny and Sam who were standing by the livestock pens. They were standing next to a rough hewn picnic table that was sitting near where folks had been eating the past couple of days.
“That’s new. Which one of you guys put in the table?”
Sam jerked his thumb towards Kenny. “He started it yesterday afternoon, worked on it during his guard shift. He’s trying to talk me into dragging him a couple more trees so he can work on another one today.”
Kenny shrugged. “I’m a big guy. I don’t like sitting on the ground while we eat. It’s not comfortable. I figure I’m just standing here watching the animals wait to get attacked, why not work while I do it?”
“Hell I think it’s great. Sam, I bet Debbie would loan you one of her chainsaws to go get a couple. In fact, I’ll even help a little while before I kick over to work on my wall again. Put some picnic tables up here where we eat, maybe some kind of workbench or something over there where folks tend to do pottery, another where John does his butchering. If we’re here for a while there’s no sense roughing it.”
Sam squinted up at the sky, and he seemed focused enough I followed his gaze trying to get an idea of what he was looking at. “It should be lighter than this by now, Jack. I’m pretty sure there’s one hell of a storm coming. I can feel it in my elbows.”
Kenny shook his head at him, “Naw, you haolies can’t predict the weather for anything. If there was a storm coming I’d smell it on the wind. Just go grab me some logs man, or cover my shift while I get them.”
The rest of the group had been walking toward us as they talked, and I looked for John figuring he’d have a good weather since if any of us did. As I was scanning faces I felt a raindrop impact on the back of my neck and run down my collar. Sam was right and I broke into a jog without saying anything. Everyone stared at me as I passed the group and I hollered out, “The clean clothes.” as I tried to put on speed. Scattered drops were falling on everyone now and a couple people started after me while others milled around or turned back for the keep.
Even though all the manual labor had me in great shape, I still wasn’t built for running. Hunter came up behind me and passed me like I was standing still, and I heard heavy breathing and turned my head to see Steve slowly gaining on me. Steve ran like a little kid, all awkward gait and stiff arms like he hadn’t done it much. I redoubled my efforts, determined not to let someone who was obviously not an athlete overtake me.
I won the race and joined Hunter on the rock face, snatching clean clothes up in bundles. Steve came up pounding flat footed in time to grab the last bundle and we all turned around and ran back. Hunter pulled ahead again, and Steve and I brought up the rear. It was raining in earnest by the time we darted in through the open door to the keep.
I was panting as we started handing back clean and mostly dry clothes to their original owners. I’d mostly recovered by the time I spun a pair of John’s unmentionables around on the tip of my upraised finger for the crowd to see. “Whose are these? Somebody recognize that unfortunate streak?”
John snatched them from my hand. “There ain’t no goddamn streak.” I laughed while Debbie came up from behind and hip checked me. “Don’t be an ass, Jack.” she muttered to me sotto voiced and I held up my hands and surrendered, admitting the undies had been mostly clean. Everyone ate jerky for breakfast as we stared out the open door at the sheer volume of rain beating down.
After a while John started muttering about the rain overwhelming his irrigation system and washing out the stuff he’d planted. He pulled out a full length yellow raincoat complete with hood from the pocket of his overalls, and started to pull it on. I didn’t know what he expected to accomplish if it was too much rain, and I thought he looked surprisingly like the Gorton Fisherman in his rain coat, but I figured I’d already given him enough shit this morning so I didn’t say anything when he ducked out into the weather and charged off to his farm. Debbie moved forward to stand in front of the door where everybody was staring, and when we all focused on her she cleared her throat.
“I guess now is the perfect time for a business meeting. John’s out and Kenny is still huddled in the rain with the livestock but everyone else is here and it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere for awhile. I talked to a bunch of you over the last couple of days and it's time to run stuff past the group. First off is our old business, Hunter you want to take that part?”
He nodded, apparently some of this had been prearranged, because Hunter walked over to a set of the crude shelves we’d put up along one wall of the keep. He held up a chunk of pottery and when he was sure he had my attention tossed it to me. I checked it out and realized it was the shower head I’d asked them to make for me.
“Debbie and I fired some clay yesterday morning. Most of the stuff you guys asked for is on these shelves. Going forward I’m taking over the pottery full time if nobody has any objections. If you’re ordering something for personal use I want a hand washing the clay, but I’ll make the trade goods and stuff for us around the camp as my contribution. Basically the same deal we’ve got with John. I’ll work the clay full time and the company gets a cut of my profits. I’m going to experiment with some different additives and maybe build a real kiln for better temperature control. I also bought some gears and pedals and I’m pretty sure I can come up with a foot cranked potter’s wheel so I can turn better stuff.”
He trailed off, obviously unsure how to go on and Debbie took back over. “Anybody object say so now, or the motion passes.” When the group stayed quiet she nodded and pointed to Allison. “You’re up, show everyone what you and Sam found yesterday.”
Allison started passing a couple of weird looking rocks around the group. I waited for my turn to inspect it closer while she started to talk. “We found the mineral deposit Tim marked on the map. It’s a vein of some kind of metallic ore. You have to climb a little bit to get to it, but there’s a good sized vein of it visible up in a chimney on the side of the cliff.”
I had it in my hands now, and there was a bunch of silvery metal shot through some grayish looking rock. It felt relatively heavy in my hand compared to an average rock but I didn’t know crap about geology so I passed it on. Debbie took over as the last of us had a chance to play with the ore.
“This is the perfect example. We’re reaching the point where I think we need to specialize. Instead of all ten of us working at general labor, I want to pattern after what John and Hunter have decided and started exploiting all of these opportunities separately. Metal goods that don’t come from the shop could be a huge resource for our company but it takes some specialized tools and techniques. I think we should come up with a list of individual jobs people can work on for the company. We start breaking at noon instead of midday and do a group meal, then put a couple hours in on group projects that need more manpower. Take every 7th day off except for whoever’s spelling the three new people on watch. There’s still details but is everyone okay with the general concept?”
There were a couple of concerns about how individual jobs would be assigned, but when Debbie assured us it would be voluntary and require a vote of the group to approve or disprove we all went along with her proposal. Immediately after it passed Sam was the first to propose a job.
“I’m a pretty good climber and I know where it is. I’ll mine the ore and drop it down the cliff face. We ought to be able to develop a pretty good stockpile while we figure out how to work it or just trade the ore off to the village. Anybody else want the job?”
No one objected and he nodded his head, apparently satisfied with his new occupation. I raised my hand to stop anybody else from going and addressed the group. “This rain has got to be miserable for Kenny right now, and honestly I’m not sure how the stock will do. That’s a John kind of question and he ain’t here right now. I think we should build a barn slash guard shack first thing when the rain lets up before we split up and do anything else.”
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I got enthusiastic support from Helen and Sam, the two who spent the most time on guard and everyone else seemed to like it, and Debbie nodded at me without bothering to call for a vote.
“We’ll definitely run up some kind of structure in the livestock pen as soon as the rain ends then. Any other jobs anyone can think of?”
Helen stood up, which neither Sam nor I had bothered to do, and addressed the group. “I want to take a shot at doing something with the ore instead of just trading it off. My uncle had a machine shop when I was a kid, and I’ve seen like every episode of Forged in Fire. I know that doesn’t make me a real blacksmith, but if nobody minds I want to try and see if I can figure something out with the ore. It’s a risk, but if I can turn out metal goods we’ll make way more than just trading the ore.”
John came back while she was still talking, and he seconded her idea to become the blacksmith before anybody even had a chance to fill him in on what was going on. Once we’d filled him in and he’d told us it looked like the rain was dying off, we ran a quick vote and Helen got the job. Debbie opened it back up for job ideas and this time Allison went first.
“Exploring the map paid off when we found the ore. I think someone should go full time trying to find out exactly what’s at all the stuff Tim mapped out in the book. I can’t stand just hanging out in one place, so I want that job.”
Debbie shook her head. “Traveling to unknown places like that constantly is just too dangerous to send one person. Buddy system at a minimum, we should do that in pairs and preferably with some of our more capable fighters. Jack, you want to partner with Allison?”
“Honestly, I still think the wall ought to be a priority. I was kind of planning to keep working on it each day.”
She shot me down. “That’s a huge project for just one man, Jack. We can all kick in on it every once in a while when we do the afternoon general labor levy, but you’d be months finishing it on your own. For the morning company shift we need you doing something more immediately productive.”
“Well when the monsters come and eat all our faces off because we don’t have a wall I’m telling everyone I told you so. Till then I’ll side Allison and help explore Tim’s map.”
Debbie looked over the group, “Everyone okay with using those two for that?” When no one responded she gestured at Steve. “You’ve done the cooking most of the time when we do the communal meal and it turns out better than when anyone else tries. How would you feel about being camp boss? Stick around the keep and keep the fire in the smokehouse going, do breakfast and lunch for everybody, out of the company stores not your own. If you run out of anything else to do you can always lay in firewood. Not as glamorous as the other jobs but somebody needs to do it.”
Steve looked over at John for a minute before he nodded his head. “I can take over that job, but I may be underutilized. I reserve the right to petition for a change in occupation later if a better opportunity presents itself.”
Debbie nodded and said sure. Jeri spoke up immediately after, like she was afraid of getting voluntold into something if she let it hang too long. “I’ve been working with Buster and Doris since we put up the livestock pens. I don’t know if anyone else talked to John about the lack of insects?” She trailed off like she expected us to confirm or deny but when nobody said anything she picked back up again. “Well after the guinea’s got here, I’ve noticed some grasshopper like things in the daytime, and there are moths and stuff attracted to the fires. I think I’d like to keep on with that, and gradually use them to help John on the farm, maybe do some of the general labor with them as well. I’ll be the llama wrangler, head rancher, whatever you guys want to call it.”
There was a moment of quiet while Debbie waited to see if anyone objected or made another suggestion, and when it dragged on maybe just a hair longer than necessary she waved her hands. “I’m still unoccupied, and so is Kenny. We’ll pitch in on other people’s jobs and maybe just do general life improvement projects until we can come up with something better.”
I smirked up at her and gestured at Steve. “You can always lay in firewood if you’ve got nothing else to do.” I shook my head at her facial expression and jerked my thumb at the far wall indicating Kenny over at the livestock pens. “Kenny already put together a picnic table by the pens you guys might have seen last night or this morning. More of that kind of stuff would actually improve things around here quite a bit.”
John coughed into his hand to get our attention and when we looked that way stood up from where he’d sat on the corner of one of the cots. “On that note it looks like it’s pretty much stopped raining and I’m sure Kenny would like the opportunity to change into some dry clothes. We ought to go relieve him, check livestock, and get started on that barn.”
Debbie looked a bit nonplussed that she’d lost control of the meeting, but didn’t object as everyone trooped out after John and started heading towards the pens. Kenny looked like a giant drowned rat with his normally short kind of kinky hair poofed out into a weird semi afro by the rain. He was happy enough to head back to the keep to change while we started work on a barn cum guard shack. John and I started talking building design before we’d made it all the way there and pretty soon the entire plan shifted.
John and half the group would put up three or four log walls coming out from the cliff face at right angles while I’d take the rest of us and mount one of the chainsaws into our own poor man’s version of a lumber mill. Once we were able to start turning out boards, they’d use them to put a top on the walls and then a second story with its own roof. John wanted the bottom floor left open along one side so the animals could come and go freely, but the enclosed loft would give us a place to store fodder and give whoever was on watch a safe place to retreat in case whatever predator came around was too much for a single guy to handle.
We didn’t vote on the new plan, when John and I came to an agreement everyone just kind of started pitching in. Since no one bitched about it I figured it would have passed if we’d bothered to vote. When I asked Debbie if she wanted the sawmill mount to be permanent or if we’d need to be able to take the chainsaw in or out so she’d have it back, she told me she didn’t care. I picked the thickest patch of trees I could spot to locate it even though it was a ways from the livestock pens. It made more sense to carry the cut lumber at the end than entire logs to the lumber mill.
It turned out to be a pretty simple design once I gave it some thought. We built a little wooden table to hold the saw with the blade sticking straight up. We dug a pit next to it so a guy could sit comfortably with his hand on the saw’s handle without having to duck underneath the height of the table. Hunter smoothed down some smaller logs while I drilled into their ends and stuck a loose fit peg in there to make crude rollers instead of a regular sawhorse. We positioned a couple on each end of the saw.
We tried feeding the first big log through and it turned out to be almost impossible to keep the cut straight. We made some more rollers and put them up vertically in line with the flat side of the blade but offset about two inches.You had to trim the log by hand if it didn’t already have at least one relatively straight side, but after that first cut the roller ran right where the kerf had been and turned out pretty consistent lumber. It was all 2 inches thick, but the width varied with the diameter of the log we fed in. It was still loads more uniform than building with logs, and produced a lot more useable pieces per tree we took down.
As we worked to shuttle lumber up to John’s project, I couldn’t help but think about what it would take to pressure treat the lumber, and what kind of preservatives we could get on there. I decided at the rate we were building stuff, even seasoning the lumber wasn’t going to be very practical and we’d just have to get used to the green stuff until we’d developed a lot more infrastructure.
John was strawbossing the construction and I’d been relegated to fetching and carrying lumber from the mill up to the job site. Some of the folks were just kind of laying the boards in place or carrying them like me while John, Kenny, and Sam who were all halfway decent carpenters focused on pegging them together or putting in mortise and tenon style joints. I kicked in my power drill and reciprocal saw because Kenny and Sam were using that weird Japanese saw and a survival knife respectively. Even John was using hand tools, although he had one of just about everything you could imagine laid out on one of the fence rails down at ground level. I made a mental note that John was the guy to go to if I needed to borrow something I didn’t already have, and went back to fetching.
Debbie fell in beside on one of the trips back to the sawmill, and she reached out and grabbed my hand. We walked hand in hand for a couple of steps until the uneven ground made it impractical and we both let go. Debbie looked out at me from the corner of her eye, but continued facing the trail as we walked.
“So, the barn is looking pretty good.”
I grunted in reply, but didn’t really see a response to that. Apparently Debbie didn’t care for grunting because she slugged me in the bicep with her middle knuckle extended. I yelped and rubbed at the spot where she’d frogged me while I gave her the death stare.
“What the fuck was that for, Debbie?”
“You mad at me, Jack? Why aren’t you talking to me? Is this because I didn’t support you on the wall?”
“Holy shit, why are the hot ones always crazy? You didn’t support me on the wall cause you thought something else was more important. Hell, you might even be right. I don’t give a shit if we don’t agree on everything, we’re still two people. I didn’t talk because I didn’t have anything to say about the barn. And hell yes I’m mad at you now. I’m pissed you frogged me for no goddamn reason.”
“Oh, c’mon. Don’t be such a big baby, it didn’t hurt that bad.”
I held up my hand and popped that middle knuckle up threateningly while I glared at her. “You want to try it?”
She shifted a little, presenting her upper arm towards me. “Sure, that sounds fair.”
“Fuck that noise. I don’t hit girls, Debbie.”
“Aw, that can’t be true. Don’t tell me you won’t even spank one if she’s been naughty?”
“What?”
She laughed at the expression on my face and darted in to kiss me on the cheek. “There, all better. Sorry about that, Jack, really.”
I shook my head at her, convinced I would never comprehend the mercurial shifts in attitude women seemed to be capable of. I did reach out and take her hand again, and we stayed like that until we got into the tree line. We both went down to where Hunter and Helen were feeding more logs into the saw while Steve sat underneath holding the on switch. She helped pile me up with lumber, and then grabbed some of her own as we started back to the barn. We made it back out of the tree line before she swiveled her load a little and bumped it into mine. I had more lumber and I bumped back, forcing her to take a couple steps to the side to keep from overbalancing what she was carrying. I grinned at her and she chuckled.
“So, Jack. My greenhouse isn’t going to finish itself, you want to trade a day’s labor again?”
“Sounds good but I promised Jeri a while back to take a look at the staircase on her and Hunter’s place. You mind if I do that first? You can take off however much time I lose working with them when you work on my place the next day.”
“That’ll work. Just meet me at the greenhouse when you’re done?”
“Yes, ma’am.”