Sarah’s first few days as an official “member of the household” passed in a strange blur that felt both fast and slow, long and short.
On the one hand, the farmer and children – especially the children – seemed to take to heart the Meat and Mead expectation (or was it a requirement?) that she perform a share of the household duties and were eager to teach her everything they possibly could. By the dictate of her “teachers”, Sarah’s days were full; the children seemed to have boundless energy, and when they finally tired enough for their mid-day naps, the farmer was always there to take up the mantle of teaching until his little ones awoke and carried Sarah off into another dizzying episode of Alien Farming 101 (Children’s Edition). Sarah never had a long enough empty moment to become even the slightest bit bored, so in that sense, the days flew by.
On the other hand…the days were really long…and that wasn’t just her exhaustion speaking. She didn’t know if the planet the Tutorial setting was based on just rotated slower than her homeworld, or if it was a lot bigger, but less massive, than Earth, like she’d considered during that long lonely walk down the forest road on her first day here. Either way, there were definitely more hours between sunrise and sunset than Sarah was accustomed to.
At first she thought it might be something like spring in the high Arctic on Earth – the so-called “land of the midnight sun” – where nights are only a few hours long, but she quickly realized that wasn’t the case. So, of course, she tried to calculate how long the days actually were…and that’s when she realized she had no way to determine the precise time, since neither her phone nor her digital watch had made it into the Tutorial with her (not that either of them would have done her much good in virtual reality, if she were honest with herself).
The farmhouse had a timepiece hanging on one wall that was a complicated system utilizing both gears and flowing water, but Sarah had no reason to expect that it measured the same units of time that she was accustomed to. Okay, so she kinda hoped it would, but that hope was quickly dashed when she couldn’t even figure out which parts might be the equivalents of the second hand, minute hand, and hour hand. In fact, she only knew it was a clock because of the way the family checked it and referred to it through out the day.
Unfortunately, she didn’t yet understand enough of her new friends’ language to discuss methods of marking time, so in the end Sarah had to calculate it out with lots of counting and math, giving her a result that, hmm…well, to be perfectly honest, was, uh, probably not the most accurate of mathematical solutions…given the, uh…special relationship that existed between Sarah and Mathematics. Ahem.
Anyway, if her painstaking calculations were correct (or at least in the general region of correct) then each day-night cycle in the Tutorial world was about four to six hours longer than Earth’s, making the days she was experiencing anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty hours long, with roughly one third of those hours being night time.
So, yeah, her first few days seemed to kinda drag on, despite how busy she was. It also made it a lot more impressive that she’d managed to sleep in until the local equivalent of noon on her first day on the farm; especially when she woke at dawn the next day and experienced first hand how very long it took for the sun to reach its zenith. The single saving grace was that the farmer and his children ate six meals a day, with the first, third, and fifth (which Sarah privately named breakfast, lunch, and dinner) being large meals, and the second, fourth, and sixth (aka brunch, afternoon tea, and supper) being smaller, lighter meals. She didn’t know if it was a cultural thing or a country living thing, but she was grateful nonetheless; it was bad enough trying to adjust her circadian rhythm, she didn’t think she could have survived on only three squares a day.
Getting her sleep schedule aligned though, that was a real nightmare. Sarah remembered reading somewhere that the human body has a very hard time adjusting to a day/night cycle that is longer than twenty-four hours. She couldn’t remember if what she’d read had been presented as a science fact or a science fiction “fact”, but she could now attest to its veracity.
By the start of her third day, it was clear that keeping up with the schedule of the farmer and his children was taking a definite toll on Sarah, both physically and mentally. Fortunately, it seemed the System was aware of her struggles, and approved of her attempts to adapt. Her fourth morning on the farm, she woke to a notification that she had earned another Attribute point in physical Endurance. The following morning she received one in mental Fortitude. Adapting to the longer days – and the hard work that was part and parcel of farming – was much easier after that and Sarah threw herself into learning the ways of her new life with increased enthusiasm.
It was spring time, which meant animals all over the place – both wild and domesticated – were giving birth, and the farm animals were no exception. Her new household, Sarah had learned, had a moderately sized herd of animals that the System identified as [Beefalo], except – unlike the pictures Sarah had once found online after a college friend told her about the strange phenomenon of cows crossed with buffalos (also known as American Bison), these [Beefalo] looked like their cow ancestors had been some freakishly large version of the stereotypical dairy cow, the Holstein.
The [Beefalo] had the enormous, rounded shoulders, broad head, and curved horns of the buffalo, combined with the wide hips, huge udder, and distinctive black and white colouring of the Holstein…and they were so big that Sarah could have easily done a limbo underneath their bellies, had she been so inclined. The [Beefalo] calves, though small in comparison to their mommas, were also quite large, though the cuteness of their big brown eyes, pink noses, and slightly floppy ears more than made up for their size, in Sarah’s opinion.
Fortunately, the enormous animals were docile and intelligent (well, more intelligent than Sarah expected a cow-type creature to be anyway), and the farmer and his children showed Sarah that she could move about their pens and pastures without fear, needing only to treat the animals with respect (such as avoiding, when possible, actions that might hurt or frighten the creatures) and with common sense (such as not stepping between two [Beefalo Bulls] in the middle of a shoving match). She learned very quickly that it didn’t matter how docile a creature might be, big was big, and if she stood too close she was bound to get her toes squashed, though none of the [Beefalo] would ever do so with malice.
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The [Raptors] on the other hand, those were a different story. The strange feathered creatures were some kind of mix between reptile and bird, and seemed to be the local equivalent of chickens, for the System identified the females as [Raptor Hens] and the slightly larger males as [Raptor Roosters]. They were apparently a very common farm animal and were raised for both meat and eggs. Unlike chickens, [Raptor Hens] laid an average of four eggs per day, though the eggs themselves were slightly smaller than those Sarah had been accustomed to getting at the grocery store, and the shells were the colour of sunflower petals instead of white or brown.
The [Raptors’] meat was apparently quite tasty and versatile, and a fully grown [Raptor Rooster] was the size of a small dog so a single bird could easily feed their small household for several meals. Also, their red and orange coloured feathers had an iridescent sheen and were frequently used by the makers of fine hats and other such luxury items.
All of these things Sarah learned over the course of her stay with the farmer and his children; the first thing they taught her, however, was that [Raptor Hens] were petty, and [Raptor Roosters] were downright mean. It would be a very long time before Sarah would manage the daily egg collection without at least one painful peck from the hens whose nests she plundered.
As the days went by Sarah learned that there were many things that needed doing on the farm, and so many ways in which she could fulfill her responsibilities under Meat and Mead. She helped the children with their daily chores, such as collecting the [Raptor] eggs, setting a few aside for the family, and then cleaning the rest and packing them into woven baskets lined with straw to be stored in the root cellar until they could be delivered to the market. She had never been an exceptional cook – and hadn’t a clue how to prepare food on a coal-fired stove or over an open flame – but with the help of the family, she learned enough to take over responsibility for the majority of the meals, freeing up the farmer to focus on more of the hard and heavy work of agriculture.
At one point, Sarah (feeling a little miffed at having been relegated to the kitchen like a good little housewife or maid) managed to communicate to the farmer that she wanted to take on more of the outdoor responsibilities. Her request amused the man for some reason but he graciously acceded to it, helping her with the lunch clean up and then beckoning her to follow him to the barn.
The next few hours were some of the most humbling Sarah had ever experienced. There were several pens inside the barn that the farmer brought [Beefalo Cows] into if it seemed they might need some assistance giving birth or if their newborn calves needed a little TLC. The herd was apparently in a bit of a lull that day, and all the pens were empty, so when the two of them reached the barn after lunch, the farmer handed Sarah a shovel and a pitchfork and indicated that the calving pens needed to be cleaned.
Sarah wrinkled her nose at the smell of urine and manure but resolutely began removing the soiled straw from the pen, using a heavy metal wheelbarrow to transport the mess outside the barn to a manure pile that was (thankfully) on the opposite side of the farmyard from the house. She then climbed a sturdy wooden ladder into the loft, awkwardly carrying the pitchfork with her, and tossed a pile of straw down into the pen she had just cleaned. As a final touch, she climbed back down the ladder and carefully spread the clean straw out in an even layer across the whole floor of the pen.
Puffing from her exertions (who knew wet straw and manure could be so heavy?!?) Sarah stepped out of the pen, happy with her accomplishment. The farmer was waiting in the aisle and she flashed him a grin of pride. He smiled and nodded at her encouragingly but her proud smile withered as she looked around and realized that the farmer had cleaned all five of the remaining pens, while she did one, and he still finished before she did.
Still, Sarah refused to be discouraged. She was new to this farming business, so of course she would be a bit slower than he, but she could catch up. She would catch up.
The next task was to check the [Beefalo] herd for any new calves. As she followed the farmer through the corral and into the small pasture that held the last dozen or so cows that hadn’t yet given birth, Sarah gazed across the yard and smiled at the sight of the two children dutifully performing one of their early afternoon chores of weeding the vegetable garden. She could see the boy lecturing his little sister, probably teaching her which plants to pull and which ones to leave alone.
There were no new calves in the pasture but the farmer did find a part of the fence that needed repair. He showed her how the post was wobbly because at some point it had been broken below ground level. The rest of the fence kept the post from falling over but now that the ground had thawed after winter, the wobble could be detected. He then led her through the task of detaching the fence rails from the broken post, removing it, digging out the broken off tip, putting a new post into the hole, tamping the dirt tightly to ensure the new post stood straight and didn’t lean, then attaching the rails to the new post.
The fence rails were heavy, the posts even heavier; the dirt was damp and exhausting to dig through; the nails that secured the fence rails were long, thick, and very hard to remove, and almost as hard to pound back in; and by the end of the task, Sarah had to admit that her participation had probably made the job take two or three times as long as if the farmer had done it by himself.
With a humbled heart, Sarah communicated to the farmer that she was going to return to the cooking, cleaning, and minding of the children. He just smiled gently and thanked her for her help. As she returned from the pasture, grateful for the light breeze that cooled her sweaty brow, Sarah reflected that she hadn’t been given tasks in and around the house because she was a woman, but because she was more suited to them…again, not because she was a woman, but because she didn’t have the physical strength or endurance needed for tasks such as those she’d just participated in. Sure, she could learn, and over time her strength and stamina would increase, but in the meantime someone still had to do the cooking and cleaning, and the vital work of running the farm would be getting done at a significantly reduced pace.
That saying that “I can do anything if I put my mind to it” is somewhat simplistic, she decided. Sure, I could be a farmer if I really wanted to, but it would take a whole lot more effort than just deciding it is so. Besides, if I wanted to be a farmer in this Tutorial, I would have picked different Skills.
She shook her head, annoyed at herself for getting sidetracked. If cooking and cleaning was the way in which she could be most useful to the household, then cooking and cleaning she would do. Household chores were a fact of life, no matter where or with whom one lived…well, okay, super rich people didn’t have to do household chores because they paid other people to do them, but the chores still had to be done, right? Right.
Chores weren’t her purpose in life, or in this Tutorial…they were just a necessary part of living, like eating and bathing and sleeping. As for her purpose, well, Sarah had Plans, with a capital P, and the first step in those plans was communication, so, as Sarah joined the children in the garden to pull the last few weeds, she set things into motion.