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11-07-2009, 09:00 PM
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11-10-2009, 04:51 PM
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______________________________ Easing down the steep switchbacks of the driveway through bands of aspen and spruce, Bill brought the truck to a sudden halt, backed up and squinted at something just above head level in the tangle of serviceberry bushes that lined the driveway, prompting Susan to ask him what he saw. “Just a minute, be back in a minute,” and he stomped on the emergency brake, leaving the truck and carefully scrutinizing the ground and the surrounding trees for a minute before retrieving a faded boonie hat from the bushes where it appeared to have been casually tossed. Bill knew better. There was nothing causal, nor accidental, either, about the placement of that hat. “Foreman,” he grunted in response to Susan’s curiosity upon spotting the hat, but did not seem inclined to elaborate. “Foreman? What? Are you two cooking something up? What were you talking about the other night when he came by, anyway.” Susan could tell from the look on Bill’s face that she ought not expect an answer. The purpose of the visit Foreman had paid them remained largely a mystery to Susan and Liz, as the two Bills had done most of their talking out of earshot of the house. Bill and Susan’s silver Chevy had just passed the FBI compound on their way to Clear Springs with the load of herbs when Bill first noticed the two black Suburbans behind them. Having helped clean up the aftermath of too many serious accidents that had resulted from drivers taking the tight curves of the narrow mountain road too quickly, Bill tended to drive a bit slower on the more winding portions of the highway, and was used to having people pass him. He watched in consternation as the Suburbans approached, slowed and kept pace some fifty yards behind him rather than maintaining their speed and passing. Rounding a curve and entering a mile-long straight stretch of highway, one of the few that existed between Culver Falls and Clear Springs, Bill slowed further to give the vehicles a chance to pass, but they kept pace, perhaps, he thought, even falling back a bit. Bill knew that, as the road and river ran through a six mile canyon with fairly steep red walls at that point, he would have no chance to turn off the road for several more miles. Susan and Liz had picked up on his concern by that point. “Don’t look back. Don’t let them know we’re watching. I think we may have a problem, here.” “Is it the feds?” Susan asked, not turning her head, but glancing in the mirror. “Yep. Think so. They stay on us like this much longer, I’m going to see if we can get turned around, head back to town and stop at the Sheriff’s. I don’t like this.” The Suburbans had edged closer, one easing out into the opposite lane. Bill could see what they intended to do, and wanted none of it, especially with Liz and Susan in the truck. A log truck was approaching; the Suburban that had been attempting to get in beside Bill’s truck fell back behind him to let it pass. “You gals got your seat belts on?” They answered in the affirmative, and Bill hurriedly downshifted into second gear, jerking the wheel to the left and sending the truck into a barely controlled spin that left them in the opposite lane, nearly at a stop. Taking off after the logging truck, Bill quickly caught up to it and passed, just before the straight stretch of road ended and it again began winding and snaking through the canyon. He grinned, glanced at Susan who was leaning back in her seat a bit breathless, thinking he had lost them for the moment. The Suburbans quickly followed suit, though, one of them nearly being forced off the road by oncoming traffic when it attempted to pass the truck on a curve. Bill could tell his tired old truck was going to be no match for the Suburbans; they were gaining on him, one pulling up beside him, the man in the passenger’s seat signaling for him to stop. Which Bill, recognizing the man as Special Agent Day, had no intention of doing. Day had gained a reputation around town as a bully and somewhat of a loose cannon, and Bill doubted that he was up to any good that afternoon. Bill gave the truck more gas, knowing that he was just over three miles from town, hoping to make it. The Suburban rammed the rear driver’s side corner of the truck hard though, sending it into a high speed fishtail from which Bill managed to recover, but followed it quickly with another, causing Bill to miss a turn and sending the truck skidding and careening down the steep bank, down towards the river. The truck came to rest at a steep angle against a cottonwood feet from the water, slowed some by a tangle of serviceberry bushes on the way down. Bill, having hit his head on the steering wheel but remaining conscious, glanced up the bank to see four men scrambling down towards the truck, and he guessed from their drawn weapons that their intentions went beyond helping out the victims of the accident they had caused. Feeling around under the seat where he had stashed his .45, he could not find it, tried to reach down to explore the floor but found that the dashboard was rather closer to his knees than it had been before the crash; his legs, in fact seemed to be trapped. He glanced over at Susan, wanting to tell her to take Liz and get out of there into the brush before the agents reached the truck, but found her hanging limply forward in her seat belt, unresponsive, a deep gash running along the side of her forehead where she had apparently come into contact with the truck door. He briefly pressed his handkerchief against the gash in Susan’s head, but could see that it was not bleeding heavily enough to be an immediate threat to her. Liz he could see no sign of; the back seat seemed to have come loose on impact and shifted forward, and Bill could see through the shattered rear window of the truck that he did not have much time before the agents arrived. Forcing open the damaged glove box he pulled out a knife, stuck it beneath him within easy reach, and again struggled to free his trapped legs as the agents approached, pistols drawn. · · · · Einar’s snares yielded two rabbits that morning, and he carried them back to the shelter, cleaning and skinning them, carefully scraping the skins and hanging them to dry, eating the livers and hanging the carcasses in a corner of the shelter in the hopes that he might decide it was a good idea to have a small fire that evening and cook them up. Warmer after the activity and breakfast, he decided to cut and hang another batch of jerky before going out to the edge of the meadow for some experimental practice with the atlatl. He was not even certain that he would be able to throw the darts, with the binding, barely scabbed over burns still covering much of his upper back and shoulders, but he needed a weapon with a longer reach than the spear that he had taken to always carrying, and the atlatl seemed a better option at the moment than a bow, as he knew that his shoulder would still make normal use of a bow all but impossible. After climbing up and hanging the jerky he had sliced, Einar looked over the remains of the deer carcass, seeing that he had carved up and hung a good portion of the meat, already. Time to start cracking some of these bones for marrow. And what I really need is a way to boil some of them, too. Could get an awful lot of soup out of them, that way, with all the little scraps of meat still attached, maybe add some cattail starch, and they could feed me for days. Add a few rabbits to that and I’ll be doing pretty well, as far as saving most of this meat. As hungry as Einar continued to be, he found himself nearly as concerned with saving a good portion of the soon-to-be dried meat as he was with getting enough to eat at the moment, though he knew that his priority probably ought to be putting on weight and getting himself back to a state where he was not so easily exhausted and prone to getting sick. He knew that it was critically important that he stretch the deer as far as he could, not knowing when he might get another, or when he might again find himself forced to travel, and too rushed to put much effort towards obtaining meat. So. Soup. He wished he had cleaned out and saved the deer stomach for use as a cooking pot, as he had done before with the elk, but he had been too worn out to really consider the task by the time he had hauled the deer back and cleaned it, and knew that the scavengers would have by then cleaned up all remnants of deer’s innards that he had left outside the protection of the shelter. I could do a big wood-burned bowl…take a piece of an aspen trunk, burn and scrape a big depression into it, fill it with water and use hot rocks to boil it. A project, he knew, that would have to wait until he could have a fire, but he supposed he might as well be keeping his eyes open for a suitable chunk of wood to use, when the time came. Taking his atlatl and a number of long, straight willow shoots that he had cut and bundled in with the cattails several days before at the lake, he headed over to the meadow, staying beneath the evergreens at its edge and fitting a notched willow shoot onto the spur he had carved into the end of the atlatl. His first throw provided encouraging results, the willow shoot traveling much farther than he would have been able to throw it by hand, and hitting near the tree he had picked out as his aim point. Sending three of his remaining willows downrange, he managed to actually hit the tree with one of them, coming close with the others. Excited about the preliminary success of his experiment, he returned to the tree where he had left the rest of the willow sticks, picking out several more of the longer, straighter ones to try. Standing up from his crouch, he felt a warm trickle of blood trace down his backbone, and stopped to determine its source. Upon exploring his back, Einar discovered that he must have put too much force into the throws, and had once again broken open one of the larger scabs on his back. He had not brought any fresh mullein leaves to change his bandages with, but figured he might as well go ahead and get in a bit more practice, since the damage had already been done. Which he did, but found his aim to be off, probably due to an unconscious attempt at caution. Well. At least I know it’s going to work. Guess I can practice some more, later. Got to make some better darts, too, turn some of that broken glass and maybe some deer bone into heads, and maybe I can even find a few pieces of chert up around here to experiment with. For the moment, though, he headed back to the shelter to tend to his back and get something to eat, afterwards sitting in the sunny rock alcove outside the shelter to begin work on a couple of bone points for his atlatl darts, growing sleepy in warmth of the sun. Drifting in and out of sleep and relaxed in the sun’s warmth, Einar dreamt of Liz, but rather than the usual comforting, hopeful dream that had so often sustained him, he had terrifying visions of twisted metal and smoke and imminent danger, and woke with a start, scrambling to his feet and grabbing for his spear with the feeling that something was terribly wrong. He stood there for a minute pressed up against the rock, listening for anything out of place, staring at the quiet, still world around him and finding nothing to justify his alarm. It was just a dream, Einar. No more real than any of the others. Now back to work. But he found himself thinking often of the dream that day and of Liz, hoping that she was alright.
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11-11-2009, 10:42 PM
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Yes, OK, go on.
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11-11-2009, 11:11 PM
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Good chapters...Hope Bill & company get out of their situation in one piece!
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11-12-2009, 01:15 AM
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Two of the agents covered Bill and Susan while Agent Day and the other jerked open the tarp on the back of the truck, which had torn and split sometime during the bumpy ride down the embankment, shouting and kicking at the ruined flats of herbs and turning each one over as if they had expected to find someone hiding beneath them. Finishing their search they joined the two agents up at the cab of the truck, shouting questions at Bill, repeatedly asking him about Einar, about where he was and who was helping him. Bill truthfully answered that he had no idea where Einar was, told them to call for help, that his wife was hurt, but they ignored him, kept shouting and rephrasing their queries, repeatedly slamming his head into the steering wheel when he steadfastly refused to answer any further questions until they called an ambulance for Susan. Sometime during the questioning Susan regained consciousness, saw through barely open eyes what was happening to Bill, saw the knife, too, and kept still. Very slowly she moved her arm, got her hand over near the knife, waited until Agent Day was leaning in close and grabbed it, lunging and stabbing Day in the arm before two of the other agents got the passenger’s door open and subdued her, which did not take much effort, considering her injuries. They dragged her from the truck then and questioned her much as they had Bill, with the addition of threats that she had no doubt they would probably have made good on, had they believed there was time. Susan refused to talk to them at all after that, infuriating Day, who was already angry, pressing his cut arm to slow the bleeding. Day shoved her to the ground, repeating his questions and kicking her when she would not answer, the other agents standing and watching in silence. Day kept it up until Susan finally stopped moving, ending with a vicious kick to the head for good measure and leaving her there bleeding on the river rocks to die, clearly a confused accident victim who had wandered away from her vehicle before expiring.
· · · · Liz heard the shouting of the agents, heard Susan’s groans as they pulled her from the truck, but the sounds came to her as if from a great distance, and she struggled to open her eyes, to move, but by the time she finally managed it, all had gone quiet. She could hear the river, the song of a robin, a truck passing by up on the highway. It was dark, and she was pinned in an unnatural position between the seat and the collapsed seat back, her face mashed into the fabric of the seat, but nothing hurt terribly badly, and she was pretty sure that she was not seriously injured. The worst of it, as far as she could tell, was the painful knot on the side of her head where it must have struck something solid, knocking her out. And the fact that she could hardly breathe, with the heavy seat back pressing down on her and the gravity of the sharply angled truck keeping it there. Experimentally attempting to sit she shoved at the seat, finally managing to move it a few inches at a time and get it to catch on something, leaving her a bit of space, and she slithered out from under it and sat up, coughing as her lungs were finally able to fully expand. She saw Bill, still in the driver’s seat. Dead, she was pretty sure, slumped forward against the steering wheel, his forehead and face a bloody mess. She could not find a pulse, did not remember hearing a gunshot but knew the agents must have done something to him. He had been talking shortly after the crash, and certainly did not appear in any shape to do so at the moment. Susan. Where’s Susan? She was not in the truck. Why would she leave Bill? Did they take her? Squeezing out of the damaged back seat, Liz exited the truck through the open passenger’s door, nearly crying out when her right foot hit the ground. Something wrong with that ankle. Maybe just sprained. She forgot all about the ankle the next moment when she saw Susan, curled up on her side on the rocks down by the river, her face covered in blood. Limping over to her, Liz knelt by her side. The halo of grey-flecked dark curls that framed Susan’s usually-cheerful face was matted with drying blood, one eye swollen shut and her face terribly bruised and deformed, her right arm bent beneath her at what looked to Liz like a very odd angle But she was alive, was breathing, and Liz quickly looked her over to check for obvious sources of serious bleeding, but saw none, and did not want to risk rolling Susan to her back without help for fear of causing her greater injury. Liz limped back to the truck, struggling to retrieve the wool blanket that she knew Bill kept on the floor of the back seat. Spreading the blanket over Susan, she returned to the truck, found Bill’s cell phone on his belt but did not expect or get a signal there in the canyon. She knew that they were near the middle of a six or seven mile stretch where there was no cell service. Next she went to try the CB, but it had been smashed beyond use by the wreck, or the agents, or both, and Liz started up the steep bank for the road, knowing that she must get help and afraid that the agents might decide to return at some point to make sure their work had been thorough enough. It was a long way up to the road, steep and loose and slick with mud in places, and Liz, beginning to feel her injuries and the effects of what she had just seen, kept thinking of Einar as she climbed, thinking that if he could keep on when he was starving and sick and half frozen and barely able to walk, surely she could make it up that bank to the road. The thought helped, gave her strength, and she used the bushes to help pull herself up the rocky bank, stopping periodically to take a deep breath and fight back the blackness that wanted to reclaim her. On one of these stops she looked back down the slope and saw Susan, the woman who had become almost like a mother to her in the past months, lying in a bloody pulp in the rocks by the river, and after that she had no trouble making it up the slope, her shock and pain being replaced with a hot rage that almost had her wishing that agent—Day. Bill called him Agent Day—would come back, so she could hide in the bushes and jump on him from the bank and bash his head in with a rock. Finding a nice chunk of river-rounded granite, she carried it with her, just in case. Reaching the highway, Liz sat down on a rock, concealed by a tree and knowing that she should go out in the open and try to flag someone down, but afraid at the same time that it might end up being an agent who knew what had caused their “accident,” and did not care to see witnesses remain living. She was a bit surprised that the men had not simply shot Bill and Susan, but supposed they had to make it look like a legitimate accident, when they were finally found. I guess they weren’t counting on me being there! The road curved sharply just beyond the point where the truck had gone over the embankment and she could not see very far at all down it in either direction, but there was a steep embankment above her, and she pulled herself several yards up the loose dirt, hiding when she heard a vehicle approaching, before continuing with her climb until she reached a spot where her view of the highway was improved. For several minutes she sat there watching vehicles approach and pass, knowing that she must wait no longer, that Susan’s life could well depend on getting help, and soon. Please, help me…I don’t want to get her killed by flagging down the wrong person. She watched the highway for another minute, saw a log truck in the distance and decided it would be a pretty safe bet. Waiting another second before descending the bank, she noticed a white pickup some distance behind the log truck, and thought she recognized it. Allan? It was. She knew the truck. Sliding down the steep embankment, she reached the road just as he rounded the curve, stepped out where he was sure to see her. Allan saw Liz but passed her, unable to stop in time, returning a few seconds later to park in a wide spot on the shoulder on the opposite side of the highway. “Liz?” He hurried across the road. “What happened? You’re bleeding.” “I’m alright. Allan, I think Bill is dead. Susan’s down there. I couldn’t wake her.” She pointed down the bank. “The feds ran us off the road.” Without waiting for more details Allan ran back across the highway and radioed in to Dispatch, grabbing his medical bag and, she saw, tucking a pistol into his vest before helping Liz back down the bank. After a brief glance at Bill he focused his attention on Susan, having Liz hold her head while he carefully rolled her onto her back to check for additional sources of bleeding and straightened and splinted her apparently broken arm. “What happened here, Liz? The truck does not look that banged up, and she didn’t get thrown out of it…” “I was stuck under the back seat. Couldn’t see. But there were three or four agents down here. I heard them shouting at Bill, asking him questions. There was some sort of a struggle up there and then everything was quiet… They pulled Susan out. I heard them shouting at her and…” she struggled to grasp memories from her time under the seat, to get ahold of them and turn them solid enough to vocalize. “Allen, I think they were kicking her, hitting her. That’s what it sounded like. I heard them threaten her with things. To do awful thing to her… I couldn’t wake up, couldn’t stop them…if she dies…” The admirable control that Liz had maintained up until that point was beginning to crumble just a bit as the details began returning to her, hot tears of rage and frustration pooling up in her eyes, and Allan, knowing he needed to give her something to concentrate on, assigned her the task of staying with Susan to immobilize her head. He went to see if there was anything he could do for Bill, and it was not too many more minutes before the rescue crew and ambulance arrived, and work began to extricate Bill from the truck and get Susan up the bank to the waiting ambulance. · · · · Returning to the rock crevice to cut and hang another string of jerky, Einar was encouraged to find that the strips he had first hung were finally beginning to show signs of drying. Another day or two, and maybe I can think of pounding some of this up for pemmican. He was glad, as he found himself becoming increasingly anxious to make a journey down to one of the slightly lower draws that split off from the high plateau to check on the state of the serviceberries, and knew that he first needed to get the meat dried and put away somewhere out of the reach of scavengers. He supposed that he would need to construct some variation of the raised caches that had been used by the tribesmen and mountain men of times past—small log structures on high stilts that were designed to keep bears and other animals from accessing the stored meat. Some of the Northern tribes who lived in areas where trees were not as plentiful had simply wrapped the meat in animal hides and built a heavy cairn of rocks over it, he knew, and he wondered if he could do something similar in the back of his shelter. Could also build a platform here in the chimney, I guess, keep it up on that. The idea of a traditional log cache out in the woods worried him some, as he knew there was always the possibility that someone might happen along and see it. At which point he would probably be forced to move on without his food supply, at best… Better keep it hidden, keep it here in the crevice, one way or another. Either way though, I’m not really going to have any deerskin to spare, for keeping it dry. Got to replace these clothes pretty soon. They’re falling to pieces, too worn out to really be repaired, and that one hide will barely make me a vest, let alone a shirt and some moccasins like I’m really needing. Need to try for another deer. Hmm. I wonder about some cattail-leaf baskets or bags, coated with pitch to keep the water out, as a way to temporarily store some of the jerky? While Einar knew from past experience that he could also construct a corded and coiled aspen bark basket that could be waterproofed with pitch, the process was far more time consuming than a simple weaving of broad, flat cattail leaves would be. And he was beginning to seriously feel the press of time, with berry season upon him and only a limited number of weeks until the snow again flew. Better get started on those pouches, because they’ll have to dry thoroughly before I can coat them with the pitch and put jerky into them. Which meant another trip over to the cattail bog, and a risky foray out into the open to cut the cattails. Wanting to make the most of the trip over to the lake, Einar collected another bundle of willow shoots in addition to one of cattail leaves, wanting to test them out as atlatl darts, and leave himself enough to make another willow basket, also, for when he picked berries. Looking back at the marshy area of cattails and willow brush as he made his way back into the woods after finishing his harvesting, Einar began to grow a bit concerned at the altered appearance of the place. Careful as he had been not to decimate a single area, but to take a few shoots and leaves here and there, it was clear, at least to him, that someone had been there, had been cutting things and trampling around on the soft, muddy ground. There had been no helicopter flights since the day the three Chinooks had first surprised him, but he worried that if they ever did come back, one of the crew might notice the signs of human presence in the bog. Got to be more careful, got to keep working towards moving on, too. But hopefully not for a few more days, yet. As his burns continued to heal, it gradually became a bit easier for Einar to move and to carry a small amount of weight slung over his shoulder, as he had to do with the bundles of cattail and willow, but he still found himself tiring very easily, and was dragging, more than ready for sleep by the time he made it back to the shelter with his load. Wanting to make the best use of the daylight, though, he allowed himself only a brief rest and some food before beginning work on the cattail jerky-storage containers. He settled on creating a series of flattish pouches or envelopes rather than baskets, with the idea that they would be easier to store and less likely to crush if he ended up building a rock cairn over his cache of meat, to protect it from animals. Not knowing how many of the pouches he would end up needing—he intended to turn a good bit of the meat into powder to be mixed with the deer fat and stored in the cleaned intestines as pemmican, but knew there would be a good bit of jerky left over after the meager supply of fat on that spring deer had been used—he ended up getting four of them finished that evening before the light began to fade. Deciding that a small fire was not an unreasonable risk that night, hoping that the drone might have moved on by then if its operators had seen nothing to catch their interest and praying that he was not making a potentially fatal mistake in thinking so, Einar used his fire steel to throw some sparks down into the finely shredded nest of aspen bark he had kept in the firepit for the purpose, setting a number of rocks down in the pit to heat as soon as he had got the fire going. That night he enjoyed—and “enjoyment” hardly came close to describing his delight—a few pieces of the backstrap meat that he had set aside, fried up in a generous helping of deer fat with some purslane for greens, and eaten with “mashed potatoes” from a couple of roasted cattail roots, which were also liberally smothered in deer grease. Only thing this meal is missing is a few serviceberries for sweetness, and I should be remedying that, in a day or two! He took advantage of the existence of the fire to cook up the two rabbits from that morning, also, cutting up and boiling one and stuffing the other with hot rocks to roast. Well, there’s tomorrow’s breakfast! He kept the small fire going well into the night, hoping the gentle rising of its heat in the rock chimney would speed along the drying of the meat so that he could store it away and get on with other projects that were going to require his extended absence from the shelter. Knowing that his future ability to use fire was largely dependent on the continued lack of air activity near the shelter, he used the opportunity to simmer down some of the Oregon grape roots he had collected earlier that day to create a strong yellow berberine solution which he stored in the brown glass bottle that he had been using for that purpose, glad that his lung troubles and the inflamed areas on his back seemed to have settled down enough that he no longer had to consume such large quantities of the stuff. He had begun once again feeling the ill effects of such consumption, and seeing the telltale yellow tinge to his skin that indicated a fairly urgent need to cut back on the amount. But I had better get some of this put away now while I have the chance, because it really does work, and I still need it to put on my back, anyway. The solution that he had been making by setting one of the brown bottles with some crushed roots and a little water in the sun for a good portion of the day was weaker, though still apparently effective, and he was glad to know that he had that option, for times when fire was not practical. Relaxing by the fire after eating, Einar worked on the dried leg sinews that he had removed from the elk, pounding and softening one of them with a rounded rock until the fibers began to separate and he could pull them apart, making a small drawstring pouch of parachute material in which to store the valuable sinew strands. Growing sleepy and contemplative there in the unaccustomed warmth of the fire, Einar allowed his mind to wander back through the events of the past few weeks, a somewhat dangerous pursuit that he knew better than to allow himself too often to engage in. It had been quite a journey, and only as he slowly began to gain strength and feel a bit better did he come to realize how very bad off he had been, and for how long. When in the middle of it, he had very steadfastly avoided thinking about the matter, had kept himself going at a sometimes unreasonable and certainly unsustainable pace until it had become almost a habit, and with the certainty—mistaken or not—that if he ever stopped, ever let himself sit down and breathe for a minute, he would die. If not at the hand of his pursuers, then of his own injuries and the weakness brought on by his extended starvation and lack of rest. Though it was a startlingly odd experience for him and one that he hardly knew what to do with, Einar found that he was rather coming to like just sitting and breathing, every now and then. He knew better than to allow himself to take such circumstances for granted, though, knew things would almost certainly be changing again, and all too soon. The heat of the fire, absorbed and slowly released by the surrounding walls of rock, allowed Einar a much warmer night than usual, curled up on his cattail mat with a few fire-heated rocks, able to breathe well enough for the first time in days to lie down to sleep and finding it a good bit more restful than sitting had been, though still having to be very careful of his burns. Waking early the next morning feeling rather more refreshed than he had in many days, he started out to check his snares, thinking that he might want to make a preliminary scouting trip down to one of the nearby draws after serviceberries later in the morning. Finding the snares empty that morning, he took a few minutes to dig spring beauty and avalanche lily bulbs from a small patch in the aspen grove, watching the sun rise and thinking that he ought to take a few days, do some exploring and find some high basins where the two plants were plentiful, digging enough of the roots that he could dry and save a good quantity for the winter. After the berries. Heading back to the crevice to prepare for his scouting trip. Einar could tell even before he reached the entrance that something was not right, that he was not alone. He listened, could hear nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly could not see anything in the blackness of the space between the rock walls, but was beset by an overwhelming sense of “wrongness” that experience told him he must not ignore. Retreating a few steps and setting down his carrying bag full of roots to give him two hands for the spear, he cautiously approached the dark chasm, hearing a clatter followed by the smashing of glass from inside as he did so. Last edited by FreedomoftheHills; 11-13-2009 at 09:28 AM..
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11-12-2009, 11:16 PM
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Oh, please, not Bill and Susan. Let them be ok for EA's and Liz's sake, and the rest of us, too.
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11-13-2009, 12:07 AM
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One of Sheriff Watts’ deputies arrived at the scene of the “accident” shortly after the first ambulance, taking Liz’s statement as the rescue crew worked to raise the stretchers that held Bill and Susan up the steep bank to the road. Liz could remember the last three letters of the license plate on one of the Suburbans, but no more, but she did tell the deputy about the presence of Agent Day, and was able to give him a pretty good description of the driver of Day’s vehicle, also, afraid to talk out of concern that the agents might find out where the report came from and come after her, but even more afraid of the truth not getting out. Liz was angry; she wanted justice, told the deputy all she could remember about what she heard from beneath the seat, including the specific and rather graphic language used by Day as he had threatened Susan. Dutifully writing everything in his report, the deputy took some photos of the crash scene before heading back up to the highway to inspect and measure the skid marks. Neither he not Liz were aware that minutes before, the driver of the logging truck had made a call to the regional Highway Patrol office, reporting the incident with the Suburbans. He had not witnessed the actual crash or the moments directly leading up to it, but had been surprised by the aggressive and very nearly disastrous actions of the two vehicles as they had passed him on the curve, and had managed to write down complete license numbers for each of them when he later passed them again, parked on the shoulder of the highway after Bill and Susan’s crash.
· · · · Late in the afternoon the day of the crash, FBI Director Terry Lotts’ jet landed at the airport in Clear Springs, the Director then being driven to the FBI compound at Culver Falls so that he could personally supervise the enacting of his aggressive new strategy in the effort to bring an end to the hunt for Asmundson. His visit had another very specific purpose, as well, as he intended to announce the promotion of one Agent Day, who had of late distinguished himself with what Lotts considered to be outstanding effort and initiative in pursuing the search, using creative tactics in an attempt to obtain potentially critical information from the unreasonably reticent locals. Upon his arrival at the compound, Director Lotts had been briefed on a developing situation there in the Culver Falls area that involved an auto accident not far from the compound, and two dead or seriously injured local residents. The Sheriff was making noises about an investigation, having apparently received a report from some truck driver about a couple of Bureau Suburbans being driven erratically in the immediate area at the time of the of the crash, and it wasn’t long before the Director received the full story—or most of it, anyway—from Day and his cohorts. Lotts, having himself always been a fan of “creative interrogation techniques,” had no problem with the tactics that the four had employed in an attempt to extract information from a couple of uncooperative citizens who had already been on the watch list and who had appeared to be involved in potentially suspicious behavior—transporting something hidden beneath a tarp in a truck bed—when the incident began. What he did have a problem with was the fact that nobody seemed to know for certain that both of the subjects had expired on the scene. There were conflicting reports on that matter, and they troubled the Director. Have to resolve this. Would be extremely embarrassing to have something like that come out in the local papers. Especially shortly after I promote Day. Could be big trouble for both of us. That evening, Lotts inspected the Bureau’s newest acquisition--loan, to be exact—walking around the Reaper UAV where it sat at the end of the landing strip and pulling a Sharpie marker out of his shirt pocket, joking that he would like to write a message for Asmundson on one the UAV’s Hellfire missiles. Lotts told Agent Day, who had been given the honor of taking the Director on his tour of the compound, that “I fully intended to be in Culver Falls when they drag Asmundson’s burnt body out of a cave somewhere. Don’t disappoint me, Day.” And Day, working his way up the Bureau ladder more quickly than he had expected possible and being a man who liked power and sought it, had no intention of disappointing the Director, if he could help it. The Director had already assured Day that the little mishap on the road that morning would have no bearing on his announced promotion, but Lotts did make it clear that he wanted to start seeing some serious movement in the search efforts, and soon. “You’ve got the tools now,” he said, nodding towards the armed Reaper. “Now let’s have some results.” · · · · The crashing of glass from inside the shelter was not accompanied by the alarmed snarls and hissing that Einar had expected, thinking a member of the cat family to be the most likely intruder. He had seen bobcat tracks in the area over the past few days. So. A fox? Could be a fox, coyote, even. No way a bear could have got in there. Whatever it was, Einar knew he must get rid of the creature before it had time to decimate too much of the meat. His biggest fear was that it might go for the deer fat, destroying his ability to make pemmican and wiping out a crucial part of his food supply. He was about to begin shouting and tossing in rocks to frighten the creature off and put a quick end to its pilfering of his food, but he needed hides, needed furs for the coming winter, and knew his chances of taking the creature would be far better in the confines of the rock crevice than they would be as it came dashing out in alarm. The idea of walking into that winding, dark space to face an unknown opponent whose vision was likely far better in the dimness than his own was not especially appealing to him, however. He was just beginning to reach a point where his injuries—the burns as well as the dog bites and poorly healed gunshot wound in his leg—were no longer threatening him with deadly infection, and wanted to keep things going in that direction. Now if I could get above it there in the crevice, get a look at it and drop on it with the spear… Food and fur, and I’d be on the way to making up for whatever it has already eaten and destroyed! Very quietly he began stacking up rocks until he had nearly covered the entrance to the crevice, stopping when only a small sliver of blackness remained at the top. Entering, he sealed the space with one final flat slab of granite. OK. Committed to this, now… Carefully chimneying up the crack until he was at least fifteen feet up off the ground, Einar eased his way towards the back of the crevice, where his camp was situated some ten or twelve yards beyond the entrance. The animal, whatever it was, continued to rummage around in his belongings as he climbed; he could hear the occasional rattle of glass or metal as it shuffled about beneath him, and the whole space was pervaded with a strong and rather unpleasant odor that he did not quite recognize, but that put him in mind of the weasel family.. He supposed the intruder could possibly be a pine marten. As Einar’s eyes began adjusting to the dimness of the crevice, he could look down and see the creature gorging itself on a string of jerky that it had pulled down, the sleek dark fur of its back set off by a lighter ruff around it, and he readied his spear, prepared to drop on the intruder and add that fur to his supply of clothing materials. He accidentally knocked loose a small stone which fell near the creature, causing it to startle and revealing his presence. Einar was surprised that his scent had not given him away sooner, but supposed it had so pervaded the crevice by that point that the creature had not been able to tell the difference. And the intruder had been making such a racket down there that it had not heard him, either, until the rock nearly hit it on the head. The scavenger looked up at him with a rage-filled snarl, the place suddenly filled with a foul and choking stench, and Einar fell, having been too far along in his preparations to spring to reverse the process when he realized that he had misjudged the nature of the intruder, his final, rather irrelevant thought as he went down being that the last confirmed wolverine sighting in the area had been nearly 30 years prior…
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11-13-2009, 05:08 AM
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I am slow but I finally figured it out
This story never ends does it. later wayne
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11-13-2009, 09:44 PM
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Einar did not manage to land on the furry intruder and drive his spear into its backbone as he had intended, his element of surprise having been completely destroyed by the falling rock. The wolverine quickly backed up against the wall to avoid the falling man, and Einar landed hard but fairly well on the rock floor of the crevice, rolling forward but getting back to his feet with remarkable speed considering his bad hip and the fifteen foot drop, and not entirely unprepared when thirty pounds of snarling, furious wolverine was on him the next moment. He got in in a good jab with the spear as the creature leapt at his face, grabbing and slashing with its claws, and it backed off a bit when the spear took it in the shoulder. Not for long, though, and the next time the wolverine charged, it went for his right arm, and Einar brought his knee up hard into its stomach, barely avoiding having his lower arm clamped in wickedly strong jaws that almost certainly would have broken the bone, as little flesh as there was left to protect it, at the moment. Einar was already bleeding from more than a dozen deep slashes that the animal had managed to get in, knew that he had to end the struggle in a hurry, or he would surely end up losing, even if he managed to kill the beast. Every time it got near him it was using its claws to full advantage, and he knew those teeth—specially designed for ripping frozen flesh—were bound to eventually close with him if the fight went on.
He wanted to brace the spear against the rock wall and let the animal impale itself as it leapt for him, but the space was too narrow; he was finding it difficult, in fact, to use the spear at all because of the confinement of the crevice, and then it was on him again, and Einar fell as it grabbed hold of his upper arm, unbalanced by the weight of the creature and landing on top of it, the spear breaking under him as he fell, struggling to control the vicious claws that slashed at him as the creature lay on its back. He felt wildly for the spear in the growing darkness, found it beneath him slippery with blood—he wasn’t sure whose—glad when he happened to grab the correct end, and began stabbing at the wolverine, aiming for the neck area and finally breaking the bone spearhead when it went all the way through and contacted rock. His efforts had been enough, though; he could tell by the raspy breaths and the gurgling flow of blood from the creature’s throat that it was done for, and he lay on it until finally it stopped struggling, prying open the iron jaws of the dead wolverine with difficulty and pressing a shred of polypropylene material against his torn up arm to slow the bleeding. Sinking back to the ground, he was still for a minute. Einar did not want to move, but he knew he was going to need a fire; the darkness was nearly complete by that point, and he had a lot of work ahead of him if he was to adequately clean and treat his injuries. Getting shakily to his feet, he began feeling around the wrecked interior of his shelter for firewood, finally remembering that he had wedged a few pitch sticks into a narrow crack in the wall so that they would be easy to locate in the darkness and finding them by feeling along the wall beside his firepit at what he remembered to be the correct height. Setting one of the sticks on the ground and grabbing a wad of shredded up aspen bark from the ledge above his fire where he had been storing it for use as tinder, he wiped his blood-slick hands on the remains of his jeans before attempting to strike sparks with the little fire steel that remained in its place around his neck. Finally getting the tinder bundle to take, he used it to light the pitch stick, jamming it back in the crack in the wall once it was burning and staring around at his ruined shelter. The floor was littered with broken glass from the remnants of his medicine bottles, the two rabbit skins that had been drying shredded and trampled, and random pieces of mostly dried jerky scattered among the debris where the wolverine had apparently neglected to gobble them. Picking up the pieces one by one and brushing off the broken glass and dust as well as he could, Einar began stacking them on the cooking rock by his firepit, gathering up his strewn firewood as he went and tossing it down into the firepit until he had enough to reasonably start a fire, lighting it with the pitch stick. As the fire blazed up and gave light to the crevice, reflecting off the walls and illuminating the dim corners, Einar glanced up at his supply of drying jerky, realizing with a great rush of relief that the intruder had only managed to pull down one string of the stuff, that despite the devastated appearance of his shelter, the bulk of his food supply remained intact. He even saw the pile of white deer fat chunks and slabs on its little rock ledge, apparently untouched. Thank you! Turning his attention to his injuries, Einar gingerly removed the tattered remains of his polypro shirt, setting the bottle of tannin solution on his cooking rock to warm, for the simple fact it was the only one that had not been broken, and knowing that it was somewhat antiseptic and that, being a strong astringent, ought to help slow the bleeding some. Aside from the ragged bite wound that seemed to wrap most of the way around the upper part of his right arm, leaving his triceps a bloody mess, the bleeding seemed not to be all that serious, so he focused on the arm, washing the wounds with the slightly warmed tannin and pressing several mullein leaves to them, binding them in place with a strip of cloth from the shirt. As he went along, Einar found himself glad that he was still working on the adrenalin from the struggle. Form the look of the arm, he knew it ought to be hurting a good bit more than it did, knew that it probably would, later, and wished the willow bark solution had not all been lost when its bottle broke. Moving on to the gashes from the animal’s claws, which seemed concentrated on his chest and arms but had not entirely spared his legs, he carefully washed each one, covering the worst of them with mullein leaves until he ran out of leaves and knowing that he needed to come up with a better antiseptic to treat them, if he wanted any chance of staving off the nearly inevitable infection that those filthy claws were bound to bring. Already he was beginning to feel a bit of the hot, dizzy confusion in his head that told him the gashes were becoming inflamed, and with it came a seething anger—at his attacker and to a lesser degree at his circumstances themselves and the pursuers who had confined him to them—which he allowed to go unchecked because he knew it would be useful to him, would keep him going, keep him from curling up in a corner before he had tended to his wounds and got the shelter back in order and found some way to keep himself warm for the night. Storming and stumbling about in the crevice, cleaning up and gathering firewood and attempting to get the place back in some sort of order, Einar’s glance again fell on the slabs of deer fat, and while he didn’t feel at all like eating, the sight did give him an idea. Melting some fat in the Spam can, he broke up and tossed in a couple of the Oregon grape roots that had been drying on one of the jerky lines for later use, watched as the liquefied fat began taking on a yellow tinge, and moved the can back a bit from the fire to reduce the chances of the fat getting to hot and bursting into flame. Knowing that it would take some time for the roots to release a useful amount of berberine into the fat, he limped over to the body of the wolverine, having intended to take out some of his rage by kicking it but instead lifting the animal by one of its massive rear paws and admiring the soft, thick fur that he knew would provide him a good bit of warmth, once he got the critter skinned and all of the drying blood washed out of the fur. Letting the body drop to the ground he inspected the paw—over half the size of his hand, despite the fact that the wolverine did not weigh much over thirty pounds—and looked at the row of strong, sharp claws, remembering stories he had heard of youths from some of the Northern tribes who had worn necklaces of grizzly claws, but had been allowed the privilege only after dispatching the bear themselves, using nothing more than a knife. Well this wolverine was quite enough for me, tonight. Bear would have killed me, almost certainly. But he pulled out his knife and removed one of the long, curved claws, anyway, wrapping and tying it in the center of a loop of parachute line before slipping the line around his neck, figuring that he had earned it. Einar found his rage to have cooled some with the acquisition of the claw, the notion of being angry at the lifeless body of his assailant suddenly striking him as a bit foolish, despite the damage the beast had inflicted. The wolverine had, after all, just been attempting to live a solitary existence as he himself was striving to do, had jumped at the chance for some easy food exactly as he might have done, and had paid the price for stealing from him. Now I got to see if I can live through winning this one… Kinda hope so. Was almost starting to look forward to winter, these past few days. Adding a few small clumps of spruce pitch to the deer tallow which had by then turned a bright shade of yellow, Einar applied the stuff, warm but not too hot, to his wounds before sticking the mullein leaves back on top and binding them in place with the tattered remains of his shirt. After that he spent a good portion of the night huddling under the stiff, mostly dried deer skin—the only protection left him with the destruction of his polypro shirt—and feeding his small fire, keeping it up until he ran out of wood and letting it die at that point, rather than venturing out into the night in search of more wood. Sitting there wide awake for a good while in the darkness, Einar finally drifted into a fitful sleep, grasping the wolverine claw around his neck and waking now and then when the pain became too great to chew on a bit of dried willow bark that he had managed to salvage from amongst his wrecked possessions.
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11-14-2009, 04:35 PM
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this phrase "his final, rather irrelevant thought" almost knocked me out. :-)
glad to see EA is still alive.
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11-14-2009, 10:08 PM
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With the destruction of what had remained of his shirt, tanning the deer hide became a top priority for Einar, a fact that was reinforced for him when he woke shivering and stiff with cold the morning after the battle with the wolverine. There simply is not a time of year when it really stays “warm” at night at the elevation of Einar’s shelter, and he had spent the last hours of the night continually repositioning the rigidly dried deer hide in a fruitless attempt to shelter himself. Watching the dawn light slowly begin to strengthen and creep into the rocky crevice, he chewed on the small scrap of willow bark that he has worked on periodically throughout the night, his arm aching terribly where the animal had managed to sink its teeth into him. The numerous gashes left by the creature’s claws were problematic also, as he found when he tried to move. OK. More willow bark. The arm was bleeding again; he was out of mullein leaves for fresh bandages. Must go find more. But first, food. Einar was hungry that morning despite the hurt of his injuries, ravenously hungry after having eaten nothing the evening before, and having expended tremendous amounts of energy in the fight with the intruder. He took the hunger and his apparent lack of fever as a good sign, hoped it meant that he was not yet, anyway, dealing with a serious infection in any of the wounds he had sustained. Chewing on one of the strips of jerky he had salvaged from the floor the past night and adding to it a few slivers of deer fat, he studied the deer hide in the growing light of the day, planning his next steps in tanning it. He knew he would have to soak it before he could get the hair off, knew that water, and the ready access to it, was a fairly important element in successfully tanning anything, and he supposed he would need to make a trip over to the creek, possibly even camp over near it temporarily while he completed the process.
Rising to go look for more mullein leaves, Einar grabbed for his spear, found it missing and remembered damaging it in the confrontation with the wolverine. Searching about the shelter, he found the pieces. The spear was broken, useless. He had the roughed out atlatl, but no darts. But I do have deer bones, and I have broken glass. I will make something. Anyway, I’ve still got the knife. And he bound it to the willow stick that had been the top half of the spear shaft, removing the broken fragment of remaining deer bone and inserting the knife in the split before wrapping it in place with a length of parachute line. The resulting weapon was only half the length of the old spear and was a bit awkward and unwieldy, but at least it was something. Einar had existed many times with less. Outside the shelter the day was overcast and windy, a solid mass of low grey cloud promising rain, and Einar hurried to gather a good pile of mullein leaves from a few plants that grew near the edge of the meadow, checking his snares and finding one rabbit before heading back, his pace quickened by the knowledge that he was about to be soaked by a cold, wind driven rain from which he had very little protection, at the moment. Hurrying as he was, he did not quite manage to beat the rain back to the shelter, and reached it breathless and chilled several minutes after the rain came sweeping down on the area, shaking the water out of his hair and stomping around in the shelter to warm up. The storm, from what he could see, appeared to be quite extensive, and with the strong gusts of wind that accompanied it, Einar was pretty sure that there should be no high altitude helicopter training in the area that day, leaving him free to have a small fire. Need wood, though. Out of wood. As little as he looked forward to venturing back out into the storm, the thought of a fire and a fresh-cooked rabbit made the idea a good bit more tolerable, and Einar hurried from one tree to the next, collecting small dry sticks and rushing with them back to the crevice before they could become too damp in the rain. Warming his berberine, deer fat and spruce pitch salve by the fire, he again treated the wolverine bites on his upper arm, seeing in the daylight that the tears they had left were jagged and rather deep, and could certainly have benefited from stitches. He could not immediately think of a way to accomplish such an effect, however, and knew that the wounds probably needed to stay open for a few days, anyway, so he could make sure that infection was not setting in. As the fire slowly heated his shelter, Einar worked to sew up the slashes in his jeans left by the wolverine’s claws, first sitting over the fire and working one of the bone fragments from the ruined spearhead with the chunk of granite he had been using to sharpen his knife, until it was thin and sharp on one end, somewhat resembling a needle. As he did not want to take the time just then to do the tedious work of abrading an eye into the bone needle, he simply left a slightly wider spot near the back, wore a depression into the bone below it, and tied a thin strand that he laboriously worried out of a parachute line in the depression. The needle was a bit clumsy and wider than might have been ideal, but it worked, and he had soon secured the loose flaps of denim with a series of small stitches, and was well on the way to returning the jeans to their original function, and preventing them from falling to pieces. The denim was badly worn, though, and as he worked he could see that the jeans were not all that far from falling apart at the seams in places, and his polypro pants were not far behind them, having not been spared the wrath of the intruder’s claws. Finishing with the jeans, he hung them over the fire to dry, starting work on the polypro pants, his efforts slowed somewhat by his unwillingness to take them off while he sewed. By the time he had finished his repair work the jeans had dried, and Einar switched them out for the polypro pair, tying the latter loosely around his neck to provide himself some small measure of warmth and protection as he moved away from the fire to deal with the wolverine. Skinning the creature as efficiently as he could with his limited tools, Einar fleshed the hide and hung it on one of the drying strings, turning his attention to the carcass, which he knew did, despite what his nose told him, contain meat. Food. Sustenance. And he was certainly in no position to turn it down. Supposing, though, that wolverine jerky might not be the best thing he had ever had the privilege of eating, he decided to go ahead and use the meat fresh, hanging the carcass in a dry corner of the shelter for the moment where it would be well clear of the occasional drops of rain that were finding their way down to the floor. Knowing that he ought to take advantage of the rain to soak the deer hide so he could work on de-hairing it and getting on with the tanning process, Einar hauled it out to the entrance of the shelter, setting it on a large slab of granite beneath a steady stream of water that had begun pouring from a ledge far above, propping the already concave-shaped hide with rocks so that it would retain something of its shape as it softened, and contain the water that fell on it. Standing just beneath the shelter of the rock overhang, Einar watched as the hide “bowl” began filling with water, knowing that he was going to miss the warmth and protection it had given him at night, however limited it had been in the hide’s rigid state. He knew, though, that the sooner he was able to get it tanned, the sooner he would have “real” clothes to wear again. At least it is summer. Didn’t much feel like it, though, and he shivered, turning away from the icy mist that blew in the stormwind and heading back to the firepit, where he used the Spam can to scoop up some ashes from the pile that he had recently removed from the pit, dumping them in the soaking hide and rubbing the thick slurry into the hair, knowing the ash should help loosen up the hair and make it easier to remove. Sitting back down by the fire, wet again but having had the sense to leave the polypro pants inside where they would stay dry, he wrapped them around his upper half as well as he could, warming up by the fire and sitting nearly on top of it so that his jeans could dry as his can of rabbit stew began to simmer on the cooking rock. Supposing that he might as well use it before it had the chance to go bad, he had chopped up and tossed most of the wolverine liver into the stew, not sure what to expect as far as taste, but knowing that it ought to be good for him. The stuff smelled fine, anyway. Lost in thought and staring at the little flames as they slowly consumed the sticks that he fed to them, Einar realized that something had changed, the world grown quieter, and he looked up to see that the occasional raindrops that had been finding their way into the shelter had turned to snow. The June snow shower was not at all unprecedented in the high country, but Einar watched the falling flakes with a bit of dismay, thinking that he would have found it considerably easier to welcome them if he already had that buckskin jacket finished… Well. At least I have this shelter. Fire. I’m eating. That is good. · · · · Liz had refused medical attention for her ankle at the scene of the crash, insisting that it was only sprained and fairly certain that she was correct, riding with Allan to the hospital in Clear Springs where they were soon joined by Bill and Susan’s son, daughter in law and two grandsons, as well as a number of their other friends from the Culver Falls area. They spent the rest of the day in the hospital waiting room awaiting word on Susan, who was in surgery for a ruptured spleen and compound fracture to her arm, as well as a broken jaw and other facial fractures. Bill was in surgery, also, to relieve the pressure from what was being described as a massive brain hemorrhage. Many hours had gone by without word on his condition, and the little group in the waiting room continued to grow, the pastor and a number of members from Bill and Susan’s church showing up. Towards evening Sheriff Watts—a personal friend of Bill’s for many years, even if they had not always seen eye to eye on everything—paid a visit, spending nearly an hour talking with Allan and Liz and Bill’s son, insisting that they call him right away if anyone gave them trouble. Watts was well aware of Liz’s report to his deputy at the scene, and of the corroborating evidence provided by the truck driver’s call to the Highway Patrol, in which he had reported the suspicious and reckless behavior on the part of the FBI Suburbans. Pacing from window to window as she waited for word, Liz watched the world outside darken and the streetlights come on, unable to avoid blaming herself for not being able to act quickly enough to do something to prevent Bill and Susan’s injuries. She knew on a practical level that if she had managed to regain full consciousness in time to take some action, she would probably be in surgery herself, at the moment, if not dead. But that knowledge did little to assuage the guilt and the growing anger that she felt, both at herself and at the people involved in the attack. Day. Day is gonna pay for this, if I have to do it, myself! She knew, though, that the best thing she could do for Susan would be to head back up the hill to the house the next morning and work on filling the herb order that they had been delivering when the agents forced them of the road. That was, she knew, what Susan would want her to do—she had worked so hard over the years to develop her business—and Liz expected that the nursery in Clear Springs would very likely forgive the lateness of the delivery, considering the circumstances
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11-15-2009, 01:18 AM
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Einar - and Liz to some degree - have captured my imagination. Although Einar seems to encounter his share of misfortune, he manages to get by on his stores of energy and knowledge. I just cannot imagine the sheer loneliness of his situation. It is about two years without sustained human contact for him.
The other thing is the raw meat he eats. I know what it is like to not eat or drink for 16 days - I was on iv, but nothing by mouth - I hallucinated food. I fully commiserate with him. But at some point he is going to contract a parasite that does him real harm. Yes, the drone may spot his heat signature along with every game animal around, but he needs fire more regularly, even if for short periods. I very much appreciate the editing on this piece and book one, FreedomoftheHills. It is a breath of fresh air. One person I wrote to that their lack of editing whatsoever was very disruptive in trying to read a story that appeared to have a great plot. The reply was love it or leave it, if I didn't like it! I left it. Good editing is so important to the final product. Thank you for your efforts and a great story.
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11-15-2009, 03:15 PM
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"Dead, she was pretty sure, slumped forward against the steering wheel, his forehead and face a bloody mess. She could not find a pulse,"
I thought Bill was dead? "Bill was in surgery, also, to relieve the pressure from what was being described as a massive brain hemorrhage" Im confused  So good so far though, loving it. 
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11-15-2009, 04:08 PM
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Liz thought he was dead after the beating by the agents, but he had been in pretty good shape cognitively before that. Susan wasn't in good shape at all from the crash, then got kicked around on top of that. He may have degraded after a period of time, but Liz didn't really examine him. A pulse can be hard to find in a bad situation she was in, in the backseat.
I, too, am loving this story and have become addicted to it. I promise to let a couple of chapters gather up before I read it, but I can't.
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11-15-2009, 09:43 PM
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Thanks for explaining that about Bill. You beat me to it. Hope that helps chaosofcreation.
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11-17-2009, 12:23 AM
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This is a great teaching tale...I would hope that no one person wouls have to go thru all these trials and setbacks...Really good. Thank you.
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11-17-2009, 07:52 PM
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Thanks for reading, everyone, and for your comments!
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Einar tries to be selective about which critters he is willing to eat raw--avoiding predators/omnivores because of the increased likelihood for parasites, but you're right, he is very likely to run into trouble at some point. Meat should always be cooked in a "survival" situation if you have the opportunity...but sometimes he simply does not. Quote:
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11-17-2009, 07:53 PM
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Continuing through the morning and into the afternoon, the snow drifted several inches deep in places outside Einar’s shelter between the two rock faces, but it did begin melting as soon as it fell, the ground too warm for any great amount to stick despite temperatures that plummeted well below freezing as the storm moved in. Einar huddled over his tiny fire of spruce sticks, working to create a new spearhead and occasionally having to venture out into the wind and snow to get more firewood, wrapping the wolverine hide, which was over four feet long, nose to tail, and covered in thick warm fur, around his shoulders for some measure of protection against the wind driven snow. Even with the hide, he returned from each of his forays badly chilled and quite grateful for a dry shelter that gave him protection from the wind and was warmed reasonably well by the little fire. The storm, he knew, would not last, the rare June snow would soon melt and be gone more quickly than it had come, but he knew that he would have been in serious trouble indeed, had he been forced for whatever reason to be out traveling in that storm, clad as he was.
Wolverine liver, Einar discovered when he ate his stew, was not all that bad, and the next time he grew hungry—which was not very long, as it seemed that he was constantly hungry as his body began trying to repair itself and return to something like a normal state—he tried some of the wolverine meat, roasting a haunch over the fire and knowing as he ate it that if he had been much less hungry, it might well have been one of his last choices. But I think I like it a bit better than coyote, come to think of it… Could get used to this. Which he knew he would not have to do, as the wolverine that had attempted to rob him of his deer jerky was likely one of a very few living among the thousands of acres of forest and meadow on the plateau. Though still angry at the beast for the harm it had done him and reluctant to admit it, Einar felt an odd kinship with the wolverine that he had killed. Just another solitary creature, struggling to make its way in tough terrain. Finishing his new spearhead, made from a section of leg bone from the deer quarter he had brought out of the wildfire, Einar worked on the paw of the wolverine that he had taken the claw from after the fight. Removing the rest of the claws from that foot, he tied them, hooked and sharp, to the parachute line around his neck until the entire foot was represented. Perhaps not the most useful of endeavors, but the work did seem to lessen the throbbing pain in his arm where the animal had mangled it, or at least to divert his attention just a bit from focusing on it. Liking the result, he slipped the string back over his head. Towards the end of the day Einar found that much of the jerky on the lower strings was dry after sitting in the rising warmth of the fire, and he carefully moved one of them lower to have a final drying over the coals, leaving the meat on the parachute line and knowing that if the line started melting, that would be a good indicator that he was getting the jerky too close to the fire. One by one he set the brittle-dry strips aside on a rock to cool, using his rounded granite knife sharpening stone to begin gently pounding them into the powder that he would use to make his pemmican. Einar had been very anxious to get some of it made, the knowledge that he might have to move on at some point with little or no warning weighing heavily on him and never very far from the surface of his thoughts. Or dreams. It was going to be a great comfort to finally have some of the stuff put away. Retrieving the dried, berberine-yellowed deer intestines from their spot on a hanging line, he carefully cut out several short sections, twisting and tying one end of each with a short strand of sinew from the deer leg before working his fingers inside and opening them up. Next he used the Spam can to melt down some of the deer fat, snatching bits of it here and there to eat as he worked and removing and eating the “cracklings” that were left unmelted as the fat liquefied. Allowing the fat to cool some, just enough so that he could touch it without the heat being uncomfortable but not so much that it had begun solidifying again, he stirred in the powdered meat, mixing and adding until the can contained nearly twice as meat as fat, by volume. Scooping the cooling mixture into the deer gut cases, he squeezed the air out as well as he could, twisted and tied them shut, setting the finished pemmican portions on a rock to finish cooling and solidifying. It was a slow process, with the Spam can as his only rendering and mixing vessel, but Einar kept at it until he had filled eight sections with the greyish mixture, sampling it as he went and sitting back, satisfied, to look over the fruits of his labors when he was finished. The pemmican, he knew, should last almost indefinitely, (assuming I don’t eat it all up, before whenever “indefinitely” is…) the deer tallow preserving the meat and preventing moisture and air from contacting it. He had heard stories of pemmican caches being discovered fifty or sixty years after being put by, and the stuff still being perfectly edible. Not that mine will be around that long. But it’s good to know that I don’t have to worry about it spoiling. I can put it aside, hopefully, and live on other meat that I take so that there is something to fall back on if I end up on the move again, or injured in some way that keeps me from checking the snares and hunting. And it will be good to have for this winter, if nothing else. Toss one of those packets into some hot water, maybe add some dried serviceberries, and I’ll have a good stew. Thinking of the serviceberries made him wonder how the crop might be affected by the sudden shift in weather. He hoped the berries were far enough along that they would not be damaged by the brief dip below freezing, and knew that, even if they were, he ought to be able to head down lower and find plenty that were undamaged. The snow, he knew, would almost certainly be confined to the top of the plateau and the surrounding peaks, and should have fallen as rain in the valleys. With the hastened deterioration of his clothing situation that had been brought on by the fight with the wolverine, though, he knew that his planned berry scouting expedition would need to wait until he had been able to turn that deer hide into something wearable. Which reminded him. Time to check on that hide, see if the hair is ready to come off. Knowing that the hair was not likely to be loose enough to remove yet at that point, he took another can of ashes along, to renew the solution that he had rubbed into it earlier. He also hoped that the strong ash solution might help keep animals from messing with the hide, but intended to bring it back into the shelter overnight, just to be safe. Brushing the wet snow off the hide, he discovered that, as he had expected, the hair was not yet easy to get out. With some effort he was able to pull and twist a clump of it loose, though, and anxious for obvious reasons to finish up the tanning process, he decided to go ahead and work on slipping the hair. Glancing around, he settled on a fallen aspen that lay at an angle, partially beneath a big spruce, to drape the hide over as he scraped. But first, back to the shelter and get that wolverine hide! Kinda chilly out here. Wrapping the wolverine hide around his shoulders—fur side in—and leaving the polypro pants inside where they would stay dry, he stoked the fire and shoved the flat cooking rock most of the way over the pit, hoping to keep some coals alive for when he returned to the shelter. Knowing that it was not the ideal tool but hoping that he might be able to make it work, he grabbed the dried, split spruce stick that he had used for fleshing the deer hide, sharpening one edge of it with his knife before scraping the branch lightly with the knife-sharpening stone, wanting to eliminate any protrusions that might snag and tear the hide as he scraped off the hair. Scraping a hide is hard work under any circumstances, and it was made more difficult for Einar that afternoon by the fact that his right arm was not really working properly after the brush with the wolverine’s teeth. He would have liked to give the arm a few days in a sling until it had started healing, but the motivation to obtain materials for clothing was, at the moment, a more powerful one. The repeated motions necessary in scraping off the hair and top layer of skin on the deer hide kept causing the mullein-leaf bandages to loosen and the wounds to bleed again, and it seemed that he was endlessly pausing in his work to retie the strips of tattered polypropylene that held them in place. The work kept him reasonably warm, though, the tree sheltered him from the bulk of the wet, blowing snow, and things were not going too badly, at least not until the wind, which had slacked off considerably, picked up again.  (Fleshing an elk hide. Not the same thing that Einar is doing in this chapter, but you get the idea...) It did not take long for the wind in its renewed fury to numb Einar’s hands and slow his pace, and though he kept at his work with a grim tenacity that had become an all too familiar part of his existence, he was finally forced to admit that the remainder of the scraping would have to wait. He was growing clumsy, careless despite his best efforts, and in the dimming light knew that he was running an increasing risk of tearing or otherwise seriously damaging the hide. Rolling up the hide and stumbling into the shelter, Einar crept to the back and sat in the dimness on his cattail mattress beside the firepit for a minute, exhausted, catching his breath, before adding a few sticks to the fire and blowing the coals to life, slowly thawing over the flames and setting some snow to melt for a batch of wolverine stew. The next day, he knew, he could quickly finish the dehairing, and begin the process of braining the hide.
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11-18-2009, 05:17 PM
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Daylight found Einar back out under the tree working on the deerskin, having dried the wolverine fur as well as he could near the fire that previous night before putting it out, wrapping and tying the nearly dry fur around his shoulders for protection. The night had brought a freeze as the storm moved out, turning the wet snow that had remained on the ground into an icy crust on which he left no tracks. The prospect of leaving tracks did not concern him too much, anyway, as he knew that the snow would be gone nearly as soon as the sun hit it, which would not be long; the morning sky was crystal clear. Working on lashing together a hasty frame for stretching the deer hide, Einar moved quickly in an attempt to keep warm. As quickly as he could, anyway, with his right arm bound to his side just above the elbow with a strip of cloth from the wrecked shirt, a measure he had resorted to after seeing what the previous day’s activities had done to the area that the wolverine had mangled. The clots of blood that had formed in the wound had kept breaking loose and the bleeding starting up again, and he could see that, with the animal’s teeth having torn well down into the muscle, there was little chance of anything beginning to knit together and heal, as long as he was using the arm. Need some of that hound’s tongue to make an allantoin wash for it, speed up the healing. Have to go look for some.
Einar could not really see himself finishing the tanning process with one arm, and his bad one, at that, and really had to have something, even if it was just a vest, to replace the ruined shirt. So he ended up treating the area with some more of his berberine and spruce pitch salve and bandaging it as well as he could, wrapping the arm to his body with a strip of cloth just above the elbow, immobilizing the top half but still leaving his lower arm and hand somewhat useful to him. The setup slowed his work some, but he made up for it by redoubling his efforts in a struggle to stave off the cold of the morning, collecting four small dead trees, removing protruding branches and lashing them together to form a rough square. He managed to adapt pretty quickly to the limited usefulness of his arm, and finished the frame without slowing down long enough to get seriously cold, but found himself strongly hoping that the sling would not be necessary for very long. As he worked, watching the world slowly thaw and the snow melt out of the trees as the sun came up he worried about the berries over near the lake, concerned that they might be a loss after the freeze, however brief it had been, and decided to make a trip over to check on them later that day, after the snow melted and he had got the hide brained and set to dry. Finished with the stretching frame, he propped it against the tree and made a hasty return to the shelter with the dehaired hide, unwilling to risk a fire on a clear day but supposing that he might as well at least be in out of the wind while he prepared the hide for stretching, using one of the sharply fractured fragments from his broken spearhead as an awl to create holes every few inches around the edge of the hide so that he could pass parachute line through them and stretch the hide in the frame he had created. Returning to the frame with some parachute line and the prepared hide, he worked to lace the line through the holes, wrapping it over the frame and stretching the hide tightly between the four logs as he went. The task was difficult with his injuries, and he ended up having to start over twice before getting it done to his satisfaction, sitting down on the ground to rest before throwing a rope up over a high branch of the spruce and raising the frame and hide well off the ground, knowing that he could do no more until night came and he could have a fire to cook down the brain solution. Returning to the shelter, he slumped down on his cattail bed and sat for a minute with his head on his knees, worn out again and realizing that in his haste to secure some new clothing, he had entirely forgotten about breakfast. Cutting a few slivers from the wolverine haunch he had roasted the night before, he ate them with some deer fat, seeing that his supply of fat was rapidly dwindling with the making of his first few batches of pemmican, and knowing that he would have to use a bit more of it in tanning the hide, to supplement the brain. Time to set out another deer snare, I guess. He knew that a steady diet of venison jerky would do him little good without a source of fat to supplement it, and he found himself very tired at the thought of processing another deer just then, for the first time in many months almost wishing that the whole thing could be over so he could just walk into a grocery store and buy a big pail of peanut butter like everybody else, regardless of the consequences. And one of lard, and a bunch of butter, and don’t forget cheese… It was a foolish line of thought and a brief one, Einar quickly dismissing it by laughing and telling himself that if he was not careful enough in his use of fire, he might very well be getting an airdrop on or near his location, but I highly doubt that it’ll have anything at all to do with food. There had been nothing in the article he had discovered in the newspaper salvaged from the camp after the forest fire that indicated whether or not the UAV the feds were using was armed, but he knew it would be foolish to assume anything other than that it was. Or could be, if they decided to take such a step. And Einar still found himself pretty jumpy about the fact that his shelter was so near an area that was clearly used, if not on an especially regular or predictable basis, for helicopter training. He worried at times that he was perhaps already becoming too complacent, too dependent on the protection of the shelter and beginning to lose a bit of the edge of alertness that had so far kept him free, if not always (always?) comfortable. Well, I can’t exactly leave right now, though. Can work towards it, but I’ve got to get this meat put away, get the hides taken care of so I have something to wear, so like it or not, I am kind of dependent on the shelter at the moment. Better just make the best of it. Securing the wolverine hide around his shoulders for his planned scouting trip over to the serviceberries near the lake, Einar realized that he could, with a few hours’ hard word, rub, stretch and soften the hide to a nearly “tanned” state where it would be more flexible, and use it as a garment of sorts as he worked on the deer hide. It would be better than nothing, and was certainly quite warm, if not exactly large enough. Blocking up the entrance to the crevice with rocks in the hope of preventing another wolverine-type incident, Einar took his knife-spear as well as the bone spearhead he had nearly completed the day before, hoping to find a new willow shaft for it on his wanderings. He felt a bit vulnerable with only the clumsy, half-length pocket knife spear in his hand, wanted something longer, though he knew that his injuries left him with a somewhat limited ability to use it, at the moment. Upon reaching the serviceberry covered hillside over near the lake, Einar’s fears were confirmed. Not only did the half-grown berries appear to have been nipped by the freeze, the late-season snow, wet and heavy and nearly slush when it fell, had broken a good many of the branches from the bushes, meaning that the berries would have no chance of finishing their growth and ripening, even if they had managed to survive the brief dip below freezing. Staring at the ruined berry patch in dismay, Einar collected a few small, berry laden branches to carry back with him, curious to see if the tiny green fruits might be edible when dried, even thought they were a long way from being ripe. He doubted it, doubted that they would be especially digestible, anyway, and knew that the sugar content would be very low at that stage. Well. Better make that scouting trip down to a lower gully somewhere, just as soon as I have that deer hide brained and drying. Tomorrow, hopefully. Cannot risk letting the season pass by down there without me taking advantage of it. He knew that in times past, dried serviceberries, known as “Saskatoons” in more northern latitudes, had, with their abundant sugar and carbohydrate content, been a staple winter food for many tribes, along with meat of various types, and had hoped they might serve a similar function for him. Not wanting to wait on the berry scouting trip until he had finished the hide and made some sort of garment out of it—several more days, at best—he decided that the wolverine hide would just have to do. It’ll be alright. Weather has moved out, and it is, after all, summer up here.
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11-19-2009, 01:51 PM
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So glad EA is having a few days to get himself back in shape and build up supplies.
I'm curious about something. EA knows there are aircraft of various kinds, manned and unmadded, with IR equipment looking for him. He knows IR "sees" variations between heat given off by various surfaces, even air columns. Yet he only makes a fire at night, when the temperature gradient between his shelter and surrounding rock is greatest. It seems he'd make a smokeless fire (Dakota fire hole?) in the day time when the surrounding rocks are heated by the sun. What's EA's thinking about this? Is he more concerned by the possibility of smoke being seen than the detection by IR devices?
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