Welcome back, FOTH. Glad to get back to Einar and Liz's story. I've been trying to read ahead, but am so far behind I can't get caught up.
Again, thank you so much for all your hours of hard work in writing this great story. So much to learn woven in with the interesting story, and the photos add so much to my understanding of what's going on and help me learn about new things too.

 

Thank you for starting the next book so quickly. I was afraid you were going to take a break, not that you don't need one, but I am glad you didn't.

 

Back in the saddle, again!

really glad to see this continue...

 

No way, a sequel? Thank you sir!

 

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was totally surprised to see this so soon. Looking forward to more EA fixes.

 

Einar, to Liz’s relief and surprise, slept most of the day as she kept the fire going, cooked up another pot of stew and carefully spread out the dozens of cattail heads she had cut, turning them now and then where they lay covering the sleeping platform, wanting the be certain they were completely dry before turning them into a mattress and covering them with the bear hide. The fever left him periodically--during which times he lay shaking in the bear hide, seemingly unable to get warm despite the warm fur and his proximity to the fire, which was heating the small space of the den quite thoroughly--but it always seemed to return, and Liz frequently offered him water, lifting his head and attempting to rouse him enough to take a drink, but was seldom successful. The cattail heads, freed of their coating of dry snow before she brought them into the warmth of the den, dried quickly, and Liz spent much of the morning arranging them on the sleeping platform, packing them in tightly so that they did not move when she lay down on them and finding them to be wonderfully cushioning and insulating from the cold of the dirt. They would, she expected, eventually come apart with enough use, the buoyant, fluffy white fibers that were designed for lifting and floating the tiny seeds to new locations separating and leaving the bed a mess of fluff, but she hoped that by then, they might have come up with a way to contain them. Several deer hides, perhaps, sewn together to form a mattress which they could stuff with the cattail down, with great heaps of usnea lichen, if they could find enough…OK. That’s way in the future. For now, this will be a great improvement, and will get Einar up off of that cold floor, and out of the draft from the door! I can feel that it’s a lot warmer up here, even two feet off the floor on this platform. That must be why he built it. She would have to wait to move him, though, until he woke, and he had shown no recent signs of being inclined to do so.

Towards afternoon Liz began to grow increasingly worried about Einar as he lay there slipping in and out of consciousness, mumbling incoherently and throwing off his bear hide covering, sweating and shaking with fever, skin appearing terribly pale through its flush, nearly translucent. Not wanting him to become too dehydrated, she prepared a warm mixture of bear broth and chokecherries, straining it through a clean sock so there would be no chunks for him to potentially choke on and carefully dripping some of it into the side of his mouth, knowing that, whatever was going on with him, he would be needing continuing fluid and nutrition if he was to get better, glad when after a time he responded by opening his eyes and taking a sip from the pot when she offered it. Squinting at her in the dim, flickering light of the fire, he struggled to sit up, took the pot from her and nearly drained it.

“Oh. That’s good stuff. Guess I fell asleep. You better just kick me if I fall asleep again. Got no business sleeping in the daytime like this.” He rubbed his eyes, tried to stand but listed to the side, dizzy, Liz supporting him and easing him back to the ground before he could fall. His speech was making sense for the first time in many hours, but, eyes bright and glazed and a bit wild-looking, Liz could see that the fever had not yet left him entirely. He was awake for the moment, though, and she supposed that she ought to take advantage of it to see if he could eat some more, went to the fire and chopped a few more chunks of bear for stew. Einar crawled over to the door, urgently wanting to see the state of the storm, whether it was continuing to offer them its protective cover and for how long it appeared likely to continue doing so, glad to see that the snow fell unabated, the wind nearly taking his breath as he stuck his head out into it. Billows and drifts of snow, windblown, deep, had piled up around the den entrance, having already obliterated Liz’s tracks from the last time she had gone out--this morning, I guess--and Einar pulled himself out into the shallow dusting of snow beneath the ledge and did his business in the shallow outhouse hole they had scraped into the dirt beneath the little ledge--got to move this over somewhere further from the entrance, before long. Only getting away with this because it’s so cold out here, and everything’s freezing up pretty quick--before hurrying back into the den, dropping the bearskin door flap closed behind him and securing it against the wind with the two rocks that they had been using for that purpose. Safe. No way they’re going to find our tracks down from the canyon rim, after this. Something struck him as odd in the den when he turned around, something had changed while he was sleeping, and Einar scanned the small space, quickly noticing the cattail-covered sleeping platform, scooting over to inspect it.

“Huh. You’ve been real busy. This sure looks warm. Where’d you get all these?”

“There’s a little meadow, a ways down the ridge from here. I saw it when I was out getting firewood, and went to take a look. There are thousands of cattails; I just brought back what I could carry.”

Einar grinned. “Great! Then we can spare one?”

“Sure, I’d say so! What are you…?” She did not need to ask, as it turned out, as Einar had chosen one of the cattail heads and set in on the flat rock she had used for baking bread the night before, touching it with a flaming stick and barely moving back in time to avoid singeing his eyebrows when it went up in flames, the fluff burning off like kerosene and leaving a little black spot on the den ceiling. Liz hurriedly stomped out a burning chunk of cattail down that had come loose and fallen to the floor, rolling over dangerously close to a pile of dry grass, shaking her head and glaring at Einar. Why, you crazy pyro… Which he probably wouldn’t have denied, but she quickly saw that his current experiment apparently had other, perhaps more productive purposes as well, as he was scraping intently at the charred rock, blowing lightly on the pile of debris to scatter the burnt bits of fuzz and stalk that remained, leaving behind a little pile of flattish, black seeds, which he dumped into his hand and held out to her.

“Here. Taste.” The seeds were crunchy, easy to chew, having been roasted by the fire, and had a pleasant, almost nutty flavor, though the yield from the entire seed head amounted to barely a small spoon full. If they’d had any spoons to measure with.

“Wow! I didn’t know that you could eat cattail seeds. Not very many of them here, but that sure seemed like an easy way to harvest and roast them, all at once.”

“Yeah, they’re tiny, but they are pretty good to eat, and if there are as many cattails down there as it sounds like, it might be worth our while to gather up a bunch of them and burn them off for the seeds, once we have as many as we need set aside for things like bedding, pillow stuffing, felted floor padding, stuffing for those two big overstuffed recliners we’re gonna build when we get everything else done and there’re still four months of winter left…” He grinned mischievously, Liz swatting at him with another of the cattail stalks.

“Right. Overstuffed recliners. Do they come before, or after we find a convenient waterfall, build a water wheel from spruce slats, sneak down to the valley and pull down some phone lines, and build a little hydro plant so we can have electric lighting in this place? You probably wouldn’t know what to do with electricity if you had it, now after all this time out here, would you? And you certainly don’t need a recliner, because I almost never see you sit still long enough to use one. Did you even have furniture at your house, before all this started?”

He laughed. “A little hydro plant…now you’re thinking! But no. I seriously doubt we’ll do that, or much furniture, either, at least not in this place. And no, I never really did have much furniture, aside from a few workbenches and of course bookshelves. Slept on the floor, had a little table and one chair, and that was about it. How much more can a person really need? But cattail fuzz was used commercially as a furniture-stuffing and insulation up through the 1950s or ‘60s, at least--I wouldn’t be surprised if it starts coming into fashion again, with all this talk of ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘green’ products that you hear these days--and mattresses and furniture were filled with it as far back as Colonial times. Some of the seeds were knocked loose and separated out as that stuff was being processed, and in the ’40s, a few studies were done on the feasibility of collecting them to produce a commercial cooking oil, since the seeds account for about forty percent of the weight of the entire seed head, and have a lot of oil in them. Seventeen percent, or so, of their weight, if I’m remembering right. I don’t know if the oil ever was produced commercially…but anyway, here the seeds are for us to use, so we might as well do it.”

Finishing his elaboration on the historical uses of cattail fuzz, Einar sat silent, staring in a daze at the seed head in his hand, seemingly exhausted by the talking, head sagging. Liz laid her hand on his arm and he jumped, startling back to wakefulness and quickly scooting back over to the sleeping platform, replacing the cattail head into the slot from which he had removed it, crawling back over to the fire, cold, as the fever was in its downswing, at the moment. Pulling out the bear leg fragment and his tools, he began scraping away at it once more, wanting to complete the dart head so he could begin on one for a new spear, his last one having been broken when he drove it into the bear whose den they were inhabiting. He had grown accustomed to carrying a spear, did not feel at all right in its absence. Not that he could carry one, currently limited as he was by the use of crutches. Need to do something about that, for sure. It’d almost be easier to get around, if I had a wooden leg in place of this broken one. Then at least my arms could be free, or one of them, if I still needed a cane or something. The thought of a wooden leg gave him an idea, a vague picture in his mind that he thought perhaps he could work with, could develop into something that would give him his hands back, while still keeping the weight off of his broken leg, for awhile. Later. For the time, his head was swimming too badly to focus on hands-free crutches or anything else too detailed, the hot, confused feeling of fever returning, and he fought it, doggedly stuck with his work on the atlatl head, finishing it, despite several small slices to fingers too clumsy to adequately hold the tools and numerous breaks during which he had to stop and lower his head to dissipate the blackness that was trying to engulf him, and then, finally, the project finished, he gave in to Liz’s gentle suggestions and allowed himself to helped up onto the cattail-padded sleeping platform, which she had draped with the bear hide, fur-side in, and he was asleep again, would remain so until well into the next day.

Curious about Einar’s mention of felting cattail fuzz for making floor coverings--though for all she knew he might have been joking about that, also, just as he had been the recliners--she took a number of the extra cattail heads that had been left over from the mattress-making project, working them to free the down, amazed at the volume of it that was packed into one of the heads--it seemed to triple, at least, when freed--and packing some of it into the snow-melting pot, whose contents she first emptied into the water bottles. Pouring the contents of one of the bottles back over the fuzz, she stirred it with a stick until all if it was soaked, pouring off the excess water and letting the resulting mat of damp, sorry-looking fuzz sit for a few minutes. She had watched Susan felt wool, had no idea whether cattail fuzz would behave similarly at all, but was very curious to find out. Already she could imagine all sorts of potential uses for thick pads of the insulating felt, if it turned out--slippers to keep feet warm in the den, insulating insoles to add warmth and protection to the future footwear they would have to make to replace their boots as they wore out--perhaps mittens, even, if the finished product came out strong and flexible enough, which she doubted, considering the relatively short length of the fibers--and of course thick, warm rugs for the den floor. Carefully loosening the mat of cattail fibers in the bottom of the cooking pot, she eased it out onto her hand, spread it flat on the cooking rock, and pressed it with a second hot, smooth rock, anxious to see what the results might be as it began drying.

 

Rest up, Einar. Now is the time. So glad those two are back together, and it seems like for good, now.

 

Looks like the couple will be really be branching out, if left undisturbed.

 

this is awesome

 

Sleeping off and on the rest of that evening and into the night, Einar was occasionally aware of Liz’s presence, or thought he was, though unable to wake up and confirm it, his mind eventually consigned her to the realm of dream, along with the wonderful, terrible, hunger-bringing odors of boiling stew that assailed him in the morning. Dreams, all of it, but at least they were good ones, so who was he to complain? The fever had been coming and going all night, bringing at its height terrible visions reminiscent of the ones that had plagued him, robbing him of all sense of time and place and reality, after he had been hit with the darts containing a tranquilizer concoction intended for bringing down black bears, and he struggled violently against his sleep then, desperately wishing to return to reality--if it existed--before he could manage to sink any deeper into the black, clinging mire. More than once during those times he sat up, grabbing for his spear and--as he had not even begun constructing the new one yet--not finding it, reaching instead for his knife, coming up short against the den wall that pressed in close at his edge of the sleeping platform and attacking it furiously before finally getting himself turned around and attempting unsuccessfully to scramble to his feet, sitting there on the edge of the bed swaying and trembling and quickly growing chilled without the bearskin, staring at Liz in the dim glow of the firelight as if he had never seen her in his life. Sitting there, Liz keeping her distance but speaking quietly to him the entire time, he finally returned to something like wakefulness, shaking his head and apologizing profusely, wondering aloud why she was willing to be there with him at all, but she told him it was alright, that she understood, that it would pass, cautiously approached and sat beside him on the bed, gave him a drink of water and calmed him with her slow, even words, gradually convincing him to lie back down with her, warming, sleeping again, grateful beyond measure.

After several such incidents, Einar crawling out of bed the second time and finding his knife and the one atlatl dart that he had finished the day before, bringing them back to bed with him and making her a bit nervous, Liz switched places with him on the bed--she had at first given him the spot nearest the wall because it seemed the most protected from drafts and allowed her to more easily rise to check on the fire, but she realized now the error in that thinking, saw that it left Einar feeling trapped and probably contributed to his distress upon waking. He slept more peacefully for a while after that, chilly at times as he lay perched there right on the edge of the platform, less than an inch from falling off, the atlatl dart clenched in his hand and Liz pressed against his back for warmth, terribly weary, herself, hoping that the exhausting routine was not to go on night after night, hoping very much that he would realize she was a friend, if he startled awake like that again. Which he did, rolling off the bed before Liz even realized he was stirring and crouching--as well as one can, with one leg in a cast--at the den entrance for a while, holding open the door flap and listening to the night, relieved at the feel of the storm-driven snow that stung his face, the night silent but for the sound of the wind. Finally, shivering, he crept back to the bed and hauled himself in, Liz helping, glad to see that the fever had gone down for the time, Einar responding in a normal, rational-sounding voice when she spoke to him, leaving the atlatl dart propped beside the bed instead of insisting that it must remain in his hand. They slept, daylight eventually creeping in under the door flap and waking Liz.

Having tried unsuccessfully several times to wake Einar that morning so she could give him some broth or at least water, Liz sat beside the sleeping platform as she ate, wondering if she might have time to go out and break up some of the firewood she had brought back into manageable-sized chunks, before he woke. Well, I’ve got to give it a try, because we’re down to a few branches and sticks and that dead aspen I hauled back up here, so you just sleep for a while, OK Einar? He stirred, drew his nose in under the bear hide, and went on sleeping, Liz beating some of the accumulated ice off of the yearling hide and slipping it over her head, crawling out into the snow to work on the firewood. Knocking the night’s accumulation of snow off of the little aspen, which she had leaned up against a spruce to prevent it being buried, she stared at it, wondering just how she was supposed to break it up without any sort of a saw or an axe, finally settling on propping it horizontally between a large rock and the enormous, uprooted spruce that lay over to the side of the den, standing up on the spruce and dropping rocks on it. The tree, long dead, dry and somewhat brittle, cracked and crunched and eventually split with repeated droppings of the heaviest granite slab she could lift, and many frustrating, tiring minutes of searching through the powder for lost rocks, thawing half frozen fingers against her stomach and climbing back up onto the spruce trunk to start the process all over again, Liz had stacked up a good fifteen or twenty lengths of firewood beneath the protective ledge outside the den. Some of the pieces had split in half or even splintered into fourths or smaller as they broke, and she hurried to get the little kindling sticks into the den before snow could begin accumulating on them. Stacking all of the wood up in the corner beside the chimney, she checked on Einar--still asleep--and left once again, warmed by the work and wanting to find another small tree or two to break up, since she was already covered in snow and wearing the bear hide.

Hearing Liz as she stacked the wood and finally, several minutes after she left the second time, managing to get his mind and body to work in concert and allow him to sit up, Einar peered around the den, seeing that Liz had put the fire out and wondering if that meant that the weather had cleared. Better check. Outside the snow continued falling, though--sure turning onto one monumental storm!--and he supposed Liz must have either been of a mind to conserve firewood, or, spooked by his behavior or perhaps something he had said during the night, had opted to eliminate their heat signature for the time. Either way, it was alright with Einar, as he had spent much of the previous winter fireless and often freezing, and was more than grateful simply to have the dry, windproof shelter of the den, the warm bear hide to cover himself with and plenty of food to eat. Speaking of eating, he was feeling terribly hungry, and, remembering the dream-smells of cooking food from that morning, he found the cooking pot where Liz had left it near the coals to stay warm, and nearly drained it of broth. Near it, on the cooking rock, he discovered a thick, matted circle of what he thought he could identify as sodden, compressed cattail fuzz, wondered about it, thinking that it looked useful, warm, potentially, but wondering if it could possibly be very sturdy, as it appeared likely to crumble if bent or handled too roughly, and he wanted to experiment with it, but figured he had better wait for Liz’s return and find out what she had planned for it, before doing any such thing.

The stove rocks lay in a pile where he had left them, and, a bit dizzy and still feeling terribly weak after the restless feverishness of the night, he slowly began moving them over near the chimney, carefully choosing and placing several for the start of the stove, supposing they could be used as a fire-ring of sorts if he did not manage to finish the construction before they next wanted a fire. Which he was beginning to do, just a bit, finding himself quickly chilled in the absence of the bear hide sleeping robe, digging around in the ashes of the fire until he found a still-warm rock and pressing it between his hands, curling himself around the lingering heat of the fire-warmed ground for a minute before returning to his work, the wolverine hide wrapped around his shoulders, stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows. Slowly, the placement of the granite slabs being a rather exact and tedious thing and the rocks seeming to him a good deal heavier than he thought they ought to the stove began taking shape, two rows of rock and then three, tapering as he went up, nearly twice as deep as it was wide to accommodate longer pieces of wood. A large flat rock, thin but not, he hoped, so thin that it would crack easily after repeated heatings, he placed over the top of the front half of the stove, meaning it to serve as a cooling surface and perhaps later as an over floor, if they decided to add such. Near the front he left two small gaps between stones, long and narrow and easily plugged with small flat granite slabs so that more or less air could be allowed in, as needed. The rocks appeared to be fitting together pretty tightly, but he supposed that a mixture of mud and spruce needles could always be smeared into the cracks later, if they ended up being problematic.

Some kind of a damper, Einar knew, would be a good idea and ought to increase the efficiency of the little stove--if it works at all…never really done this before--and as he narrowed the stove, bringing the rings of rock closer and closer together as they rose to meet the chimney opening, he left a big gap in the front, two inches high and as wide as the chimney, itself, sorting through his pile of leftover slabs until he found one that was close to fitting it, and working to grind and carefully break the granite piece until it slid into the gap. OK. Pretty tight. I’m sure there will be gaps around it even when I “close” the damper by pushing it all the way in, but…better than nothing. I can always take everything apart and start over, if this turns out to be a miserable failure. Filling the gaps between the stone structure and the chimney opening in the ceiling with small stones and clods of dirt, Einar sat back and scrutinized the stove, finally shrugging, shivering, beginning to feel a bit confused as the fever returned. Wanting to test the stove before Liz returned, and before he ended up curled up in a corner without any idea of what he was supposed to be doing, if that was where things were headed, he once again checked on the state of the storm before breaking up a few sticks and arranging them in the firebox, huddling close as the flames climbed up through them and adding a larger piece of wood from the stack that Liz had piled nearby. The stove seemed to be working, the chimney drawing and no obvious leaks existing, and, some of the feeling in his hands finally restored after several minutes of holding them near the flames, he slid the flat door-rock into place, closed the damper partway and retreated to the bed, rolling up in the bear hide, resting, thinking that things were going awfully, unbelievably well, everything considered, or would be, if only I could get rid of this doggone fever…

Einar had not been resting for long before Liz came hurrying in, brushing the snow from her coat, the look in her eyes telling him that something was terribly wrong, even before she spoke.

 

well, it was getting to be to comfortable!
Good chapter.

 

Liz did not even take the time to shrug out of the yearling hide, propping a frozen section of bear ribs against the cooking rock beside the stove and warming her hands, barely seeming to notice the work Einar had done on the stove, in her absence. Her face was white, eyes big as he scrambled out of the bed and hurried to join her by the stove.

“Something’s taking our food. Two of those big pieces that you had hanging in the spruce, and everything that was in the fir…it’s like something climbed the trees and jumped at them, pulled them down. They’re gone. The strings you had them tied up with are still hanging there, but the meat…”

“Were there tracks?”

“Yes, but with all the snow, I couldn’t tell what kind. You could see where it dragged the meat, though, and it must have come back several times to haul all of that off. You can still see the trenches, the drag marks, for a little ways where the trees are heaviest, but then they’re all drifted over with the snow. I just came to see if I could take that atlatl dart you made, and I’ll go look for more tracks, see if I can find that trench again and follow it where the trees get thick again, see if I can get our food back.”

“No. Cat. Can’t think what else it could be, and you sure don’t want to be following after a big cat through the dark timber and trying to take his meal, armed with just a dart. Let me do it.”

She looked at the floor, weighing her answer. “Einar, you’ve been sick. That fever, and I think you hardly slept at all last night…”

“Liz, we’ve got to have that food. When this storm clears off it’s gonna get cold, a lot colder than it’s been so far, I expect, and you’ll be surprised how fast we start having to go through whatever meat is left out there, just to stay warm. And that’s even if they don’t start bringing choppers and planes in over here and make it a real bad idea for us to have a fire, which you know they probably will. Now that cat’s probably already eaten a good bit of what he pulled down, especially if he came during the night, but he’s bound to have stashed some of it up under a tree somewhere, to finish later. That’s what they do; I’ve seen it. Kinda kick some needles over it, hide it partway. If I can find his trail, pick it up and follow it, there’s a good chance that we might be able to get at least some of that meat back. What’s left out there, anyway? Just the ribs?”

“Mostly. And that one little piece, maybe five or ten pounds, that I’d been carving off of. It’s still there.”

“Doggone it. Knew I should have secured that stuff better. What we really need is a cache, the kind they use up North, where you make a tall platform, and build a little log shed sort of thing on top, to keep all the critters out of the meat you stash in there. But I couldn’t. Barely managed to get the stuff hung up there. And it would have started spoiling here in the den. I’m gonna go have a look at those tracks, you stay and get warmed up. Look like you’re freezing.”

Gathering up his atlatl, the one completed dart he had for it, his near-empty pack and some cordage to help him drag back the meat that he hoped to find, Einar hauled himself to his feet there in the den, bent over there under the low ceiling, barely lasting for two seconds before he pitched forwards and met the rocky floor near the entrance rather sharply with his forehead, the world spinning absurdly around him. No. You have to get up. Have to be able to do this. Tried again, Liz supporting him, the second attempt no more successful than the first, and he sat on the floor, sagging forward with his hand pressed to the gash in his forehead, accepting the water Liz offered him. Get up. And he did, onto his knees, at least, despite the whirling confusion of the world as it spun around him, distorting his senses, crawled to the door and out, following Liz’s tracks where she had come from the food-tree. She was there beside him, twice kept him from sprawling out in the snow when he lost his balance, retrieving and carrying the atlatl and dart when he dropped them from his pack unheeded, and by the time he reached the tree, even Einar was ready to admit that climbing the ridge above the den in search of the cat’s stash--for that was the direction he determined it to have gone, after some looking--would have little chance of ending particularly well, as he found himself quite unable to keep to his feet. Liz again offered to make an attempt to follow the animal’s trail, but it was plain to both of them that between the fury of the wind, which had drifted over the marks in many places, and Liz’s relative lack of tracking experience, there was little sense in such an endeavor. They returned to the den, warming in front of the stove, which Liz just then really noticed, admiring it, setting a pot of snow to melt on the rock slab that served as its lid.

“This sure will make cooking easier! I guess we’ll really have to get every bit of nutrition we can out of what’s left of the bear, now. The carcass is still down there buried under the snow, I guess? If you’ll tell me where, I can go down and see if I can get some more bones off of it. Maybe there are some bits of meat left, and we can always boil down the bones for broth. We’ll get by. I can go set some snares out, too, just as soon as the storm stops…”

Staring into the fire, Einar nodded grimly, shoved another chunk of aspen branch into the stove and slid the door-rock across the opening, angry at himself for not taking steps to better protect their food supply, angry and frustrated, most of all, that he could not seem to gather his wits or his strength or whatever on earth it was that had left him feeling so weak and scattered and useless since returning to the den, and do what needed to be done, climb that ridge and see if he couldn’t find the cat’s trail, retrieve the meat, or what was left of it. He glanced up, supposed Liz was waiting for an answer about the snares. “Yeah. We’ll have to do that. But I have another idea, too. It won’t come close to replacing all of the meat the critter took, but it’ll be something, and will keep this from happening again. At least with that cat. Need you to go out and find as much spruce pitch as you can, dry yellow globs from around where porcupines have stripped off the bark, fresh oozing stuff, everything and anything. Gonna need a lot of it. And some strips and squares of bark from that big fallen spruce just outside the den, too. The flatter the better, but curved ones are OK, too. With a little steam and heat and some heavy rocks, I can flatten them. Cat’ll be back for more, no doubt, but we’ll be ready.”

Curious, unable to picture just how a bunch of spruce pitch and some flat strips and squared of bark were supposed to have anything to do with the mountain lion that helped itself to a good portion of their food, Liz held her hands over the stove’s warmth for another few seconds, got the yearling hide back over her head, and hurried out to search for the requested ingredients. And I’d better finish bringing in this firewood that I dropped, too, in my hurry to tell Einar about the meat, before it gets buried under the snow.

Einar, fighting a nearly overpowering urge to crawl up on the bed and curl up in the bear hide, sorted through the pile of sticks that lay beside the stove, choosing a sturdy, hip-high spruce branch, dry and yellow and free of bark but not in the least dry-rotted, laying it parallel to his bad leg on the ground, picturing in his mind the device that he intended to construct, which, if it worked at all, might give him back the use of his hands, while still keeping his weight off of the healing leg as he worked and traveled and as I run the snare lines. Because it looks like we’re going to be eating a lot of rabbit, before this winter is done…

 

Great chapters, so glad they're back.

 

When Liz returned with the quantity of pitch and the slabs of spruce bark requested by Einar, it was to find him sitting just inside the shelter, holding a piece of split aspen trunk in both hands, blowing gently on several glowing orange coals that he had set near its center, producing a good quantity of smoke, but no flame. Setting the bark and the bag full of pitch chunks down well away from the fire, she joined him at the entrance, watching as he moved the coals from place to place on the flat, split surface of the wood, continuing to blow and keep the smoke coming but always stopping just short of fanning it to flame. After a time the coals began cooling, losing their living, dancing orange and growing increasingly black, and Einar, breathless and a bit red-eyed from the smoke, scooted over to the stove and dumped the nearly dead coals back in, scraping with his knife to remove the charred wood that the coals had left behind near the split log’s center. Curious, Liz sat down beside him to watch.

“What are you making? Besides smoke…”

“Well, I’m using the coals to burn out some of the wood from the center of the log, here. You can make bowls this way, spoons, big cooking pots, dugout canoes, even, if you’ve got a big fallen tree and a lot of time. But right now I’m just working on a platform for my knee to sit on…in, actually, and when I get it all done I’ll take some of this soft dry grass and stick it in the depression I’m making for padding, or even better, maybe I’ll be able to find some usnea for padding. That would be springier and last longer, too. Then I’m gonna carve out a little notch in the front of the split log, one of the short ends, and slide this spruce stick into the notch. I’ll use a bunch of sinew to lash the horizontal platform to the spruce upright--hopefully that’ll be enough to hold it. I think it will, though if I happened to weigh much more, it might not--and rest my knee on it so the broken leg doesn’t touch the ground. Have to shorten the cast some for this to work, so I can bend my knee, but it seems that it’s probably time for that, anyway. Knee needs to move; I can feel it. I’ll take a couple strips of bear hide and lash my leg to the spruce stick, once just above the knee and once below the hip, and hopefully it’ll all hold together well enough for me to walk on. Expect I’ll be pretty clumsy on it at first, but if it works, it’ll mean that I can walk and hopefully even climb, without having both of my hands tied up by those crutches. How am I supposed to use an atlatl or do much else, either, when it’s taking both of my hands just to stay on my feet? I’ll still use the crutches some around the den here when I’m not going far, because I know I need to start putting small amounts of weight on this leg to help the bone heal and strengthen up, but it’ll be good to have both options. Don’t know if this’ll work, but it’s sure worth a try, I figure. Been thinking about it for a couple days, but that cat this morning convinced me I needed to hurry up and give it a try. Sure don’t care to be hunting any cat, on crutches!”

Liz shook her head. “No, I certainly wouldn’t think so! You said something about making bowls and spoons by hollowing out pieces of wood with hot coals like that. Can you show me how? A couple of spoons and some bowls sure would make mealtime a little more pleasant, around here!”

“Well, there’s not much to it, really. Just pick out the right piece of wood, do a little carving with a knife to rough it out and flatten the surface you’re going to be burning, set the coals on it and give them some air to start the burning process, but sure, I’ll show you. After we get this trap done.”

Choosing the smallest of their two cooking pots, Einar emptied into it all of the pitch chunks and blobs Liz had collected, adding two good sized lumps of bear fat--an amount equal to approximately one third the volume of the pitch--setting the pot on the stove to begin heating. “Got to be sure this stuff doesn’t actually catch on fire, which it tends to be pretty inclined to do, if you get it too hot. Will you watch it, while I work on theses bark pieces?”

With Liz tending to the heating mixture of pitch and bear fat, Einar turned his attention to the bark strips, shaving down the thicker areas with his knife, removing much of the outer bark until he was left with only the thin layer of inner bark, backed by a thin, dark brown crust of harder outer bark. Lining a number of the bark pieces up on the flat area of dirt den floor just in front of the stove, he sprinkled them generously with water from the snow-melting pot, taking several flat rock slabs--leftovers from making the stove--which he had leaned up against the stove to heat, and easing them down on top of the bark slabs, careful to go slow so as not to break the slabs. While the bark pieces--ranging in size from four inches square all the way up to strips that were several inches wide by nearly a foot long--steamed flat, he checked on the progress of the melting pitch, which had begun to bubble and smoke a bit as Liz attentively stirred it with a stick.

“Good. This looks real good.” Dipping a stick into the pitch, he dripped a bit of it onto some snow near the entrance, allowing it to sit for a minute and cool before digging down in the snow and removing the little lump, glad to see that the addition of the fat had kept it flexible, but a bit disappointed that it had not remained sticky, as well. It needed to be sticky. More fat. And he added it, realizing that the only ingredient the resulting solution lacked in order to be pine tar soap was some lye, which he knew they could make by allowing water to slowly filter through a good quantity of wood ash from the fire. Huh. May have to try that, if we ever get time. Which we will, if we actually end up living through the winter, and aren’t forced to run again. Plenty of time. Though I do seem to remember hearing that hardwood ash will make a stronger lye solution, and we don’t have any hardwoods here to burn, at all. But I imagine it might still work. Bet Liz would like to have some soap. As soon as the added bear fat had melted in and combined with the pitch mixture, Einar again tested it in the snow, greatly pleased when the stuff remained tacky enough to briefly stick his fingers together. OK! This ought to do it. Leaving the pot on the stove to stay warm, but moving it to an area near the edge which was somewhat cooler than the center of the cooking surface, he took a handful of black, fibrous inner bark shreds from one of the few pieces of aspen firewood that still had bark, using them as a paintbrush to smear a thin layer of hot pitch onto each of the pressed bark strips and chunks, which had by that time dried thoroughly and were, after their steaming, staying quite flat. Finishing all of the pieces and seeing that there was a bit of pitch left, he poured it onto one of the smaller of the pieces, setting the leftovers aside for future projects.

“Alright,” he addressed Liz, who had watched quietly as he worked, “all we need now is some bait, and this thing will be finished! Figure we might as well just lower one of those rib sections--a good small one--for bait, arrange all these squares around the hanging bait, and we’ll have the critter.”

She looked skeptical, wrinkling up her nose as she studied the bark squares and looking at Einar out of the corners of her eyes for any sign that he was joking with her, about to burst out laughing at her expense, but seeing none. He seemed entirely serious, and she wondered if the fever was back, and affecting his judgment significantly. “That’s it? I guess I don’t see how this is going to trap a mountain lion…”

“Oh, it’s not, exactly. But it sure is gonna slow him down. We’ll set this up in the evening, since cats are active at night, and when he comes back down here after the rest of this bear, and goes for the stuff that we leave hanging down good and low, he’ll get some of these squares stuck to his feet. You ever watched a cat--just a house cat--with something stuck to his paws? Some chewing gum, or something? Critter can’t think about anything else, until he gets every last little bit of the sticky stuff off his paws. Cat’ll tend to just sit down right there wherever he is, to clean his paws, and of course in this case, that will mean he gets more bark squares stuck to him, to his belly or his sides or hind end, and then he’ll have to work to get those off, too, before he’ll want to go anywhere. As particular as cats are, this can take quite a while. The Incas used to trap jaguars, this way. Only they didn’t use spruce pitch, but some other sticky resin from a tree that grows in the foothills of the Andes.


“So, the lion will step on the sticky squares, stop to chew them loose and clean his paws…but then what?’

“Well, then I go in and take him with the atlatl first thing that morning, while he’s all distracted. That’s what. Have to make a few more darts, and I got to finish this hands-free crutch thing, so I’ll have my arms, or one of them, anyway, available for throwing.”

Liz was not especially pleased about the fact that Einar still intended to go after a mountain lion, armed only with an atlatl and with one functional leg, but said nothing about it for the moment, searching instead through the woodpile for a suitable branch, intending to begin making a spoon and hoping as she worked to come up with a way to dissuade him, before evening came and they set out to place the cat-delaying sticky traps.

 

I sure never heard of the sticky traps!
I'll have to try something simular on my DIL's cat. Ought to be interesting to watch..

 

It's an interesting way to deter house cats from jumping up on counters...

And was actually used by the Incas to keep jaguars in the area, so they could be more easily hunted.

________________________


Watching for a minute as Liz began carving at the stick from which she intended to make a spoon, Einar returned to the construction of his crutch replacement, carefully notching the end of the coal-hollowed split-aspen piece to accept the spruce upright, scratching a slight depression--he did not want to make this too deep and potentially weaken the upright--in the spruce on its outside arc so the sinew wrappings could be more firmly seated as they wound their way up through the notches he had carved to accept them on either side of the hollowed aspen’s short ends. Fitting everything together and scrutinizing it, he wondered whether the knee support might simply collapse under his weight, supposed that it probably would, and searched through the woodpile until he located a likely-looking aspen chunk out of which he could carve and scrape a triangular piece to secure beneath it for additional support. The small chunk of wood--secured with pitch glue made by adding ashes from the fire to some of the remaining pitch and fat mixture from the cat trap and wrapped in place with sinew--would add minimal weight but, he hoped, might significantly strengthen the setup. Not that this thing is gonna be especially useful in all this snow, unless I make some sort of a snowshoe-like device to attach to the bottom of it. Otherwise, it’ll just sink into the snow and throw me forward like the crutches do, only the thing will stick in the ground as I fall forward, and I’ll probably end up breaking the femur, too. Not good! Definitely not an improvement, at all…

“Wish I had some willow, Liz. You seen any around here? Down near where you found all those cattails, maybe? Seems like a spot where some ought to grow.”

“Why, is your leg hurting pretty badly?” She moved closer, put her hand on his leg. “Do you want me to take the cast off and rub it for you, again?”

“Uh…it hurts some, yeah, but it’s sure been worse. Really need the willow for snowshoes, right now. We each need a pair, if we’re going to be getting around much this winter, but I was just thinking that this one-legged crutch thing is gonna be worse than useless, without a snowshoe on it to keep me from sinking and sticking in every drift I try to walk through. So if you see any…”

“I’ll keep my eyes open for it.” And the silence returned, a comfortable silence for both of them as they each worked on their projects, punctuated only by the crackling of the wood in the fire and the howling of the wind through the trees outside and against the bear hide, as the storm continued.

Einar picked up the spruce stick, inspecting it once more. Alright, time to smear some glue on this thing, get the triangular piece in place so I can start wrapping the pitch on the knee support. Poking and prodding at the large, still-sticky clump of pitch-bear fat mixture that had been scraped out of the pot and stored on one of the bark squares, Einar realized that in continuing to add fat to keep the stuff flexible and sticky, he had ended up creating something that would probably be less than ideal as a glue. The pitch glue he was used to making generally consisted of five parts pitch to one part fat, with one part wood ash and sometimes a bit of finely powdered plant material--dry grass, leaves or even a ground up deer or elk dropping--for strength. The sticky-trap mixture had far more fat in it than his usual glue recipe called for, but Einar supposed the stuff could be make workable again, if he melted in a few more chunks of pitch and added some ash and finally powdered grass from the quantity the bear had gathered in the den. Reheating the pitch mixture and modifying it to make a better glue, Einar smeared a generous amount on the spruce stick where he had flattened one surface to accept the triangular brace, holding it in place until the glue began to cool and harden. Doing the same for the horizontal knee support, gluing it to the top of the triangular brace as well as to the spruce stick, he set the device aside so the glue could sit undisturbed for a few minutes, and scooted over to the row of flat rocks against the back wall, which Liz had been using for shelves.

There had been a good quantity of sinew--obtained from the yearling bear and from the deer he had taken back at the crevice before Liz had shown up--stored in the backpack, and he hoped it might still be there, wishing to save the sinew from the bear whose den they were inhabiting for other future projects, including, he hoped, a bowstring or two. The sinew was still there, a number of stiff, round clearish rolls of leg tendon and the longer sheets of backstrap sinew from which he knew could be pulled long, sturdy threads, with a bit of work, and he chose one of the backstrap pieces--they were so valuable for backing bows and other large-scale projects that he seldom used them for simple joining work, but was willing to make an exception, in the case of his crutch-replacement--beginning to work it back and forth in his hands, watching as it went from nearly clear to white and opaque with the handling. The thicker, tougher bundles of leg sinew needed a good bit of pounding--done with a heavy piece of wood or, more carefully, with a smooth-edged rock--before they would begin to flatten and separate and release the individual “threads” that were so handy for projects ranging from hafting spears, arrows and atlatl points to sewing buckskin clothing and moccasins, but the thin strips of backstrap sinew could simply be worked a bit with the hands, and then pulled apart. Which Einar attempted to do, quickly discovering, though, that his hands had grown too chilled and clumsy as he had sat there basically immobile, working on the glue and the sinew, his hands--and the rest of him, for that matter--shaking pretty badly. Liz, who had been watching in silent curiosity as he worked, keeping the fire going and carving a bit here and there at her spoon-stick, saw his difficulty, led him over closer to the stove and wrapped the wolverine hide around his shoulders, pressed a pot of broth into his hands, warm, nourishing, and he took it, shivering harder at the warmth it brought him and looking up at her over the rim of the pot with grateful eyes as he drank.

“It looks like you got a lot done, there. Time for a little rest, maybe?”

Still shaking, Einar nodded, sinking to the ground right there in front of the stove, suddenly feeling overwhelmingly weary, entirely unable to keep his eyes open. Liz had allowed herself to hope, watching him work for hours on the traps and crutch with an unwavering intensity, that the fever had finally left Einar for good, that he was on the mend and was hopefully through with the frightening--to her, at least, and she could only imagine that they must be to him, as well--incidents during which he woke scrambling for the nearest weapon, apparently unaware that he was, for the moment at least, out of immediate danger. Her hope had been premature. The fever was back--what’s wrong with you, Einar? Sure wish I knew how to help--Einar responding only with an unintelligible series of grunts when she asked him if he wanted to get up on the bed so he could wrap up in the bear hide, and she lifted him, helping him crawl over to the sleeping platform and getting him settled in the bear hide, lying down with him for a time, until he was asleep again. Returning to her place beside the stove--this thing really is keeping the place a lot warmer than it was, before--and doing a bit more carving at her spoon, pausing to break up a couple of the bear ribs with a rock and get them in a pot of melted snow to simmer, Liz watched Einar as he lay there sweating and shaking and mumbling in a troubled fever-sleep, wondering once again how she might help him get over his present difficulty, aside from continuing to make sure he had a steady supply of broth and stew to keep him going, and urging him to get rest, when he seemed willing. She wondered whether he might be suffering from an infection of some sort, but none of the wounds that were visible on his ribs and arms from the struggle with the bear appeared infected, or even particularly inflamed after repeated applications of hound’s tongue-infused bear fat, and she was at a loss as to what could be causing his ongoing trouble. She would have suspected pneumonia, as he had mentioned dealing with it in the past after inhaling too much river water, but he seemed to be having no trouble at all with his breathing. Well. She tucked the bear hide, dislodged by his shivering, back in around his neck, smoothing the hair away from his eyes. You’re just worn out, I think, and it’s no wonder. Rest, Einar, and this will pass, soon enough. The fever worried her some, though, as he felt awfully hot, and she wished she did have some willow to give him, as he seemed not to have the same objection to partaking of it as he did the yarrow tea. Seeing that Einar finally appeared to be sleeping somewhat peacefully, Liz slipped on the yearling hide, added another log to the fire, and went in search of some willows.

The blast of icy air that entered the den with the first big wind gust after Liz took down the door flap woke Einar, and, thinking that it felt terribly good on his flushed face, he threw open the bear hide and lay there flat on his back for a good five or ten minutes as the fever went down and he began shivering, finally wrapping back up and propping himself up on his elbows, wondering where Liz had gone. More firewood, I guess? He didn’t know, doubted it, as the stack in the corner seemed quite sufficient, for the time, rubbed his eyes and shook his head, not liking the slow, confused feeling that seemed to be lingering after his little nap. Never should have gone to sleep like that…now, what was I doing? Slowly scanning the dim interior of the den--we need some light in here, now that the stove is enclosing the fire. Got to work on a couple simple bearfat lamps--his eyes came to rest on the thin sheet of deer backstrap sinew that he had set down to accept Liz’s offer of broth. Yeah. That. Rolling out of the bed and dragging himself over, he retrieved the sinew, meaning to sit there by the stove and finish preparing it, as he knew that he must have the crutch replacement finished, tested and usable before he could set up that cat trap. Now that he was thoroughly cooled down, though, he could not seem to get warm again, and sat there shivering uncontrollably in the draft from the door, teeth rattling and hands nearly useless, finally hauling himself back up onto the bed and wrapping up in the bear hide on his stomach as he worked the sinew, slowly warming. Twisting, folding, rubbing and separating the thin, strong fibers, he finally ended up with a good sized pile of long, flexible threads, onto which he dabbed a bit of water to further increase their flexibility before beginning to lash the triangular brace and knee support to the spruce branch, anxious, now that he was so close to having it ready, to give the device a try.


Backstrap sinew and some smaller pieces, scraped to remove flesh and membrane and dried on a flat surface

Top piece dried only, bottom worked with hands to begin separating fibers

If this thin membrane was not all scraped off while sinew was wet, it must be pulled off now. When the sinew sheet is twisted gently, the membrane separates easily

Sinew worked down and pulled apart into individual threads, ready to use; perhaps the strongest thread you'll ever find in the wilderness!

 

If they turn off the Internet before you finish this, I'm gonna be so ****sssed!
MOOOOOOAR PLEASE!!!!!!

 

Really great pictures...Many thanks!

 

YOOOHOOO! Can Einar and Liz come out and play? Please?


(Thanks FOTH...I think we're all jonesin' here.)

 

Carefully lashing the triangular brace and knee support to the spruce stick, Einar set some of the remaining pitch glue on the stove to soften, brushing it over the sinew lashings to waterproof, protect and further secure them. All that remained before he could test the device, he supposed, was to add some padding for his knee, and cut the bear hide strips which he intended to use to lash the stick to his upper leg. Well, that, and find a way to keep myself on my feet for more than a few seconds at a time without getting so awfully dizzy. Just have to make it work, somehow. Returning to the bed, he cut two strips, each two inches wide by nearly three feet long, from the bear hide, thinking that it would be a good idea to be able to wrap them at least twice around his leg, before tying them in place. Then, gathering up a good sized handful of dry grass from the den floor, he pressed it into the coal-burned depression in the knee support, knowing that an equal volume of usnea lichen would have provided more padding and been more resilient and durable, too, but supposing that for the time, he could certainly make do with the grass. OK, time to give this a try. Leaning against the bed in the only spot in the den that came close to having a high enough ceiling to allow him to stand--bent over, but still standing--Einar carefully got the improvised crutch replacement positioned in front of his right leg, scooting forward and resting his knee on it, hanging onto the hip-high top of the spruce upright for support and holding his breath as he eased his full weight onto it. There was a good bit of creaking as the support pieces settled in against their sinew bindings, some scary crackles that led him to believe something was about to snap loose, but nothing did, and Einar finally allowed himself to breathe, a slow grin spreading across his face as he realized that he was standing, alone and without leaning on a wall or a tree or Liz or his crutches, for the first time in weeks. There was nowhere to go in the den, though, and he used the bed to lower himself to the ground and scooted, dragging himself backwards to the entrance and, with difficulty, back to his feet in the rocky, partially protected area beneath the den-ledge.

Movement with the device was clumsy, awkward, and he could see that it would take some getting used to, but after ten or twelve steps he found himself already moving more easily than he ever had on the crutches--dizzy, though, and feeling awfully weak, just keep going, ignore it for now--and he could tell that the device was going to work. Needs to be a little shorter, though, especially if I’m gonna put on a snowshoe attachment of some sort. Which is looking like a real good idea, and… He lay on his stomach in the powder, spitting snow out of his mouth and laughing breathlessly, feeling around for the crutch and wiping his face to free his eyes of the clinging whiteness. And I really, really ought have used those bear hide strips and tied my leg to this thing before giving it a try. Pitching to the side a bit when the crutch had begun sinking into a snowdrift, Einar had fallen off of it, lost his balance and taken a tumble into the snow, and despite his rather chilly hands and face and the wrenching ache in his bad leg where he had twisted it slightly in falling, he was jubilant, excited. It was going to work! What wasn’t working, though, were his efforts at getting back up again, even after he had located the crutch and used it to push and shove and support himself as he attempted to rise, failing at that but sinking deeper in the powder with each attempt. Finally, exhausted, coughing and out of breath after ending up with another mouthful of powder snow, he flipped over onto his back and lay there for a minute, panting for air and looking for anything he might grab, a tree branch or nearby boulder, anything, to further aid him, but seeing nothing, and realizing that he was going to have to return to his stomach and “swim” out of the soft snow, scrambling on his belly until he reached a spot where the snow was not so very soft and deep. In a minute. Have to get my breath, first… It was in this situation--which would have been somewhat comical, had he not been so very, visibly cold by that time--that Liz found him some minutes later when she returned with a big bundle of willow shoots over her shoulder, and seeing Einar--legs sticking up strangely from the deepening pit he had unintentionally dug with his efforts to free himself, every inch of him crusted with snow, straining with the effort of holding his back and shoulders up out of the snow with the crutch--she hastily threw down her burden of willows and helped him up, kicking a trench through the snow so he could move a bit more freely.

“Works…Liz! Gonna work!”

“What works? Lying in the snow until you freeze to death? I would have thought you already knew that worked. No need to continually test it like this! Now, come back inside. How long have you been out here?”

“Wait. Crutch.” He grabbed it, brought it along as she helped him into the den, anxious to show Liz how greatly his walking was improved with the use of the device. Until he hit the deep snow with it, anyway…but seeing that she had brought willows, and plenty of them, he knew that was one problem that would soon be remedied. Liz was having none of it, though, shoving the bundle of willows out of his reach when he went for them, anxious to begin constructing the snowshoe, and keeping them away until she had helped him into some dry clothes, given him a pot of broth to drink and--over his repeated, half-decipherable objections that he was “just fine”--got him warmed up some. As he sat there wrapped in the bear hide and sipping the broth Liz had given him, Einar showed her the crutch replacement, explaining excitedly how it worked and how everything, from helping her collect firewood to hunting with the atlatl, was going to be so very much easier, as he got used to using it. Liz nodded, admired the crutch and told him that it was great he had found a solution that would allow him to get away from using the cumbersome crutches all the time, but he could tell there was something more she wanted to say, something that was troubling her, and he stopped talking for a minute, waited to see what it might be.

“Einar, you really need to rest, stay in bed for a while. Wandering around in the snow out there isn’t going to help you get better…”

“Aw, now Liz, I didn’t go far, and…besides, I’d have to be dead before I could stay in bed all day, or at least unconscious…if I’m alive, I’m gonna be doing things, moving around, or trying to, at least.”

Unconscious, huh? Well if that’s what it is going to take… and she eyed the firewood pile, wondering half-seriously whether she would be able to move quickly enough to choose a likely-looking aspen chunk and get in a good hard whack at his head before he sensed her intentions and did something about it, but she just sighed, shook the droplets of melting snow from the willow bundle and handed it to him. “I brought lots of these willows. Want me to make you some tea? Looks like your leg’s bothering you a little, since we came back in.”

He looked up from the willows, which he had already begun to sort, choosing a long, sturdy one to bend for the outer frame of the snowshoe, nodding. “Sure. Please.”

As Liz shaved the bark from one of the smaller willows, collecting all of the thin, reddish slivers and dumping them into some simmering water, breaking up and adding the narrow tips from many of the branches as Einar had previously shown her to do--makes a stronger tea, that way, and it’s quicker than slicing off all that bark--he held the chosen willow shoot over the steaming pot, softening its middle and slowly, steadily bending it until its two ends met, forming a rough oval. Wrapping and tying some sinew around the two ends, lashing them together, he set the loop aside, choosing another stout stick and cutting two pieces out of it, notching their ends and carefully widening the oval created by bending the first stick, inserting the two shorter ones horizontally into the loop and wrapping more sinew where they met. Laying the two-slatted snowshoe frame on the ground, he chose two more sticks, cutting them roughly the length of the oval and notching them, also, fitting them overtop the two horizontal sticks and lashing the four together--using rawhide cut from the bear hide, this time, to save the sinew--allowing the newest additions to stick out a bit over the front and back of the oval, for support. Next he retrieved his crutch from its place leaning against the bed, shortened it by two inches, which it had been needing when he tested it, and would especially need, now that he was adding the height of the snowshoe, and squared the end with his knife, fitting it into the roughly square hold left between the four crossed sticks in the center of the snowshoe. Ha! It’s gonna fit! Weaving and tying additional strips of bear hide across the still-open spans of the snowshoe, he set the remaining pitch glue on the stove to soften again, brushing it over all of the rawhide strips to help protect them from absorbing water and stretching. The snowshoe was a crude thing, ugly, awkward--yeah, a lot like me--and could definitely be improved upon when he had time, but at the moment…

“Time to go set up this cat trap, Liz!”

 

The whole setup, is a really neat ideal.

 

The snow was still coming down as Einar and Liz left the den to place the sticky bark sheets, and Einar, gingerly testing his new crutch with its newly-completed snowshoe base, was a bit concerned that blowing snow could end up covering enough of the squares that the trap might be rendered ineffective. He didn’t worry about it for long, though, because his entire attention was soon consumed with the attempt to stay on his feet and navigate the snowy woods. The crutch and snowshoe were not, as it turned out, the problem. They were working wonderfully, improving his balance, the snowshoe preventing his “wooden leg” from sinking a foot or two into every snowdrift he encountered and pitching him forward onto his face as had happened with his initial experiment, but his left foot, having no such advantage, was sinking instead, making travel difficult and extremely tiring as he braced himself on the snowshoed crutch-foot, leaning heavily on a stout stick for balance as he struggled to free his left leg. Huh. Clearly need two snowshoes, and it looks like Liz could really use a pair, too. That may be a project for tonight. Starting them, anyway, because I got atlatl darts to make and hopefully a spear for Liz, and one for me, too, before we go after this cat in the morning. If he even comes back tonight. Bet he will. Those critters eat eight or ten pounds of meat a day when they can get ahold of it, from what I hear, so I can’t think why he’d pass up on the opportunity to raid our meat-tree again. They had, by that time, reached the tree, the going a good bit easier for Einar in the shallower snow there under the black timber, though he was having to watch carefully to see that his snowshoe did not hang up on rocks or the protruding branches of fallen trees, and he stood staring with a clenched jaw at the mess the cat had left of their meat supply, spruce-root ropes snapped and hanging, empty, where many pounds of food had been, and he lowered one of the remaining pieces, a section of ribs that he had hacked out and hung--no wonder this wasn’t the critter’s first choice, but I bet he’ll be back for it--leaving it within easy reach of a leaping cat, but not so low that every fox and ermine that passed might dine on it, leaving less of a tempting target for the hungry cat.

The bait in place, Einar took some of the sap-covered bark squares from Liz and began carefully placing them in a rough circle around the hanging rib section, covering the edges of each square with dirt and small rocks that he had scraped loose from beneath the duff, wanting to make sure they would not blow away before the cat had a chance to come along and--hopefully--end up with a number of them stuck to his paws and fur. Liz took the other side of the tree, arranging the remaining sticky squares in a rough half circle that met Einar’s, securing them as he had been with dirt and rocks, even going back and adding dirt to the corners of a few of his, as he had been unable to be quite as thorough as he would have liked, due to the limitation the crutch put on his ability to crouch down and reach the ground.

“You don’t think the lion will smell us all around here, and stay away?”

“Oh, he’ll smell us, alright, but it didn’t seem to concern him too much the first time. That’s another thing I don’t like about this. Don’t want him getting too accustomed to us, losing his fear of the human scent. Cats are usually no threat, but that--over familiarity--can create a dangerous situation where we start looking like food, especially those of us who may be sorta gimpy in one leg, for the moment. Although…I certainly wouldn’t want to be the cat who attacked a person wearing a contraption like this,” he joked, tapping on the crutch. “He’d come away from that encounter with a splitting headache, and no meal to show for it. Unless he managed to knock me down, and then… Yeah. Best not to let him get too familiar with us, too accustomed to our presence. Besides, you ever eaten cat?”

“No. Not that I know of, anyway…”

“Well, it’s some of the best stuff you’ll ever taste. Real white meat, pretty tender, actually. Would be a great change from all this bear, and the hide…we can certainly use all the hides we can get ahold of, right now. Hopefully this trap works like the Incas and those old guides I’ve talked to said it does! Guess we’ll find out, first thing in the morning.”

Liz nodded, still thinking that it sounded like a very bad idea indeed for a one-legged man who had, for the past several days, been experiencing periodic difficulty with staying on his feet and awake for more than minutes at a time, to deliberately corner and take on a big cat, but knowing there was no dissuading him from the plan, she resolved simply to do her best to back him up in his efforts. Speaking of the intermittent fever and its effects on him he was, even at the moment, swaying, staring off into the snowy woods as if he had suddenly forgotten where he was, why he was there, jumping and glancing up at her with a bit of a lost, confused look in his eyes when she spoke to him. She felt his face, found it hot despite the bitter wind.

“Let’s head back, OK, if we’re all done with the trap? I left that stew near the fire, and wouldn’t want it to boil dry…”’

He nodded, took a halting step back away from the trap-tree, got himself turned around with her help and headed across the slope towards the den, shuffling a bit, dragging the crutch and bad leg behind him for a few steps as he hopped along on his left leg, leaning on his walking stick. After a minute of that he stopped and scooped up a big handful of snow, eating part of it and shoving the rest up under his hat, pressing down to start it melting, Liz watching in dismay and wondering if she ought to try and stop him. Shivering as the icy water began trickling through his hair and running in a thin stream down the back of his neck, Einar wiped his face, shook his head and looked up at her, grinning. “Whew! That’s better. Now what’d you say about that stew?”

Back in the den they ate, Einar hanging his hat to dry on one of the exposed spruce roots above the stove and, as he gobbled chunks of bear rib meat and rehydrated chokecherries, spreading the contents of his pack out on the floor, including several atlatl heads that he had been working on over the past few days, and one larger point, carved from the bear’s front leg bone, that he had intended as a spearhead. Beside it he set a very similar, though not quite finished piece, scrutinizing it and picturing the needed modifications that would turn it into a second spearhead. Among the willows Liz had brought back from the cattail meadow were several that looked sturdy enough to make passable spear shafts, and he intended to complete work on both weapons that evening, wanting both he and Liz armed with one, when they went for the cat. Handing Liz the stew pot, from which he had eaten a healthy portion--the walk down to the tree and the feeling that he was, finally, managing to get something useful done for a change, rather than spending most of his time holed up in the den, had left him with a better appetite than he’d had in days, despite the fever--he chose one of the willow shafts and carefully split it, inserting the base often spearhead and softening a bit of sinew in his mouth, removing it when it was soft and pliable and wrapping it around and around the split section of the willow, binding it securely back together and using another piece to wrap up around the notches he had carved on either side of the spear point, further securing it to the shaft. Looking it over one final time, he handed the spear to Liz.

“This is yours. Want to come lion hunting with me?”

Taking the spear she drew it back, poised, looking to Einar as if she was ready to charge at the cat without any hesitation, and he gave he a goofy little smile when she lowered the weapon and glanced over at him, not entirely sure what to make of her sudden aggressive stance, the natural confidence with which she handled the weapon, but supposing that he liked it just fine. “There was no way you were going to talk me out of it, Einar! Of course I’m coming with you.”

“Well…good!” He grinned at her, shrugged and looked away quickly, wanted to tell her that he would be most honored to have her along, that she was a companion that any hunter would be more than proud to have standing beside him, but couldn’t think of a way to say it that did not sound terribly goofy, so he dropped the matter.

“Now, Liz, I think I’ll be able to get in a pretty good hit with the atlatl--throwing will be a lot easier, now that I’m not on the crutches anymore, and I’m gonna have a total of four darts when I get done working here tonight--but I need you to be ready to back me up, alright? We still need to get you some practice with the atlatl, and I can make you your own pretty soon here, but for this, better just stick with the spear I guess. Big cats have been successfully fought off with such things--hiking sticks, even--and they’re highly unlikely to attack a person at all, would much rather avoid contact, but of course, in this case, we’re the ones initiating the contact, so…best be ready.” Liz nodded, handed him a fresh pot of spruce needle tea.

That night as Liz and Einar lay bundled up in the bear hide, weary, their work finally done and thoughts of the morning on both their minds, the mountain lion, a three year old male, returned to the spot high on the ridge above the den where he had cached his stolen supply of bear meat, finishing it, and, still hungry, heading down the ridge for the spot where he knew that more awaited him.

 

I'm glad it (the problem) turned out to be a mountain lion...They have much more dangerous predators looking for them, which I doubt would taste as good as the lion.

 

Weary as he was, Einar did not get a tremendous amount of that sleep that night, troubled as he was by ongoing dreams that had him startling awake more than once, holding himself rigid against the powerful impulse to jump up and get his hands on the atlatl or knife--no need to get up, knife’s right here under the rolled-up wolverine hide we’re using for a pillow…feel it? See, still there--and remaining still with the greatest difficulty, wishing very much to avoid disturbing Liz but feeling an almost overwhelming urgency to leave the bed, the den, to flee out into the night and find a suitable tree to dive beneath, and huddle there for the rest of the night, wakeful, watching, listening…but he did not. The fever was gone, it seemed, his thinking clearer--even as he lay there sleepless, trembling, almost tasting the need to run, to move--than it had been when he’d woke thus during the past several nights, and he was very thankful for the change, glad to be himself once again, such as he was. Which sure isn’t much, at the moment! Now will you please go back to sleep already? Got a cat to take, and morning coming pretty quick, here. Easier said than done, but he did finally sleep, Liz, who had been awake, herself, and aware of his struggle, sleeping also, waking before he did in the early predawn darkness, certain that morning had come or was about to, slipping out of the bed and stirring the fire back to life, melting a pot of snow for them to drink before heading out.

By the time the snow was melted and the water heating, Einar had joined her by the stove, rubbing the sandiness from his eyes--and the feeling back into his fingers--and fitting his snowshoe into place on the end of his crutch, once more inspecting their small arsenal of four atlatl darts, two spears and a good fixed blade apiece--Well. Sure hope it doesn’t come down to that, because the cat would end up ahead, I’m pretty certain. Looking at those tracks, the critter weighs more than I do, by a good twenty or thirty pounds--and hoping that it would be enough, that his skill and strength might be equal to the task that hopefully waited for him with sticky feet and a stomach full of stolen meat, out near that big spruce. It was his turn with the pot of warm water--infused with spruce needles and a good dose of honey for energy in the cold; he could tell by the smell--Liz holding it out to him, but he knelt there for a minute leaning on his spear, head bowed, seeking strength, for wisdom, asking that Liz, at least, might come through the morning without being injured in any way. Finished with his prayer, Einar accepted the pot, drank, and Liz helped him into his buckskin vest and got the wolverine hide wrapped and secured around his shoulders, wishing he could take advantage of the yearling hide’s warmth, but knowing that he was not yet strong enough to carry both its weight and his own. Soon. He’s eating, getting some rest, seems to be over the fever. It won’t be long. And, knowing that the morning air was certain to be bitingly cold, she freed the hide from its spot above the door and slipped it over her head.

Quietly, slowly, avoiding areas of harder packed wind drift that might crunch and prematurely give away their presence, Liz and Einar made their way across the slope towards the meat-tree, the cat-tree, stopping frequently to listen, but hearing nothing, nor especially expecting to. It was light, or nearly so, the snow continuing to fall but not nearly as heavily as it had been the past several mornings, and Einar squinted into the whiteness as they approached the stand of trees that held the trap, saw the tracks, fresh, hours-fresh, it appeared, if that, took another step and was finally able to make out the spruce-root cord that had held the rib section, dangling, broken, empty, and he fitted a dart into the atlatl. Stopping behind a clump of stunted firs, Einar, every sense taut, listening, reaching out for clues, scanned the snowy shadows beneath the nearby trees, the dark smudge that was the exposed duff where he had scraped up dirt to pin down the bark and pitch strips, the somewhat less dark smear over against a fallen aspen, that…hadn’t been there the evening before! Holding his breath, raising his arm with a motion so slow as to be almost imperceptible, he focused on that smear, held himself rigid, still, waiting until he could make out a shoulder, an ear, a cat, and a big one, working intently on a front paw where it must have encountered one of his sticky traps, and he took another step, cautious, as stealthy as one can possibly be, with a wooden leg and snowshoe, getting himself out from behind the tangle of little firs that had been obstructing his shot, threw the dart.

And missed, the cat rising and streaking away across the snow all in one swift motion, a shadow, a ghost, a swirl of snow and then nothing, Einar fitting another dart by feel as he watched it but refraining from throwing, the creature long gone into the black timber of the ridge. Hobbling over to the spot where the lion had reclined against the aspen trunk, Einar found his dart, retrieved it, a mere inch or two from the impression left by the big cat’s shoulder where it had lain in the snow, shreds of bark attesting to the efficacy of the trap. Well. Gone. Liz was there beside him by that time, staring at the large, fresh tracks and up into the dark woods where the creature had disappeared.

“It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” She whispered, awe in her voice.

Einar stared at the dart in his hand, face grim, stony. “It is gone. And so is most of our food. I messed up, Liz. Bad.” And, grabbing what remained of the rib section they had used for bait, he turned without another word to head back for the den, knowing that if he gave himself time to consider the matter, he would decide to track the cat, would have to, and probably wouldn’t make it back from such an excursion. No sense in that. Cat’s gone.

Back in the den Einar sank heavily to the ground beside the bed, leaning on it, silent, shoulders bowed, shivering in his snowy clothes until Liz insisted that he join her by the stove to warm up, practically dragging him over and pressing broth into his hands, telling him to drink.

“Don’t take it so hard, Einar. You missed. It happens…”

“Yes. Happens a lot.” He was staring at the ground, rolling a dart back and forth between his fingers, wouldn’t look at her, continued, speaking quietly, firmly despite the exhaustion evident in his voice. “Did you know that in the wild…and this is definitely ‘the wild’…a healthy, fit predator will usually only be successful at taking prey somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of the time? Hunger…is a fact of life out here. And of death. And I know that, accept it, but I don’t…it isn’t right that I’ve brought you into such a life, Liz. Not right.”

She grabbed his shoulders, tried to get him to look at her, but he wouldn’t. “You didn’t bring me into this life. I came here. Came back. To you. To this. Several times, if you remember… And,” she released her hold on his shoulders, realizing that she had been shaking him, “there is no place I would rather be. Don’t you believe me, dear Einar?”

He looked up at her, caught her eye, nodded slowly. “I believe you.”

· · · ·​

That first week back at the den had been a difficult one, between the ongoing storm, Einar’s illness, the loss of much of the bear and the subsequent loss of the cat--he never did return to the tree where the meat had been hung, after his encounter with the sticky traps; Liz checked every day, for awhile--whose meat they had hoped would add to their dwindling food supply, but none of these things were on Einar’s mind as he and Liz climbed side by side up the slope below the den, deer quarters over their shoulders and the promise of a fresh venison feast awaiting them, as soon as they returned to the shelter. Liz, however, watching Einar climb and seeing that a bit of his strength was finally beginning to return, did reflect on the week that had come before, on the long, sleepless night hours during which she had had sat with him as he struggled with the fever and the troubling visions it brought him, the days of care and worry as she had hurried back from collecting firewood only to find him, often as not, sprawled out in the snow in front of the den, exhausted, purple-lipped and half frozen where he had fallen when his energy had run out, striving beyond the limits of his strength as he had sought to keep going, to help her maintain things around the place, and though she had been furious with him at the time for doing that to himself, she had to admit that she loved him for it, too, for that absurd, implacable tenacity that so often kept him going when no reasonable human ought to be able to, ought to want to, even, and she looked over at him, caught his eye as they paused there resting just below the flattish spot in front of the den, smiled, and he returned it. Thankful. Grateful. Each of them thinking that life was, at the moment, very, very good. As was Liz’s stew of very fresh venison and dried serviceberries, eaten steaming hot and in great abundance some hour or two later, the cattail starch flatbread she baked on top of the stove to go with it, the pot of chokecherry pudding, thickened with cattail starch and sweetened with the last of the honey, and as they ate Einar and Liz discussed the future, the need to build a raised cache for keeping meat secure from scavengers and thieves, the snare line that Liz had been working on over the last few days since the loss of the cat and which Einar meant to expand as soon as he was able to get around just a bit better, small things, hopeful things, life would go on.

 

That evening as Einar and Liz sat beside the stove enjoying the last of their meal, the wind picked up outside, swaying the trees and freeing them of their heavy burdens of snow in a series of soft thuds, a restless, scouring wind, the sort that often as not heralds a significant shift in the weather, and Einar felt it, left the warmth of the stove to crawl over and push the bear hide aside, listening, smelling, tasting the wind. It had, for the first time in days, stopped snowing, the wind sharp and bitterly cold, a few stars visible already through the dispersing clouds. Letting the bear skin door fall back into place, Einar secured it with the flat rocks they had been using for that purpose, adding several additional ones to further pin it in place. It was going to be a very cold night by all appearances, and they would not have the benefit of a fire to warm the shelter through it.

“Storm’s breaking up, Liz. First time I’ve seen stars since that night when I was climbing up to the canyon rim, just before the avalanches. You can be sure they’re gonna have choppers up, and until we give it a few days, see what their search pattern is like and how much activity we’re dealing with, we’ll be needing to do without that fire.”

She moved to put out the fire, quickly shoving aside the stove door-rock and scraping up a double handful of dirt from the floor to throw in, but Einar stopped her.

“Wait. Let’s take a few minutes and melt some more snow, make sure all the water bottles are full and boil up some more of this deer so we got cooked meat to eat for a day or so, at least. I figure we have a little time, enough to do that much, anyway, before we can expect company. And it’s gonna be awful cold tonight; I can feel it. Always seems to happen that way the first night a big storm moves out and the sky gets clear. Wouldn’t hurt to stick a couple more rocks down in the coals to keep close while we sleep, tonight.”

Filling two of the three water bottles with the water that was already steaming in the pot, Liz hurriedly scraped up more snow to begin melting, soon filling the third as Einar piled grass and duff from the floor against the bottom of the door, blocking out most of the draft that came in beneath the bear hide. It would not, he knew, be a good idea at all to seal off all airflow into the den while they still had the fire going, but was not worried about the possibility that his efforts might do so, with the amount of air he could feel seeping in along the sides of the door. With all three water bottles full and tucked into the hide on the sleeping platform where they would stay all night to prevent their freezing, and Liz chopping venison and adding it to the boiling water in the second pot, Einar filled the first yet again with snow and set it to melt, adding another handful of snow every time the level went down far enough to allow it, and keeping this up as the pot began to fill with water.

“This’ll almost certainly re-freeze overnight, but it’s a lot easier to melt ice down for water than it is snow, and if it comes down to having to melt something in our mouths for water for a little while because we can’t have a fire, well, the water content is so much higher in ice than snow that it goes a lot faster. So having a pot full of ice around won’t be a bad thing, at all.”

As he tended the pot of melting snow, Einar searched about in the pile of rocks near the entrance, certain that he had seen among the granite slabs and flakes and the occasional chunk of grey shale a piece or two of the red sandstone that was so common in the area at slightly lower elevations and, with a bit of searching and sorting, managed to come up with one. Adding more snow to the pot, he chose a sharply fractured piece of granite and used it to chip away at the top surface of the sandstone lump, stopping to remove the rock fragments when he had worked a good-sized little pit into it, nearly twice as long as it was wide. Then, scraping the granite back and forth in the pit he deepened it, pausing frequently to tap the accumulated sandstone dust out of the growing trench, carving a shallow notch at one end of the trench, and finally, satisfied, setting the rock on the cooking surface of the stove to warm. “OK, that ought to do.”

Liz did not respond and Einar looked up to see her bent over the rock that held her cattail-felt experiment, which, after being set aside and neglected for days in the aftermath of the discovery that the lion had taken a good portion of their food, had suddenly taken on a new and rather urgent importance with the realization that serious cold was on its way, and they would not, for the time at least, be able to ward it off with a fire. The felt, if it could be called that, was thoroughly dry by that time, had been for a day or two, actually, and she saw that it had regained a good bit of its original loft, the cattail fuzz fibers losing their original scratchy coarseness--which, according to Einar, tended to cause an itchy, red rash if in contact with the skin for too many hours at a time--and coming out wonderfully soft and fleecy-feeling, but when she carefully took the round pad of felt in her hand, she was dismayed to find that it did not want to hold together too well at all, one corner of it coming loose in her hand and another section appearing close to separating, also. She set it back down, disappointed. The stuff more closely resembled the loose, synthetic stuffing she had used in sewing projects than the wool-like felt she had been hoping for, and certainly lacked the integrity to be cut and shaped and used as-is for footwear or even insoles or floor padding, and she wondered what she might add to the mix that would act as a binder, without reducing the air-trapping, insulating properties of the down. An experiment for some other time, clearly, as she could see that Einar was finished with his work at the stove, was nearly ready to put the fire out, and they were about to lose their light for the night.

Before putting out the fire there was one last thing that Einar needed to do, breaking off a small slab of the rendered bear fat they had saved from the yearling and dropping it, piece by piece, into the depression he had carved in the sandstone chunk, warm by that time from the heat of the stove, the fat quickly beginning to liquefy. Choosing one of the bundles of unprocessed milkweed fibers that he had weeks ago stripped from some of the stems Liz had brought back to their shelter in the crevice, subsequently storing and carrying in her pack, he rubbed them roughly between his palms to clean them of some of the outer bark and pith pieces that still clung to them, dipping two of his fingers into the pot of melt water and dampening the fibers to make them easier to work with. Twisting and cording the fibers, Einar, already struggling with stiffening hands and uncooperative fingers as the den began to cool with the dying down of the fire, created a string nearly a foot long, cutting off a several inch section and soaking it thoroughly in the melted fat in the sandstone rock before pulling about an inch of it up out of the liquid and laying it in the notch he had carved at one end of the trench, leaving the end of it sticking out over the edge of the rock. Pulling a flaming stick from the fire, he lit the end of the wick, glad to see that, after a few initial moments of sputtering and smoking and threatening to go out, it glowed steadily with a small, uniform orange flame. A lamp!

The time had come, then, no sense in delaying the inevitable, and no wisdom, either, in risking the heat signature from their little fire showing up bright and clear to some passing, searching aircraft in contrast with the bitter air of the mountainside that night, and Einar made one final trip over to the bear hide, pulling aside a corner and waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark before looking up and confirming that the storm had not returned. Which it had not, the sky clear and pierced with millions of stars, their light hard, white, sharp-edged and looking tremendously close through the thin, cold mountain air, moisture on the hairs in Einar’s nose freezing as he breathed it. A sure sign of an arctic night to come, and he pulled his head and shoulders back into the warmth of the den, once more securing the bear hide and throwing Liz’s scraped-together pile of dirt onto the fire. They sat together wrapped in the bear hide watching as the coals died, orange fading to black, the wan, flickering little flame of the lamp taking over as the sole light source in the den, and Einar was reminded of the first time he had used a similar lamp for light, the previous winter when he had been holed up in the old mine tunnel, injured and starving, feeding tiny slivers of his last remaining fat to that hungry little lamp and praying that its light would not die, its meager warmth leave him, not for another night, at least, not until he had--hopefully--managed to come up with a little something to eat, something to sustain him just a bit longer… He shivered, put his arm around Liz, hoped she would never have to face that level of crushing desperation and knowing that it was up to him to do what he could to see to it that she did not, both by securing a food supply for them that winter, and by teaching her all he knew, the collective wisdom of hundreds of days of hard work and struggle, knowledge bought and paid for many times over with the coin of pain and… she was saying something, and Einar pulled himself out of his reminiscing to listen.

“We won’t be able to hear them from in here, will we? The helicopters, when they come…”

“Don’t know. But I will feel them, the way they shake the ground, that rumbling…I can always feel them long before I hear…” His voice trailed off, body taut with listening, straining in the silence as he sought any sign of the search that he knew must come, nearly jumping up out of the bear hide the next minute at the loud splintering crack! that came from somewhere just outside the shelter.

 

Oh, thank you thank you!! We need our Einar fixes regular like. Keep them coming.
Great chapters, FOTH, very helpful and entertaining, too. Thanks for all byour hard work.