A Long Time Until Now (24 page)

They had it down to a smooth process, but it was body-bruising labor.

Elliott said, “Going well. I hope we can have it done before winter.”

Bob said, “I’d say we could go with something lighter to fill in the gaps if we don’t. Brush, thorns, firewood.”

“Possibly. But I’d rather do it right first if we can, rather than do it twice.”

“Yeah. Just time is an issue.”

“Well, this is going to make time worse.” He indicated Caswell.

They must want to borrow some labor.

“Ah, hell, go ahead, sir, Jenny.”

Elliott nodded at Caswell, who said, “I want to save ammo by building a goat pen. It might work for small antelope, too.”

“You figure to bait them in and bar the gate?”

“Yes, just that.”

“Posts set in stone, filled with earth, and rails with woven mesh?”

She actually smiled.

“Exactly. I take it you’ve done one before?”

“Nope.”

“Crap.” She frowned.

He clasped his hands in mock excitement and said, “But I always wanted to learn.”

After a few snarky comments between them, Elliott said, “I’m going to survey and stake out with five-fifty cord on the other side of the stream. We’ll use the straight limbs we’ve trimmed. After they’re rocked into holes, we’ll pour mud in until it settles.”

“Ash would help.”

“If we have enough.”

“How big?”

Caswell said, “I figure twenty foot square to start with. We can add a second one later. We may have to rope some goats if we can’t bait them.”

“Ortiz may know something about that.” He turned and shouted to the ditch, “Hey, Ortiz! Break.”

Ortiz was ripped. He’d been muscular to start with. He was a pocket sized monster now.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

They explained the idea. Barker asked, “Can you rope goats?”

“So we’re going to have a genuine goat rope?” he asked. “Possibly, or tangle trap them. I’m sure I can do something, but why so much work on the pen?”

“We want it to last.”

“Why not just zigzag the timbers, and run buttresses at the joints?” He interwove his fingers to demonstrate.

“Will that work without the goats climbing?”

“It does on our ranch.”

“Well, shit. Why didn’t we do this before?”

“I figured we’d do that next year,” he said. “But we can do it now. If you don’t mind losing that potential firewood, although we can always recover it later, we just carry it and stack it. We need a hundred and twenty-eight of them.”

Elliott said, “That’s pretty much everything I see in that pile.” He indicated the pile of limbs and large saplings waiting to be pins, stakes, buttresses and firewood.

“Well, if it’s a bit short, we can do some tricks with staked brush, or wait to cut another dozen trees.”

Elliott shrugged. “Yeah. It’s wood. We’re not going to run out.”

Caswell said, “I think it’s awesome that you just said that, sir. Gives me hope.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what the early American settlers said. Have you seen Long Island lately?”

He grinned. “Noted. I want to leave Doc out of it. We need his hands in good shape.”

Bob noticed she wasn’t grinning. It was sarcasm, but not humor.

“I agree on Doc,” he said. “There’s plenty of stuff for him to do.” There’d be plenty of splinters after this, even with gloves. No need to injure the medic, but that reduced labor even more.

Caswell walked back and forth on the timber pile, pointing out the thicker and straighter ones for the bottom of the fence, slimmer ones for the top rails, crooked ones for buttressing. By dinner, they had a pen about thirty feet square.

As they sat down to leftover meat with no veggies, they continued the discussion.

Ortiz said, “It’s easy to expand, too. Just open one side, move the rails, stick more in. It doesn’t even have to be very symmetrical, and it follows the lay of the land.”

Elliott said, “I definitely overthought this.”

“You, sir?” Bob said. “I was all ready to dig the river a foot deeper to get the rocks.”

“Well, the environment is happy a while longer.”

“Not really,” he said. “I’ll need rocks for the sweat lodge, and I’ve thought about damming the stream so we create a plunge pool. That takes rocks and logs.”

“Hmm. Possibly next year. Now, how do we get goats?”

Ortiz said, “Either we bait them with grain and a salt lick, or we rope and carry them.”

“Can you do that?”

“I can probably rope some. Easier would be to lay out the cord in a crisscross, wait for goats, yank it tight, wrestle goats, and toss them over the fence.”

“Is that fence tall enough?”

“Yes for goats. Maybe for some antelope.”

Bob asked, “Are we wrestling tomorrow, then?”

Ortiz wiggled and leered. “Grease me up, big boy.”

“It sounds like fun, actually,” he said.

Ortiz stared at him in mock horror.

“Not greasing you up, you sick fuck. Wrestling the . . . oh, shit, there’s no way I win this one, is there?”

Everyone lost it completely.

Spencer said, “Daaaaddy!”

Elliott said, “Okay, let’s eat, and Bob can tell us his background wrestling goats.”

“I’ve actually never wrestled a goat.”

Ortiz said, “It’s okay, no one will judge you here.”

Bob said, “I was Navy. I wrestled Marines.”

“How does that work?”

“I worked in the radio shop. If they wanted it fixed, they had to do as I said. And we did have a wrestling league aboard ship.”

“When was that?” Elliott asked.

“Ten years ago. But that doesn’t help here. What does help is I know what a salt lick looks like, but we’re going to need a source of water to refine it. The raw stuff is just gray mineral dirt. We’ll need to filter it. I’ve gutted animals and done some curing, but I think we need to pool knowledge. It’s likely Ortiz knows the science better than I do. I’m working on buckskin and rawhide, and the bows. Gut strings are gonna be messy.”

Caswell asked, “How long do bows take?”

“A quick one is just a stick, but doesn’t last long. A good one is split from wood and shaved, not carved, drying as you go. Better ones take specific sections of specific trees, or glue, but that’s later. As to the Navy, I actually got out, and into wholesale industrial equipment sales. Then went into the Reserve as an equipment operator. I wanted to be on land. So here I am.”

Spencer said, “I dub thee, Landsquid.”

“Talk to Trinidad,” he said. “He’s been on land the whole time.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Trinidad agreed. “Funny how a kid from a Bataan village winds up in San Diego, then A-stan, then the Stone Age. Honestly, there isn’t a lot of difference.”

“You’ve supported the Army the entire time?”

“No, did a lot of Naval work the first three years. Aboard ship, even. The
Peleliu
.”

“Well, glad to have you,” Elliott said. “Tell us about you.”

Trinidad shrugged. “My sister and parents are in the PI. I always wanted to join the Navy, so I made sure to learn good English. Intel sounded neat. It was a bitch to get my TS clearance. I had citizenship paperwork filled out and pending. I guess that doesn’t matter now. I’ve been watching how the locals move, and I can actually apply the same skills to animal routes. Then there’s their resources and stuff. Otherwise, I’m really good at cutting brush and you could have asked me about the fence as well. We don’t have a lot of fasteners back home.”

Bob said, “Well, let’s eat, drink and be merry. Tomorrow we wrestle goats.”

Alexander said, “Get me the cord. I’ll show you how to crochet a net.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She walked over to the kindling pile, dug through for a straight stick. She pulled out her small sheath knife and carved a notch near one end, grabbed the parachute cord and started hooking it.

Between bites of meat and root, she made large loops in squares about 6” across. It went surprisingly fast. Bob started on another one, following what she did.

“You’re too fast,” he said.

“Sorry. Let’s try again. Loop here, pull, twist, pull again. You missed a pull there.”

“Yeah, got it.”

By the time they were down to firelight he had to quit, but had a piece a couple of feet square. Hers was about five foot.

She said, “Hey, we’ll take all the goat or small antelope hides the Urushu can get us. That tepee cover isn’t coming together fast enough.” She pointed to where a third of it was now dressed in stitched raw hides, stiffening in the sun. Actually, with that, it was becoming structurally more like a yurt.

“She’s right,” he said. “Heavier cover for winter, stitched to be weatherproof.”

Oglesby said, “I’ll ask them. I guess they owe us,
if
they have that concept, which I’m not sure they do.”

Gina Alexander woke up and stretched. She hurriedly pulled on boots and lumbered for the privy in the gray, foggy dawn. She was glad the men just stood on the bank to pee. She much preferred sitting to squatting, and the one ersatz seat was a bottleneck. Caswell was right behind her.

No one paid attention to it anymore. If you needed to go, you went, much like in survival school, or the how the Urushu did, though the soldiers still preferred a little discretion, and they needed to keep that. It would be so easy to lose their civilized veneer.

She wiped off with the old T-shirt she’d designated for the purpose, and made note to rinse it out today. That done, she walked back to the hooch to get the rest of her stuff, and a coat. It was cool, definitely early fall, even if the trees weren’t starting to tinge. Her ass had chilled on the dew-damp toilet seat.

This was a PT day, and she walked around the perimeter as the others ran, lapping her. Twenty-six laps was two miles, and they were done completely before she got three quarters of the way. She tried not to be self conscious about it. Her ankles didn’t work anymore. Inside, she still felt old and under par.

No one said anything as she came to the fire to eat. They never did.

Barker called, “Firewood detail, Oglesby, Dalton. Hunting and goat detail, Caswell, Alexander, Ortiz. Camp detail, Trinidad, Devereaux when not handling sick call. Sergeant Spencer and the LT are working on setting stakes.”

He had leftover meat, warmed on the rocks, and handed her a strip as she walked by. It was edible, but really getting boring fast, and tiring to chew. She had a sore tooth and suspected meat fiber was stuck in the gum.

“Hooah,” she replied in acknowledgment.

“Scrambled eggs?” Dalton asked, seeing something.

“Of a sort,” Barker said. “Want some?”

“Yeah!”

She wasn’t going to have any. They were in no risk of starving to death, and she knew—

Dalton said, “Hey, this tastes like there’s chicken in it.”

Trinidad muttered, “Balut.”

Dalton apparently understood the word, and stopped in mid bite.

“You fuckers.”

“What?” Barker asked. “They are duck eggs.”

“With bits of baby duck?”

“Fetal duck, but yes.”

Dalton looked ready to heave. Trinidad laughed and kept eating. Dalton didn’t eat any more, and stuck to the warmed goat. She didn’t blame him. Proper eggs could wait.

Done eating, she grabbed her gore-tex and gloves.

“Caswell, should I bring helmet and armor for hunting?”

“Good idea. Just in case of wolves.” Caswell was grabbing hers, and her carbine.

“Yes. Though they’re getting scarcer.”

From the front of the tepee, Ortiz said, “We smell like predators.” He had a bow, and the pouch he used to field dress game, which now held a folding saw, a large knife, some pliers and thong, among other things.

She needed to distract Caswell from the bow.

“Indeed we do.” She asked Caswell, “How are you managing on all this meat?”

Caswell shrugged. “It’s not possible to keep vegetarian here. If it ever becomes so, I’ll see what I can do. But part of my rationale was resources, which aren’t short here. And we look the animals in the face as we kill them, which is more honest.”

That made sense. “Fair enough. I love meat myself, but damn, I want bread. I wasn’t supposed to eat much back home anyway, with my thyroid, and I didn’t, but here . . . it’s all I want. A whole damned loaf.”

Caswell said, “I know. I want a fresh salad with oil and spices, not just weeds. They’re nutritious but not tasty. And little beyond minerals and vitamin C.”

“We need to gather rosehips for that, if we find any.” They hopped over the stream, which now had four stepping stones. Then they went up the bank, which had been muddy but was now covered in pebbles, and headed into the eastern meadow. Bit by bit they terraformed their property.

“And replant some here.” Caswell indicated the area she’d roughly cleared, using an E-tool as a hoe, attached to a pole. They tromped past it through tall growth.

It had surprised the men for Caswell to be a rifle Expert, partly because she was female, and a lot because she was Air Force. That was a good lesson for them not to underestimate either. She could headshot an animal with ease, and had.

None of them had commented much on her ability to recognize edibles, except to be grateful. She was an arrogant young bitch, but she did have useful skills.

The bows, though, had pissed her off immensely. Bob Barker had shaved them down to eighty pounds. He said he wanted that weight for larger antelope. He could draw it. Dalton could. The other men except Trinidad could mostly manage. But neither woman could. It was an upper body weapon, and they didn’t have the strength.

Caswell had bitched long and loud as if it was a personal affront to her. Gina understood the practicality behind it. Heavier bows meant heavier kills. Something smaller just wasn’t lethal, and it took strength to draw one, that few women would ever have.

It was bound to come up, though. Gina said, “Well, I’d like to avoid goat for a few more days. Small antelope?”

Caswell said, “If I can get a head shot.” Ammo was finite, and an M4 was not a large game rifle. Dalton had said nothing over two hundred pounds was a safe target, except for a few with thin enough skulls for a brain scramble shot. Yes, she was going to use the rifle as often as she could, since a bow was not an option. Gina understood it, but it was still annoying.