Even though his body was crying out for fluids, his fear of dying in agony from some horrific disease was stronger and held him back.
‘Damn. This isn’t fair,’ he huffed.
Pol surveyed the immediate area. The trees at this point were quite dense and he felt relatively safe, protected by hundreds of evil pointed thorns protruding from every branch and twig. He could easily roll under the nearest tree at a moment’s notice.
Water.
His body craved for water, but he had to ensure the stuff was safe to drink first and it didn’t take him long to come up with a solution.
‘I guess the best thing might be to boil some of this stuff before I drink it. Just to be safe.’
However,
This posed a problem. Pol had no doubt he would be able to light a fire once he was back at the cave. Trouble was; how was he going to carry a decent quantity of water back to the cave so he did not have to keep running the gauntlet every time he wanted a drink?
As far as Pol could see, the leaves on umbrella trees were way too small for him to use to fashion any kind of cup or bag.
‘Wait a minute. Yes, I’ve got something in my inside pocket. Doggy-poo bags. They ought to do the job.’
He made to take the bags out of his pocket but stopped when a nasty thought occurred to him.
‘Hang on a minute, Dumbo. They’re impregnated with some kind of sanitizing lotion. You dozy prat.’
“Yuk.”
‘I don’t fancy drinking from any of them.’
Something else. Two somethings, in fact.
‘My boots.’
Of course, his boots were smelly and soaked in sweat, but they were supposed to be waterproof. Ought to hold a bit of water. Would have to give them a bit of a wash in the river first though. Fill them with water then make his way back to the cave. Hopefully, he would still have enough of the water left in the boots by the time he got all the way back up the hill. Once he was back at the cave, with a fire going, he would be able to boil the water. Then drink it with confidence.
Great.
Brilliant.
Questions.
One. How will he make a fire–two boy scouts rubbed together?
Two. In what will he boil the water?
‘Asshole.’
Ok. Here’s the thing, being unemployed since the day he had left school, Pol had spent many a boring afternoon watching a host of crap daytime programs on TV. Watched a myriad of nature and survival programs. Somewhere, in the depths of his mind, there ought to be an answer to this new problem.
‘What did the natives in the jungle use?’
The answer came to him almost immediately—pots. Clay pots.
‘I haven’t got any pots.’
No pots.
‘Bugger. It’ll take too long for me to make a pot and let it bake in the sunshine. By the time I’ve done that, and then filled it with water, I’ll have shriveled up like a prune.’
Nothing else came to mind.
“Maybe I’ll think of something while my boots go for a little swim,” he sighed.
After he had removed his boots, Pol threaded the end of Tinker’s lead through the side loops, and hooked the dog-clip onto the thin rope. Then he clicked the brake on the plastic handle, and hooked the handle onto a short but strong-looking branch. He carefully lowered both boots into the river and watched them sink as they filled with water. Hopefully, if he were to leave the boots in the water for long enough, most of the smelly sweat would be washed away. Meanwhile, he might pass a few minutes by attempting to make a fire. Then he would boil enough water with which to slake his thirst.
‘Well, it should be easy enough to sort something out,’ he reasoned.
There were plenty of wood and leaves lying around. Not to mention thousands of dry dead thorns.
‘Soon have a bit of a fire going with a bit of luck.’
After foraging around on the ground on his hands and knees, and gathering enough kindling for a fire, Pol carefully examined some of the smaller rocks lying nearby. Within a few minutes, he had found a reasonably sized almost circular bowl-like slab of rock, which might be ok. The stone was thin enough, no more than half an inch thick in the centre, a bit thicker towards the edges, about a foot in diameter, was slightly concave on one side, and convex on the other side. Pol was not the least bit interested in how or why the stone had ended up like this His interest was in what he intended to do with it.
‘This might hold about a half cupful of water, if I’m lucky. Shouldn’t take too long to boil.’
He placed the stone on the ground to one side, gathered up a couple of dozen small rocks, and used them to build a makeshift fireplace on which he could rest his stone bowl.
‘It’d be great if I end up setting fire to everything around here, not.’
“Ok, next. The fire.”
Another easy solution. Again, it was down to Pol employing a particular method he had seen on TV.
“I’ll make one of those bow-drill things,” he chuffed enthusiastically. “Ought to do the trick.”
Grinning broadly at how clever he was, Pol selected a couple of suitable sticks, plus a thicker chunk of dry wood, and removed the penknife from his pocket. Used the knife to cut a nick in each end of the longest stick.
“Right. See if I can remember how to do this.”
Using a length of the tough hairs he had found, Pol bent the flexible stick, tied the hair to each end to make a small bow, and looped the middle of the length of hair around the shorter stick. Holding this stick vertically, he rested its lower end on a small chunk of wood he had previously placed in the centre of his fireplace.
Voila! A homemade fire-starting kit.
“Well, it looks a bit like a bow-drill,” he mused. “Not perfect but, it’s as good as any I’ve seen on TV, anyway.”
Pol made a smug grin and mentally patted himself on the back whilst heaping dry leaves and thorns around the bottom of the vertical stick.
“Clever shit, eh?”
Ugh. Ugh. He immediately spotted another problem.
“Mmmm. If I hold this stick at the top, the friction’s going to burn a bloody great hole in my hand. Can’t have that now, can we?”
Again, the solution was simple. He picked up another small stone and placed it on top of the vertical stick. This would provide a means of protecting his hand. In theory, when he made a sawing motion with his bow-drill, the upright stick would rotate and create friction between it and the piece of wood it was resting on. His other hand would be protected by the stone on top.
Ha!
“Everyone knows how friction produces heat!”
In theory anyway.
He had seen it work ok on the TV. Whether it would work in practice was another thing.
“Ah well. Let’s see if it’s as good as it looks, shall we, son?”
Pol started sawing away like a virtuoso cello player. The vertical piece of wood spun easily at a decent rate, rotating first one way, then back again. At first, nothing appeared to be happening so he increased the speed of his sawing.
Then, after a short while,
‘There you go shit-face.’
He grinned broadly, satisfied when he saw smoke, albeit thin wisps of smoke, drifting up from within the small pile of leaves. Encouraged, Pol increased the speed of his ‘fiddling,’ smiled when the smoke increased in volume, and grinned broadly when he saw the bright red glow at the end of the upright stick. His fiddling stopped abruptly when the vertical stick gave up the ghost and snapped in half.
‘Bugger!’
The tough hair had effectively sawn through the stick!
‘Never thought it would do that.’
Pol discarded the now useless bow drill, leaned forward, and blew on the leaves. At the third puff, a small flame erupted and he quickly heaped more leaves and thorns onto the fire. Followed these with a few small twigs. When the twigs were well alight, he put more, thicker twigs on top. Within a couple of minutes, he had got a dec
ent sized fire going.
Clever tit.
“Now for the proof.”
Leaving his boots dangling in the water, he leaned over the riverbank, and scooped some water into the shallow pot of stone. Then he placed the stone on the fire, making sure it was correctly balanced on the surrounding ring of small, uneven stones before he shuffled away from the fire in case any of the stones should shatter in the heat, and waited.
‘Right then, smart-ass, I’ll need something with which to lift the stone off the fire when the water’s boiled. The stone will be too hot to handle and I don’t want to spill any of the water, or scold myself. I’ll leave it to one side to cool for a while but, I don’t want to use my snotty hanky to lift the stone off the fire.’
“Not very hygienic.”
Whilst he waited for the water to boil, Pol turned the problem of the hot stone over in his mind. Within minutes, another idea occurs to him. Of course, it’s something else he had seen on the TV.
Taking his time, Pol sorted out a couple of short, flexible sticks and carefully wove them together to make a kind of lifting tool. Used a couple of strands of the tough hair to bind them.
Found it relatively easy to fashion the crude lifting tool.
Simple.
“Piece of piss.”
With the two sticks formed into a ‘Y’ shape, Pol would be able to slide them underneath the cup-stone thus enabling him to lift it off the fire in safety.
Another satisfied grin.
Pol might be a bit thick when it came to identifying trees. To him, one tree was just like any other. As far as he could tell, the trees around about look like any other tree he’s ever seen, apart from the weird umbrella trees. They were a breed of tree he had never seen before.
One thing he did notice was how well the fire was burning and how it had quickly stopped giving out a lot of smoke.
‘Perhaps the wood is a bit different here, or maybe it’s just because it’s bone dry?’
Whatever the reason, Pol was happy he would not be advertising his whereabouts to all and sundry, especially being as he did not know who or what the ‘all and sundry might be.’
Better safe than sorry.
‘You’re a clever sod, Einstein.’
Now. All he had to do was, wait.
It did not take long for the water to boil. After a few minutes of bubbling, he assumed any life-threatening bugs would be dead. Using his makeshift ‘lifter,’ he quickly removed the stone from the fire and laid it on the ground to one side.
No problem.
Whilst still keeping a wary eye on his surroundings, Pol reckoned he must have been down by the river for at least an hour.
Whilst he stared absently at the river flowing by, he began to search for an answer to his predicament; how did he get here, where was here, and would he ever be able to find his way back home? More to the point, would he survive long enough to find a way home? Or, will he end up being some hungry animal’s dinner?
Yuk.
Thinking about one or more of those big birds picking the flesh from his bones sent a shiver down his spine and something in his stomach attempted to claw its way up into his throat making him gag and cough as he tried to control the urge to be sick.
‘Urgh!’
“Stop it, you dick.”
After a while, his stomach calmed down and he was able to relax again and concentrate on the main problem.
But,
No matter which way he looked at things, he was convinced he wouldn’t be able to identify the exact spot where he had landed in this forsaken place. His hopes sank as he envisaged an inhospitable and lengthy stopover.
‘Bum. Lumbered on a bloody unknown desert-planet. I don’t even know if it’s in the same Galaxy as Earth let alone the same Solar System! Shit knows what I’m going to do now.’
Pol may not have been too sure of the whereabouts of this God-forsaken planet, might still be on Earth for all he knew, but he knew wherever it was, it certainly wasn’t home.
Back to the immediate problem of quenching his thirst...
Chapter 43
Tinker surveyed his surroundings as he stood on top of a large, flat boulder. His eyelids were half closed against the blinding glare of the sun overhead as he cautiously sniffed the air whilst listening for any sound, which might indicate either, the Pol-creature was calling out to him, or some marauding animal was on the prowl.
Instinct told the dog the aromas reaching his nose were not anything like those of home. The only smell he could recognize was the smell of water, the rest were unknown. Even the grass, which looked like grass, did not smell like any grass he was used to. So strange. He puzzled over the reason for this before deciding it was not so important.
He turned his head to the left and looked down towards a wide river at the bottom of the shallow valley, perhaps half a mile from where he was standing. Licked his lips, suddenly aware of how thirsty he was.
The thirst focused his mind.
He needed a drink.
For the moment, water was what he really needed. Everything else could wait. He licked his lips again and decided to head down towards the river knowing how the Pol-creature would also be needing water in order to survive, especially in this heat. The Pol-creature would surely stay in the vicinity of a ready supply of water.
Made sense.
Happy to see there was nothing nearby which might want to have him for dinner, Tinker jumped down from his perch on the boulder and loped through the grass, making a beeline for the river. The nearer he got to the inviting water, the drier his throat became.
By the time the thirsty dog reached the river, he was panting hard, and his muscles were aching as his body cried out for liquid. Within seconds, he spotted a good place where he could safely reach the water. Jumped down onto what looked like a small sandy bay. The hot sand felt sharp and stung his paws, but he ignored the unexpected pain. A group of large fish scattered as he hungrily lapped at the cool water.
Once he had drunk his fill, Tinker sat on the rough sand, and panted happily as he waited for the fluid to make its way to those parts of his body most in need. He knew he would have to take in more water to replace the amount his body would quickly absorb from his stomach.
Fish, being rather stupid, quickly got used to the dog’s presence and reappeared to resume their search for food in the shallows. Must have assumed Tinker was not a threat.
Tinker watched the fish mill aimlessly around with mild interest and vaguely wondered if they were edible. The thought sent a sharp, rumbling pain through his stomach. He was in two minds whether to jump into the river in the hope of catching one. Common sense and the fact he had never tried to catch a fish before stopped him from trying.
After resting for a few minutes, Tinker lapped up more of the life-saving liquid, again scattering the fish, and did not stop drinking until his body told him he had had enough.
Knowing he could always come back to the river when he needed to drink, the dog jumped up the short distance onto the bank and warily glanced around the area. Another sniff of the air told him the Pol-creature was not anywhere nearby. A quick look at the sky reassured him there was nothing dangerous circling overhead. In fact, he could see nothing overhead apart from the burning sun. Not a cloud to be seen.
Hungry and tired the dog decided the best thing he could do was find some shade, somewhere safe; somewhere he could sleep and conserve his strength. After resting, he would be more able to search for the Pol-creature. His master had to be around here somewhere. With luck, he would turn up soon. The Pol-creature was clever. He would find them both something to eat; he always did.
As with Pol, Tinker could see the benefit of crawling beneath the protective branches of a nearby umbrella tree and, after scraping an area clear of dead thorns, he curled up close to its main trunk.
Within seconds, the tired dog had fallen asleep and started to dream doggy dreams...
Chapter 44
Pol was feeling quite chuffe
d with himself, clever sod.
Knowing how he would be vulnerable to attack on his way back up to the cave, what with no boots on his feet, sharp rocks all over the place, plus having to lug two boots full of water; he reckoned he would require something better than a silly little pointed stick and a pen knife for protection.
As he sheltered from the sun beneath the umbrella tree, Pol took his time to fashion another, decent wooden spear. This one was a sturdy eight feet long branch, from which he stripped out small twigs and all of the thorns. He also fashioned two similar shorter spears, each spear being about five feet long. The wooden branches he had cut from beneath the umbrella tree were strong and straight, and he found it relatively easy to cut the spears with the blade of his penknife once he had sharpened it on a stone. It was then a simple matter to whittle a sharp point on each of the spears. But, as he began to sharpen the first point, a sudden thought occurred to him and he changed his mind. Carefully splitting the tip of each spear to a depth of about two inches, he inserted one of the previously discarded thorns in each slot, and bound them tightly with strands from a bunch of coarse hair plucked from a branch above his head. As far as Pol was concerned, each of the thick thorns would serve as a ferocious-looking blade, protruding further than the length of his thumb, and ought to prove to be more deadly than the simple sharpened end of a wooden stick!
Once he had finished, Pol made proud as he inspected his handiwork.
‘Brill. You clever git.’
Satisfied with his new arsenal he discarded his original puny effort.
Suddenly, he felt better knowing he might now have more than half a chance of surviving another attack by one of those strange birds.
A vision of a giant bird roasting over a roaring fire set his mouth watering. His mouth formed a little smile as he thoughtfully licked his lips.
“Mmmm. Didn’t realize how hungry I am.”
He lovingly laid the new spears on the ground and cautiously tested the boiled water with a fingertip. Although it was still warm to the touch, he decided the water was cool enough to drink. Satisfied the stone was also cool enough to handle, he gently placed his palms around the edge.
Appollinaire: (The Other Side of Nowhere) Page 12