by Jack L Knapp
Eventually, I got a tiny spark in the tinder from the friction of branch point rubbing inside the socket I’d carved. The tinder smoldered and I blew carefully on the spark. When the first tiny flame appeared, I carefully added small twigs. When they caught fire, I fed in larger pieces.
Humans love fire, other animals don’t. For the first time since I arrived here, I felt safe. My eyes smarted from the smoke as I prepared to cook my turtle.
I lopped off the animal’s head (turn him over, wait until he sticks his head out, a fast swipe with the knife) and let the carcass bleed out. I wasn’t yet prepared to drink the blood as a source of salt and additional nutrition; for now, I simply cleaned out the entrails.
Turtles stink when the shell is opened, but I didn’t complain. I made a quick trip to the stream, washed the turtle thoroughly, then made a hasty retreat back to my fire.
The turtle was soon cooked, more or less, and I ate him. The bones were small, but I saved them; they would be useful at some point. I hardened the tip of my spear in the coals, then tied a sling on for easier carrying. Finally I scraped the live coals together and covered them with ashes, I hoped they would still be hot enough tomorrow morning to restart the fire.
I collected more birch-bark before climbing a tree to spend the night; the bark had long fibers. I extracted the fibers and made more string, smaller but equally strong. Now I had enough for a safety loop to make sure I didn’t roll off the platform in my sleep. The powdered bark remnants I scattered over the woven branches of my second platform home, added a layer of green leaves for comfort, and was soon asleep.
The trees offered concealment and a place to sleep in relative safety, plus a refuge from predators, but I needed a better location where I could trap small animals and catch fish.
My first spear shaft had begun to dry and overnight it warped. I could still use it, but the second one would be better.
A thin layer of mud inside the turtle shell had dried overnight, making a basin for carrying fire. I hoped to avoid making another fire from scratch; still, I could if I needed to, and next time I could use my string to make a fire drill rather than depend on my still-tender palms.
Blackberries were in season and the ripe fruit proved tasty. This also told me that the season was sometime in early summer. It meant I could count on having at least four, maybe even six months before cold weather arrived.
The oaks I’d seen included southern live oaks, easily identified by their wide spreading branches, and I’d seen magnolia trees too. The forest seemed familiar, the kind of country found in western Louisiana where I’d grown up.
If so, the Gulf of Mexico should be to the south and I might have a better chance of surviving winter near the coast. The fruits and berries wouldn't last, but there would be clams, crabs, and fish along the shore, easily caught. Salt, another need, could be evaporated from seawater.
I could head southwest, avoid the worst of the swamps, and maybe reach the Gulf within a few days; if that didn’t work, I could go northwest. To the east lay hundreds of miles of thick forest, most of it like the area where I was and offering no advantages. There were also huge rivers to the east, dangerous for a lone man to cross.
Heavy forest, the kind where I now stood, was not my preferred habitat. Vision wasn’t particularly useful because I could only see a few yards in any direction, meaning a predator might be lurking just out of sight. Animals use scent and hearing more than sight in heavy forest, giving them an advantage. Many forest carnivores could climb as well as I could.
The only real advantage the thick forest offered was temporary summer foods like figs, berries, and nuts. There was timber available for building shelter and making improved weaponry, but at the same time large game would be scarce. The forest didn't provide enough grass for grazing, and as for browsing animals like deer, there was too much cover to make hunting easy.
I would also need to find other humans at some point, not easily done in heavy forest.
#
Routine took over; travel, look for food, find a safe place to sleep, work on improving my equipment in the afternoon.
My strings made a net bag, crude, but it would serve. Lining it with leaves helped, and I learned to put my turtle shell with its live coals into the bag, tighten a drawstring around the top, then secure it to my belt before heading southwest.
I had a better weapon now, the replacement for my early effort, and a lot more confidence than I’d had when I first arrived.
The predators were out there, so I was still wary.
Depending on weather, I was also prepared to sleep on the ground now and rely on my fire for protection.
My food was frequently the sort of thing I’d have rejected in my earlier life, but it was keeping me alive and well fed. I wasn’t losing weight; the clothing I’d been given by the Futurist still fit me and was holding up well.
I had adapted. Darwin’s World was home.
Chapter 2
A month had passed since my arrival on Darwin's World.
The trail of a deer led me to a muddy salt lick. A lot of tracks were around the site, some from animals I didn’t want to encounter. The salt was also poor quality, as much dirt as salt.
Soaking the mix, pouring off the liquid, then evaporating the water would give me usable salt; for now, it was too much work for too little result. Still, it meant I could find salt without going all the way to the ocean.
I had worked my way southwest without much difficulty, but then I encountered a large river.
Creeks hadn’t been a problem, but this river was much more dangerous. The water ran sluggish, murky, and wide, at least a hundred yards. It was too deep to wade and I had no idea what might lie under the surface. Might there be alligators, even crocodiles? For that matter, were there predators I didn’t know about? Was the bottom quicksand? There was no way to tell without wading in, and if I blundered into trouble it might be too late to turn back.
Swimming would be equally dangerous, and if I suddenly had to swim my boots would be a hindrance. Pushing my weapons and boots across on a small raft might work, but if I lost the raft I would then be barefoot and unarmed. I had a momentary vision of scrambling back to the bank, a crocodile in pursuit, my equipment floating away downstream.
Carry my spear, or dump it in favor of making a better one after I crossed? I rejected that idea. I might have immediate need for the spear on the other bank, so it would have to go with me. A wrong decision could kill me.
Building a raft and cutting a push-pole would take at least a day, maybe two, and then I would simply abandon the raft after it had served its purpose. A dugout canoe would be better in that I would have directional control, but would require a lot more labor and time to construct. That would only be worthwhile if I intended to use the craft afterward. I could travel farther by canoe, even go upstream, but even so I could go only where the river flowed.
I would also have to take time away to hunt and gather edible fruits or nuts. By contrast, traveling on foot allowed me to forage along the way as well as choose the path I would follow. That latter thought made the decision for me. I would go upstream and look for a safer crossing.
#
A low-growing palm-like plant had leaves arranged in a fan shape, each with sharp edges and a wicked point. I cut the stems and chopped off the sharp tips for ease in carrying.
After stopping for the night, I removed the long, strong fibers from the palmetto leaves. Much superior to what I’d harvested from other sources, palmetto would be the fiber of choice whenever I could find the plants. My strings and ropes were weapon, tool, and building material combined. Leather or rawhide would be better than plant-fiber cords, but I needed string in order to make the traps that would catch the animals.
I hung my newly-woven cords from a heavy limb, then added another limb to stretch them while they dried overnight. Coils of finished cords were easy to carry in my woven bag.
#
It was time to add more meat t
o my diet.
Hunting only works if you’re there when the animal is present, so trapping or snaring is much more efficient. Rabbits, squirrels, and large birds were common, if I could only catch them. They’d found it easy to avoid me so far, but now I had the means to build efficient traps. I might even catch a raccoon. I had seen tracks near the streams.
My deadfall traps, tree trunks suspended over a trigger, hadn’t caught anything. I had enough cords now to put out a dozen snares each afternoon when I found a good place to stop, so hopefully my trapping success would improve. More traps and better traps should result in more catches.
My life settled into routine. Get up each morning, take care of personal necessities, then drink water from a gourd I’d cleaned by swishing dry sand around the inside. Breakfast was whatever I’d caught during the night, augmented by edible roots, greens, and fruit. Check the wind direction, look around for danger, then move out. Direction of travel was determined by the wind direction and the river. It originated somewhere to the northwest, so that was the course I followed whenever possible.
Weather was more annoyance than problem. I sometimes huddled under a spreading canopy to wait the rain out, but given enough warning, I built a tree shelter.
Adding a cover over my arboreal sleeping platform kept me dry as well as safe. Branches, arched, tied, and overlapped shingle-style with leaves made a fast and easy roof.
If birds and small animals ate fruits, that was recommendation enough to at least try them. Some I liked, some I tasted only once. The only things I refused to eat were mushrooms. Knowledge of which varieties were safe had accumulated as people got sick or died. I wasn’t hungry enough to experiment.
The blackberries were gone now, most eaten by birds or small animals. A bush huckleberry had ripened since and the fruit provided a pleasant snack. The huckleberries weren’t as large or as tasty as the blackberries had been, but I picked a few whenever I found them.
My diet varied with location and changing of the season, but I was eating well, the result of not being picky.
Among the signs of rabbit, squirrel, and raccoon, I saw a large cat’s track. It might be a puma, and if so I wasn’t particularly worried. Pumas, sometimes called panthers, aren’t likely to attack a full-grown man. But it might be a jaguar or some kind of cat I didn’t know about, and some of the big cats could climb. Even so, they would find it difficult to creep out onto the limbs where I slept without waking me.
Giant lions and saber-tooth cats lived in North America at the end of the Pleistocene, but supposedly they couldn’t climb. Face a saber-tooth on a tree limb with a wooden spear? No, thank you!
#
A fist-sized rock, found near the stream, gave me an idea. Cutting a thick branch from an ash tree, then carefully splitting the end, made a haft. I worked the rock into place, then strengthened the joint by wrapping it with cord. As a final step, I coated the joint with milkweed-sap glue to make it stronger. Similar easy-to-make clubs had been used by early humans.
The point of my spear was relatively fragile. It was useful, but the club was almost equally so and it was certainly not fragile. Best of all, if either weapon broke, I could make another.
Armed with spear and club, I was ready to try living on the ground. Trapping, cooking, and other activities necessarily took place on the ground, so living where I worked made sense. Fire would be my primary protection, backed by my club and spear, but if I lost the fire I would be forced back into the trees.
My new traps were easy to construct. Straight sticks, laid crosswise in a hollow pyramid, were held together by tension. Strings, attached to the bottom sticks and stretched to the ends of a bow-stick across the top, provided the tension. Figure-four triggers, easily carved from three branches, supported one side of the trap and tossing bits of bait around the trigger stick finished the job. With practice, building and setting the traps took only a few minutes work. Most days, the traps caught birds. Snares, set out when I stopped, took even less time, so I usually set out twenty or more each night. As a result, rabbits now formed the core of my diet.
Fish, crustaceans, rabbits, raw shoots and roots, these things had kept me alive. Still, I hungered for different foods. If you’ve ever eaten a cattail root, you’ll understand. It’s survival food but no gourmet treat. Dandelion leaves and thin green shoots from milkweed plants are edible too, but both are an acquired taste. I intended to un-acquire it as soon as possible.
#
My daily routine changed. Now I constructed a lean-to shelter each afternoon, then kindled a fire from the coals in my clay-lined turtle shell. The lean-to would protect me, but more importantly, it would protect my fire.
After building the fire, collecting fuel and building a shelter, it was time to set up a fish weir if the stream was suitable. I built the weirs with a wide, enclosed end upstream and a small mouth opening facing downstream. Fish entering the weir were unable to find their way out, because they tended to swim upstream. I tied crayfish inside my weirs for bait.
I also fished, using gorge-hooks. Small, sharp-ended bones with carved grooves around the center made hooks, and thin cords tied around the grooves completed the assemblies. I made the hook-and-line sets in advance, then coiled the strings around the bone hooks. Tie the remaining string end to a tree or pole, then toss the baited hook toward the center of the stream. Catfish, my usual catch, alternated with rabbit for my suppers. Even a small amount of variety in my diet made a diffence.
I used a long, thin branch with a tied crosspiece to rake crayfish from the bottom. I added braces between the branch and each end of the crosspiece, stabilizing my makeshift ‘rake’. An added piece, tied parallel under the crossbar, made the device even more effective. The tool wasn’t pretty, but it was easy to construct and use. The crossed end went into the stream as far out as my arm would reach, and I held the crosspiece against the bottom as I raked it to shore.
I usually caught several large--and angry--crayfish, some of which I’d boil in a turtle shell, one of several I'd acquired. The others got used for bait.
Bamboo-like canes, if present, made superior fishing poles. Using the long, lightweight canes allowed me to toss the baited hooks farther. Angled cuts on the ends of the poles made them easy to stick into the dirt. So anchored, they resisted the pulls of even large fish.
Traps set, shelter built, bed of green leaves waiting under the rear of the lean-to, a fire burning for cooking and protection; so ended my days.
After placing my weapons where I could reach them, even in the dark, I ate a little cooked rabbit or smoked fish, fresh or from the previous day’s catch. Water, from the stream or collected during a rainstorm, was my drink. As the light faded to dimness I lay down, sometimes damp, but not too uncomfortable and definitely not hungry, to sleep as much as possible during the night.
#
The chunky animal looked to be a kind of cross between a bull moose and an Irish elk, but was neither. Its body was a light brown with a whitish belly, while the upper back showed a faint dappling of lighter spots. A darker-brown growth of longer hair covered the withers and extended down over the shoulders. It grazed on the long bunchgrass near the stand of trees, raising its head occasionally to look around and test the breeze before resuming feeding. The deer was huge, its antlers palmate but with long tines extending from the flattened sections. The main beams extended rearwards, while two lesser beams with wider flats pointed forward and diagonally to the side, a kind of counterbalance for the main antler mass. In addition, two straight prongs projected forward from the bases, inside the secondary beams, one half as long as its fellow. The rear antlers protected the animal’s back from predators, while the forward palmations gave it an offensive weapon to dominate other bulls. Perhaps fighting accounted for the broken tine.
A figure slipped silently through the trees, moving easily to avoid the underbrush. A slight movement of the hand cautioned two others, following ten yards behind the leader. They paused, obediently, managing t
o stop without alerting the bull, though neither moved as smoothly as the leader.
The animal fed on, unaware, as the leader brought up a crossbow and took careful aim. The buzz of the string was followed immediately by a solid thump as the bolt punched into the rib-cage behind the beast’s shoulder. It bolted but soon stopped, head hanging. Finally, with a loud, rattling sigh, the animal collapsed.
The two followers moved forward toward, only to be interrupted by a hissed command.
“Stay back until I get this thing reloaded!”
Moments later, crossbow ready, the leader signaled the others forward. “Stay behind me,” she whispered. “Those things take a lot of killing.”
But the animal was dead, and the three stood looking down at the carcass. “I’ll keep watch while you dress it out. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open. I may not have much time to warn you if I see something.”
The other two, also women, nodded and set to work. Their butchering skills were on a par with their woodcraft, unpracticed. The leader looked at them with a kind of amused contempt. Well, she’d once been green herself, but at least she’d been raised on a farm. These two? You’d think they’d never seen an animal, much less had to prepare one for supper!
Chapter 3
One of my pyramid traps had caught something large and aggressive. It had destroyed the trap, which was just as well; I probably wouldn’t have wanted to eat it anyway. I wasn’t going hungry. Raccoon? Maybe, or a bobcat or coyote, but not a wolf; this wasn't their preferred habitat.
My kit now included a net bag. It was easy to make; I knotted the strings together fishnet-style, with the vertical and horizontal strands about an inch apart. Making the first bag took time and small objects tended to fall through, but carrying things in the bag was more comfortable than stuffing them in my pockets.
I had a bundle of fibers ready each afternoon. I generally stopped early, so I would have time to set up camp and put out traps and hooks. After my other chores were done, I wove the fibers into string. When I had enough strings, I plaited them into rope.