by R Magnusholm
“Be positive.”
“I am positive,” he said. “But it’s so annoying having to drink like a camel.” He jiggled his stomach, making the water slosh louder. He didn’t mention that every time they stepped outside their bramble fortress, they invited animal attacks.
Liz laughed most delightfully, and he grinned. Her honey-blonde hair, sun-streaked and wild, framed a face that appeared leaner and sharper than he remembered. He mused idly what he looked like himself, what with a rumpled suit, dirty shirt collar, and five-day’s worth of stubble on his face.
He supposed he should forget about improving water storage for now. Fire was the priority. Make a bonfire, and no wild beast would dare to approach within a hundred yards. And if need be, they’d carry burning brands when fetching water.
Suddenly, the deer herd stampeded, and in a blink they were gone. John thought he saw gray shadows slinking in the trees, and then they too vanished. Wolves. He gripped his spear tighter. The Arsenal mug in his hand began tilting. With an effort of will, he steadied it. Compared to the sabertooth, wolves were almost cuddly.
The opening to their thorny enclosure lay but a few yards away, and they retreated to safety without further incident.
“There are wolves out there,” he said, blocking the entrance to their clearing.
“I only saw deer.”
“Anyway, wolves rarely attack people when there’s plenty of other food,” he said. His words sounded hollow in his own ears. If the deer didn’t fear them, why should the wolves? And those might not even be regular wolves, but the bigger and stronger dire wolves. Or perhaps they weren’t wolves at all, but velociraptors.
“How reassuring . . .”
“It’s true.”
She gave him a sad look but said nothing.
John checked his fire-making contraption. Despite the day being sunny and the lens remaining focused, the tinder remained barely warm. He sighed. The paperweight clearly wasn’t working, and he had a hunch it wouldn’t work at midday on the equator.
How else to make fire? Flint and steel produced sparks in lighters and flintlock rifles. And he heard of something called a bow-drill. Whatever that was. He set a fist-sized cobble (that might or might not have been flint) by the tinder, held his cutlery knife loosely by the flat sides of the blade, and swung it against the rock. The metal handle bounced off, producing a shower of short-lived sparks.
“Hey Liz, watch this,” he cried, striking the stone repeatedly.
Dry mineral dust tickled his nostrils, and there was a hint of ozone in the air. Each time he whacked the flint, a swarm of pale sparks shot into the feathery reed fluff. But so far not a wisp of smoke came out. Now, if only his tinder had been soaked in lighter fluid or sprinkled with gunpowder . . .
John kept striking until the knife slipped out of his numb fingers. He stared at the pile of tinder in dismay. The reed fluff was perfectly dry, so why the hell wouldn’t it catch fire? Was his knife the wrong type of steel? Did he use the wrong flint? The sparks he managed to strike seemed too weak and too short-lived compared to the rich pyrotechnic display he’d seen a survival expert produce with his flint and steel. Another day, another failure, as his father would’ve said.
Liz touched his arm. “You’ve done your best.”
“Did I?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll try again later,” he said gloomily. Although it was quite clear that neither the glass lens nor flint and steel were of any use.
“Have a lunch break,” Liz suggested. “And something tells me we need to lay food stores.”
“Huh?”
“Nuts, berries, and mushrooms only grow in the fall. What are we going to eat for the rest of the year?”
Reluctantly, he put the knife away and returned the cobble back to the pile of rocks. They might be able to survive without fire, for a while at least, but they would certainly die without food.
Two massive hazels grew in their clearing—both festooned with nuts. Since the bushes were isolated from the surrounding forest, John hoped no squirrels would reach them easily. He did a quick calculation. A pound of nuts per person per day meant they’d need roughly 700 pounds of hazelnuts to last them a year. Obviously, for a couple months they’d be able to simply pick them off branches or from the ground. But they’d still have to store some 500 pounds.
He rubbed his head, thinking hard. They’d have to keep the nut harvest out of the rain and away from pests. They might put some in baskets suspended from the ridge beam of their shelter. But he couldn’t imagine the thin pole withstanding the weight of hundreds of pounds. Would the nuts rot if they simply piled them on the floor?
“Liz, can mice gnaw through hazelnut shells?”
“Only one way to find out—catch a little brown mouse and ask him.”
“Very funny.”
She shrugged, pulled an orange-headed aspen bolete from her canvas bag, and sawed it in half lengthwise with the cutlery knife. “We should dry them for winter.” She walked over to a nearby birch tree and stuck the mushroom halves on a leafless twig.
Chapter 15
Stupid Birds
Deep in the forest, the great stripy cat sniffed the air and caught a pleasant scent wafting with the wind. Aurochs. When he’d been young and strong, he had hunted them. Even fully grown bulls weren’t safe from him. But as he grew older and wiser, he switched to deer. Softer to chew.
But aurochs . . . Oh, what lovely fragrance of manure . . . He could almost feel their hot blood flooding his hungry maw. As the cat licked his lips, his tongue caught on the broken fang. He growled softly at the back of his throat.
The strange carnivorous stag had thrown a hoof at him. Deer didn’t do that, but that two-legged stag smelled a bit like a wolf. The cat recalled the last time he’d eaten a wolf. Ah, such juicy and tender meat! Too much fur, though. He’d been spitting fur-balls for days afterward.
Nearby, a stream gurgled. A peaceful sound. Sunbeams danced on the water, casting annoying flashes into his sensitive eyes. He yawned and stretched on the soft green moss. Time for a nap. And if he waited long enough, a deer was sure to pass by and serve itself for dinner.
A crow cawed harshly overhead. The cat shot it a baleful stare. What a disgusting creature. So noisy. He’d devoured a crow fledgling in summer. Absolutely vile. Tickly feathers, no meat. And so much noise . . . Out of the corner of his eye, the cat watched the foul feather-flapper. Oh, how much he wished he could fly . . . Then, he’d eat all the birds in the sky and shut them up for good. He got on his haunches and considered leaping at the crow. But it was too high.
He lowered his head to the ground, caught a smoky scent, and froze. Oh, that vicious reek of the weird two-legged deer! It had passed here only yesterday. The cat sprang up with a growl, all thoughts of a nap forgotten. Like a silent shadow, he glided over fallen logs, following the forest river downstream. The hateful scent of his enemy grew stronger. They’d defiled his home and dared to hurt him. Twice. They’ll pay. In blood. Oh yes, they will.
The crow flew overhead, cawing again, but the cat ignored it. The noisy bird wouldn’t save them this time, because he’d go after his quarry in the dark.
And annoying birds slept at night.
Chapter 16
Bowing the Drill
Late afternoon, Fleet Woods
John selected a curved and flexible willow limb and tied a length of twine between its ends to make a crude bow. He flexed it until the bowstring kinked. Liz looped the slack string around a dry rod meant to act as a drill bit.
“Behold the mighty bow-drill,” she chirped.
He lifted the contraption. The loop promptly unwound, and the drill-rod fell out. “Sorry. I’m not used to this Stone Age stuff.”
She smiled. “Let’s try again.”
They did. This time, John clutched the bow in his right hand and held the drill-stick in place with his left.
He fit the tip of the drill-rod into a knothole in the log that served as their dining
table. “Now what?”
“Not sure. All I’ve seen is a drawing in Dad’s book.”
“If it’s a drill bit, we gotta make it turn somehow,” he said.
He sat astride the log, thinking. Then he pulled the bow toward him. The drill rod in his hand turned. He pushed the bow forward. The rod rotated in another direction.
“Holy moly, it’s turning!” he exclaimed.
He began sawing the bow back and forth furiously. The rapidly rotating stick rubbed against the palm of his left hand. He carried on regardless, but after a few minutes the heat building up in his palm forced him to stop.
“What’s wrong?” Liz asked.
He carefully released the drill-stick and opened his hand.
She gasped. “Oh, John.”
A long red blister formed across his palm, like a bleeding lifeline.
He suppressed a sardonic chuckle. Read this, Mademoiselle Palm-Reader. D’ you predict a long and prosperous life? A richly branching bloodline and offspring as many as the stars in the sky? Hmm . . . He studied Liz speculatively.
“John, what are you grinning about?”
“Ahem, my lifeline just turned into a bloodline. If I were to present that to a palm reader . . .”
She giggled. “I worry about you sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?”
“Didn’t you yell Geronimo as we fell into the Thames?”
“Yeah, but I was delirious from thirst.”
“And then yesterday you started hollering about ketchup.”
He sensed blood rushing to his face. “Seemed appropriate under the circumstances. If you ponder the mysteries of life long enough, you’ll see something humorous in everything.”
For a while they said nothing, staring at their bow-drill.
This fire-conjuring business just wasn’t working. The drill would rip off his skin and grind his flesh to the bone well before it produced a glowing ember at its tip. They had to find some way to hold the damn drill-stick in place without touching it—but how?
Liz said, “Let’s wrap some leaves around it.”
“Around the drill-rod?”
“No, silly. Your bleeding hand.”
“Nah, it’s nothing. A little sacrifice to the spirit of fire.”
A crow cawed somewhere deep in the forest. The sun sank slowly toward the western woods, and John estimated it was between three and six in the afternoon. He stared at the bow-drill until his head hurt. His gaze drifted to their nut-cracking stone. Suddenly, he had an idea.
“Use the stone to push the rod down,” he said.
The rock had an indentation on one side, and it mounted atop the drill-stick perfectly. Liz held it in place with both hands. Now the business end of the drill sat snug in the knothole, pushed into it by the weight of the rock.
They exchanged a jubilant glance, and his spirits lifted. It might just work. He resumed the sawing motions with the bow. As it ground against the wood below and the stone above, the drill bit squeaked and squealed. An opera fit for the Mouse King. Squeak, squeak, back and forth, back and forth.
His mind drifted.
Oh, how he envied the rabbits hopping around their meadow. Now those guys had no need of fire. They just ate grass, dug their burrows, and bred like crazy. In the golden evening sun, they appeared perfectly content. He imagined they wouldn’t be too happy roasting in coals for his and Liz’s dinner.
A crow called again. Closer this time. John gazed about the clearing distractedly. Ah, what a miracle meadow they had. So lovely. A forest fire must have burned out of control here, decades ago, demolishing a patch of woods some hundred yards across. A few charred trunks still stood in testimony to its fiery fury.
Over the years, brambles choked the newly opened space, in some places growing higher than John’s six feet. But somehow, the thorny vines shunned the center. Perhaps they didn’t like direct sun. Too dry for them. Whatever the reason, the result was a forty-by-thirty-yard meadow where ferns and wild grasses grew waist-high, alongside assorted young trees, including the two mighty hazels. Their emergency food supply.
Despite his shoulder muscles cramping, he continued to saw the bow back and forth. Finally, he asked. “Any idea how long it might take?”
“Nope.”
He shifted the tool to his left hand and resumed drilling. Every now and then, he would glance at the drill-stick rotating in the knothole, hoping to see the stick burst into flames. So far nothing.
“Let me try,” she said.
Carefully, he swapped his bow for her stone. He found holding the rock in place and aligned wasn’t as easy as it looked. His desk-driver’s muscles screamed in protest.
Liz applied herself to the bow with surprising vigor, and ten minutes later a thin wisp of gray smoke curled around the drill-rod’s tip. Jubilant, she redoubled her efforts. The stick ground and squeaked. The smoke grew denser. A beautiful aroma of smoldering wood rose in the air.
By now, Liz was breathing hard, her sawing motions slowing down.
“Let me take over,” he said.
Her hands trembled as she handed him the bow and picked up the stone. John worked the drill furiously for five minutes. The smoke thickened. He was grinning like a madman.
“Let’s try it,” Liz exclaimed. “I can’t hold that rock for much longer.”
He nodded and gripped the rod. Liz took the stone away. Like a ghostly snake, the smoke continued to coil around the stick.
Warily, as if he were handling a landmine, John pulled the rod from the knothole. The end glowed red like that of a lit cigar.
But before he could plunge it into the ball of reed fluff and birch-bark shavings he’d prepared for the occasion, the glowing ember broke off and fell.
Trailing smoke, it bounced off the log and onto the damp ground. Liz dug it out of the matted grass with a spoon and dropped it into the nest of tinder. Too late. No matter how hard they huffed and puffed, the fire wouldn’t start.
Dejectedly, they exchanged a weary smile.
“Never mind,” he said. “Great things aren’t supposed to be easy.”
Out of the corner of his eye, John saw a crow alighting in a dead fire-blackened tree at the far end of their clearing. Surely a good sign. He yawned. Why was he so sleepy? They still had a couple hours until nightfall. Yesterday, he didn’t want to sleep until dark.
Liz yawned too. “Now this was really tiring. I’m knackered. Please no more today.”
“We’ve gotta take advantage of dry weather,” he said, but his voice lacked conviction. Anyhow, if they managed to get a glowing ember on the first try, they’d do better tomorrow. As a proof of concept, the experiment had worked like a charm.
He yawned again. So tired. What time was it exactly? Should they power up one of their phones and check? Sooner or later the batteries would die anyway.
“Liz, what time is it, you think?”
“Six or seven. Why?”
“It feels much later.”
She stretched. “It must be because we work hard and eat little.”
John glanced at the sun, rubbing his aching neck. When they’d first arrived at this world, the sun had been setting like now, while their phones displayed 10 a.m.
He brought out his box from the hut, fished out his phone, and powered it up. He expected the screen to show ten or eleven in the morning. Instead, it showed three in the afternoon.
For a while, he stared at it dumbly. Somehow the clocks got messed up. Again. What the hell? He said, “On day zero, the clocks were off by eight hours. But now they’re off only by three hours, judging by the sun. It’s like the time zones keep changing.”
Liz peeked at his phone and frowned.
“How could this be?” he asked.
“Maybe something’s wrong with your phone.”
She switched on her own device. When it powered up, the screen displayed. 03:01 p.m.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said brightly.
“I do love when you put a positiv
e spin on everything.”
“Yep, negativity kills. Anyway, who cares about clocks? We live by the sun.”
“We’ll ponder the problem of the wrong time tomorrow,” Liz said. “I’m so tired, I can barely keep my eyes open.”
A flock of crows arrived and cavorted over the far end of the meadow, calling in their harsh voices. The bunnies scattered. Or perhaps the smell of the burning had scared them. John noted the smoke had blown in that direction.
***
Deep inside the bramble patch, the stripy cat shivered in terror, his belly low to the ground. The awful stench of the Terrible Thing That Burns itched his nostrils. He couldn’t comprehend why the two-legged deer couple didn’t flee from the Terrible Thing. Instead, they seemed to be in deep communion with it. Concealed within the thorny embrace, the cat couldn’t see them, of course. But his nose told him more than he wanted to know. The deer and the Terrible Thing were dancing, their pleasant meaty aroma nearly subsumed in the fiery breath of the Thing.
The cat tried to retreat, but the vines had collapsed behind him, blocking the way. That was a minor annoyance only. He was comfortable within the brambles. Indeed, it reminded him of the time, long ago, when he was a small kitten, hiding. He’d always been good at hiding.
The cat had been slowly infiltrating the lair of the strange two-legged deer all afternoon. The feather-flappers flew overhead, making their annoying noises, but the strange deer couple remained blissfully unaware of him inching ever closer. They grazed in their meadow, banged their hooves against the log, and ground their horns into it. A part of their mating ritual, no doubt. The season of yellow leaves was the deer-rutting time, after all. Good for hunting. Distracted deer were easy prey.
The cat sniffed the air again. The smoky stench of the Terrible Thing lessened. Perhaps the Thing fell asleep. He lowered his great head and crawled under a thorny strand. The barbs slid harmlessly over his slick, thick fur. He flexed his shoulders, and the vine tore. He inched forward again.
Soon it will be sunset and then mealtime.
Soon.