In no time Urist and Co. finished making the coop and moved the chickens inside, the lazing chickens were startled at first but then quickly relaxed when they settled in. As for the dogs who were big golden retrievers, they would sleep inside the cave together with the dwarfs since they had been fluffy bed warmers.

There wasn’t any dog food to feed them so they were fed leftovers such as cooked boneless fish or leftovers from the prepackaged food. As for water needs, Urist had found a large watertight log with a deep bowl-shaped hole made from some nest making animal that had fallen over.

Urist made sure to keep them healthy in case they needed emergency food rations, but unless food became a dire thing, he didn’t want to do that. He named the one with blue eyes Goldie and the one with brown eyes Wicker.

With such thoughts on his mind, Urist headed over to the trap making team and found out they had made pretty good progress in making the traps. When he told them that he had seen squirrels and deer, the funny thing was how fired the trap group got when Urist mentioned making some tasty meat stew if they caught some.

The dwarfs immediately got to work making a few deer and squirrel snares. For the squirrel snares, they were pretty easy to set; all they needed to do was to make a small noose and tie them to a large stick. The trap worked pretty easy if you lean a log onto a large tree that the squirrels frequented. They would get lazy and use the large stick to travel up the tree.

For trapping the vampire deer, they would search for animal trails and a suitable sapling to make a leg snare. The principle behind the snare was that as the deer walks along the path, its leg would be caught in the noose. The noose, with it being connected to a wooden mechanism, would then be activated by the unfortunate deer's leg.

As for catching hares alive, the best idea to catch hares alive however was to craft small wooden boxes to trap them with. The nifty thing about these traps was the counterweight closing door mechanism. When a hare pushes against the rope holding the counterweight in place, the weight would fall and close the door.

After doing a trial set up of the trap the dwarfs quickly noticed that the trap was too light and now faced skywards. To fix the slight problem they added rocks at the bottom tied with rope to give the trap more weight. With the problem of how to catch them alive solved, they now faced how to keep the hares from escaping.

A thought struck Urist to create another pen but for the floor to be made out of stones should the hares decide to dig their way out. For the material making up the walls, bamboo was decided upon to be used and later Urist wished to replace them with rocks.

And to keep the hares warm and comfy, grass bedding on top of warm dirt was placed down on the ground granting the hares a place to rest in ease. When they caught some, Urist made it a rule to clean their pen once every week to make sure no strange disease popped up; the same went for the chickens.

All poop, that also included dwarf poop, was gathered away from the camp to be mixed with dead leaves and soil to create a simple fertilizer for planting. With the plans all coming together, Urist talked with the trapper dwarfs and worked out a time to set up all these traps. The schedule was in the morning and when afternoon came, the traps were to be checked to see if they caught anything.

With that all out of the way, Urist set his sights on making a bowl. The concept was easy enough to understand, burn a hole big enough to eat out of. Simple really. He had prepared beforehand taking out some sticks to act like tongs and used the shovel to hold the cherries he used.

Finding a dead tree of heavy wood for the base material, he split it down the middle using the axe. He enlisted the help of Uria, Uroa, and Briana who finished their jobs for today to share the burden of cutting the wood into fair-sized chunks. Afterall, he didn’t want to break his back alone.

They took turns chopping up one of the pieces into chunks to be used as bowls using the charcoal guidelines Urist laid down. While they worked on that, Urist dragged the other log over and started carving entry holes with his stone knife and marking up the guidelines.

Finishing his preparations, Urist got to work placing cherries into two holes and started blowing on them to make the process faster. It was by luck when Urork found some shells when he was fishing that would be perfect for scaping.

Urist chuckled when he remembered how sad Urork had been when he asked for the tool and only gave it up when he said he’ll make something yummy for him later. The process should take a while to finish so Urist asked Uria to help him in the process leaving the wood cutting to Uroa and Briana instead.

Sitting next to her Urist got a bottle of water out and started explaining the process, “It’s really simple Uria all you need to do is watch the coals burn in the spot for a while and breathe on them like this.”

Blowing on the coals to get a small flicker of flame going, Urist continued his explanation, “Next, when the coals have burned enough, we’ll take the shell scraper and remove the ash to make sure the process is going correctly in the way we want it.”

“To make sure we don’t get weird burns we’ll dampen the sides with water to better control the fire’s burning process.”

“Un I understand! But, um... Why are you making more than nine bowls?”

“Ah, it’s a simple matter of wanting to boil water faster. If we put water inside it and then throw in a hot stone, it’ll boil the water and make it safe to drink. This way we can also carry things inside them other than bamboo and make food and water holders for the hares. I hope to make a few buckets and containers this way and use them until we learn how to make pottery.”

“Throwing rocks into the water to boil it? Would the water even be safe? I mean why did we make filters out of charcoal if we could have done this in the first place? And why do we need bowls when we have bamboo? I think it’s a waste to use fire in such a way.”

Urist took a moment to think and sort through the barrage of questions before answering.

“You see, boiling kills off germs that reside in the water. The rocks shouldn’t have anything on them even with ash to carry with such intense heat. The reason why we made the filters is to to be careful.”

“Careful of what?”

“We don’t know this world and what inhabits it. We might be prone to dying from a certain material in the water so it was me just being cautious. With all the sightings of mammals, I can assume that the water supply should be drinkable with just a boil and decanting. Although I do want to test the water later on the captured hares and see their reaction. For the filters, we can still use filtered water as medical and long storage water.”

“Ok I can kind of get it but why can’t we just use bamboo as bowls? We shouldn’t waste fire.”

Urist made a bitter smile, “Yah we could just use bamboo as bowls, but it’s not the same as a good old round bowl. The volume can be considered bigger and we will be using the bamboo for other things anyway. Does that answer all of your questions Uria?”

Uria put on a thoughtful face before slowly nodding her head, “It’s not what I wanted to hear, but I can understand your line of thought. I’ll go with it for now.”

“That’s fine to be questioning me. Just wait and see I’ll show you the joys of bowls!”

Countdown

Time: 3 Days 5 hours 27 minutes until Market opens

Points Gained: 3462