Steve did the cooking again, this time it was pork chops with a little bit of that lemon grass stuff and the combination was surprisingly good. I would have killed for a side of mashed potatoes with it at this point, but settled for a pork chop that literally hung an inch over the edge of my fairly sizeable wooden plate. John warned the rest of the group about the hell moose, and I couldn’t help but grin when I realized the group had officially adopted that name for it now. I suddenly appreciated the thrill a naturalist must get when they got to name a newly discovered species. I was picturing a hideous monstrosity I could hang the moniker of my ex on when Jeri asked me where we were at with the pottery project.

I shrugged and pointed at her boy toy. “Ask Skippy, he was our head kiln builder. I just work here.”

“Thanks for throwing me under the bus, Jack. It’s been cooking all morning, babe. I quit adding more wood a little while ago. It ought to have burnt down far enough to put it out by the time we finish dinner, then we’ll dig up the pottery pieces and check.”

She reached over and squeezed his leg, and the conversation around the fire shifted to some TV show Debbie and Allison both used to watch in the real world. I had trouble following because I’d never seen it, but it didn’t sound like I was missing much. We all finished eating and followed Hunter over to the kiln instead of breaking up to our own thing. I guess everyone was curious about the kiln experiment. He was screwing around trying to pull out smoldering embers by hand, and I bumped him with my hip so he’d get out of the damn way and just dragged the fire over to the side with the edge of my shovel. After the ground was clear I took another pass to peel off a layer of dirt, trying to keep it gentle in case I hit pottery. I felt it click against something and pulled my shovel back and stuck in my hand.

The top piece was one of the arrowheads. It was still unpleasantly warm in my hand, and had picked up an almost rust orange color. It felt hard though if not all that sharp, and I handed it to Debbie.

“Careful it’s hot.”

She took it and started examining it, eventually passing it to some of the others as I took a knee and felt around for the rest. It was all a slightly different shade of that same orangish color, which seemed weird because the clay had been gray. The oil lamp had some tiny hairline cracks that didn’t look like they went all the way through, and the hinge looked permanently locked in place while the flange part of it had broken completely off. The thimble that had been buried the deepest deformed when I squeezed it a little too hard, but overall I considered this to have been a successful test run. John had the little cylinder I made and he tried it against his overalls and then tested it with his thumb.

“This needle isn’t going to work for sewing. It’s dull as all get out.”

“Huh, a needle would have been a pretty good seller. I imagine we’ll see a lot of hand sewn products in the future.” I’d just been screwing around with the clay, but needles weren’t a bad idea.

Debbie picked up the two broken pieces of hinge, and smacked them with the back edge of her bowie. I guess she was trying to get an idea of how rugged the fired pottery had ended up. She had to ramp up the smack a couple of times before she shattered the piece on the third hit. That must have been good enough, because she held up her oil lamp and smiled at the rest of us. “Tomorrow we spend the morning at full scale clay production to give us plenty to work with. It’s looking kind of like Terra Cotta so we’ll have to check and see how water resistant it is without a glaze. I think we’ve come up with a short term trade good instead of hides though. Good job guys.”

Nobody cheered or anything, but everybody looked pretty happy as we all split up to go do our own thing. After the throw down with the Hell Moose which was still out there, I was a little nervous to work on my place with no one around to watch my back. I sucked it up and got started anyway, careful to pause every now and again to look around, even running a short patrol around the area twice. It slowed down my work a little bit, but I didn’t take an antler in the ass so I counted it as a win.

I poured some water from my waterskin into my pail, and dropped in strips of rawhide to start soaking. After that was started I measured out the height for my door jamb and brought the sturdiest two logs I could carry by myself over to frame it out. There wasn’t going to be a heavy duty deadbolt set into a white pine 2 x 4 stud like most houses back in the real world in this house. Trying to kick in my front door would earn a guy a broken foot. The door itself had to be light though, because metal hinges weren’t available and I had to be able to open and close it after all. I went for strong instead of solid. I must have cut a thousand willow branches in the next couple of hours. None longer than the door would be tall, and most of them smaller diameter than my pinky finger. I’d pick a couple random places on two switches and tie them together with tiny strips of the wet rawhide. I repeated the process, again and again, until my fingers were raw with it. I kept adding the bundles to one another, sometimes diagonal, sometimes vertical, but never horizontal. There was an overall pattern without a pattern until in the end I had a door size rectangle about three inches thick, made up of tiny flexible rods. Once the rawhide dried, if a guy took his time and cut a couple hundred of the individual rawhide thongs, the whole door would come apart. If a guy tried to chop the door down or brute force his way inside, the door should give and just bounce right back as strong as before.

I made a couple of wooden hinges to put on the inside by carving a trunk with a limb at right angles hollow and whitling the end of another just like down just small enough to fit inside. When I stacked them together it worked as a crude hinge. I had to stick the hinge to the jamb by carving out a mitred dovetail that would lock them together. That part didn’t seem too sturdy, but since I’d have to have a bar up to lock the door anyway I figured that wouldn’t matter. If the bar was sturdy enough it wouldn’t matter if someone broke the hinges.

By the time it had gotten dark I had four walls and an awfully sturdy door in place. I still had a roof, some kind of light source, and all the furnishings to worry about, but my future home was slowly coming together. I hiked back up to the keep and read through the articles on moose while I drifted off to sleep, trying to figure an advantage for round two.