I slept the last night on the Compass Rock. I sat in the dark scraping the animal’s pelt on a rack of woven bones. I scraped the animal’s thin amphibious hide with a splinter of its lower jaw. My lack of experience left the pelt with several ragged holes and tears. So it goes. One supposes that my skills will improve with time.
I have very little in my kit as I depart my cave for the northern incline. I have the remains of a spear now reduced to a walking stick. I the intestines of the first croc wrapped around my forearms, five on each arm, cut to 15 cm straps. The second length of guts is wrapped about my walking stick. The animal’s leather has proven brittle when it dries out, but perhaps they will serve. Around my neck is one such small leather sack, becoming brittle as it dries out.
Leathermaking will require tanning and curing and a host of other things. These indigenous animals have such weak flesh. It barely justifies the effort. I must have things that attach other things, or else I will be unable to build even the most basic of tools.The fern stems serve, but they dry out as well, and are weak. Perhaps the guts will do better, but they must be rationed, and every meter of them is won in battle.
North of the cave, I immediately observe a lessening of the undergrowth. Fewer ferns. No fronds of those short trees. No conifers. Their cones no doubt run down the side of this mountain with the rains. The rains are from moisture trapped by the mountain. The area becomes a basin for life, a receptacle where the aggregate of several regions are combined and evolution hashes out the dominant pattern.
I discover a jutting area of rock about 4 km up the mountainside, facing southward. The stone is bleached white by the sun. Only short ferns adorn the transition to pale stone. The mountain is solitary, a jagged tooth at my back, grey stone and rising to the height of the sun in the middle distance. The vague outline of further mountains in the distance suggest that it’s the beginning of a longer mountain range. One can only imagine where it leads.
A foul thought corrupts the scene. I have a seat on the stone and look back at the swamp. The swamp is life. Food is there, the slimy things that crawl and devour one another to build the mighty engine of evolution. Behind me is bare rock under a baking sun. There is no guarantee of any life along that mountain range. It is not a mountain of my fading memory. It is not ecology. It is simply stone. What lives on or in mountains may not be for another 50 million years. I have to remind myself of such things. This is not my world. All assumptions, logic and conclusion must conform to what is. What was/will be is no longer relevant. There is only this once and future present.
Does this mean that we must only live in or around the swamp? Am I bound to a 5 km circuit around that pit of crocodilians?
The stone beneath me is bare and warm. It’s wide and flat and moored well to the rock. The angle offers poor coverage beneath. I’ll call it Arrow Rock, until something better occurs to me. How can I use it?
This is how I think of everything now: how can I use it?