“Damn, good job, Trel,” I said.
I gestured for Sheela to climb down the rope as Trel dismounted, and the cat-woman did so. My palms got sweaty when I looked at the distance down to the ground, but I remembered how easily it had been for me to climb the rope up, and I leaned over the branch to grasp the rope. A few dozen seconds later and I was standing on the ground and Trel’s lips were pressed against mine.
“I was worried,” she whispered in my ear after our passionate kiss ended.
“Me too,” I replied. “We are going to lose this rope, and you’ll need to make a new saddle, and we’ll need to make another trip back with our spare pots for water.”
“I can get the rope,” Trel said as her spider legs extended from her back.
I watched her scale the tree like some sort of Doctor Octopus from the Spiderman comics. Her arachnid legs did all the work of clinging to the wall, and her human body just floated in the air. It took her less than five seconds to reach the branch and untangle the rope, and she descended even faster.
“Easy,” Trel said as she handed the coiled rope to Sheela. “You know, I’ve never been this far out of the camp before.” She looked up to the trees, and I saw her wink her eyes a few times.
“What are you thinking?” I asked as I turned an eye toward Hope. The parasaur didn’t seem worried about anything, so I guessed that the raptors were long gone.
“We could build in the trees,” she said as she blinked her eyes to use her Eye-Q. “They are very strong and we would be safe high off the ground.”
“Hmm,” I said as I looked up at the tall trunks of the massive redwoods. “What about a farm or stable for our tamed dinos?”
“Might be useful as a backup fort,” Trel said with a shrug of her shoulders. “Besides, you have only tamed two dinosaurs so far, so I’m not thinking our stables need to be that big.”
“Hey, I’m working on it!” I said with a laugh. Damn, it felt good to be alive. It felt great to kiss Trel, and it felt wonderful to know there was going to be a tomorrow. For a few minutes, I was sure I was going to die, and I’d been okay with it because I knew Sheela might live.
“Well, you need to work on getting water, and then clay, and then inseminating me,” Trel said with a coy smile. “So let’s get back on Hope, return to the fort, and complete our tasks.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a mock salute.
Then the two beautiful women and I climbed onto Hope’s back and rode back to our fort.
Chapter 5
Sheela and I went right back out as soon as we returned Trel to the fort. Galmine and Kacerie didn’t want us to leave again, especially after we told them about the organized raptor attack, but we really didn’t have a choice, we had no water left, and we had broken two of our jugs. We did have four more that we could use for water, but I hadn’t planned on breaking two of them, and now we really needed clay.
The ride back to the stream was uneventful, but Sheela and I were on high alert and knew that we would be in big trouble if we got attacked again. We didn’t have a saddle to help us stay on Hope, and we could only really carry one spear and two jugs between us. The trip was tense, and we both breathed a long sigh of relief once we had returned safely with the water.
“Victor, I believe we should skip the trip to the lake for clay,” Sheela said as she gestured to the sun. There was only a sliver left of light, and the air was beginning to fill with the sound of frogs and crickets.
“Damn,” I sighed and tried to rearrange my plans so that we all wouldn’t waste too much time. I intended to have Galmine show Kacerie her clay handling techniques while Sheela, Trel, and I worked on baskets. Then, when the clay was drying, Galmine and Kacerie could continue with either baskets or cordage.
“Trel,” I called out to the spider-woman as Sheela and I slid off Hope’s back.
“Yes?” the obsidian-haired woman answered without looking over to me. She had laid out some of our thinner poles on the ground in a trapezoid shape, and I saw her blink her eyes a few times as she tapped her lips with one of her black fingers.
“Can you work on the saddle tonight and tomorrow? That is the priority now.”
“Victor.” She sighed and finally looked over to me. “Priority is my pregnancy; everything else is secondary.”
“If we don’t have the saddle, it will be hard for us to get a lot of clay,” I said. “If we don’t get enough clay, we’ll have to keep making runs for water every day, which will take time away from working on the improved fort.”
“Not a big deal,” she said. “It only takes you a few minutes to get water every day.” The woman turned her black eyes away from me and looked up to the branches of the massive redwood tree we had built our fort walls against. Then she looked down at the trapezoid shaped array of wood poles on the ground.
“Except today Sheela and I were almost killed by raptors,” I said as I tried to control my voice. She was suddenly being difficult, but I remembered who I was talking to. Trel was brilliant, but also selfish. I was going to have to show her what was in it for her.
“But you weren’t,” Trel said as she glanced back up to the tree again.
“If if I had, what would that mean for your babies?” My question caught her attention, and she turned down from the tree so she could see me.
“Hmm, I see your point, Victor. I will work on the saddle tonight.” Trel turned her black eyes to Sheela and cleared her throat. “You are both going to be astounded by what I am about to say.”
“Astounded?” Sheela asked as her cat-eyes opened.
“Yes,” Trel sighed. “I’m afraid I have made a mistake.”
Sheela and I both looked at each other and then turned back to Trel.
“I was thinking of the trees in the forest, and I realized that we could easily occupy this one.” Trel pointed up above her to our tree, and I cranked my neck back so I could see it. The massive redwood was probably a good sixty feet in diameter, and the nearest branches were probably that high off the ground.
“How?” I asked.
“It would be difficult without nails,” Trel said, “but I realized I can use rope to suspend platforms. I can ascend the trunk easily, and we can have a rope ladder descend so the rest of you can follow.”
“So we are going to need a shitload of rope,” I said.
“Yes,” Trel said. “But the cordage we are making with plant fibers will not be strong enough. This is the mistake I made.”
“How are we going to make stronger rope?” I asked.
“Dinosaur sinew,” Trel said with a sly smile. “I will still need a lot of it, but it will last much longer than what we are using now, and it will support more weight. I made a mistake by not thinking of it sooner.”
“We have a pile of raptors out there,” I said as I pointed to the door of our fort.
“Yes, but night approaches. If they are still there in the morning, we can use them, or we can all drag them back into the fort and then begin the long process of cutting them open and tearing out their tendons and ligaments.”
“We also need to get fibers to make baskets,” I said as I went back to my plan about what to do tonight without clay.
“That will be much easier to gather,” Trel said. “You should leave now and get them. The sinew approach will take a long time for us to process. We will need to tear them out of the corpses, then let them dry, then cut them into thinner strips, then wind them together, then combine them into thicker cords, then rope. It will take two, maybe three times as long to come up with cordage using it, but the result will be much stronger.”
“It would be much better for bows,” Sheela said.
“Yes. It is a better material. I am apologizing because I didn’t think of it before, and I’m angry for the time we wasted.”