“It is a nice night,” Galmine said as she stood from beside the fire. “I will go work on the baskets for clay outside.”
“I will go inspect the logs we are burning,” Sheela said as she stood.
“I uhhh, guess I’ll help Galmine,” Kacerie said as she also stood. The three women walked out of the hut, and I looked at Trel.
“You didn’t eat any of your dinner,” I said as I pointed at her plate.
“I am hungry for other things now, my dear Victor,” she whispered, and then she pushed her plate aside and crawled over to me on her human knees.
Our lovemaking wasn’t as intense as it was yesterday. Trel was still mostly in control, and she still rode me with urgency, but we spent a lot more time kissing, whispering pleasures to each other, and cuddling. We both climaxed when she was on top of me, and she did her usual inverted hang to ensure that all of my sperm went into her womb. It was kind of a turn on to see how much she wanted my seed, especially after almost of a month of her antagonizing me.
Our second round was doggie style, but we did it standing with her spider legs bracing against me. The position allowed me to fondle her perfect ass while we made love, and Trel really seemed to enjoy it. She let out a long growl when we both climaxed again, and I relaxed on one of our sleeping mats while she hung inverted over my mouth. We kissed for a few minutes while we came down from our euphoria, and then she lowered herself into my arms so we could bask in each other’s embrace.
“Our children will be beautiful,” Trel said. “They will be brave and intelligent. Our work will be much easier once they are born and reach maturity.”
“How long will that take?” I asked, even though I still doubted she could get pregnant.
“Five or so years,” she said. “But they will be able to do work after six months.”
“Damn, that is fast.”
“Is it? How long does it take your species to reach maturity?”
“Uhh, we have both physical and emotional maturity. Most people are physically mature at eighteen years.”
“Eighteen years?” Trel gasped. “Why so slow?”
“That’s just how it is,” I said. “I’m surprised your kind ages so fast.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty,” I said.
“Perhaps the measurement of time is different on our world,” Trel said. “I’m six years old in my own time, but our ages seem similar.”
“Could be,” I said. “Probably doesn’t matter. I doubt we’ll be going back. All I know is that I’m happy you are in my arms right now, and I’m glad we have a good plan for tomorrow. We are a good building team.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I do enjoy this. I am sorry again for being so difficult when we first met. If I’d known how much I would enjoy being your lover, I would have just--”
“It’s fine,” I said as I hugged her tighter. “We have a lot of work ahead of us. I’d love to lay here with you all night and drift off to sleep, but I think we all need to work on baskets and cordage. Let’s go get the others and get back to work.”
“Yes, Victor,” Trel said as she leaned her mouth up to kiss me. Her lips reignited my passion again, and we made love one more time before we went back to work.
Chapter 12
The next day was a whirlwind of constant work.
And that was saying a lot since Trel, Sheela, Galmine and I were used to some pretty grueling work.
We’d finished making two more clay baskets last night as well as a lot of cordage. Galmine’s task for the day was to make another basket for clay, craft more arrows, and continue with the cordage. She also had to take care of all the meal preparation. The beautiful woman informed me that she had enough bird for today, but we’d have to get more food tomorrow.
Sheela was our resident axe expert, and she went to work clearing the branches from the trees that we toppled during the last two days. She worked tirelessly with her tools, but she avoided looking at me during most of the day.
Trel spent the day organizing the trees we toppled so that they were aligned to make a tight fit. This meant I had to use Hope to push the logs around, but the other three parasaurs were the better diggers anyway, and the loss of the smaller dino didn’t really impede their progress.
Once Trel had thirty logs aligned the way she wanted, she used an axe to start on the spot where she would make the fire holes. To make sure she was setting these correctly, she asked me to make Hope spin them around a bit so that she could eyeball the sides. At first, she asked Kacerie or me to use an axe and trim some of the trunks so they would fit better, but Trel was quickly frustrated with Kacerie’s lack of axe chopping skills, so she ended up doing the task herself.
Kacerie was our floater. She helped Sheela clear the cut branches from the trunks, selected branches that might work for dowels and put those in another pile for Trel to inspect, and sharpened our axes during her downtime.
The axes ended being a bit of a problem for us. We had built them like traditional ones with the blade’s edge parallel to the handle. Trel’s new plan for the wall meant that the logs had to be shaped a lot more, and we quickly realized we needed axes with a blade mounted perpendicular to the handle. That way we could stand on top or astride the log and cut downward to shave the trunk. Trel didn’t really know the name of the design, but I recalled the name “adze” from an old boat crafting documentary I once watched on YouTube.
Building our first adze was surprisingly simple. I told Kacerie that she needed to find an arm-length branch with some sort of knot or junction at the end. We had plenty of branches lying around, but the material was still green, and I thought it wouldn’t be suitable for a handle. She still found a dried branch on the ground during her other tasks, and it had a junction like I wanted.
I used one of our axes to trim the pieces off the end and then carved a slot by the junctioning piece. A few hours later Sheela stumbled across a rock that would work for the blade, and I pounded into the slot before I wrapped it to the nub of the branch at the junction. The tool ended up resembling the number 7, or like a gardening hoe, and I tested a few chops against the bark of a tree. I was able to get some good leverage with the tool, so I gave it to Kacerie so she could shave the handle and sharpen the stone blade.
I probably had the easiest day of the group. I did chopping and gathering work when the parasaurs were busy with the tasks I commanded, but rotating the logs with Hope required most of my concentration. Bob, Sonny, and Cher ended up taking down their sixtieth tree a bit after lunch, and I switched their tasks around so that they focused on pushing the fallen trees closer to the central spot where we were working. These trees were hard to muscle around because the roots were still attached, but we’d cleared a significant part of the younger growth the two hundred yards from our processing center. I didn’t want Trel, Sheela, and Kacerie working that deep in the forest, so I made the dinos do the grunt work of bringing them closer to us.
While the three parasaurs moved the recently fallen trees, I attached the dragging harness to Hope and had her pull the logs Trel marked into the fort. The set up worked well since the smaller parasaur could fit through the door, and I had all thirty of the logs Trel marked inside of the fort by the time the sun was low in the sky.
“I just need the clay,” Trel said when I returned to our log-processing site with Hope. “All of these trees are marked, and we should be able to get them all burning tonight if you can get me the clay soon. Then we’ll be done out here and we can start on the ones inside of the fort.”