“That’s a compliment!” Trel shouted back. “You are almost as smart as me!”
Kacerie narrowed her eyes at the spider-woman and smirked before she went back to her task.
Sheela was starting the fires on the logs, and I walked with Trel as she moved to the other side of the log.
“What about the door?” I asked as Trel handed me one of our fire making hand drills.
“I’ve got a good solution,” she said as we both set our drills next to the tinder in the chopped out nook of the log. “The logs we are using for the wall are six feet or so in diameter, and my circle design will ensure that they all support each other. However, the door will become the weak part. I’d like to use ten foot wide vertical posts for the entryway. We’ll cut notches in the bottom and then lay a horizontal support beam in the ground--”
“In addition to the dirt?” I asked as I spun the drill in my hand. All of us were practically magicians with the drills by now, and my tinder began smoking in less than ten seconds of me spinning the rod in my hand.
“Yes,” she replied. “It might not be needed, but I want to ensure any horizontal pressure on the door archway will be transmitted to the rest of the wall. I’ll do the same thing at the top of the twin posts. I’ll take another large log and then set it horizontally between them as a brace. The idea is that any pressure on the walls will continue to push through the entire structure instead of being halted by the gap in the door. That will give it strength.”
“Sounds like you are a genius,” I said as I grinned at her.
“Of course!” she giggled before she blew on her tinder. A few seconds later and our wood was burning, so we lit some branches on fire and moved to the next section while we continued our conversation.
“What about the door?” I asked. “You just told me about the arch. We need something to keep dinos, and maybe other people, from coming inside. Are you going to do another horizontally hinged door like you did for our first wall?”
“No. That isn’t going to work anymore.” Trel frowned. “The dinosaurs you have just acquired are too tall. I need to do doors that can be swung on vertical hinges. Ideally, we need two large doors so you can get even larger dinosaurs inside.”
“Can you make it big enough to fit one of those brontos in?” I asked.
“Oh, Victor, you are so cute sometimes. You really do think I’m a genius, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll bring the dinos, you figure out how to house them. We are a team.”
“We will need one of those bronto dinosaurs to be able to raise a frame big enough to fit one inside of the door,” she said. “Or I need to build some sort of crane to lift up a log that tall. What I currently have in mind will work with some cord pulleys and your trikes as muscle. Any higher will be more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult.”
“Got it,” I said. “So how do we build two giant doors on vertical hinges?”
“I have two ideas,” she said as we used our burning branches to light the next logs on fire. “They can both work together, but I will let you decide which we should work on first.”
“Okay,” I said as my cut caught on fire. “One idea is that we do not even bother with a door. Instead, we dig a trench around the entire fort and leave a dirt bridge leading out from our entry.”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“Look back at our current walls,” she said as she gestured to our camp. “Imagine how hard it would be for aggressive dinos to attack us if there was a six or eight-foot trench around our wall.”
“Hmmm,” I said as I tried to imagine it. “It would be like having an extra six or eight feet of wall.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Our enemies would have to run down the slope into the trench, then climb up the slope to our walls. Meanwhile, we could rain arrows or spears down upon them.”
“If we dug the trenches too deep, wouldn’t that risk the wall posts coming out at the bottom?” I asked.
“We’d put a bit of space from the slope of the trench and the wall,” Trel said. “Maybe three feet or so. But remember that our new wall is joined by dowels. Once we have the door arch erected, there will be no way an enemy can just pull down one of the posts. Even if they dug to the root of our wall, they are all forced together with the dowels that lock between them.”
“Makes sense,” I said as we walked to the next log to burn. Both Sheela and Kacerie had moved next to us so that they could hear Trel’s plans, and we all went to work on lighting the next log ablaze.
“We’ll leave the ground alone at the door, so it makes a land bridge across the trench.”
“The design will filter any group that attacks us into one area,” Sheela said. “I like the idea.”
“Agreed,” I said as I thought through the layout. Trel was pretty much making a “moat” around our castle. And while there wouldn’t be water in the trench, leaving the land raised and leveled at the gate would give us one point where we could leverage our defenses. “What about the gate?”
“That’s a bit of a challenge,” Trel said. “Initially, I thought we might not even need a gate.”
“What?” I asked with surprise.
“We have the group of trikes,” she said as she gestured to Tom, Nicole, and Katie. “And you seem to be on a dinosaur acquiring kick, so I imagine you’ll get more. You’ve taught them how to guard us, so I thought we could just leave a pair at the opening. Nothing will get past their horns, and we’ll be able to come and go easily when you just command them to step aside.”
“Hmmm,” I said as I thought through her plan.
“I do not like the idea,” Sheela said.
“I figured you wouldn’t, and I’ve reconsidered after what I saw at the lake. Those dark raptors are monsters, so we are going to need a door, and the trikes, and maybe a secondary wall that I will have to think through. Walk over with me to the dirt here, and I’ll show you what I was thinking.”
The three of us followed Trel to the side of the burning logs. We had a pile of wood there we were using to help build the fires, and she grabbed a few smaller branches and began to lay them out on the ground.
“Two doors for the gate. Each door made of three thicker vertical posts. We’ll use the dowel method to fill in the space between them with smaller vertical posts that will only extend down half the length of the three thicker posts. Across the back, I’ll tie horizontal logs for more strength.” Trel laid out more logs as she spoke and the design made sense to me.
The design looked a bit like the letter “H” but with one extra vertical post on the side and horizontal posts tied to the face of the door pointing outside.
“How will it stay locked?” Sheela asked.
“Those three posts. We’ll dig holes that they set into. Then we’ll just pull it up and out of the holes when we want to open it, but I’m not liking the design.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s going to be heavy,” Trel said with a shrug. “Each door will probably weigh a few hundred pounds, so I can only make it about eight feet high with posts four feet in diameter. We are going to have to muscle it up and out each time we want to leave. I might be able to craft a pulley system that uses the header of my frame, but that’s only going to help a little with the weight. The issue is that you are the one leaving most often, so we can’t count on dinosaur power to move them open and closed consistently.”
“Do you have any other ideas?” I asked as I puzzled through the problem.
“Plenty,” Trel said, “but they all need metal. Or more time. I can improve on the design in the next few months, but if you want a gate on this fort the day after tomorrow, we either have to do this heavy twin door design, or you are going to have to keep the trikes as sentries.”
“Let’s go with the doors first,” I said. “If they become too hard to move, we’ll just use the trikes, and I’ll see if I can tame a few more. We’ll have to make them guard in shifts, but I can tell I’m starting to we
ar them all out with the building.”
“I’ll get to work on it tomorrow after we finish preparing the last group of fallen trees,” Trel said, and we went back to work burning this batch of logs.
We finished a bit after the sun had set. I was still a bit worried about leaving all these smoldering logs burning inside of a redwood forest, but I realized I didn’t have much of a choice. We needed to do this to alleviate the potential bottleneck. Trel and I could put these sixty logs up in the trench tomorrow while the parasaurs pushed down the final group of fifty-ish. I felt as if I’d gotten rid of all the possible bottlenecks in our process, and the original plan of six weeks was going to take us just two more days.
We were all exhausted though. It had been a month since Sheela and I took a day off, and even our break of lovemaking at the side of the river had been an exercise. The team ate dinner in silence, and it was apparent that each of us was lost in our own thoughts.
“You are all doing a great job,” I said after we finished eating and decided who would take which watch shift. “We just have two more days of this, and then we can take a bit of a break. We probably won’t ever be able to relax, but having this new fort wall up is going to give us a lot of protection and space. Then I’ll get more dinosaurs and we can work on some comfort projects.”
“I am looking forward to that,” Trel said, as she lifted up a clay funnel to show me. It was part of the water filter design she had crafted with Galmine. “This will be ready for finer sand after we get the wall up and trenches built. Then we will have clean water.”
“Looking forward to it,” I said as I turned to Kacerie. “And your soap.”
“Me too,” the beautiful pink-haired woman smiled at me and then her eyes opened wide with surprise.
A glowing light filled her skin as if she had a spotlight aimed at her. Trel, Sheela, Galmine, and I gasped when a loud popping gun-shot sound cracked.
The light from Kacerie instantly faded and the woman let out a long exhale.
“Ahhhh,” she sighed with pleasure.
“What was that?” I asked, but I already guessed the answer to my own question.
“That was my Lance recharging,” she said as her eyes narrowed.
“Ahh. That’s sooner than expected?”
“Yeah,” she whispered as she turned to look at Trel. Then Kacerie turned to look at Sheela.
There was suddenly a lot of tension in the hut.
“Well…” Kacerie said as she set down her empty plate. The woman stood up gracefully and then flexed the fingers of both her hands as if she was preparing to play the piano. “I guess it’s my watch.”
“Yeah,” I said as I felt a bit of relief pour into my stomach.
“Alright, I’ll wake you up for the second one, Victor.” Kacerie smiled at me, and then she stepped out of the hut.
Trel, Sheela, and I all let out long exhales as soon as she left.
“What’s wrong?” Galmine asked as she picked up Kacerie’s plate.
“For half a moment there, I thought I’d have to bite her,” Trel whispered.
“Same,” Sheela whispered.
“Huh? Who?” Galmine looked around the hut with confusion, and Jinx let out a chirp.
“Kacerie,” I whispered even softer than Trel and Sheela. “She just got her powers back, and we were worried that she might use them on us.”
“Really?” Galmine’s emerald eyes were open wide. “But Kacerie is so nice, she’s been so helpful. I wasn’t worried at all.”
The three of us laughed, and then we all leaned down so we were laying on my sleeping mat.
“Galmine, don’t ever change,” I said. “I love how you are.”
“Don’t worry, Victor,” she said as she crawled over to me. “I will be who I am for you always.”
The gray-skinned woman came into my arms and lay on top of me while Trel moved over to lie against my back. I turned across the fire to look at Sheela, and then I gestured for her to join us. The blonde woman nodded and stepped around the flame to lay opposite of Trel. The three of them cuddled near me made the hut incredibly hot, but I didn’t care. I’d have to wake up for my watch shift in a few hours, and the feel of my lovers’ warm bodies against me while I slept was worth all the work I’d done so far in Dinosaurland.
Chapter 16
The next morning went exactly as I planned. The holes we burned in the logs were all perfect, save for one that Trel said had burned a bit too wide. We ended up using the remainder of our clay to fill the gap between it and the dowel and still used it for the wall.
Scavengers that had feasted on the corpses of the waring birds for the last few days moved onto the corpses of the carnos. The pile of those bodies was all the way on the other side of the clearing though, so we didn’t have to worry about any of the small dinosaurs being near us. I’d actually thought about burying the carno bodies, but it would have been a giant hole, and taken time away from pushing down the trees. I had to balance us getting the wall built with the threat of scavengers.
I still worried about the new species of raptors, and the dark smoke in the distant north. The smoke plumed in the air less than it had yesterday, and I finally took Hope up to the nearest crest of the north hill with Sheela. We got off the parasaur some thirty feet from the top of the ridge and crawled the rest of the way to the top of the slope so that we wouldn’t accidentally be seen. It really didn’t matter though, the smoke was significant, but it seemed to be thirty or maybe forty miles away. It looked like it was near the coast of the beach, but it was too hard to tell.
“A wooden wall isn’t going to stop flames,” I said to Sheela as we watched the distant smoke.
“No,” she said. “Perhaps we can use some of the clay to fortify the walls?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “It would be like stucco. I’ll add it to the list, but I’m worried we are going to run out of clay from our spot. We could use mud, but I don’t think it will be as strong.”
“We could also use stone,” Sheela suggested. “We’ll need to find a quarry and cut some.”
“That’s a lot more work,” I said, “but we might have to do that. Let’s go back to camp and work with what we have. The new walls will stop those raptors and keep our dinos safe. We can finish tomorrow if we push hard enough today.”
We rode Hope back down to our camp and continued to build. The parasaurs pushed down more trees, Sheela and Kacerie chopped the branches off and set the cuts for the burns. Trel and I used Katie and Nicole to lift up the logs in the wall while we hammered in the connecting dowels. We’d all become efficient at our tasks, and we’d ended up raising forty-four logs before it was time for lunch.
The women took a break inside the smaller fort while I took the dinos to get their lunch drink. The trip was quick, and I returned to find them cooking our second to last chunk of carnotaurus. We’d be good for tonight, but tomorrow I’d have to get the wall up and also hunt for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Trel and I finished erecting all the available logs a few hours after lunch. It was around the time the parasaurs pushed down the last tree we thought we would need. The wall was about three-fourths built, and it looked all sorts of badass. The posts we’d sunk into the trenches didn’t wiggle at all when I had Tom do a test lean into them, and they were a good fifteen feet tall. We ended up finishing our fort work for that day a few hours ahead of schedule, and I started to feel like everything was falling right into place.
Then I remembered that we needed to make another clay run.
“I will go with you,” Sheela said.
“Me too,” Kacerie said.
“It might be dangerous,” I said. “I’m just going to take Bob, get in, and then get out as fast as I can.”
“That is why you need help,” Sheela said in a way that made me think I wasn’t going to be able to argue with her.
“You’ll need me also,” Kacerie said. “If you do get attacked, I can take out the first two raptors in an inst
ant.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we only have two spots on the sadd--”
“We can cram together,” Kacerie said. “It only takes us ten minutes or so to ride there. We can all sit on each other’s laps.”
“Take Kacerie,” Trel urged. “I’ll stay here and work on the stand for our filters. Just be quick, or Galmine might worry.”
“Ahh, just Galmine will worry?” I winked at her, and she gave me a quick kiss before she handed us the leaf baskets.
Sheela and Kacerie put the baskets on Bob’s saddle, and then we all climbed on. Kacerie ended up sitting between Sheela and me, but there was just enough room on the saddle for all three of us. I turned the parasaur around toward the northeast side of our valley, ordered the rest of my dinosaur pets to patrol around the fort, and then set off toward the lake.
We made it to the other valley without issue, but I paused near the top of the ridge so that we could carefully study the lake. The water in the main part of the lake was no longer the beautiful turquoise, it was now a dirty rust color that almost made it to the smaller finger lakes closest to us. The area where we got our clay was clear of dinosaurs, but there must have been thirty of the dark red and black raptors lounging on the beach beside the two carcasses of the brontos. Each of them was half eaten, and I was thankful the wind was blowing from the south so that we couldn’t smell the corpses.
“Sheela, what do you think?” I asked.
“They look lethargic,” the cat-woman said. “Half of them are resting and the other half are rutting together. I doubt that they will be looking over to where the clay is, but even if they do see us, I doubt they will give chase because of the ample food they already have.”
“Okay,” I said. “Here is the plan: We’ll ride directly down there and I’ll have Bob crouch near the clay. Kacerie, you are going to stay on his back while Sheela and I scoop. You’ll keep an eye out around us and then tie the baskets when we give them to you. Everyone got it?”
“Yes, Victor,” they said in unison, and then I commanded Bob to run down to the side of the finger where the clay was.
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