63 Days

The next morning, all eyes were on me. The other students would stare at me out of the corner of their eyes, and I wondered what they were all thinking. I gathered my things to get ready for the hike when a tiny little brunette named Daisy came over to me.

“We’re not hiking today. We have to learn how to make a fire with sticks.” She backed away a few steps then turned around and scampered back to her things with her head down. I laughed to myself. These people were insane.

Murdock got us all gathered around in a circle as he pulled out a board, the size of a ruler.

“This…is a fireboard. You will each need to find a dry piece of wood later to make your fireboard. You’ll see in a moment why,” he said.

Next he dug hastily into his pocket and retrieved a round stick, about the length of a pencil, and 4 times its thickness. “This is a spindle. You need to find a tough stick that is about this size and strip it of its bark.”

He stepped over to a juniper tree and pulled off a branch that was about as long as his arm but only as thick as his thumb. He bent it so it was bow-like and grabbed some weird sticky twine off of a roll that was sitting on the ground near his feet.

“This is sinew. Not real sinew, like on the back of your ankles. Those are tendons, and this is artifical sinew. Its going to make this stick into a bow.”

He tied the sinew so that it held the branch into a bow shape. Next, he set the bow down by the fireboard and the spindle and got a flat rock out of his back pocket. It was a flat rock, probably granite or sandstone, as those were the dominant rock types out here, and he showed it to us. It had a small indent in one side, like some God had pushed his thumb into it when he created this area of the world. The rock fit in Murdock’s palm. He pulled out a knife, long and dull with a wooden handle and scraped a bit at the indentation.

“This is the handle, you’ll hold this on top of the spindle so that it rolls between the fireboard and the rock smoothly by moving the bow back and forth. You’ll cut a small notch in the fireboard each time, and each notch will have a cut that runs to the edge of the wood. The coal will need oxygen to burn. You’ll see. Next, you get some stringy bark or small sticks and twist them into this,” he said. He grabbed some dry bark threads from a juniper tree and made a long twist with it and fashioned it into a birds nest type mess, about the size of his head.

“Ok, so I’m going to demonstrate, then you go and fetch what I told ya to get.”

He got down, one foot holding the fireboard in place, knee bent, and the other leg was kneeling on the ground. He held the rock on the top of the spindle after he wrapped the sinew part of the bow around the center of the small spindle. It was confusing, but I instantly understood the mechanics of it.

After a few pulls on the bow, a tiny trail of smoke came up. He laughed and put it all down and told us that “You’ll never get it this fast, infact, you’ll probably not get one this week.” He laughed at us and we all snickered under our breath.

He stood and walked to his pack and when he turned around he had something in his hands that scared all of us for a moment. 12 huge meat cleavers were sitting on a handkerchief he held taut in his hands.

“These are for you guys. They’re pretty dull.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty stupid to be giving us knives,” I thought. I accepted mine as he handed them out to the dirty students here who were still in shock from the reality of coming to Challenger in the first place.

I looked around me. All of them were meek, every one still polite. They all held a fear that I’d somehow shed. I knew there was no fighting these people, but I also knew that being scared didn’t get you anything but a stomach ache. They’d soon realize that these demons who held us captive were not Gods, but sad little human beings who needed to feel powerful, and to do that, they tortured children in the desert…

We tried for 10 hours each to get our first bowdrill fire that day. None of us succeeded.