April 9th

15C and sunny.
Nice to see the spring weather arrive.
Yesterday we had the local family here for Easter dinner but I did get several pages added to the story earlier in the day. The bad news is we are going to Salmon Arm tomorrow so the next week maybe somewhat intermittent. However I'll save the story file to Dropbox and then can access it as long as we have internet access. Dropbox is a great tool.

its exact location was difficult to pinpoint.

A good hour later he found it but not until he had walked past it twice. “Another job,” he mumbled. “Gotta establish marked caches.”

On the way back, Bob searched for and found enough mushrooms to partially fill his knapsack, then picked a few red huckleberries as well.

After cleaning and filleting the fish he started a small fire in the rock pit and put the fillets on a wire rack he had made and left them to cure in the wood smoke.

For most of the rest of the day he worked on the bow and the arrows. He tested the flex of the bow several times as he finished the shaping, then using a piece of the steel wire, he bent the bow leaving it in a partial curve. He was afraid to bend it too much as it was still uncured and he didn’t want to over-do the curve.

After a dinner of fish and mushrooms and a couple of handfuls of berries he started to work on the arrows.

While searching for the wire earlier he had picked up several smallish rocks, all relatively flat. He selected one that was slightly rougher than the others and one by one he smoothed each arrow turning them constantly as he “sanded” them. By the time he had done the last one it was dark, so he put them again on the floor and replaced the plywood and wood weight

The next day he continued the finishing of the arrows, the final “sanding” was done with a fairly smooth piece of shale like rock.

He spent an hour after a meager lunch building a a pole platform over the rockpit then carefully spread the arrows across making sure they were well supported then erected a long  pole that leaned toward the pit and terminated about a foot short. To this he hung the bow by one end. After surveying his handiwork and making a few adjustments he started a small fire. He kept it going through the balance of the day.

Having forgot about getting anything for dinner, he decided to celebrate and opened a tin of the stew and heated it in the fire outside.

He stoked the pit fire with some green wood and went to bed a little later than usual.

That night he slept restlessly. He dreamed that the fire roared into life and consumed his hard work and he dreamed that in the morning the fire was out but the bow and arrows  had disappeared.

He stumbled outside the next morning to a drizzling rain and to find that the fire had died out. Three of the arrows had warped but the rest and the bow other than being wet were just fine. He brought them all inside and placed them in a corner well away from the stove and weighted everything down with the plywood weight.