Lost in Time(42)

When he was done, Sam sat back and smiled at it. A dinosaur skull rain barrel. By nightfall—if it rained again in the afternoon—the small reservoir would be full of water, and Sam could drink from it, staying by his camp instead of venturing back into the woods to drink from the velvety fern leaves. That might save his life.

On his next trip to the woods, he found what he had been searching for the first time: the skeleton of a carnivore. He snapped off a sharp tooth and brought it back to camp. He grabbed a stick of wood and ran the tooth up and down it, sawing away. Tiny slivers of wood peeled off, some as thin as human hairs. They would do. He placed them atop the twigs and dry leaves in the pile of tinder.

He then used the tooth to sharpen his self-defense stick. When he was done, he inspected the small spear. It would do. He carried it into the woods and found another stick and sharpened it (for a backup).

Finally, he turned his focus to the fire. He carved a deep groove in a piece of flat softwood, then sharpened another stick and began plowing up and down the groove, creating friction and shearing off thin layers of wood.

The friction and heat ignited the hairs of wood above and soon, smoke rose from the tinder pile. Sam leaned forward, eager to see flames sprout up. He blew gently, but the smoke drifted away and the fire died.

He had been too eager.

Total rookie move.

He sat back on his haunches and exhaled. At the end of the piece of flat wood, he repacked the tinder, careful to ensure the fine wood fibers were at the end of the groove.

Then he began plowing again.

As he rowed back and forth, he thought: that’s life. You push and pull and sometimes things catch fire and sometimes they don’t. You keep going: that’s the key.

Soon, smoke rose again.

But still he plowed. He wanted to be sure this time. The flames needed to be strong before he gave them oxygen. When he smelled the fire and saw the first flames rising, he leaned down and blew and fueled it. The fire licked the twigs and ignited them and burned into the sticks steepled above it.

He had made a fire.

He sat back, watching the growing flames. It was a representation of so many things he had taken for granted in his old life. Before, fire was always a click away. Here, it was a struggle. And probably the key to his survival.

To survive, he needed to take the fire with him. That was easier said than done.

He needed a torch. The ideal torch would have a slow-burning fuel. Tree sap, pitch, oil, or animal fat were best. All were problematic. Specifically, they were hard to come by.

The best fuel options available to him at the moment were moss, wood, and leaves. They wouldn’t burn long. And if the torch itself was wooden, it would burn down to his hand.

A thought occurred to him. A prehistoric innovation.

He returned to the Melanorosaurus skeleton, gripped one of the long rib bones, and leaned back until it cracked and broke free. As he suspected, it was hollow inside. It was also just the right size to be stuffed with a piece of hardwood wrapped in moss. And that’s what he did.

He held the torch over the fire, lit it, and hoisted it up.

In one hand, he held a spear. In the other, a dinosaur bone torch. He hadn’t mastered this land, but he felt safer than he had since the night Nora had died. The thought of her brought a sharp pain to his soul. He wasn’t ready to think about her. But his mind wanted to, like it was trying to lick a wound that was still raw.

Would that cut ever heal? Probably not.

That hurt reminded him of his wife. She had also been taken from him. Sam had watched her wither away. In a way, it had broken him. Irreparably.

Nora had a similar hurt, from the loss of her husband. She and Sam had that in common. Wounds that wouldn’t heal. And they shared the bond of the secret of Absolom. And, as they had discovered, an attraction to each other. In a way, she had brought Sam back to life, awakened something inside of him. Just when he thought they were ready to take the next step, she was gone, torn out of his life.

If he dwelled on the things that had happened to him, if he kept feeling sorry for himself, he knew it would drown him, just as the sea had wanted to. As in the water, here on land, he needed to swim, to propel himself forward, toward the shore, toward the future. The past pulled at him like the depths of the ocean, the abyss, but he resisted. He was going to fight. For Adeline. For Ryan. For his friends. And lastly, for himself.

With the torch in one hand, he reached into his pockets and emptied them. He threw the sickening green pods across the white rocks and put small pebbles in their place. If he lost the torch and spear, they would be his last line of defense. The small rocks wouldn’t hurt the large reptiles here. But, as he had learned last night, they would scare them. They had never seen prey (or a predator) who could hurl rocks at them. Something new represented danger. Something to flee. Thanks to evolution, they were programmed to avoid uncertainty.

He glanced up at the sun. It was low in the sky. Sam figured it was probably two in the afternoon. Plenty of day left. And much to do.

He knew he needed food. Something hardier than Triassic earthworms. He wouldn’t find it in the forest behind him—unless he was ready to fell a seelo. He wasn’t.

Ahead lay unexplored territory, and within it, the prospect of easier prey. Perhaps a mammal he could eat. Or fish in a pond or a stream.

He had the fire now, and that gave him the option to cook larger animals.

Yet the prospect scared him. Ahead was new, unknown territory. That was the way of the world: even slowly starving, we cling to the lands we know instead of striking out into the unknown. But he had to now.