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I Forge Iron

Game 2, the "Iron Fjord"


Frosty

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Max is so startled that he loses his marmot and a little water,  spins around cussing a short sting of profanity and clutches his club ready to swing. Seeing the guy there and not some talking bear he eases up and lowers the club and catches his breath as his heart still pounds like crazy but that slowly eases up as the guy talks. 

" Man, you found the wrong guys if your looking for room on a boat." Max asks who he is and what he's doing here. As the guy explains Max walks over and picks his marmot up from where it flew to. 

"Hi Dave, I'm Max and this is Brandon. We have some others here too. Hate to tell you but our boat was ground to pieces so looks like your still stuck here. " Max explains the story of their trip and the fate of their boat. 

 

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Brandon unconsciously shifts his grip on his spear and turns the tip on the newcomer before catching himself and lowering it slightly.

"I must be losing my edge, I must admit usually people can't get that close to me without me seeing them." Brandon holds out his empty right hand to shake, shifting his spear to his left hand. 

I'm sorry to hear about your predicament.  As my friend here told you we are in very much the same situation. I can't say much for the others but I'll give you my welcome and say another hand to help with the camp work is always welcome. We are hoping to flag down some search teams in the near future and get ourselves off this god forsaken rock. Do you have a camp or anything near by? 

With that Brandon leads the way back to the camp for the noon (ish) meeting. They would have to come up with a new plan for including Dave into the work. Brandon would talk it over with Clinton.

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"Ben I wouldn't suggest drinking strait from the streams. Their are some bugs that will have you sicker than the proverbial  dog. We need to treat it all, or boil it. Rain water is the exception, as long as a bird dosen't come along and leave us a gift on the tarp."

chatting Ben up to see what kind of weapon he would be confortable with, then as we trail along see what we can find to make him one. 

Clinton and Ben spend about one more hour before turning back.

Still holding out hope to find a place to set up the radar reflector, and any sighn of civilization. 

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Ben says, "Naw Clinton, the water is safe here. It's spring fed and running over the rocks aerates it, nothing like oxy to kill anaerobic bacteria. Flowing through the ground from one bluff to the next filters it thoroughly and it's a short run so it's moving fast. I wouldn't drink from one of the surface streams, lots of bad bugs. These springs are okay if you can drink close to where it clears the surface."

Clinton stands there looking at Ben nodding, not sure what to think. Ben is not only sounding lucid he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. "How do you know so much about safe water, you're a city guy aren't you?"

"Oh yeah, I live just north of LA but I work for the water district. We not only process waste water we purify water brought in to the city. Have you ever seen a waste water treatment plant? The big round tanks with bubbles coming up like a radar scope sweep?" They're aerating raw sewage, then it's filtered and if it weren't for public opinion we could pipe it for potable water. Oh .a splash of chlorine maybe but not if we ran it through another aeration cycle. Waste treatment plants don't even smell bad, they send for guys like me if they do"

This leaves Clinton thinking while Ben starts selecting berries to eat for lunch, he seemed to be favoring the bright red ones on the thorny bushes and glancing repeatedly at the clouds. "Do you know what kind of berries those are Ben?" Clinton asks.

"Rose hips, lots of vitamin C, kind of tart but they taste good."

Ben and Clinton follow the bluff edge back to a point above Camp and descend an easy break following a stream.

 

Max and Brandon walk back to camp with Dave who tells them the story about being stranded. He's obviously lost track of time, he's been there a lot longer than he thinks. The date he gives for buying the boat is almost 3 months past. He bought the boat late July and it's early mid October now. He describes how he provisioned and equipped himself for cruising Alaskan waters, Months worth of food, two hunting rifles and two pistols with enough ammunition for a fire fight serious camping gear and lots of comforts.

He'd been having a good time cruising the coast but  sea in the Gulf of Alaska tends to be rough on a good day so he was following sheltered waters as much as possible. He'd heard about clams on mud flats in Alaskan waters and had decent luck a couple times he'd tried. He found pretty good sized mud flats at the head of the fjord so he anchored off shore and waited for the outgoing tide. Beached his boat on the side of the river flowing out from under the glacier and started digging clams.

The next time he looked out the tide was coming in in a wave a good 4' high! He new he couldn't get to the boat before the water so he started running up the river bank thinking he could catch the boat as the wave carried it up the river. He could handle a short swim. To his horror the wave swamped his boat, rolled it right over and washed the wreck up the river a way but never close enough for Dave to grab it. When the tide turned the river current carried it into the fjord on the outgoing tide. Dave was only able to collect a few things. He's wearing what he had on at the time. He ran out of .22 bullets pretty soon feeding himself.

Brandon and Max both notice Dave has sharpened the edges of the clam shovel. Dave is never out of reach of his clam shovel, he didn't say anything about it it's turned out to be one handy tool, cuts brush, does okay on trees and on one occasion dispatched a deer quite nicely. He keeps it close to hand because he's seen bear fairly often.

Fostig Den Arbitus.

 

 

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As they head towards camp Dave asks the guys for the story of what has happened to bring them here.  After his time alone in the bush he is eager just to talk to people again. He keeps a close eye on the brush around him during the walk and asks the other two about any run ins they have had with bears and cats. 

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Day 4. Noon Meeting

Everybody will have returned to camp by now and met Dave. You exchange the basic story about how you got here. Dave of course has the advantage of having kept up with the game so far in his mundane fantasy life.

Everything in camp is stable, Aaron is hanging in there occasionally rational enough to suggest he'll buy if someone runs for KFC and beer.

Frostig De Arbitus.

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Brandon sighs as he settles down at camp. "I think from here on out we need to focus on that wreck. It might give us our best chance at some decent equipment. I'm at a loss on how to get to it easily. We could build a raft and have it tethered on a long woven cord to the beach while we pole it out? Anyone have any other ideas?"

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Brandon Looks over at Clinton, "I'm not the most familiar with how to build a coracle but it should work. Would we be able to weave the willow branches to make it? We could also weave the willow branches into a thick cord... Maybe as big around as my forearm to attach to the Coracle and be able to pull it back to safety if needed. We could have two people on the shoreline monitoring the travel, tides, and waves. The rest of us can put on the float suits and PFD's and try to head out. minus someone to keep an eye on Aaron of course. Clinton can you walk us through making one?"

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For the rest of his Afternoon Brandon is going to be gathering up the recommended roots and branches to weave the cordage and Coracle. "Dave, Since you have your shovel handy are you interested in helping me dig some roots? Be easier then digging with rocks and sticks that's for sure."

Brandon tries to stay relatively close to camp and always keeps his spear within easy reach.

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" as we are basically making a basket I think willow is the animal we need" so finding a spot to work, sense the tarp is small and rectangular it looks like we will end up with something more oblong than round. So lay out a tarp and get an idea of the size and set two pegs and make a loop of cordage and mark the parimiter using the pegs and string as a guid. Now taking saplings or slender branches and plant the. About a hands with apart all around th perimeter the. Bend them over, one from each side and lash them together. Once that happens begin weaving very thin branches threw the frame work. Once the "basket" is woven, dig the sides up and flip it over. Now the  ends need trimmed and witled to have two flat sides in line with the casket edge. Now to find some good peices for the rim and split them longways and lashed on either side of the shaved basket frame peices. Thus forming the "gunwale" from here a seat or two can be installed. And lashed to the frame. Flipping it back over and going over the whole frame with his hand looking for rough spots that would rip or wear the skin. Skinning is basically a sewing project. 

Spruce roots are harvested, and either worked like buck skin to loosen the fibers (split and braded is best, but for something static like lashing just bending it repeatable and working it over a smoth branch works just fine). With the boat finished turning his attention to the cable, as it is so large (compared to lashings) again no splitting, simply brading  it (over lapping each added peice a foot) once made up working the whole thing around a smoth trunk and trim any protruding buts. 

That will keep Clinton and a helper or two out of trouble for a wile! Lol. 

A camp loom is next, some "covers" would be nice, lol. 

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Brandon explains as best he can to Dave, "Have you ever seen the movie Armageddon? Where they land at the wrong spot on the asteroid and none of the instruments or anything they have works because they are on an iron plate? well as near as we can tell that is this island. None of our emergency transmitters or compasses or anything work. That being said we don't know when a rescue will find us. In the meantime we have very limited tools or anything else to work with. That boat gives us an opportunity for metal we can use to build what we need to work with."

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Bruno is keeping camp up while watching Aaron and a smoker he built while having to stick close. Currently he's brining some porcupine and marmot in sea water that has evaporated to a pretty strong salt solution. The tin pail and plastic bucket Dave brought to the party are going to really help.

Ben is helping where he can, he seems to be recovering from the shock of being shipwrecked but he's obviously a city guy. He may be a highly trained "engineer" but not a structural engineer so other than holding things and acting as a gofer he's not a lot of use making the coracle. In fact it takes him a while to realize a coracle is a boat. a roundish hide boat.

"We're going to use that to get to the wrecked boat?" He asks Clinton while he holds two arced pieces so Clinton can bind them. "Isn't it going to be really small?" Clinton answers the questions and maintains conversation with Ben but he isn't really into the conversation, he has other things to think about. "Isn't that going to be really dangerous? I mean the waves are really rough going over those rocks won't it just roll a little boat right over?" Clinton just grunts, he doesn't want to go into the ideas about ropes and flotation gear but has to admit Ben is right. This is really risky.

"Too bad we don't have a ladder, then we could just climb down the mast." Then Ben goes back to looking at the clouds.

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Dave helps the guys with the boat where he can. He asks about what the guys are hoping to find if they get on board the wreck. As he reaches for his knife to cut a root he mentions that he chucked the compass that used to share the sheath with his blade.

"Blasted magentite made the thing more of a distraction than useful tool"

 

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