5 Ymiden 721
Dan filled a small pot with water and set it on the fire to boil. While he waited, he took the hardened leather breastplate from his leather armour, which was shaped to fit his torso, set it down in a clean patch of grass, and folded his oldest shirt to make a protective and absorbant pad over the top of the breastplate. Then he took a small piece of the good leather, cutting it from the narrow corner where one of the deer's legs had been, where the leather wasn't wide enough for anything big, and carefully traced the outline of a sliding buckle onto it with a bit of charred wood. He then cut round the outline even more carefully than he had drawn it. The resulting shape was just a little bit too big to be comfortable as a buckle on a belt as it was, but that was fine. It would change when it was turned into boiled leather.
Once it was finished and cooled, plain boiled leather was hardened like his leather breastplate, tough and rigid and sturdy enough to take a strain or an impact. You could do it with wax, if you had any, which he didn't. That was a slower process, a more finicky one to get right, but ended up with a very similar result. Boiling leather took advantage of the fact that leather stiffened if it got wet, and enhanced that process into something useful rather than the nuisance that accidental stiffening was.
The pot of water came to a rolling boil. Dan dropped the buckle leather into the pot. This part wouldn't take all that long, but it needed to watched every trill. He saw the water turn brown. He saw the leather darken. He saw it grow a little smaller and a little thicker. Then it began to curl up on itself and that was the signal to fish it out with a stick. It had been in the water for barely a bit. Now in this moment, it was soft and flexible, easily moulded into whatever shape he desired, but as hot as the boiling water itself. Dan wore heavy mittens to protect his hands from the heat as he flattened it out and laid on the pad of cloth over his breastplate. There it would and could take the curve of his body from the previously moulded breastplate without having to immobilise his actual body to do so or risk getting burned. Once it cooled it would stay in whatever shape he set it in now, so he had to get it right. He hoped that he had, anyway, but only time would tell on that front.
Dan took a deep breath, let it out, and only then remembered to take the water off the heat and set it aside to cool down. Now all he had to do was fill in the time waiting for the leather belt buckle (now, having shrunk slightly, it was just the right size) to cool and set before he could do anything more with it. Still, it was the season of plenty, a time to gather food and preserve it for the cold seasons ahead. There was always something he could do to fill in the time, out here where survival meant long hard breaks of work.
He started down the path to the stream to check his fish trap, and then stopped as the pungent smell of wild onions, sometimes called ramsons, reached his nose, and his belly growled in hungry response. Picking a sturdy stick, he roughly sharpened one end to a point, followed his nose to the patch where they were growing. He knelt and ran his fingers through the leaves of the wild onions, counting the number of plants as best he could so that he knew how many he could take without devastating them for later use. Once that was done, he used the now pointed stick to dig the wild onions up by the roots. He jabbed the point into the dirt and then leaned on the stick to lever up the dirt in a small area without damaging either the roots he was harvesting, or the plants around them. Once he had the onions, he strung all but one up under the shelter of his tent to dry and store them, then resumed his trip to the stream.
When he arrived on the bank of the stream, he slid his gathering bag off, dropped it beside him, and brushed his fingers through the over-hanging grass, searching for the thin rope tethering his fish trap to the land. Off to his left, a backwater in the stream showed the pointed spikes of cattail and the lower bushiness of watercress stubborn enough to survive any weather.
His questing fingers snagged on the rope and he wrapped them round it and hauled it in until it lay against the bank, weighted down by the stones inside. He plunged both arms into the water, gripped the fish trap tightly and heaved it up onto the bank beside him. From there he could check it for fish, and he did so, grinning as he found not three fish caught inside. None of them were particularly large, but one of them was large enough to make a good meal if he included other things with it. The other two he could open out and hang them up to smoke over the fire, simultaneously preserving them, drying them, and giving them a bit of extra flavour. He killed all three fish with quick blows to the head, and cleaned and gutted them on the spot, so that he could use their guts to bait the fish trap again for the next day.
He cut himself a bunch of mint to dry next to the onions, and a stem of feathery dill to flavour the fish for tonight, then went after the watercress. He grasped a handful of watercress and cut it free, shook the worst of the water off, stuffed some in his mouth and dropped the rest in his gathering bag. In the shade of a tree, he also found some late wild leeks and pulled a couple, adding them to the plants and fish already in his bag. One of the fish, stuffed with dill and baked in the fire, served on a bed of onion and leek sounded very tasty to him, but as hungry as he was, he thought he ought to have some starch as well. Luckily, cattail roots were an easy and pleasant source of starch, and he was next to a bed of those. All he had to do was dive for a few.
He stripped to a ragged loincloth, piled his clothes and gear on the bank, and waded out into the backwater. Mud squished between his toes, and clung to his steps as he made his way out to the cattails. He took a deep breath and upended himself into the water beside them, digging his hands down into the oozy mud that they grew from. His fingers quested through it in search of the edge of the mat of roots, just as they had quested through the grass for the rope earlier. He came up for air and splashed slowly along the edge of the cattails, probing with his toes his time. Stems and leaves skittered across his bare skin and he shuddered faintly at the sensation. Then at last, he touched one of the long leathery-feeling roots. He dived down, found it again with one hand, and traced it back to the tangled network of roots with the other. He shouldn't take too many, but he could take some. He dug his fingers into the roots at a join and heaved in an attempt to snap it free. The root resisted for a long moment and he wrenched harder. It parted from the tangle with a snap and a jolt that sent him plunging backwards into the water. He only clutched it tighter as he spluttered his way back to the surface and swept his sodden curls out of his eyes with his free hand so that he could check over his prize.
He held a knot where three roots, each over a foot long, met each other. Thread thin rootlets diverged off the larger ones, but it was the three main roots that made him smile. Three would do him a pleasant meal and have a little over to treat the horses with. He pushed off the muddy ooze with his feet and splashed his way back to the bank. He rinsed the mud off, dried himself on a rough piece of sacking, and dressed again, then packed everything up and headed back to his camp to prepare his meal and see how his new buckle was doing.
"Signed words" Spoken words
