Earth's Eulogy, page 18
Eulalia mounted him and started punching him in the face, head, arms, chest, and everywhere else she could.
After about a minute, Paul realized that this boy was pretty used to being beaten. Even though he had a bloody nose, split lip, swollen eye, and little cuts and bruises all over, the boy was a little too proud to surrender. Paul pointed out, “Boy, you are getting beat by a girl. It takes days sometimes weeks for bruises to go away, the sooner you say you surrender, the sooner the bruises, that girl gives you, goes away.” That did not convince the stubborn boy to give up, so Paul said, “How many weeks do you want to tell people that you got those bruises from a girl.”
That thought convinced the boy to scream out, “I Surrender.”
Paul told Eulalia to, “get off him and get back in line.” Now that the boy had been badly beaten by a girl who was younger than him, he would be much more malleable to discipline. As soon a Eulalia was off the boy, Paul felt regret the boy was not wearing clothes, as Paul only had one thing to grab on the boy. Paul grabbed the
boy’s hair and picked him up. Disrespect had to be addressed.
Paul screamed in the boy’s face, “How dare you question the ability of my warriors when you got beaten blue by a girl a year younger than you!” With that, Paul took out a switch and began beating the boy’s butt. The boy tried to run, but Paul had his hair in hand
Then Paul yelled out, “How dare you disrespect me when you can not even fight a girl that I have trained.” Paul continued to use the stick to tan the boys hide. Careful to make sure it stayed on the boy’s gluteus maximus.
Paul continued to yell in the boy’s ear, “How dare you disrespect the men I trained when you can not even beat a girl.” And Paul continued to use the stick on the boy. The boy finally figured out he couldn’t run, so tried hitting Paul, but Paul had the boys hair, and with a twist here, and tug there made the swings very ineffective.
Paul then said, “How dare you disrespect…” the stick broke as Paul said disrespect, and Paul stopped and said, “See my stick broke on you because of your disrespect, that’s okay we will go get another one.” With that, Paul dragged the boy with him to the woods and grabbed another stick. None of the other children dared to move.
When Paul had another stick, he started spanking the boy again and said, “How dare you disrespect me when I offer to teach you how to fight, especially when you cannot beat a girl.” After all that, the boy finally started to cry. Paul hated doing this. But these kids have been hardened by constant abuse, and they needed to listen to him. Now that the boy was finally crying, Paul stopped beating him and started talking with him.
Paul said, “You will follow my instructions from now on, do you understand.”
The boy finally wailing said, “Yes, sir.”
Paul said, “You will do it with a good attitude.”
The boy crying said, “Yes, sir.”
Paul said, “You will obey all the instructors I put over you.”
The boy started getting the suck backs sucked in air and said, “Yes..” Sucked in air, “Sir.”
Paul brought the boy back to the group and said, “Does anyone else have anything else they want to say to me.” The rest of the kids were dead silent. With that, Paul sent them to get dressed and start their first day of school.
Chapter 30 March AD 73 Extra Large Canoe
John’s winter was great. He had a lot of help making new iron ingots and teaching his new students how to turn them into really useful things like nails, plows, knives, fast fire bows, axes, and spinning wheels. Every man who came found a wife. Most of the bachelors went back home to their villages, but a few stayed. John was delighted to have more men coming alongside him and help him longterm.
On a personal level, John was happy to see Xena give birth to puppies. He was going to teach the men how to train the puppies to be guard dogs for the village. John’s son was growing up fast, and John was happy to spend time with the boy. Truth be told in his past life, John felt guilty that he didn’t spend enough time with his children, and in this life, he did not want to make that mistake again.
John also made a lot of people believers in his Bison domestication project, as they had fresh meat all winter long. John started the winter off with three juvenile male bison, but by this point, it was clear which bison was the most docile. The other two became rather good steaks. There were eight adult female bison, and one was clearly more aggressive than the rest, and it also made some delicious steaks.
The tribe that John was very quickly turning into homesteaders was prospering in grain and goods, although other supplies were starting to dwindle. One day John called a meeting of the tribe to address the problem.
When everyone was gathered, John said, “Right now we have plenty of iron ingots, we have enough grain stored for two years, we have enough meat, fruit, and vegetables canned for a year, we have plenty of cloth. But we are getting low on furs and lumber. I don’t think the lack of fur is a critical issue yet, as everyone has been switching to cloth. But the lumber issue could be a problem in the near future as we use a lot of lumber keeping the forges going.”
One of the men said, “Lumber isn’t an issue. We just have to go further away from the village to get more, and if we start really hurting for hides, we can always use the hides off the bison you keep in the valley.”
John answered, “First of all, no, you are not going to use the bison in the valley for your hides. I am very carefully culling them so that one day we will be able to ride bison. When that happens, it will change our world.” John did not believe that they would be resistant at all to riding the bison when they became domesticated. The Previous timeline showed that as soon as horses made its way to this area that the people very quickly started riding them.
John continued. “As for the lumber, we do not have the manpower to go further and further away from our village to get it. What I propose is that for now, we stop making more iron ingots, and we focus on making a dock and boat so we can travel upriver and trade with tribes who have more manpower, let them build log rafts, and we will take those to our docks, which will then meet our need for more lumber.”
All the people looked confused, and someone said, “I do not understand anything you said after iron ingots.”
John frowned and said, “Do you mean dock, boat, or log raft.”
The man said, “Yes to all of them.”
John thought about it for a few seconds and said, “A dock is a wooden structure you build on the river connected to the bank of the river. You build it there so that it is easy to get into a boat.”
The man said, “If a dock is built for a boat, maybe you should explain what a boat is, so I can understand what a dock is.”
John said, “Good point. A boat is a wooden structure that floats on water and can be used to carry people and products up and down a waterway.”
The man said, “OH, you mean a canoe.”
John said, “I don’t think I mean a canoe. A boat and a canoe are similar but different. When you say canoe, what do you mean?”
The man said, “A canoe is where you take a log, then burn or dig out the inside, then sit in the place you hollowed out and take it up and down a waterway.”
John said, “That’s similar to a boat but not exactly the same. A boat is a lot bigger than a canoe. To make a boat, you cut down a tree or several trees for larger boats. Then cut the trees into flat boards, and then shape the boards and nail them together in order to make what we could call an extra-large canoe.”
The man said, “What’s a board?”
Growing up in America, John went to Lowes and Home Depot, growing up. When you are a little boy going to those places, you are fascinated by all the different boards they had. But its easy to forget he is with a group of people who have never heard of a board. In his past timeline, This area would not see a saw for another fourteen hundred years. He is in a place where a rock head ax is rare, and it is more common to use fire to burn a tree down, and fire to shape the tree than to use a tool to cut a tree down and shape it.
John said, “You know what, this is my fault. I forgot that all of you have never seen this stuff. Let me take out a stick and show you what I mean.”
With the stick, John started drawing on the ground as he talked. First, John drew a badly drawn log, then he drew slices in it, and next to it, he drew a badly drawn boards. John said, “What we are doing with the log is cutting it in slices like this.” He pointed to his badly drawn log. “When they are sliced up, they will look like this.” Then John pointed at his badly drawn board.
Then John started drawing a boat on the ground and drew little rectangles that were meant to represent boards and said, “This is kind of what a boat is supposed to look like. To make the boat, you put all these boards together, and it will basically work like an extra-large canoe. With this extra-large canoe, we will be able to carry a lot of grain, jars of food, and iron products up and down the river for trade. The boat will be able to carry what it would take several dozen men to carry, but it would only take a few men to paddle or pole it up and down the river.”
The man said, “I have never heard of anything like this. Do you think it will work?”
John said, “If we work together, it will.”
The man said, “You haven’t let us down yet. What do we do first?”
With that, the village began the long process of making saws, cutting down trees, sawing them into boards, learning to shape wood, and so much more. There was a lot more to boat making than John thought. With all of Johns’s other responsibilities boat making, or more precisely making the tools to make the boat, took up the rest of Johns’s year.
Chapter 31 April AD 73 Watchtower
Since the last attack in January, Paul and his people have been very busy. They built dorms, started teaching a brand-new group of kids everything from ABC, to how to use an outhouse, and had to guide the Nguvu Simba tribe on how to build a road. Since his people would get to keep their own grain, they had to build their own granaries at their own homes. Paul himself stayed busy with a very special glass project.
Then it was time for harvest. The villagers harvested more grain than they ever had before, and with all the young people staying in the dorms, it was easy to put them to work helping with the harvest. It was truly a new experience for the men to get to keep 90% of their labor. Paul, as chief, had the village take 10%. The people didn’t understand what Paul meant when he said that the village kept 10%. They were just floored that for the next year, every time they wanted grain, they could go to their own granary. The village 10% tax meant that the village granary had almost ten times the amount of any family in the village and twice as much grain as it had the year before.
That was not including what Paul harvested from his own fields. Paul used his fields to teach the children things like plowing, fertilizing, watering, crop rotation, and various types of harvesting. Paul also taught them how to create and use pesticides, both on the crops and on themselves. Paul easily harvested five times as much food as the next guy, but then again, Paul had an army of children helping him out. If Paul focused solely on farming instead of teaching and creating new innovations, he would likely have had twenty times as much food as any other villager because of his army of workers.
On top of harvesting grain, they harvested fruits, vegetables, and canned them in jars. At this point, Paul wondered why canning wasn’t called jarring, but it wouldn’t be too long before the people just called the process jarring.
By all accounts, his people would eat well this year and have plenty of seed for next year. It didn’t hurt that the seed Paul had given them was many times better than what they had previously.
Sadly, there had been two other raids since the last one, but the raiders were so skittish nobody died on either side from those raids. In all honesty, the reason why so many died on the first raid was Paul’s fault. Paul had trained his men to be aggressive individual fighters. When the raid happened, the men did what they were trained to do; they went and fought. They died because they bolted into a situation where they were outnumbered. But Paul had been the one to teach them to be that aggressive. After the raid, Paul trained his people to form a group of at least three before they went to fight. In the next two raids, while his people were forming up and screaming, the raiders ran away before they could form a counterattack.
To Paul, the raids were unacceptable. To his people, they were a normal part of life. In fact, if their crops had not done so well, they would have went on raids during the rainy season also. To be honest, there had been years where their crops did so badly they did raids during the dry season. If they had not raided, they would have starved. The truth was that it wasn’t uncommon for a village to be wiped out from hunger.
Paul wanted better for his people, and Paul believed that if he could just give them time and food security, his people would be a great one. But its hard to have food security when people are constantly trying to steal it from you.
To deal with the problem, Paul called his men to him and said, “Men, if the raids keep happening, more of our people are going to get killed.”
One of the men said, “Raids are a part of life.”
Paul said, “Not where I come from, and I want to put a stop to it as quickly as possible. Step one of that process is building a watchtower.”
Abilio said, “What’s a watchtower?”
Paul said, “A watchtower is a tall building with a platform on top so that you can see enemies coming from a long way away. We build it by cutting down four tall thin trees and bringing them to the center of the village, and we stand them straight up, and build a platform on top.”
Another man said,” Chief, that sounds like a lot of trouble. You know we worked hard to bring in the harvest, and we got plenty of food for the dry season, and it’s really hot. Why don’t you let us rest and have fun until its time for planting again?”
Paul thought to himself, “Great, my people are fed, and now they want to be lazy.” Then Paul said, “During those years when you didn’t have food for the dry season, and you went on raids, did you run away when you were caught or did you fight for the food?”
One of the men said, “We were starving, so we fought for the food, and lost a lot of good men doing it.”
Paul said, “You know that there are a lot of hunters in the area that goes from village to village. In fact, we have had a lot more hunters come our way because they saw the road and followed it to our village. When they got here, they saw our prosperity. After seeing our prosperity, do you think the desperate villages will be more or less likely to raid us?”
Several of the men said, “More likely to raid us.”
Paul said, “When they raid us, and they are desperate, do you want to be ready for them, or do you want to die?”
They were all quiet because they wanted to be lazy until Abilio said, “I would want to be ready.”
Paul said, “Alright, men grab your axes we are going to go find some wood for the watchtower.”
The men grabbed their axes, and Paul grabbed an ox, and they went searching for trees. It wasn’t long before they found several trees that worked. They cut them down, hooked them up to the ox, drug them to the village, and put four poles into the ground. To a real extent to the young men, this was boring work. And the young men were dragging their feet and trying to quit the job before it was done.
With all their complaining, Paul said, “Well, the next part involves nailing crossbeams to connect the trees and building a platform on top. If you are too scared to climb up the poles, feel free to go back.”
At this point, he had all the help he needed, and any whiner was accused of being scared. After the accusation, they immediately volunteered for the most dangerous job available. With more than 20 men, it wasn’t long before the watchtower had crossbeams added, a platform built, and of course, ladders all the way up each pole.
Once it was done, all the women and children came out and told the men how amazing the tower was and how good of a job they did, and of course, the men bragged on their excellent work.
Paul waited to tell them this last part after they built the tower; otherwise, they would never have built the tower. Paul said, “Now that the watchman tower is built, we need to set up rotating watchmen to watch for raiders at night.”
Several of the men looked like they wanted to kill Paul right then and there, which was very disconcerting for Paul, and one said, “What do you mean you want us to watch for raiders at night?”
Paul said, “Every night we put a man up there, and he watches over the village, if raiders come, then he starts shooting arrows at them, and lets the rest of the village know that they are under attack.”
Abilio said, “So you want a man to stay up all night?”
Paul said, “Your right, it would be tough to have a man stay up all night.” The men relaxed when they heard Paul say that, but then Paul continued, “So we will have a man stay up half the night watching for raiders, then have another man replace him halfway through the night.”
The men were looking for a way to wheedle out of this uncomfortable sounding duty and said, “How can a man tell if half the night has passed?”
Paul smiled and said, “I am glad that you asked, I need you to come with me, and” Paul pointed at three more men, “You three come to.”
They followed Paul to his home, and inside there was a very large hourglass surrounded by a wooden cradle. Paul had the men take hold of it and bring it to the front of the watchtower. Paul said, “This is known as an hourglass.” Then Paul flipped over the glass part of the device, although the outside frame of the device did not move. The sand started falling from one side to the other. That’s when Paul said, “When all the sand falls from one end of the device to the other then half a night has passed, and then the person who has watch duty goes and finds the next guy and wakes him up, and he watches until the sun comes up.”
