Chapter 64: Rain Shelter
Clothing, food, housing, and transportation—clothing, food, and transportation have all been solved.
For Su Ran, now only housing is left.
Actually, the werewolf’s bird’s nest is also very good.
Far from the ground, it can stay dry, one household one room, good privacy, and also sufficiently sturdy.
But these are for the werewolf.
For Su Ran, the most immediate issue is that going up and down the bird’s nest to get things is very inconvenient for her.
The next most important is the problem of keeping warm in winter.
During the rain the previous two days, Su Ran could clearly feel the rapid temperature change in the bird’s nest.
And this was just a rain in spring.
If it were winter, there’s no way to make fire for warmth in the bird’s nest. Although the branch-woven bird’s nest doesn’t leak rain, it definitely lets in wind!
Extremely low temperature plus biting cold wind—even if Su Ran isn’t frozen to death in the cold winter, she would probably die of illness in the spring of the following year.
Actually, she was really puzzled about how the beastmen with bare bodies manage to get through the cold winter!
Today, Su Ran prepared to build a rain shelter for storing firewood and some sundries.
The current weather is showing increasingly obvious warming. The wood that was placed on the river beach to dry a few days ago for building the rain shelter has long since dried completely.
Su Ran chose the location for building the rain shelter on the river beach near the woods.
Because if built directly on the river beach, she was afraid that during heavy rain, the rising river water would flood the rain shelter.
Then building this rain shelter would have no meaning.
The size of the rain shelter, Su Ran set at about three meters long and two meters wide. The main body of the shed would use at least twelve sturdy tree trunks.
Among these twelve tree trunks, six would stand on the ground as pillars supporting the shed roof, and the other six would form the beam part circling the top of the shed roof.
And just as she started building the shed, Su Ran encountered a problem.
She had no nails.
Without nails, there’s no way to join the wood together.
She thought that making bone nails or stone nails would be time-consuming and laborious, and might not withstand the hammer’s intense hammering.
If the shed built with so much effort collapsed in just a few days, Su Ran felt she could vomit to death!
After thinking it over, the most suitable method was probably the traditional mortise and tenon structure.
Of course, that kind of exquisite mortise and tenon technique of skilled craftsmen was something Su Ran absolutely couldn’t do.
But she remembered that in the room at her home when she was young, right in the center of the room, there was always a pillar supporting the roof beam.
And on top of the pillar, it was fixed together using the simplest mortise and tenon splicing structure: one pillar in a concave shape, the other in a convex shape.
Now it’s too difficult for her to do that, but this kind she could try it out.
Thinking this, she turned her gaze to the pile of wood prepared long ago.
She first used the saw blade to saw the six tree trunks for the base pillars to the same length, then sawed the ten pieces of wood for the long sides of the top beams and the two pieces for the short sides each to the same length.
Then she took charcoal and marked numbers from one to twenty-four on the two ends of each piece of wood according to her conceived assembly order.
Then she began digging out the shapes starting from the first piece of wood.
She first drew the area to be dug out on the first piece of wood, then started digging with the bone knife.
After finishing the first piece of wood, she moved over the wood marked with number two, placed the two pieces of wood facing each other, drew the shape along the groove dug in the first piece of wood and marked it, then started digging the second piece of wood.
The structure dug out on the second piece of wood was the protruding one, but only dug to half the diameter length of the first piece of wood.
Because the first piece of wood was one of the pair in the middle of the three pairs of wooden stakes standing on the ground, the groove on top needed to connect simultaneously to one beam wood on each left and right side, so the other half of the groove had to be left for the wood on the other side.
And when digging the tree trunks for the four corner parts, the shape of the groove also changed to a right-angle shape.
The two sides of the right angle perfectly received the long and wide sides above the shed roof.
Busy all day, from early morning until the evening sky was filled with sunset glow, Su Ran finally finished processing the joints of several pieces of wood.
Even though the werewolf had been watching eagerly from the side, Su Ran didn’t dare to teach it this delicate work.
Because even she herself didn’t know yet what it would specifically look like when done.
So as early as morning, she drove Gray away to process the several animal hides that had accumulated these past few days. After finishing the hides, she told it to collect the firewood to be stored in the shed.
To avoid it asking questions around her.
And now the project of building the shed had finally completed the first step.
She looked down at her palm, which had been rubbed to form three blisters, and the base of her thumb also showed fine cracked lines from friction. With a slight movement, her fingers felt stiff, sore, and weak, and the blistered palm throbbed with piercing pain.
Su Ran’s gaze moved away from her painful palm, she took two deep breaths, suppressing the sudden surge of sour grievance in her heart.
Yet she had already begun imagining whether her hands would be covered in calluses a year from now.
On the side of the river beach, Gray had already lit the campfire and set up the prey.
These past few days, Su Ran made seafood soup again, and also used the wild vegetable she found that day—
Later she named it housheng vegetable, and made green vegetables stir-fried meat and green vegetables stewed meat soup several times.
But obviously, compared to that, Gray still preferred roast meat.
Now in Gray’s recipe, the deliciousness ranking of food should be: seafood soup > roast meat > greaves > raw meat > vegetables stir-fried meat > kelp.
And it’s not just Gray; after Su Ran made vegetables stir-fried meat and shared it with other beastmen, except for those beastmen with herbivorous animal traits, the other beastmen also clearly didn’t like this method too much.
It seems beastmen still prefer that greasy, fragrant way of eating meat.
However, thinking that beastmen besides eating meat also always pick some sweet wild fruit to eat, Su Ran was no longer worried about their poop problem.
Today, what Gray hunted back was a four-eared ox, because Su Ran wanted a few more four-eared ox hides to make more bedsheets and quilts, as well as shoes.
The method for roast meat, Gray was already extremely familiar with.
From crushing wild fruit and salt powder together in the wooden basin, to scoring knife marks on the skinned four-eared ox, then applying the marinade to the four-eared ox body, and finally making fire to start roasting—the werewolf no longer needed Su Ran to guide from the side at all.
Su Ran walked to the campfire side, picked up the thermos and poured a lid of water to drink, the pain in her palm reminding her that the wound hadn’t been treated with medicine yet, but she felt lazy, not wanting to move at all.
She looked at the leaping firelight in front of her; the firelight shone on the werewolf’s bare upper body, outlining clear lines of chest muscles and abs.
The werewolf’s lower body was wearing a loose beach pants newly made for it by Su Ran.
At this moment, it was roasting the meat while occasionally looking up at Su Ran with a smile; in a daze, it actually gave Su Ran the romantic illusion of spending a self-driving camping trip in the wild with a handsome little wolf dog…
