“Well, before I could do any tree-trimming I had to have an ax. That meant I needed some iron. By that time I could get by O.K. in the native language. I asked ’em if they knew any place where there was red dirt; told ’em it was important magic. A few weeks later a hunting party came back from the other side of the lake with some pretty good samples. The witch doctor had some coal—used it to carve gods out of, ’cause it was easy to work. I built a furnace and piled it full of lumps of ore and chunks of coal and set it off, and, sure enough, after a couple of hours melted iron started running out the bottom of the furnace.”
“Case, what do you know about smelting iron?” Chester interrupted. “You didn’t happen to bring along The Handyman’s Home Smelter’s Handbook, did you?”
“I used to blacksmith for the show in a pinch,” Case said. “I didn’t know much—but I learned.
“I cast half a dozen ax and hatchet heads in clay molds the first time. They came out pretty good. I sharpened ’em up on a flat stone, and then heated ’em and dunked ’em in a pot of water. They hardened pretty good. Later on I got the formula down pat. It depends mostly on how much coal and stuff you’ve got in with the ore.”
“A carbon content of between .7 and 1.7 percent produces the optimum combination of hardness and malleability,” said Genie.
“I wish you’d been here, kid,” said Case with a sigh. “You could have been a big help. But we managed. I pounded out a knife blade and fitted a handle to it and used that to cut ax handles. Then I put the natives to work clearing land—and it wasn’t for show. The local wild life couldn’t sneak up on the village any more—no cover. I had ’em root out all the bushes and coarse stuff, and the native grasses took over. We undercut all the trees as high as a man could reach. Then I had ’em shape the trees, pull down all the vines and stuff. Made it look like a regular park around here.
“Then we went to work on the lake. We made up some flat boats and got out and cleaned up the dead branches and cattails and then did a little dredging; built up a nice beach along this side. I rigged some fishing gear out of leather strips, showed ’em how to catch trout, and then staged a big fish fry. They didn’t want to touch the fish; wasn’t what their grandpaws ate, I guess. These kids were as conservative as a bunch of Ivy League alumni. But I gave ’em the old magic routine and they tried it. Now they spend half their time out on the lake. We made up a couple of saws and I showed ’em how to slice a tree into boards, and we built a few rowboats. Funny thing was, before long a couple of boys were ahead of me on boat-building—and fishing too. I made ’em up some bows and arrows and cast some iron arrowheads. Made up skinning knives and showed ’em how to scrape a hide and work it till it was soft.
“There were a lot of wild sheep and cattle around. We made up a batch of braided ropes and went out and brought in a couple of young goats and a half-grown critter that looked like an overgrown Texas longhorn. Later on we got a couple of newborn calves, a male and a female. In a couple of years we had a nice herd going. We let ’em graze the park here to keep the grass down. And o’ course I showed ’em how to milk and we experimented around and made some cheese.”
“I didn’t know you knew that much about animal husbandry,” Chester put in.
“Anybody that’s worked around a circus knows which end of a critter to feed. That was the least of my problems. I was getting a lot of pleasure out of admiring the beach and the park, and thinking what a pile of dough I could make out of it if I had it all back home. Then I’d see a couple of the local gals come trotting by, buck naked, grimy, fat, with stringy hair, and pretty gamy, if you got too close to ’em.” Case sighed. “And I wasn’t much better, I guess. I’d kinda got out of the habit of shaving, and there wasn’t too much point in taking a bath if you had to put the same old leather drawers back on. So I decided it was time to give a little thought to developing the feminine industries.”
“The first thing I needed was some cloth, to get away from the smell of hides. I tried some wool off these goats we keep. It wasn’t much good. We scouted around for some wild cotton, but couldn’t find any. Finally discovered a kind of flax. Went to work and rigged up a spinning wheel. That took the best part of a year, but we finally worked it out. We spun up a big batch of yarn. I had a loom ready; that wasn’t so hard. We set it up and wove us a blanket.
“Well, I trained a few of the girls, and set ’em to work spinning and weaving. Made up some needles out of bone; couldn’t manage it in steel. I wasn’t much of a seamster, but I had lots of time. I cobbled up a pair of breeches for myself first, then a shirt. But heck, it’s too warm here for sleeves, and anyway they’re hard to make. I settled on a vest; it’s just right to keep the chill off on a cool morning.”
“What about the winter?”
“Funny thing, there don’t seem to be any seasons here. Stays about like this year around.”
“Pre-Ice Age,” Genie murmured.
“Then I had to make soap. I messed around with animal fat and ashes and finally worked out a pretty good formula. I had to make ’em wash, at first, but I gave ’em the old Great Spirit routine, and pretty soon they were down at the lake scrubbing something every time I turned around. They’re as bad as a bunch of Methodists when it comes to trying to make points upstairs with something easier than laying off sin. And once you get clean, you itch if you start letting dirt pile up again—and you start noticing your roommate—so the last few holdouts got dunked and scrubbed.
“Then I saw the need for a little civic improvement. The dump where we’d been living all this time was alive with fleas and rats and the damnedest collection of chewed bones, worn-out hides, magic frogs’ innards, mummified totem animals, and other junk—just like Grandma’s attic back home. They were a little mad at first when I burned it down. I told ’em it was the word from on high and that the place had to go, but there was a crafty little devil of a witch doctor that had the confounded gall to stand up and call me a liar. Imagine!”
“Well, after all, Case, you had been telling them everything you’d been doing was divinely ordained.”
“Worked pretty good, too. It might even be true. Anyway, after I took the witch doctor down and dumped him in the lake, nobody else complained.”
“You were lucky he let it go at that. From what I’ve read about shamans, they can be dangerous enemies.”
“Oh, I hadn’t taught anybody to swim yet.”
“You mean you drowned him? Case, wasn’t that a little drastic?”
“Maybe. But I figured that if I was setting up a society, I might as well do it along realistic lines. There’s no point in letting somebody half your size push you around—especially when you’re right. A weakling makes as bad a dictator as anybody else. The way I saw it, it was up to me to stand up for my ideas.”
“The next big man might not be as interested in the public welfare as you were, Case. What then?”
“To tell you the truth, Chester, I wasn’t interested in the public welfare. I was only interested in making a comfortable place for me to live in. I wanted clean, healthy people around, because I don’t like smelling dirty, sick ones. I wanted them to live good so they’d have the time and inclination to learn the things I was trying to teach them, like fishing—so I could eat fish; raising beef, so I could eat steak—and, later on, painting pictures that I could look at and making music for me to hear and taking an interest in cookery so they could lay on a good feed for me and being happy so there’d be a nice atmosphere in the village. In the end I discovered that I got a lot more pleasure out of associating with a nice bunch of people than out of anything else.