Survivor 3295743

13

I got to spend a lot of time living in that tree after completing and fully stocking my home with firewood and food. The female lizard above was doing well as well after I installed a large boulder in a nearby branch for drinking water. To transport water up the tree, I was carrying tall hollowed out and burned logs that could hold multiple gallons on my back from the shallow valley.

To clean my drinking water I would simply burn rocks in my fire pit and drop them in the logs I kept for myself. The lizard's hollowed out boulder saw enough sunlight to both kill and render bacteria infertile with heat and UV radiation. The atmosphere was much cleaner after thousands of years without humans and a general expansion of the planet, letting through more sunlight from a star that had barely aged at all.

After gathering over a dozen different samples of young trees and branches, I had set to work testing woods and fat oils to see which made the best bows and maintained the longest. Weasel was somehow a red meat and their fats broke down quickly in a hollowed rock over a low fire, making it to easiest to use for lard oil. I stored these oils in the rocks I cooked them in, covering them in tied down lids of thickly woven plant fibers.

The same dark hardwood I liked to use for my spear shafts, of which I now had several, seemed to be the most resilient and supply wood at my disposal. Not only did the thin planks compress well together and absorbed simmered thin evergreen sap well for an adhesive, they maintained their shape the best after several days of dry firing. From each wood I made several bows.

The first batch of bows were never oiled and single plank in body. Their point was to test the base strength and durability of the different woods and were never oiled, the other plank woods all snapped after the first day and the evergreen lost its elasticity in the dry firing test. Only the darkwood plank lasted for three days before losing its shape and splitting apart.

The next batch of bows were bows I had oiled once and gently flexed for the past few days to test the strength of three planks compressed and sapped together. All but the evergreen lasted for several days but the evergreen never took the thin weasel oil and flexed out all of its original sap to break of the adhesive while losing shape.

I simply scrapped the remaining evergreen bow.

The other compounded bows all worked well enough at first and could send a naked stick aimed straight ahead well over a hundred feet. However, they gradually lost their strength over the continuous daily use for hours at a time. Only the darkwood bow could fire an arrow straight ahead for the better part of a football field before hitting the ground and maintain its strength for the better part of a week.

After I started live firing the bows, I quickly scrapped all of them and set to work and more carefully making a set of darkwood bows. For these, I gathered only the best samples of wood from young-ish darkwood for their youthful resilience but large hearts. The 'blank' bow I made to test this style of wood after a full day of chopping could fire an arrow roughly a hundred yards before hitting the ground and proved to last for several days without oiling.

The proper bows I made were all three-layered bows like the blank but they were more carefully shaped to one another. The middle layers were vaguely diamond shaped with thin sides and thick centers. These centers fit into hollows filed into the outer planks. After thickly painting the middle plank with boiling hot and thin tar, I pressed the outer planks on and squeezed them together with my entire body and suit for coverage.

It took several hours before I was confident in letting the first bow relax and after watching the bow carefully until that evening I felt confident in my crude manufacturing process. The next day, I made and pressed two more bows together. For bow strings, I used twisted sinew cordage made from the tendons supporting weasel spines.