Year 4 Day 30

They’re here!

adolesent lion from Morguefile, www.observare.it I’ve been expecting their return for the last two fivedays, and even resorted to flights over the surrounding countryside. I spotted the first group, a day or two away, three days ago, and have seen several since. There are things I can find more easily than they can, and I have laid in a good supply of salt, tropical fruits, and obsidian.

I need to trade for tanned skins and cooking. I can get foodstuffs easily enough, with Patches’ help, but the computer is not much help in telling me how to cook them.  Same problem as the architecture program, but worse: the recipes assume I have a cooker that needs only to be programmed.

Perhaps I should have accepted the offer of Meerkat’s help? Her cooking could not be as bad as mine. But her company …. Not to mention the assumptions she was quite willing to make! The People are better company than Patches, and I might as well admit that company has become more important to me than tanned hides and cooking, but they are not R’il’nian.

Songbird and Giraffe were, predictably, the first to wish to see my new home, and the most charmed by it. I’ve managed a small heat pump which keeps food cool, and Songbird was amazed and delighted to see how meat would keep fresh for a few days without salting, drying and smoking. They are to be mated at this gather, and I assumed they would be staying with Rain Cloud’s group, but they seemed a little hesitant about that. They could go back with Dust Devil’s group, but do not seem enthusiastic about that, either.

I hope they make up their minds soon, Unless I am very mistaken, Songbird will be a mother before the next gather.

Jarn’s Journal is part of the back story of the Jarnian Confederation, the setting for my science fiction novels. Jarn is a human-like alien, a R’il’nian, who was stranded on Earth, in Africa, about 125,000 years ago at the height of the penultimate interglacial period. He has met and is increasingly dependent on a group of primitive humans, the People. The parts of his story blogged to date are combined in my author site.