First hunt, fire-making trial and error, and the reality of being the alpha male.

A year has passed since my encounter with the Tiger of the hill, and nine years has passed since I reincarnated in this world.

I got a lot taller compared to my last year, so I believe I’m in a middle of a growth spur. Right now I’m around 135 cm tall.

Our community lives in a small cave in a high place surrounded by trees and other greenness. There is a stream of water nearby. {#1}.

I’m currently being tended by a older woman called Iuwa. She is a young woman that likes caring for younglings like me.

Summer has just started, but it’s hot and dry. I sweat pretty often, and being hairy doesn’t help. Spring, the right season for fruit harvesting, has just ended, so we need to find other ways of getting sustenance, like hunting.

Today is my hunting debut. Before that I would go around gathering fruits, hand fishing on the raining season, looking for herbs and roots, and working on making stone tools.

We are gathering together in the entrance of our nest while preparing pointy rocks. Our hunting party consist of me, Yawo, Howu, Iuwo, Huwoho and two of his close aides.

Yawo is a slender young boy of my age that is taller (140cm) than me.

Howu, a boy a year older than me that is way too large (140 cm also, but way too bulky) and too timid for his age.

Iuwo is a young adult man that is very kind to me, and Huwoho, our current leader/ alpha male.

Among the adult males, the average height is 160 cm tall, while our leader Huwoho is a huge bulky 175 cm tall with large frame.

As weapons we are using hand-axe heads made out of carved stone. Those don’t have handles, just the head. They are made by banging rocks together.

The fabrication process of those axes are quite interesting. First, you need a small but hard rock called hammerstone. Then you get a stone by the river or on a cliff, and use the hammerstone to crack them. When cracked, they make a sharp edge. Then you keep hitting on the right way until you make the rock sharp in the shape you want. {#2}

Iuwo-nii is leading the party. He is specially good at scouting and tracking targets. We found a track made of small holes in the ground. It must belong to a hoofed animal.

By going downstream, following the tracks, we found it. Our target is there, drinking water. It’s something animals do more often in this scorching heat.

It was a lone deer, but with shining metallic antlers. Its fur is dark yellow with dark blue dots that shines occasionally. The fur was very fluffy, which was spiked thanks to static electricity. Some blue sparks come out of those antlers. I don’t really want to touch those. I call it Lighting Deer.

The lighting deer are more common this time of the year. They usually live in the savanna, but come up on the highlands on spring for their mating season, and stays around here in summer while it’s dry, leaving to the savannas on the fall, staying there until the end of winter.

The forest we live in is richer in resources, and water is more abundant, but it’s more dangerous. That’s why they go to the savannas on the fall and winter, when it’s colder and wetter (means more resources there, with less competition, but wetter climate means wetter fur which means less static electricity).

The reverse happens on spring and summer. They come up to the forest when it’s hotter and drier (with less resources on the savanna, they must come up on the forest, but summer is also the season when they are the strongest, since the dry season doesn’t interfere with the static electricity).

Females lives in herds while males are left to live by themselves after becoming adult, only rejoining the band on the mating season. Our target is a male deer.

Our leader Huwoho made the signs. These signs looks like those signs you see special operatives do in action movies. We surrounded this deer while Huwoho’ aide cross the stream. The Lighting Deer does not want to get wet, so if it gets attacked near the stream it’s likely it won’t cross.

[ OWAWI – YAWO – HERE – HOWU – STREAM – LEFT – DEER – ME – STREAM – RIGHT – DEER – YOU – CROSS – STREAM] (Huwoho, with gestures, organizing our deployment while surrounding the deer)

Me and Yawo was right behind the deer, one of Huwoho’s aides was across the stream, another one was with Howu on my left, Huwoho himself was on the right and the deer was completely surronded.

The alpha’s aide attacked, and predictably the deer ran in the direction opposed to the river, right up to me and Yawo. We were prepared to attack it when it suddenly turned left, going straight to Howu with its antlers pointed to him.

I ran after it and threw my axe-head. It hit the deer’s head, making the deer stagger slightly off balance. It allowed Howu to grab the deer by the neck, which made him get electrocuted by it’s charged fur.

The discharge wasn’t very strong though, being just enough to inflict a numbing pain for a second on whoever touched it. The sensation must be similar to accidentally touching the outlet with a finger.

After the discharge, the deer’s fur was no longer spiked, which means it was safe to grab it. It’s antlers was still sparking though, and we needed to be very careful.

Howu heavy and stocky frame helped him slow down the deer, which was caught by one of the goons. Soon, we (me, Iuwo-nii, Yawo and the two aides) started hitting him with our axe-heads while Howu and Huwoho pinned the deer down by it’s neck.

It was still resisting. The deer was heavily struggling and managed to hit Huwoho onde with its electric charged antlers.

I can see on the deer’s eyes the terror from being ganged up and beaten up to death. I can also see its will to survive.

It also managed to kick once me in my right leg with its hind legs. It hurts. Its hoof is hard and my leg was swollen..After Yawo and Iuwo-nii did one last strike and the deer stopped moving.

The deer was dead. We caught the deer together. After lifting its body, we started taking it back to our community. After arriving there, the wounded got to rest, and the others started butchering the deer.

While I said the wounded, it was just Howu being electrocuted, the chief Huwoho being struck by the deer’s electric charged antlers and me getting my legs swollen by that kick.

The other people started butchering the hunt with the axe-heads, chipped stone knives and other sharp parts scrapped off from rocks. It’s a surprisingly efficient process with include skinning, then butchering the deer into the liver, tongue, then muscle parts.

Me and Huwoho got treated by wrapping the skin from the deer on our wounds. I’m kinda bugged by how we use those skins to wound treatment, but no one had the idea of clothing.

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Today’s successful hunt turned into a feast. Huwoho and his aides got to eat the tongue and liver, which seems the tastier. I satisfied myself with a piece of meat.

Ayu has sit on my side and we were enjoying our meal together. She was concerned about my swollen leg, but I told her that I was alright.

[WE – HUNT – DEER – HOWU - PIN – DEER – KICK – MY - LEG – WE - STRUCK – DEER - KILL – DEER – MEAT – YUMMY] (me, gesturing about the hunt).

Yawo tried to steal my part of the hunt even though he already ate his. I can’t figure him out. He is always trying to taunt me. Since longe ago, he always had that sense of rivalry towards me.

I slapped him in the face, he got angry and tried to punch me, then I dodged and slapped him in the face again. He is taller than me, but he is skinny. While relatively agile, he obviously don’t know any fighting techniques. Since I was doing boxing in my previous life, it’s not a big deal.

My mother Waya and Yawo’s mother then came to stop the fighting. Yawo’s mother was scolding him for causing trouble, and my mother also scolded me for fighting him. It seems a very motherly thing to do.

Across me, our tracker Iuwo-nii and Iuwa-nee had sit together. Iuwo craved a small hole on the ground that looked like tracks and he was explaining non-verbally about the hunt. His gestures was like:

[ TRACKS – ANIMAL – HUNT – WE – SURROUND – HORNS – CHARGE – ELECTRIC – PINNED – KILL ] (Iuwo, with gestures, talking about the hunt)

Iuwa was clinging to him in a flirty matter. They always are close to each other. Iuwo looked at her with a love-struck look. Iuwa and Iuwo are young adults that are phisically mature. Iuwo seems to be a bit older than Iuwa. They have been close for a long time.

They started hugging more tightly. Their breathing became more ragged. Then suddenly she got away from him. After that she ran up to Huwoho and hugged him. Then they went a bit deeper inside the cave. Iuwo looked dejected.

In this wild community, things like relationship, monogamy, marriage and family and even fatherhood are unknown. There is just the community, and people do it whenever and with whoever they want.

They also seem to not having figured out the correlation between sex and childbirth. For them, sex is some fun intimacy moment you have with a person of your choosing, something good, while pregnancy and childbirth are random events that generate new members that will be part of our community in the future.

It’s not like Iuwo-nii never gets to do it with her, he sometimes does. But more often than not, Iuwa ends up wanting Huwoho, the strongest of our community. He was unable to do it today. Talk about unlucky.

Huwoho was the leader at very least since I was reincarnated to this world. Since was is the alpha male and the most sought after man since that time, he is probably my biological father.

He is not just a musclehead, but is able to make plans for the future of our clan. He determines objectives, divide up labor, assign people their roles and plan our hunts.

He usually cares about our well being, but is very keen of maintaining his authority in this group, and is able and willing to use his strength to do so.

He is specially attentive to Howu. Howu is big and stocky like him, so he has great potential to become the next alpha leader that will protect the clan. But he is too kind and too pacifist. He avoids getting into conflict and hesitate a lot when fighting, either on hunts of on fights.

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Later, I began gathering varied branches and pieces of wood to do a personal project that I’ve been trying later.

With some thinner branches that I’ve caught, I used a rock edge to remove the bumps and to make it more cylindrical.

With some thicker branches, I flattened them up and laid them on a flat rock outside the cave.

Then I pressured one of the thin cylindrical branch/stick perpendicularly on one of the flat wood pieces I’ve carved.

I grabbed the stick with both open hands and started drilling the flat wood piece while pressuring it down.

The objective of this experiment is to develop fire-making. It’s been around 6 months since I started trying it, with no success. Today was not different.

I still can’t figure out fire-making. In the beginning I managed to figure out the need for a flat board as simply rubbing dry leaves and random wood pieces scatter them all over the rock.

It’s just the next step that is harder. It seems that I’m on the right way, as I manage to generate heat and smoke through this process but it never develops enough to actual fire-making. 

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong of if I’m getting the wrong piece of wood. I also started trying to craft things like spears and axes (with both head and handle). While I can find hard wood to serve as a handle, the hard part is figuring out a way to fix the head to the handle.

All the prototypes I made so far ended up loosened within a few strikes. I tried using the magical vines on the trees around to hold up together, but the vines are too fragile and not only break up, but dismantle in magical bright particles whenever I try to hold them up.

I know that crafting and fire-making made humans stand up from being animals like any other to being the dominant species in my world, but as expected, it’s hard to figure out how to do things in the middle of the wilderness without any prior experience or any form of consultation. Today was a busy day.

#1 - https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/280000/velka/cave-entrance-on-mountain-cliff.jpg

#2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrvPOkMs4U4

#3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbyd0LuVoZw