Back To The Roots (REWRITTING)

8: A need for Safety

At some point during the night Kyla woke Lily for her shift of keeping up the fire and she laid down with Josiah to get some sleep. She carefully situated herself trying not to bump him or make too much noise. Tired as she was, she barely managed to pull a blanket over herself and bundle up before she fell asleep.

When daylight lit up there camp lily woke Kyla so she could get a little more sleep before her son was up for the day.

“I just restocked on wood,” she told Kyla, before laying her head down on her backpack, her eyes already closed.

“Thanks,” Kyla yawned, crawling out into the warm morning air.

She stared into the fire chewing a piece of jerky and started to nod off. Her head bobbed and startled her awake, she had to get up and do something. She glanced around looking for something to do. Her eyes stopped on their new home. What did she need to do to make it safer so they wouldn’t have to stay up again? After thinking about it for a few minutes an idea came to her.

She stood up to go look for some sticks that were short but wide. She had an ax in her pack but that was a lot more work and time that she didn’t think was necessary. It took roughly two hours to find all the wood she needed. She was dropping the last arm load onto her pile in front of the den when Lily came crawling out with Josiah close behind her.

“Good morning,” Kyla said, cheerfully.

“Morning. What’s with the big pile of wood?”

“I’m fixing our little house, I’m gonna close up the front with these logs so no one has to stay up with the fire.”

“Awesome. Let me go pee and I’ll be back to help you,” she said rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“There’s some jerky in my bag if you want it, or some other stuff,” Kyla said, sitting down to take a short break.

Lily came back a short while later to help, “You ready to do this?”

“Yep, can you watch me do a few first to make sure my idea works?”

“Yeah, no problem. It’ll help me get a better idea of what you mean anyway. Before we start let me go grab Josiah a couple toys from my bag, ” she said, crawling into the den.

She came back out and handed Josiah four cars and a monster truck to play in the dirt with. Kyla positioned herself where she needed to be to reach everything she needed without having to get up and down a bunch of time. Then reached out and grabbed the nearest log and started on the left side she began closing in the front of the den. The top part of the log she pushed into the dirt above her and the bottom she pulled on until it was nice and wedged into the ground. She also got several bowls of dirt and packed them around the bottom of each makeshift post just to be sure. Lily watched her do three then came to sit beside her and followed her direction. After working side by side for about an hour they had the entire front part closed in except what they left open to be able to go in and out. They looked at each other’s dirt smeared faces and busted out laughing.

“We could really use a bath,” Lily said.

“No kidding. Looks like it might be a good time to go find our water source then, and hope it’s not too far away so this wasn’t for nothing,” Kyla responded, gesturing to the work they’d just done.

“Any suggestion on how to find it?” 

“Not really other than the horses came from that direction,” she said, pointing over Lily’s shoulder.

“That way it is then. Come on Josiah, we're gonna go look for a place to take a bath.”

Finding water turned out to be much easier than they thought it’d be. When they left the campsite the horses followed them and ended up leading them right to the water. It wasn’t very far and they probably would’ve found it on their own eventually, but they might not have found the deer trail that led them through the overgrowth so they didn’t have to fight off the briers.