Fallon spent even more time securing it, making sure it wasn’t just going to fall over, and even the guys came over and checked it out, impressed by our skills. I didn’t think I’d enjoy this task, but it turns out I liked doing it a whole lot more than I first thought. Once we’re finished admiring our handiwork, Rhett gives us all a small foam roll out to sleep on, and I’m very, very grateful.
We use some more foliage to lay underneath our roll outs so they’re not directly on the hard ground, and I decide to use one of my extra layers of clothes as a pillow. It’s actually not horrible. Sure, I wouldn’t want to sleep here for weeks on end, but it’s definitely doable for a few nights.
“Okay, ladies,” Rhett says, handing us all a sheet of paper. “Everything you can eat is on here, but anything you collect, you need to show us before eating just so we can double check. There are plenty of fish in the water—if you’re talented enough you might work out a way to catch some. Otherwise, this area is full of fruit trees, nuts, and maybe even some ground vegetables. It’s old farming land, and before all of this was here, there were a lot of crops. I’m sure if you look hard enough, you’ll find what you need.”
Well.
This should be entertaining. A shelter is one thing, finding food is another.
I guess we’re having one blueberry and the image of a fish for dinner.
6
“I can’t believe you found all of this,” Ember says, eyes wide as she looks at everything that Fallon tips out of her shirt when we return from our little dinner hunt.
We went together, and Fallon seemed to know her way around the wilderness like a pro. As we looked for food, she told us how she grew up on a farm and remembered a lot about how the crops were grown. If this used to be farming land, we should be able to find crops that have continued to grow over time. Especially beneath the ground.
She also told us about why she was in prison and how she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and went down for murder but was freed of it when solid evidence came in that she had nothing to do with it. It was quite the story, and it makes me feel bad for her that she had to live through something so horrible.
She was right about the land, though.
We came across a pumpkin vine growing wild amongst the trees and managed to get two pumpkins off it that hadn’t been chewed out by bugs. We found an old barn that was a pile of rubble on the ground, it must have been from when this was all farming. Because of that, Fallon said we should be able to find more crops, and we did. There were random patches of corn, which we managed only to get one cob off, but we also found some berries, a grape looking fruit, some root vegetables beneath the ground that I have no idea what they are, and some wild nuts.
It's not bad for our first attempt.
We gathered as much as we could and took it all back to camp where Rhett went over our collection, impressed by what we had managed to get. Only a few of the items were inedible, but the rest we were able to use. Everyone else managed to gather a few things, too. Dante and Elias got a few fish and the other ranchers bought back some wild bananas and some more root vegetables.
Marg and Betty only managed to get some berries and some weird looking vegetable type thing that I’m definitely not eating.
Still, combined, we’ll have dinner.
“What are we going to do with these pumpkins?” Fallon asks, glancing at the two we collected.
“I have an idea,” I say. “When I was younger, a friend of mine, her dad used to cook a whole pumpkin in the fire. It was like ... delicious. Sure, we don’t have half the stuff he used, but I think if we can crack the top, scoop out the middle, we might be able to make it work.”
“Oh,” Ember says. “I’ve seen that done before, too. We can put the corn inside, and the root vegetable, and it’ll be really yummy.”
Fallon nods, impressed.
We take our pumpkins over to where the ranchers are preparing a fire and borrow the one small knife Rhett brought with him to cut the middle out of the pumpkin, then we take everything to the river and wash it before stuffing the pumpkin and making an area beside the fire with some coals that we can cook it in. I have no idea if it’ll work, but it looks like it just might.