Chapter 13.

“With just dry wood?”

“Figure it out yourself, I’m just going to enjoy watching you struggle off to the side.”

She sat down on a log nearby, crossed one leg over the other and let her chin rest on her open palm while staring at me, eager to see me fail.

A fire…

“Do you have a lighter by any chance?”

“Even if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t give it to you right now.”

“Can I borrow the charger you brought?”

“Absolutely not. Electricity would obviously be cheating as well.”

“Did you actually just bring me here to torture me by pushing me back into the Stone Age?”

“Hehehe. That could possibly be one reason. An unfaithful cheater should have to put in a bit of effort to be forgiven for his sins after all.”

I grumbled to myself, “but I didn’t even cheat.”

“What was that? Did you have something you wanted to say to me?”

The smile on her face… I reconfirmed it in my heart, it still scared me at times. That smile was the smile of a woman plotting to chop your manhood off should you utter even one wrong word.

Dejected, I blankly sat on the ground staring at the pieces of drywood she gave me. Did I really have no choice but to rub them together like an unsophisticated caveman for hours on end?

To be honest, it would be kind of embarrassing to stumble this early after only just arriving. Googling it felt a bit too shameful even for me when it was a task as simple as starting a fire. The fact that a caveman could do it, but I couldn’t with my vast knowledge of modern science felt too humiliating. Perhaps Adele knew that and was why she’d taken up great pleasure in watching me suffer through this.

“Adele, could it be you’re making me start the fire because you’re actually unable to start it yourself?”

“Hehehe. Yeah, I can’t start it myself, so please go ahead and show this out of touch young lady how it’s done.”

That sadistic smile on her face told me she’d easily seen through the cheap reverse psychology I was trying to pull to get her to do it for me. Tch, and I thought I’d look so smart at the end when I donned a smug smile and said, ‘look, I used my head to make the fire by getting you to do it for me.’

Why, just why did it have to be something as mundane as starting a fire?

I should really think this through first, just rubbing the two pieces of wood together without a plan would probably just result in failure. Fire requires oxygen, heat and fuel. To reach the required heat by mindlessly rubbing the wood together with my hand would probably never happen. I’m no superhuman with endless stamina.

Rather than mindlessly rubbing up and down, another motion that can generate friction to produce heat is rotation. Rotation is much easier, but again, it will require stamina to do it over and over again.

A tool to aid with that rotation would be ideal. I need the ideal structure to rotate as well. These pieces of dry wood don’t fit the criteria. A straight stick would work. As for something to rotate the stick, a bow like structure should work, right? I can decrease the amount of repetitive motions while substantially increasing the efficiency at which heat is generated and lost this way without hurting my hands.

The only problem was, I needed a string. I looked at my own clothing, but refuted the idea of that. I’d rather not lose my clothes so soon. Long durable fibers, that was what I needed. Duh, cellulose in plants. I got up and found a plant I wasn’t familiar with, but it was exactly what I was looking for. It had long stems and was encased in the sturdy cellulose fibres I needed. I broke it by bending it at a ninety degree angle near the thick base at ground level and the outer layer peeled off the stem in the process. With a bit of effort I successfully snapped it off.

I picked up a sturdy tree branch bent in a crescent shape. I twisted the long cellulose fibre up tightly then tied it around the crescent shaped  tree branches ends. I then picked up a straight wooden stick along with some dried up leaves on the ground and returned to where I left the small pieces of drywood. 

After about 10 minutes of rotating the stick with the makeshift string on the bow wrapped around it, the dried up leaves I’d put between the pieces of wood started to smoke while I blew on it. I got a bit excited and picked up the pace and before I knew it a small fire ignited.

My face immediately lit up like fireworks. I felt a strange sense of joy I’d never felt before. It felt invigorating. It was such a simple act, but I somehow felt like I’d achieved a great accomplishment. It was probably along the same line of feeling cavemen of the past experienced when they stumbled upon fire.

You really wouldn’t understand it unless you experienced it yourself. It was kind of like returning to your roots and seeing where it all began. An indescribable surge of excitement welled up deep inside me out of nowhere.

“Tsk. You cheated didn’t you? You must have looked it up online just now. The first time I started a fire took me hours when I was a kid, there’s no way you just did that in 10 minutes without looking it up online.”

I turned towards Adele with a wide, overly satisfied, smug smile on my face, “Oh? Could it be that I’m what they call a genius of the wild? Could it be my Adele is actually not as adaptable as I am?”

“Should I toss you back into the ocean and see how well you fair there?”

The thought of those jellyfish quickly cooled any sort of superiority I had over her. Just remembering how savagely she ate them without a shred of hesitation, even as far as enjoying the flavor… I was certainly not her match. I shouldn’t let a small bit of success get to my head. Besides that, there were countless survival skills I lacked with respect to nature.