Making a Fire in a Hole

Lu Zhe finished speaking, and several of the girls were surprised!

In such extreme weather, it would be good enough just to stay alive, yet he actually had such clear thoughts on how to survive.

My man is truly remarkable!

By comparison, I could only think about this and that.

Thinking about it, I really feel ashamed!

Shen Bing and several of the girls looked at each other, all feeling that they couldn't just sit there and eat the ready-made food.

Time to take action!

The girls took off their drenched bras and underwear from under the bear skins, and made simple bra and skirt sets using the dried banana leaves, and indeed felt much better.

With the clothes handled, next they had to share some of Lu Zhe's burden!

"Lu Zhe, what can we do?"

"That's right, we can't let you do all the work yourself, we have to share some of the burden too!"

"Yes, we're a team. We should help each other and work together."

"Little Brother Zhe, shall we help you weave the cave entrance?"

Lu Zhe squeezed the two bamboo poles tightly and thought for a moment: "This has to be woven very sturdily, I have to do it myself. If you really want to help me, do these few things instead."

"What do you need us to do, Lu Zhe?!"

Tang Xiaoguo said: "Seeing how well you're performing, feel free to make some slightly unreasonable requests!"

Lu Zhe nodded and said: "First, take stock of our current supplies, which will help analyze what we can do with these supplies next.

Second, see how much mosquito repellent ointment we have left. There may be fleas and lice parasites in the bear cave, everyone should apply more, which can temporarily reduce bug bites. We'll have to thoroughly treat the bear cave later. Do these two things first, then we can discuss the next step!"

These were all very simple yet important tasks. The girls all nodded: "Understood!"

Everyone in the cave busied themselves.

Lu Zhe removed the bamboo partitions and used nails to punch holes before tying them together in a staggered pattern with ropes, forming a bamboo panel. He then tied palm leaves onto it to create a door.

He wedged this door into a rock crevice half a meter from the cave entrance, and stuffed the crevices with rags!

In an instant, the sounds of wind and rain from outside were reduced by more than half, without the cold wind blowing in. The temperature loss inside the cave finally improved.

At the same time, it also led to some negative factors - the light inside the cave became even darker.

But after some adjustment, they could still barely make out the interior of the cave.

Lu Zhe moved on to the next task, building a fire starter.

He picked up a tree branch, wiped it dry with a twisted rag, and whittled it with his paratrooper knife.

This was a dead dry tree branch, about the thickness of a thumb, straight as a rod.

After the bark had soaked up rainwater, he stripped the bark to reveal the wood underneath that hadn't been saturated.

He continued to whittle it to a point, which could be used to drill into wood for friction fire, and whittled some dry shreds to catch the sparks.

Next, Lu Zhe chopped off two short and one long bamboo strips, about 4 centimeters wide each. He drilled holes in the middle of all three bamboo strips with his paratrooper knife.

He threaded the two short strips perpendicularly under the dry stick, crossing them and securing them one third of the way up the drill tip with twine, to provide balance and inertia. He threaded the long strip over the top of the stick.

Then he found a piece of twine twice as long as the stick, tied it in the middle around the tip of the stick, and tied both loose ends to the ends of the long bamboo strip.

At this point, the legendary Iroquois Indian fire starter was completed.

He then found a stick as thick around as a girl's wrist, split it lengthwise, and used the dry interior section.

Lu Zhe braced his feet on both ends of the half-log and twisted the stick a few turns with the drill tip pressed against the interior dry spot on the log.

Grasping both ends of the long bamboo strip, he rapidly see-sawed back and forth, causing the stick to spin very quickly.

It required far less effort than rubbing by hand!

Even the girls would have no trouble operating it.

Ning Shu was very curious: "This thing is so amazing!"

"The principle is very simple, would you like to try it out?"

"Okay!"

Ning Shu began drilling wood for friction fire like Lu Zhe did: "See, isn't this method more elegant than the 'plane' method?"

"Ms. Class Monitor, have some class, that's called a bow drill!"

"That's not important, your arm is hurt, so leave this to me!"

"Alright, that works out, I'll prepare some tinder."

"We already have charcoal and wood, what other tinder do we need?"

"Charcoal and wood both produce smoke, wet smoke especially. Outdoors it's fine, but using them as fuel in the cave would be suicidal."

"Then what do we use?"

"Bear fat and cotton threads. Let's see how much bear fat is left?!"

Meanwhile, the girls had finished taking stock of their supplies:

Jiang Yao estimated: "For food, there are two pieces of dried fish left, half a catty of dried python meat, one smoked bear paw, plenty of about 20-30 catties of smoked bear meat left. There's also one dried bear gallbladder, and three bottles of bear fat!"

Lu Zhe nodded: "Very good!"

Tang Xiaoguo said: "On my end there's half a brick of honey, one bottle of salt, one bag of chili peppers, a strand of bananas, a bag of vegetables, and...one bag of lemons!"

Lu Zhe nodded again: "Not bad either!"

Shen Bing said: "For tools there's the bayonet, paratrooper knife, steak knife, don't know where the pocket knife wandered off to. The helmets, mess kits, canteens, entrenching tools, etc are all present. For stone tools there's only the stone mortar that got brought along, the rest got tossed down the well."

Lu Zhe nodded: "With better tools available, it doesn't matter that the pocket knife is gone. The important tools are still here, which is good."

Lin Qianqian said: "Most of the stuff we initially washed up on the island with is also present, like the backpacks, pencil cases, hand creams and such...they're all here. Sister Bing's duffel bag also has fifteen bottles left, plus some clothes, pull tab cans, tin cans, other daily waste."

Lu Zhe nodded again. He felt these girls weren't bad, they had the most important things all packed away.

With these items, he was confident they could live quite well in this cave for a period!

He took a bottle of bear fat to make a bear fat lamp.

It could both bring some light into this dark cave, and preserve a small fire source.

By now, the bear fat in the bottles had all congealed into a milky white, waxy solid. He cut open the bottle to extract a bottle-shaped block of hardened bear fat.

He then scrubbed a lamp wick from a strip of pure cotton rag, and scraped some of the bear fat block back and forth over the wick until it was covered by a thick layer of fat. Now the wick could be used.

Next he whittled a long, thin bamboo skewer, sharpening one end while tying the wick to the other. He inserted the bamboo stick through the top of the bottle-shaped fat block, penetrating out the bottom, leaving just a bit of head. This left the wick suspended in the middle of the bear fat, like an oversized candle.

Finally, he removed the bamboo stick and stuffed the bottle-shaped fat into an emptied tin can, and the complete bear fat lamp was finished.

Just then, everyone caught a whiff of smoke.

Ning Shu happily yelled "Ha ha, there's fire!"

"Quick, pour it onto the wood shavings..."

The embers from the friction drill ignited the wood shavings, which in turn lit the bear fat lamp. At first there was some black smoke, but after about ten seconds the flames stabilized and the smoke smell vanished entirely.

That tiny little flame illuminated everyone's faces, and lit up the entire cave.