Day 8:
Today I learned cows are difficult to push.
While looking for ore, I dug out a chunk of the hill that my cave is in.
(I guess since it has 4 walls and 2 doors I should call it a house now?)
(Nah, most of it is still underground, and there are cows grazing on my roof. Still a cave.)
It was perfectly shaped to hold larger animals. And it was mostly under cover, but with just enough access to the sky to keep anyone from getting claustrophobic.
Technically I’m breaking Company policy, by the way. When we’re dropped into a planet, we’re supposed to enter the caves, mine the ore, take everything valuable inside, and get the heck back out without ever disturbing the surface. It should look like we were never there. The goal is to covertly do extractions without alerting the natives (or their government) that we were ever present.
I strongly suspect The Company is not properly procuring their intergalactic mining permits.
The problem is on a planet of polite flora and fauna, it’s easy to go into a cave, extract ore, and go home, especially with a team, and most especially with a team who has the right tools. On a planet of zombies and skeletons and flocking giraffe-corgis that explode, it’s important to build a shelter with a door.
I could have followed policy to a T by digging into the earth and covering my tracks and never surfacing, but:
- How would The Company find me, if I left no traces on the surface? It’s not like my radio’s here.
- I can’t make stone tools without wood handles, and trees don’t grow underground. (Well, so far. Nothing about this damn place would shock me anymore.)
- I’m hungry. My supplies are gone. If I hadn’t killed those sheep a few days ago, I’d be starved to death right now. Staying alive means growing food because as I am about to prove, I am a lousy lousy rancher.
So anyway, here I was with a great place to keep cows, and directly outside and above it, I had cows. They were walking on the roof of my cave house. All I needed to do was entice the cows into the cow house, and I’d have things like milk. Milk is filled with fat and protein, great food for miners, especially starving miners.
But the cows are bigger than me and heavier than me and they didn’t want to go in the cow house.
When a 140lb woman, even a miner, tries to push a 1,500 lb cow into a hole the cow does want to enter, the 140lb woman does not win. Also, the cow gets annoyed.
So today, Day 8 of my being trapped on a rock in the middle of nowhere, I annoyed cows.
Maybe tomorrow I will have something more interesting to write.
