wild trail

Chapter 11 The Simple Loom

Because the bark fibers are too thick and not soft enough, fortunately, there are many kinds of plants in the deep forest. Wang Lang has seen many plants similar to hemp before. Wang Lang plans to try to use this plant fiber for weaving.
The current looms can be said to be very crude. Since there are no metal tools, they cannot process wood effectively, so Wang Lang had to consider other ways to improve.
The thing in my hand that can barely be called cloth has only five warp threads, so it has no practical value at all.
Wood processing is inconvenient, so Wang Lang considered using bamboo instead. A while ago, when making bows and arrows, a lot of bamboo was cut down, and now there are still a lot of them piled up in the corner.
Wang Lang selected a bamboo as thick as an arm from the bamboo pair, cut it off with a stone axe to a length of about one and a half meters, and then split it into four parts of similar size. It took nearly half an hour to finish, and I was tired and sweating profusely.
After resting for a while, Wang Lang raised the fire. Because the bamboo has good bending properties, it will become soft after being baked by the fire, and can be processed into the shape you want. After cooling down with water, it can be shaped.
Wang Lang carefully roasted the four split bamboo strips until soft, and it took an hour to make three straight bamboo strips about seven or eight centimeters wide.
Next, Wang Lang found a stone knife for cutting meat. The edge of this stone knife is relatively thin and hard. After careful polishing, it is very sharp. Although it cannot be compared with metal, it is still very easy to cut flesh.
Wang Lang took this stone knife and cut a bamboo strip in half from the middle, and drilled two small holes at both ends of the bamboo strip. Then he carved the two sections of the other two bamboo strips into convex shapes. The bamboo strips are put together to form a rectangular frame.
Wang Lang looked at it and felt a little dissatisfied, and made some simple adjustments. After he felt that it was almost the same, he used a stone knife to carve grooves on the edges of two relatively short wooden strips. This work is meticulous work. Wang Lang has no experience, so The movement was very slow, and Wang Lang carved a bamboo strip until it was dark.
There was not enough light at night, Wang Lang couldn't finish carving the rest, so he had to carefully put away the finished ones, and told everyone in the tribe that this is a very important thing not to move around.
The next day, at dawn, people continued to clean up the surrounding weeds and shrubs. After a day of hard work yesterday, more than 100 square meters of open space had been opened up in front of the cliff. Wang Lang asked them to clean up half of the open space. up.
Wang Lang looked at the progress and was satisfied. According to this speed, the wall can be built, and a few thatched houses can be built before the rainy season.
After instructing everyone to pay attention to safety, Wang Lang continued to do what he didn't finish yesterday.
After a whole morning of hard work, Wang Lang finally finished carving all the grooves. After assembling, looking at the densely packed grooves, Wang Lang felt a sense of accomplishment. Seventy or eighty threads can be fixed on a wooden strip more than half a meter wide. This is the limit of what Wang Lang can do.
Wang Lang didn't know what the ancient looms looked like, but Wang Lang felt that the principle should be similar to what he made, but if he wanted to weave finer and denser cloth, he had to wait for conditions to continue improving.
In the next day or two, after everyone cleaned up the nearby bushes and weeds, Wang Lang took the tribe's men out to cut a lot of hemp plants, tied them up and threw them in the river to soak.
During the waiting period, the women and children dug pits in the cleared land of the tribe for the purpose of building wooden walls in the future, while the men went fishing again under the leadership of Wang Lang, and then handed over the fish. Smoked and dried fish for the women.
In order to cope with the arrival of the rainy season, Wang Lang took the warriors of the tribe to hunt around. Human beings are at the top of the food chain, and with Wang Lang's more sophisticated weapons, animals of all sizes near the tribe are miserable during this period. Whether it is a large mammal or a small dinosaur, giant birds cannot escape Wang Lang's clutches.
Although there are only seven people, these seven people are all in their prime of life. With their hard work, they hunted down two moas, a two-meter-high carnivorous dinosaur, and a leopard within a week. brilliant.
Of course, Wang Lang would kill any carnivore he saw, but he would try to capture small flightless birds and some herbivores alive if he could.

However, it is relatively difficult to capture alive. During this period of time, Wang Lang only caught a dozen pheasants and two fawns. It is obviously unrealistic to domesticate livestock as food reserves with such little things. Wang Lang can only Comfort yourself by accumulating more.

In the chicken coop built in the corner of the tribal wall, more than a dozen chickens were clucking in the fence, not at all aware of being a captive, and there were even two roosters fighting fiercely for the right to mate. In desperation, Wang Lang had no choice but to Catch one of them and kill it for meat.
Different from the flock of chickens, the two fawns caught were shiveringly tied beside the chicken coop. They hadn’t eaten for a day or two. Wang Lang was worried that they would just starve to death. I had no choice but to kill them while they still had meat on them.
For a week, Wang Lang led the people to fish out the hemp stalks soaked in the river, piled up bundles of hemp in the yard, and asked everyone in the upper tribe to peel and extract the hemp fiber.
After everyone's hard work, Wang Lang obtained about thirty to forty catties of dried hemp fibers in two days. Looking at the yellow-white hemp threads drying on the bamboo poles in the sun, Wang Lang couldn't help but feel a surge of excitement in his heart. .
After collecting the usable fibers, Wang Lang taught the women in the tribe how to spin them into threads and how to use the looms they made.
The women gradually mastered the use of the loom, and used their dexterous hands to lead the spindle back and forth between the twine, and the white cloth gradually took shape.
Because the loom is too crude, the efficiency of weaving is extremely low. Wang Lang estimated that two skilled women would weave such a piece of cloth that is one and a half meters long and one and a half meters wide. Under the current conditions, there is no other way to do this. Although Wang Lang felt a little pity in his heart, he had no choice but to do so for now.
When the women were busy weaving, Wang Lang called the men of the tribe to him. He planned to visit the place that might be the salt pond in the next few days. After all, it would take a day to get there, including the time for collecting and returning with heavy loads. It takes at least three or four days to go back and forth, and it is very dangerous to spend the night in the wild. After everything is arranged, Wang Lang dares to take people away from the tribe with confidence.
(End of this chapter)