Reunion (Part 1):

Although I knew that I could just fix the problem by carving another rock into a pot and just adding a rock ark that I could use to support the pot, that still wouldn't have fixed the main problem of how long the pot took to boil water, not to mention cooling down afterward, so it was time to change my strategy.

It was obvious that the reason why the pot took too long to boil water was both because of the relatively low heat of the fire, and because of the amount of water that had to be heated up at once. So to fix the first problem I grabbed a big stone from the ground and threw it into the fire in order to see how long the stone could hold out for.

Although I knew that the stone was not going to fall apart that easily I still tested it out just in case, after all, I had never tried it out before, thankfully though, as expected despite some darkening the stone was pretty much intact meaning that I could just make a small pot and put it directly over the fire.

2 hours later and it was already 5 PM so I knew that this was the final attempt I had before ending off the day, thankfully, this time the water took a lot shorter to boil and was able to easily be retrieved by using the tall handle. Plus with the fact that it could hold 6 cups worth of water, it was good enough to use for the day.

As for when there would be more people, I would just have to make more pots, simple as that. Finally done with the water boiling problem I began to think about how to build traps starting tomorrow, after all the serpent meat would only be good for so long, plus with my arm broken I wouldn't be able to make much progress on the house anyway so there was no point in prioritizing it.

Genesis February 19th, 0001:

Yesterday after brainstorming for a while I decided that it would be best to just make pit traps. There would be no actual weapon at the bottom of course, as it would be more of a waste of time when I could just ambush the animal after it fell into the hole without having to do any minimal damage to it beforehand.

Although It did feel sort of wrong to kill animals that weren't bugs for food, at the very least I could take solace in the fact that only carnivores and omnivores would be attracted to the trap by the smell of cooked snake meat. So I got straight to work with everyone else's help in order to get the trap set up as soon as possible.

In the end, we were able to get everything set up in just under an hour, leaf coverup included. Thankfully I didn't have to warn anybody to avoid the trap as they could easily recognize the place where the trap was set. What I did have to do though was warn them to stay away from the snake meat.

After laying a portion of the meat on the ground I got everyone to climb up a tree with their axes and to wait. To my surprise, despite the fact that I hadn't told them what I was doing they had already connected the dots and seemed to have a rough idea of the plan, so I was able to relax and truly just focus on looking out for any predators.

After a while of waiting, a single Jaguar took the bait slowly approaching the meat making sure to constantly look around itself waiting to see if there were any around to compete for its 'prey'. Despite knowing that there was no need to fear, I for some reason was not able to shake off the eerie feeling it was emitting.

Nevertheless, the jaguar continued moving until it eventually fell into the hole, at which point I threw my axe at said jaguar followed by everyone else doing the same thing. There was only the start of a roar that was heard before silence, the only thing left, so seeing that we succeeded I went back down the tree to recover the free meat.

The jaguar had clearly been massacred as it lay there with axes all over its head and neck with one outlier on its back, it was disturbing to look at, but there wasn't much else that could be done but remove the axes and try to erase that image from my memory as I took the Jaguar carcass to the fireplace and prepared the trap once again.

I had always wondered why I had never encountered any other predators apart from pumas and giant green serpent snakes before and was even beginning to fear that I was somewhere near one of their breeding grounds, thankfully though, it seemed that I had been worried for nothing as if our fireplace was located anywhere near their breeding grounds chances would be that there would be almost no other predators in the area.

Once everything was set again we all waited patiently to see if any other animals would take the bait. As we waited I began to think back about how far I had come, although I hadn't truly done anything remarkable, at the very least I had managed to no longer have to fear and cower all the time, plus, I had even started work on establishing a settlement.

As soon as I thought about the settlement I began to daydream about the future and what I would be able to work on once I had established humans as the dominant species here. Before I could get too lost in my own thoughts though, I could hear movement towards us coming from the west side. As the noise approached I began to get into position to attack, unlike before though the eerie feeling emitted this time was a lot less powerful, almost negligible. It was then that I finally got a glimpse at one of them.

'OTHER HUMANS?!'