Wednesday's Words on a Friday

 The original Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and eventually taken over by a moveable feast of participants when Delores had computer troubles. Sadly, Delores has now closed her blog forever due to other problems.

The aim of the words is to encourage us to write. A story, a poem, whatever comes to mind.

If you are posting an entry on your own blog, please let us know so we can come along to read it and add a few encouraging words.

This month the words/prompts are supplied by Hilary Melton-Butcher and can be found here

This week's words/prompts are:

1.smoking  2.culture  3.popular  4.decade  5.soft

and/or:

1.consumption  2.stretch  3.ripen  4.fields  5.cavern

and a rather large bonus set of words:

1.jumper  2.multiple  3.oven  4.disprove  5.support  6.bound  7.rural  8.swathes  9.poverty  10.pop

I have not used all the words, but am working on it.

Here is this week's effort:

A week later Russell and Erin had become settled within the Sanctuary and were gradually learning people’s names and what they did there.

Erin had become fast friends with the two young women, Elaine and Lorraine, whose main chore was herding and milking the goats while their brother Sam was in charge of making sure the Billy goat did not trouble the Nannies, nor roam randomly eating grasses that were being dried to make baskets.

Elaine was closer in age to Erin and was fascinated with the pregnancy news, “I hope to have a baby myself one day,” she confided as Erin let her feel the baby kicking.

Russell had been led deep into the woods by Rufus to the base of a hill where a small natural cavern had been discovered and was now used as a smokehouse. “Once a year we hunt down a wild pig and slaughter it just out there by the sandy bit to absorb the blood and then we light the fires inside the cave and smoke the meat along with any fish that have been caught that day,” he told Russell.

“It’s an easy job for you to begin with. Not the slaughtering part, but the timing of the smoking and turning the ribs and hams. Terry will show you how and we mark the time by the passage of the sun. The rack against the wall is for the fish to be strung onto and the horizontal racks are for the hams.” Terry turned from stringing the fish and gave a small wave.

Rufus continued, “smoking foods was a popular culture long ago, before the machine age, most native peoples of all countries did some form of this, it helped preserve the foods for future consumption, which helps of course to stretch the resources further than things would normally last.”

Russell nodded, saying “I’ve read about the old methods like this and also about people burying meats in hard packed snow as well. They would render the fat from animals and pack the meats in that in layers and then pack the whole bundle in a snow dugout.” “You have read well,” said Rufus, “and I noticed you brought some books with you. We would appreciate being able to read them and learn. Many of our people are ‘soft’ from the decades of machines doing it all, while real knowledge became lost. They will need our support to adjust to rural life as it once was.”