Forsaking Home (The Survivalist Series) Read Online Free PDF

smiled. “Then I guess we need to get this soap made.”
    Mel clapped her hands. “So! What do we do?”
    Thad grabbed the large pot and nodded toward the river. “First, we need to get some water boiling.” After filling it with water from the river, he set the pot on the fire. As we were waiting for it to boil, Jeff came back out in a fresh change of clothes.
    “This the soap-making class?” he asked.
    “This is it,” Bobbie said.
    “Do we get merit badges?” Jeff asked with a smile.
    “No merit badges, but you will get to wash your laundry. And from the looks of you and Morgan after your adventure today, your clothes need it,” Mel said.
    Soon enough, the water in the pot was boiling. Thad set the pillowcase of ash into one of the buckets, then asked Danny to pour the boiling water into it. Danny quickly dumped the steaming contents in as requested. Thad folded the edges of the sack over the rim of the bucket and looked up, “Go fill it again.” Danny jogged down to the river and refilled the pot. When he returned Thad told him that pot needed to boil too.
    While we waited for the water to boil, Thad explained the next step in the process.
    “When that one boils, we’ll pour it into one of those other buckets. Then the bag has to be dunked in and out of the water, like you’re making tea.”
    We sat around talking while we waited. With so many eyes on it, the pot seemed to take forever to boil. Once it did Danny poured it into the sack as well. Thad grabbed the top of the sack and closed it up, then began dunking it up and down.
    “Once this is done we need to boil everything down.” Thad looked up at Mel and Bobbie. “Either of you have a big enameled pot?”
    “I do, it’s about the size of that one,” Bobbie said, pointing to the pot used to boil water.
    “That’ll work.”
    “This is pretty cool, Thad. I always wanted to learn to do this. It was one of those things I always figured I’d get to.” I looked over at him. “Just another example of putting things off till tomorrow. Sometimes tomorrow doesn’t come.”
    “I know what you mean. I never thought of this as a skill I would someday rely on. It was just a way to keep something from the past alive, in a way.”
    I looked down into the slurry. “There’s decades of skills lost that would make our lives easier. The rush to make life easier, more convenient, overshadowed those skills, and we’re paying the price now.”
    Thad grunted. “Yeah, people made fun of folks who held on to the old ways, calling ’em hippies or whatever. I bet they are a lot more comfortable right now than most folks.”
    Thad poured the slurry into the pot Bobbie handed him. “We’ll cook this down for a while.” After scraping the bucket out with a stick, he set it on the fire.
    “How long does it take?”
    Thad looked up and smiled. “Till it’s done.”

Chapter 3
    T ed guided the boat slowly down the river. Between the four of them and all the gear, the boat was almost overloaded.
    Doc sat beside him with his feet stuck out on his pack.
Wish I had a flipping stick
, he thought. His thoughts drifted to a few months ago. Doc’s tour was almost up before things went south, and he had decided it was time to get out. His parents were both gone now and he had no siblings. He had planned to fix up his parent’s old place in Tennessee just as the shit hit the fan. To say he was bitter about the way things worked out would be an understatement.
    Sarge sat in the front seat with his legs outstretched on the bow and the SAW lying across his lap. In the cool morning air, it was a peaceful ride down the river
.
The calm before the storm
, Sarge thought.
    The Guard camp was located on a sand plain six or seven feet above the river, spread out under the old live oaks and gum trees. On the previous visit, Doc had told Captain Sheffield that as nice as the area was, in the summer it would be crawling with ticks, and he was right.
    The river became narrow and