The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [127]
“It’s not good to let the water stand in the boat too long. We don’t want the wood to swell, only to soften enough to give. Thonolan, are the struts close by so they’ll be ready when we need them?” Carlono asked with a worried frown.
“They here,” he replied, indicating the poles of alder trunks, cut to length, on the ground near the large dugout filled with water.
“We’d better start, Markeno, and hope the stones are hot.”
Jondalar was still amazed at the transformation, though he had watched it take shape. The oak bole was no longer a log. The inside had been gouged out and smoothed, and the exterior had the sleek lines of a long canoe. The thickness of the shell was no more than the length of a man’s knuckle, except for the solid stem and stern. He had watched Carlono shave off a skin of wood, whose thickness was no more than that of a twig, with a chisel-shaped stone adze to bring the watercraft to its final dimension. After trying it himself, Jondalar was even more astounded at the skill and dexterity of the man. The boat tapered to a sharp cutwater at the prow, which extended forward. It had a slightly flattened bottom, a less pronounced tapering stern, and it was very long in proportion to its width.
The four of them quickly transferred the cobbles that had been heating in the large fireplace to the water-filled boat, causing the water to steam and boil. The process was no different from heating stones to boil water for tea in the trough near the lean-to, but on a larger scale. And the purpose was different. The heat and steam were not to cook anything, but to reshape the container.
Markeno and Carlono, facing each other across the boat at the midsection, were already testing the flexibility of the hull, pulling carefully to widen the craft, yet not crack the wood. All the hard work of digging out and shaping the boat would have been for nothing if it cracked in expanding. It was a tense moment. As the middle was pulled apart, Thonolan and Jondalar were ready with the longest strut, and when it was wide enough they fitted the brace in crosswise, and held their breaths. It seemed to hold.
Once the center strut was in, proportionally shorter ones were worked into place along the length of the boat. They bailed out the hot water until the four men could manage the weight, took out the rocks and tipped the canoe to pour out the rest of the water, then set the boat between blocks to dry.
The men breathed easier as they stood back to look and admire. The boat was close to fifty feet long, and more than eight feet across at the midsection, but the expansion had altered the lines in another important way. As the middle was widened, the fore and aft sections had lifted, giving the craft a graceful upward curve toward the ends. The results of the expansion were not only a broader beam for greater stability and capacity, but a raised bow and stern that would clear the water to take waves or rough water more easily.
“Now she’s a lazy man’s boat,” Carlono said as they walked to another area of the clearing.
“Lazy man!” Thonolan exclaimed, thinking of the hard work.
Carlono smiled at the expected response. “There’s a long story about a lazy man with a nagging mate who left his boat out all winter. When he found it again, it was full of water, and the ice and snow had caused it to expand. Everyone thought it was ruined, but it was the only boat he had. When it dried out, he put it in the water and discovered how much better it handled. Afterward, according to the story, everyone made them that way.”
“It’s a funny story if it’s told right,” Markeno said.
“And there may be some truth in it,” Carlono added. “If we were making a small boat, we’d be done except for fittings,” he said as they approached a group of people who were boring holes along the edges of planks with bone drills. It was a tedious, difficult job, but many hands made the job go faster, and socializing eased the boredom.
“And I’d be that much closer to mating,