Chapter 267: Slats and Strings

Tera stood out in the middle of the clearing with her head tipped all the way back. She could not stop looking at the finished shelter.

It stood two feet off the ground on eight charred black posts, and above that it rose another eight feet to the top of the walls, and above that the roof climbed up into a steep pink peak nearly seventeen feet off the ground at the ridge.

She had built that.

Not alone, obviously. Thirty beasts had built that. But it had come out of her head, and there had been a point, back when she was staring at a muddy rectangle with a stick in her hand, when she had seriously wondered if it would ever look like anything at all.

It looked like something now.

[Host has been staring for eleven minutes!]

[This system is so excited Host has completed the first shelter]

[It bypasses Host’s clan shelter by leagues]

[What an improvement!]

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Tera laughed, unable to take the smile off her face.

The shelter was far more beautiful than anything she had ever envisioned. And the system had been particularly helpful at certain points, but Tera truly hadn’t expected it to look this pretty.

Green would have been a refreshing colour, but the pink bamboos had a luscious sheen she couldn’t take her eyes off.

It was astonishing.

It had taken many weeks to complete this, but Tera wasn’t panicking. She was confident that, like previous projects, once the wolves had mastered one shelter, the next ones would be completed faster.

The mat weaving and cordage would just take a lot of time.

But Tera could not help but bask in the success of the moment. The optional walls had been the thing she had struggled with for a while. Mats had been the initial thought, but she needed it to be something that required less stress to create, and she needed to consider the roll-up mechanism of it, along with its ability to hold off rain when it beat against it.

Most importantly, they had to be easy enough that a wolf could work them without thinking. They had to let the breeze through even when closed, because there were no windows and the whole point of the design was that nothing ever felt sealed. And they could not, under any circumstances, be the kind of thing that fell on anybody.

Hinged panels were out. She had liked them for about a day before she pictured a wolf hitting one at full sprint in beast form, knocking the prop loose, and bringing the whole panel down on a cub standing behind it.

The answer, when it finally came to her, was so simple that she was annoyed it had taken her so long.

Shutters.

A row of narrow horizontal slats, stacked one above another across the whole opening, all strung together with thin cords that ran up and over the top beam. Pull the cord and the whole row lifted and stacked itself up under the roof. Let it out, and the slats dropped back down and covered the gap.

There were cords at the bottom of the shutter that could be tied to a fixture running along the edge of the floor. That way, the slats would stay down once lowered.

And the part she was most pleased about was that the slats did not sit flat against each other. Each one overlapped the one below it and tilted slightly outward, the way the slats on a window shutter do.

So, when rain hit them, it ran down the face of each slat, dropped onto the next, and kept going straight down the outside of the shelter instead of finding its way between them.

Air still went through the gaps. Rain did not.

But before all that, the walls had gone up first.

This shelter got two solid ones, while the two optional walls were the shutter curtains.

The solid walls were built from bamboo laid tight against itself, course after course, lashed to the frame. Then came the clay.

All that high-plasticity clay they had dug out of the foundation holes and packed away was first used here.

The beasts had smeared it into every vertical gap in the outer face of the wall until there was not a crack left anywhere.

Once it dried, the wall was one solid surface. Wind could not get through it, and neither could water.

The partition wall went up inside, standing on that extra pole they had lashed over the floor base weeks ago to mark its line. A doorway space had been left near the solid wall so wolves could move between the two halves of the shelter while the shutters were closed.

The roof was where the beasts had outdone themselves.

It started with the ladders and the scaffolding, and that alone cost them a whole day to set up.

Teaching the males to create scaffolding was surprisingly simple, considering how it was similar to the frames they had created for the flooring. Every single piece had been tied extra securely as they would be climbing it, but something interesting happened that Tera hadn’t expected at all.

The wolves were afraid of heights.

Males who could charge a corrupted beast without blinking went up two levels of scaffolding, looked down once, and froze solid. One of them had to be talked down a rung at a time. Another got to the top platform, sat down, and stayed sitting for a very long while.

Tera had not seen that coming, and it had been a sad but funny sight.

They had been actually terrified, and Calis was no exception.

Her own clan members, on the other hand, had an absolute ball.

They went up like it was a festival. Tera guessed it was likely because they comprised of different beasts, all of whom were surprisingly good at climbing.

A few of them worked the top platform the entire time without once looking bothered. One of her females walked along a lashed beam sixteen feet up carrying a pole on her shoulder with ease as they worked on the framework for the roof.

They set most of the roof. They were proud of it in a way that got slightly out of hand, and before long there was a certain amount of commentary being directed down at the wolves still standing on the ground.

Which, in the end, was what fixed it.

A handful of the wolves could not take being outworked by the other beasts working their way up. It wasn’t easy, but Calis had been the first to overcome his fear. Another wolf climbed the first two levels with his eyes shut and his claws sunk into the uprights, and when he got to the platform the clan members cheered him so loudly that he nearly went straight back down out of sheer embarrassment.

By the end of it, roughly half the wolves had made peace with being up there.

The other half stayed on the ground, hauled poles up on ropes all day without complaining once, and did not discuss it.

Tera had settled on a gable roof. Two sides slanted at a 45-degree angle to make a triangle. To do that, the framework had to be fully completed first.

The frame of the roof went up in a strict order, and Tera did not let anybody skip a step.

First, the tie beams. Poles running across the short width of the shelter, resting on top of the posts, tying the two long walls to each other. The beasts did not understand why they mattered, and she made them do it anyway. A roof is heavy, and a heavy roof sitting on two walls will slowly push those walls apart from each other if nothing was holding them together.