Those spruce trunks that were deliberately sawed into about ten meters in length had already had their bark stripped off and had been left in the dry and extremely cold snow for more than two months. Rurik also stayed in the Far North for a long time. time.
A large number of tree trunks have been dried in the shade for a certain period of time. Although the trunks are frozen hard, a large amount of water has been sublimated inside, making the entire trunk appear even harder.
After all, the materials that will be used as masts are cedar trees that have grown for thousands of years. Their slow growth cannot be easily described in words. Just felling and sawing them requires the joint efforts of multiple strong loggers, and it also takes some time.
Now, these tree trunks have become shorter, so Rurik took measurements of these tree trunks with similar lengths and diameters on the eve of moving them.
For a small ship like the Caravel, it is just a major modification of the Viking cargo ship, and its length and displacement have not increased much. Its mast cannot be too long or too thick.
All the materials selected are from the front part of the trunk. The maximum diameter of the trunk is about 50cm, and the minimum diameter at the other end is reduced to only 25cm.
Therefore, these materials are similar to extremely long truncated cones. Rurik held a branch and made simple mathematical calculations directly on the snow.
The large number of mathematical symbols really dazzled the onlookers. Only the girl Saipolava saw some of the clues carefully and told her curious father.
What on earth is Rurik doing? Mechasta didn't understand. Oh, it seems my daughter already understands.
After all, Saipolava was in Roseburg, and like other children, she was taught some mathematical knowledge by Rurik. There is always nothing to do for a long time, and girls are naturally weaker than men in physical strength. It is more like a Covin girl like Saipolava, who does not like to fight and kill by nature.
The minds of those children have developed to a certain extent. Children over seven years old only need education to quickly logically understand abstract knowledge such as mathematics. Their minds are no different from those of modern people a thousand years later. The only difference is the lack of teachers with extensive knowledge.
Rurik was happy to impart knowledge to his future wives. In this way, when the land is full of children and grandchildren, there will be no need to invest a huge amount of time in their children's education.
The volume of the tree trunks was calculated. Rurik estimated that if one stika and one meter were basically similar (he always felt that the two measurement units were surprisingly similar), then the volume of six tree trunks would be just over four cubic meters.
The size of the big tree has more than doubled compared to before.
In essence, the weight of the trunk has been reduced to less than two tons.
After all, it was made of solid wood. When it was laid flat on the snow, it really took at least ten people to push it.
A group of strong men squeezed the flax cables, which were almost as thick as their arms, under the trunk of the tree. The hemp ropes were fastened with tight buckles so that they could be hung by the iron hooks of the crane.
Rurik did not expect that only one piece of equipment could handle the sled well. In order to ensure stability when loading the sled, he needed two pieces of equipment to start at the same time.
After some preparations, the boom hooks of the two cranes hooked the ropes.
On the other side, three sleds stood ready.
The strong men who had been busy for a while were covered in sweat. Many simply took off their leather jackets and wore only linen on their upper bodies, as if they didn't care about the minus five degrees Celsius.
Jevro was entrusted with an important task. He stood in the mouse cage and waited for his master's orders.
More than five hundred people stared with their eyes wide open. They wanted to see a spectacle that they had never seen before in their lives today.
"My lord! Let's start!" Yevluo urged loudly.
Rurik looked left and right and swallowed his saliva.
"Okay! Start!"
The huge squirrel cage finally began to rotate, accompanied by a strong creaking and twisting sound, and during this period, the ratchet latches made of chromium iron made a metallic clanking sound.
In order to create a batch of amazingly tough Range Rovers, the people of Ellenborough made a lot of sacrifices. Rurik bought fishing nets from fishermen with wheat. The nets were dismantled and the thin hemp ropes were twisted thicker and thicker. That's not all. In order to make it more resilient, all the ropes are soaked in seal oil and fish oil. The rope gave off some damn stench, but no one doubted its toughness.
Everything is proceeding in an orderly manner, and while people are stunned, the extremely heavy solid wood is slowly leaving the ground.
Rurik visited the scene in person and was stunned when he saw that the trunk of the fir tree was too high by more than one meter.
"That's it!" He ordered, and the mouse cage stopped rotating. The strong pawls stuck the mouse cage tightly, and the tree trunk just hung in the air.
"Mechasta! It's your turn."
Mechasta was not a bystander. He took orders at the critical moment and ordered the people on standby to push the two empty sleds directly under the tree trunks.
Rurik looked again: "Start laying out the line!"
With the help of many previous experiments, the person in the rat cage turned around at the command, and the person responsible for operating the ratchet also began to operate in the opposite direction.
The tree trunk was being unloaded slowly and rhythmically, and was finally pressed smoothly onto the sled.
In fact, the big tree can of course be dragged directly by the cable, and the reindeer herd keeps pulling it and sliding towards Roseburg. Rurik was too worried that such an operation would destroy the precious wood, and besides, it was not necessarily labor-saving.
There is nothing in the northern snow world that is more useful than a sled, not to mention a batch of sleds built by the residents of Ellenburg. It can squeeze twenty adults into it, and its economical and practical load capacity is at least more than one ton.
Rurik wanted to squeeze the potential of the sled, and these two sleds were loaded with two tree trunks.
"Hey, it really feels like a semi-trailer."
The tree trunk is tightly fixed to the sled by cables, and combined with the trunk's own gravity, it becomes extremely stable.
Rurik began to jokingly call this a semi-trailer, and the front of it was towed by four reindeer.
Since the contact area between the sled and the ice and snow is very small, just four reindeer can pull it away under the urging of the whip, and still maintain a good inertial movement.
The loading work was completed in the eyes of more than 500 onlookers, and it was just the beginning.
During this day alone, not only the six most critical spruce trunks were loaded, but a batch of pine logs also began to be hoisted very quickly.
By nightfall, ten sleds had been loaded. Especially the four trucks dedicated to loading pine wood. The tree trunks cut into two standard stikas were hoisted one after another, with five at the lower end and one at the top. They were stacked in a pyramid style and finally bundled with Range Rover.
Everyone had to face an exciting reality. The core personnel who completed the lumber hoisting were the four guys standing in the mouse cage. After completing the task, no one could tell how tired he was, but Rurik still gave the four of them the most sumptuous dinner.
Now that the squirrel cage crane is put to good use, it should move more lumber!
At night, the crane became the most popular topic of conversation among bored people.
No, in Rurik's mansion, Mechasta's laughter was almost never heard. Because he knew that as long as the crane stood in Ironburg, it would never be moved again.
He has no concept of "heavy equipment requiring regular maintenance" and thinks that if it stands here, it will serve Ellenburg forever.
The lights in the mansion were brightly lit, and Mechasta continued to feel lazy after dinner, and couldn't help but ask about Rurik's next arrangements.
“Now that the crane is successful, when are you going to leave?”
"What? Are you expecting me to leave?" Liliurik deliberately showed his displeasure.
Mechasta hurriedly denied: "How could it be? I... hope you will continue to live here. You know, my people have all benefited from you."
"A favor? If this can be considered a favor..."
The so-called favor here actually refers to Rurik's extremely generous provision of a large amount of wheat. In fact, this is nothing. Rurik must have understood the basic knowledge of modern nutrition. To put it bluntly, these are all knowledge in middle school biology courses. Their physical labor was unprecedented, and the cranes would not have been able to build without being given large amounts of wheat.
Rurik has always had an idea that he hopes can be realized in the short term, which is to ensure that every adult man and woman in the Rus tribe and the servant tribe can eat one pound of wheat every day.
If there were 10,000 Russians, the annual wheat demand would be 3.65 million pounds. Judging from the reality, if the Russians had not personally opened up a large amount of farmland and relied on various means, it would have been difficult to buy such an astonishing amount of wheat from the Melalen people.
It can be said that the residents of Ironburg have taken the lead during this period to live the kind of life Rurik hoped for. But this good life is about to come to an abrupt end, and they have to live the same old life of eating only fish.
Rurik thought for a moment and cheered up, "Frankly speaking, the reason why I stayed until now is to get a large amount of wood for shipbuilding, and the purpose of making cranes is also for this purpose."
"Now the crane is complete."
"Yes, so I'm going to evacuate. I can load all the remaining wood in the next three days, and on the fourth day I can drive the reindeer herd and evacuate with my people. The crane is here, and it's still there There are many strong men eager to sell their strength for silver coins and wheat, and there are many sleds that are empty. Even though it is very cold, we still have to go on."
"Oh! That's so good!" Mechasta longed for those wheat in his heart. The 70,000 pounds of wheat were destined to be eaten in his stomach. He couldn't wait to be eaten by his own people.
Rurik continued: "I still have to wait. I have to wait for the big leader to come back."
"They... they went to the east." Mechasta worried, "Maybe they went to my hometown again, and maybe they encountered tribes that did not surrender."
"Are you... worried about their failure?"
"No!" Mechasta flatly denied: "We don't know anything about the eastern world. They may have the most terrifying bears and the most dangerous land."
"It's really boring, so you are weak." Rurik muttered, and sat upright: "If they really go all the way east, they will see a sea frozen by ice and snow. It is not the end of the world in the east, it is just a sea It’s just the sea.”
Mechasta believed it: "Master, you do know the composition of the earth."
"Of course! To be fair, the place we are in is by no means a good place. If there weren't a lot of leather, ores, salmon, and even a lot of shipbuilding wood, why would I build a city here? Listen, sooner or later one day We're going to run south and explain that I'll let you settle in a warmer world."
Sometimes Rurik would laugh at himself that he vowed to be the king of bad land. This was indeed the case. The reason for this situation was extremely simple - the population was too small.
Since we cannot get a large number of people from the outside for the time being, we can only rely on our own people to desperately reproduce. This brought about another serious food problem, which caused the Russians to step up their expansion. Then ships, as important tools for expansion, need to be manufactured more intensively.
Rurik wanted to wait a little longer, and took the opportunity to organize people to continue logging, and notified people to make more sleds.
The coldest month of January is over in the Gulf of Bothnia, and the days are now growing dramatically longer.
The time has arrived on February 15th in the Julian calendar, and more than half of the month has passed. The difference between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar seems to be that the calendar time is one week later, so the vernal equinox in 831 was March 28.
The temperature is no longer so aggressive. Even if there is a snowfall in the middle, the temperature is still rising quietly. It will take a while before it returns to above freezing point.
Finally, as March was about to arrive, a team that was full of travels and fully loaded returned to Ironburg triumphantly.
who are they? It was the hunting army led by Otto.
Originally, Ironburg was used as a shelter for the northern hunting team, but as a result, the hunting team rushed towards the east like a speeding arrow.
They actually hunted wild deer, forest cats, ferrets and snowshoe hares near the lakes in the upper reaches of the Kemi River. They set up a large number of traps and captured a large number of small animals. They also used particularly useful crossbows to hunt wild animals crazily. Reindeer and other large animals.
Other than that, they didn't meet any other hunters.
This is what happened, and they actually operated in what is now the Nordrbotten district of Finland. Even a thousand years later, this place is almost no man's land. In the past, some hunters from the Kewen tribe would visit this area, but now that the Kewen people are weak, Ross's powerful hunters began to plunder the animal resources here for the first time.
They only built a fleet of rudimentary sleds, which hauled large quantities of furs of various kinds. The wheat cakes have been eaten long ago, but fortunately the captured animals are rich in muscle and fat. Otto's aging body was sitting on the sled, being pulled by his own people. He didn't feel tired. What he cares most about now is the price he can get for the furs on hand.
Otto is back, and today's Ironburg is familiar yet strange.
What are those two huge indescribable things standing at the west gate of the city?
It wasn't until he saw that this thing could easily lift extremely heavy wood, and was so surprised that he sat down in the snow, that he realized how dreamy it was.
The winter hunting was a great success. In the forest and snow fields of the east, the team obtained more than 300 deer skins and as many as 2,000 mink, forest cat and snow rabbit skins. There were ten bear skins. Frankly speaking, if some bears hadn't been smart enough to escape, the Russians would have brought back more bear skins.
Ten ferocious bear heads and forty terrifying beheaded bear claws are the best proof of strength.
The hunters who were eager to make money almost immediately sold the leather to the merchants stationed in Ironburg. Since the Gould family's cubs gave the best price, it can be said that the Gould family became a big player in this transaction. winner.
Why? For more than three months, they stayed at Ailenburg to enjoy the aurora every day, and watched the crane grow from scratch while enjoying themselves. Their waiting brought them huge profits. They were all second-tier dealers. They would roughly process the leather they purchased and then sell it to tailors who made clothes.
In the past, this work required leather merchants to transport goods to Mälaren for trading. For the Gould family, because he and Fordegen, who owns the tailoring workshop that moved to Roseburg, Gould can immediately exchange profits. All his family seems to have to do is to acquire, package and supply goods.
Otto came back. He listened to his son's stories about cranes and giant trees at the banquet in the mansion. He also told about his various adventures in the eastern snowfield.
"We are leaving with a huge amount of goods. What are you going to do when you go back?" Otto asked his son.
Rurik's answer was very simple: "Building ships. I have stored a huge amount of wood for shipbuilding."
"Wood? The ones near Roseburg can't satisfy you?"
"Of course! Those small trees are only suitable for fuel, and only the big trees in this area are the best materials. From now on, we will have to transport a large amount of wood here every winter."
"That's fine. I plan to stay for two days and then leave. What about you?"
His father was so anxious, Rurik thought about it and nodded.
The two leaders of Ross will lead their tribesmen to evacuate, and then Ironburg will return to its old state. At first, Mechasta was a little resistant to their permanent presence, but now that he is used to it, he hopes that the leader, especially Rurik, will visit him often. Let’s talk about the emotional relationship, because his daughter Saipolava is destined to be Rurik’s woman. As the father of his daughter, he naturally treats Rurik as his own child.
Of course, Mechasta knew that Rurik's status was extremely noble, and he also felt that he had an obligation to provide all help he could.
In the end, there were twenty snow trucks filled with lumber, of which three "semi-trailers" were the most eye-catching. The carefully selected reindeer became the core driving force of the sled, and the task was completed instantly with only eighty stags.
They headed along the ice front of the coast, some of the 70,000 pounds of grain still uneaten.
In addition to leaving part of the reward to the residents of Ironburg, the remaining Rurik was taken with him. Humans only eat a small portion, and most of the unprocessed wheat grains are food for the reindeer along the way. That's twenty sleighs with a huge load. If they don't feed them fine feed, the reindeer will soon die of exhaustion.
Rurik's small body didn't matter. He was covered in thick leather and sat on the top of a sled. He was riding on the highest pine wood, and the paving was laid under his crotch to protect him from the cold.
He saw that the dark transportation team gathered in a compact group and continued to trek, but the speed was quite slow.
Finally, after walking on the ice for five days, they returned to Roseburg, where they had been away for four months, and time quietly entered March.
