CHAPTER 1

 

"Damn! That's all I need."

The tall blonde woman, gazing despondently at the bowl of fresh eggs lying smashed on the beaten earth floor at her feet, frowned with anxiety. She was horribly aware she was due for a whipping when Arthur came back from woodcutting. She had no doubts about that. She had already experienced his wrath. Just a few days before, she had been hoeing the vegetable patch behind the log cabin. The day had been hot and she had been sweating under the sun, bent over her hoe. Concerned that the great dark patches of wetness under the arms of the stuffy gown would ruin the only proper clothing she possessed, she had taken it off, laying it on a bush in the sun to dry. Unfortunately, she had also discarded her stays and her petticoats, and had been wearing little more than her shift. The rivulets of perspiration between her breasts had turned the thin garment into near transparency, the peaks of her dark brown nipples showing through the material almost as clearly as if she had been stripped to the waist.

Arthur had come home unexpectedly to fetch a whetstone for his axe. He had not been amused. "Cover yourself up, woman! Your tits might just as well be bare!" he had burst out, when he had seen her state of undress. "You look more like a dancehall whore than a respectable homesteader's wife. I haven't time to deal with you now, but I'll warm your shoulders for you with a strap before supper since you seem so keen to flaunt them bare."

With the memory of that beating, it was hardly surprising that the woman now showed her agitation. However, she could hardly be described as getting her knickers in a twist since beneath the simple gown, the tightly laced stays and the three-layered petticoats, she was as bare-arsed as a babe. More so, perhaps, since a babe might expect to have a diaper of some sort, while the woman had nothing to cover the rich thatch between her legs, or the firm pert rounds of her mature buttocks. An existence of unremitting toil meant that there was always some movement of air around her groin to remind her of that bareness. In addition, the nature of her present living somehow had engendered a permanent state of sexual arousal, evidenced by the continuous emission of slick sticky secretions which, with time, gathered until they spilled over the thick swollen lips of her vulva and left sticky snail-trails down the insides of her thighs.

It was all a far cry from her previous existence when close-fitting panties, with their absorbent gussets, had mopped up her moisture as fast as it was secreted. She had not always worn the clothing of a 19th century frontierswoman; one of the pioneers who had settled and tamed the vast tracts of the mid-West. Once she had been a sophisticated and successful member of modern American society, a professional woman who had born and raised two children, now teenagers, but who had volunteered to take part in this social experiment.

Stamvard University's prestigious Department of Social History had for years devoted a great deal of time and resources on their studies of the real life of the western pioneers who had opened up the lands of the vast interior of the USA in the early part of the nineteenth century. They were not interested in the romantic myths of Hollywood, or the daring-do of writers like Louis Lamour, who had virtually single-handedly invented `the West'. They wanted to know the nitty-gritty, the dirt, the discomfort, lice, sex and sanitation.

One of their more ambitious projects was to call for families to relive the lives of an actual group who were in the historical record and to see how, with hindsight, things would turn out for modern men and women in the same circumstance.

"You'll be flown into the centre of an uninhabited tract where we've prepared the basis for a homestead for each family, together with exactly the same stores and resources that the original pioneers had as they had prepared for their first winter. Didn't go too well for them. They might not have pulled through to the next harvest if another group hadn't lost their way and stumbled on them in the spring just in time to save them from starvation. You'll have the benefit of a complete record of everything they did, right or wrong and in addition, we'll come for you in the spring, just in case you do get it wrong."

There was an additional incentive to the kudos of having faced the wild and survived. If they came through to spring and still had enough to go on and plant again, the homestead and a great tract of land around it would be theirs, free from all encumbrance. It would be a chance for a new life away from the modern rat race.

Together with her husband Arthur, daughter Amy, 19, and son Roy, 18, Celia, the blonde woman now contemplating another whipped back, had been accepted, one of only two families from the many that had applied. The whole family had sat down to discuss the project and their attitude to it, very seriously indeed before finally committing themselves.

"I have a feeling it's going to be a lot tougher than any of us realises," Arthur had warned them. "I think it would be an unacceptable risk of our family future if we were to find at some time that one of us didn't want to go on. It would be bad enough if one of us pulled out; disastrous, not just to the project, but to the family, if we gave up as a group."

"What are we going to do then, Dad?" Amy had wanted to know.

She was a junior version of her mother, the same blonde good looks; though her figure was slighter and lacked the more mature lines that Celia's thirty-nine years had lent her. She also shared her mother's belief in the inherent right of women to have an equal share of all the good things of life, though shying away from those matters that disadvantaged men.

"We've a week," her father replied. "I suggest we spend that time researching on the Net and in the local library for as much detail of life on the prairie as we can, to supplement the more academic stuff that Stamvard has given us. Before we give them our final answer, we'll hold a family conference at which we'll all have a say, and whatever decision we come to will be final and binding on us all."

The women had not stopped to think too seriously about what they were doing. Home, home on the range. Away from the rat race; the lot of 21st. Century career women, was about as deeply as they thought. They romanticised, referring to a stack of coffee-table books of `primitive' quilts. They harboured endearing thoughts of a homestead with its roses round the door and fluffy little chickens scratching around outside and providing brown eggs for breakfast every day.

The men were drawn to the idea of a life where they could be men, not lackeys; where they could exercise their strength without being derided as chauvinist pigs, or sexist, because they were stronger and more practical-minded than women.

On the eve of the final decision, Arthur was probing for some indication that his spouse was committed to the project, beyond the possibility of withdrawing. He had chosen his moment carefully, propped on his arms above her supine nakedness, his iron hard prick just lodged in the wet mouth of her twitching vagina.

In vino veritas was all very well, he mused, moving his hips slightly to stir the fire between his wife's spread thighs to a sudden heat. Alcohol certainly loosened the tongue, but a healthy shot of sexual desire was even more effective as far as women were concerned, he believed, and the hangover rather less painful. Celia moaned beneath him and he smiled at the thought that spread and open as she was, not only her belly, but her brain, could not be closed to him. Well, many men held that women kept the latter in the former, or at least their behinds.

Insofar as she was capable of rational thought, Celia marvelled at her own reactions. After an indoctrination starting as a tiny girl and continuing through a University degree and a business career, she was as deeply processed a feminist as one might meet. Standing before a meeting in her smart knee-length business suit, she always felt as if nothing could stop her, but here, lying spread and open, Arthur could control her with no more than four inches of his body, albeit that four inches was just now lodged in her wet and yearning tube. How could he do that to her, a liberated woman? Perhaps, she thought vaguely, it had less to do with being liberated and rather more to being a woman.

Again he fed her a little more fuel for her fire, making her groan with frustrated desire, aching for him to thrust in the remaining four inches, and make her belly feel rammed, crammed, stuffed to the gills. She should be softened up enough by now, he judged.

"If we decide to go ahead and join the project, do you think you will be able to stay the distance?" he asked. "Stick with it, like the women of 1830 did? Or have you lived too long in the 20th century to take on the hardships they faced?"

"I can do it."

"Whatever comes?" Arthur demanded, easing in a treacherous inch, then withdrawing it to leave her even more unsatisfied than before. "You swear you won't back out, even if it turns out to be much harder than you imagined?"

"Oh, yes, you know me; I won't back down."

She raised her hips to try and get more of him inside her, but he held back a little longer.

"And how about Amy? Do you think she'll stick it out when the going gets tough?"

"Yes, yes. She's as stubborn as me, and she wouldn't be able to live with being thought weak. You know modern girls. They think they can do anything. Now, are you going to give me what I need, or are we going to go on talking all night until this-" she contracted her vaginal muscles on the four inches of hard gristle, which was all of him he would allow her to have so far, "-shrivels up and falls out?"

Satisfied with her answers, Arthur set out to achieve that other satisfaction he had been holding back from as he had explored his wife's mind. Now he set out to explore her body, or at least that part of it immediately accessible to him.

He bent, took a rubbery nipple between his teeth and bit gently. Celia bucked and squealed, but her arms came round to clasp him. A second nip, of the other teat this time, and her legs wrapped around his thighs. Giving in to the urgent invitation of her limbs, Arthur plunged the whole length of his generous endowment into her wet and pulsing sheath and began to ride her with long, powerful strokes. She was moaning with pent-up desire from the start, moans that became sharper. Increasing his rate of strike a tad, he soon drew out the honking cries that signalled she was on the way to orgasm. Keeping back his own climax by sheer exercise of will, he drove her up to, and over, the crest of her climax, and she positively howled as the spasms hit her belly.

More gently now, he resumed a slow pistoning, increasing his speed as her hoarse breathing told of returning desire. Soon he had her honking with passion again, and this time, as he drove her over the top, he allowed himself to climax too, feeling the semen blasting its way through his throbbing tool as keenly as Celia could sense it laving her womb. For a few minutes they lay together, he supporting most of his weight on his elbows, engaging in those affectionate little post-coital attentions lovers use, his still partially erect prick sending small pulses of greeting, her sheath responding with contractions of its own. Just as increasing detumescence sent the spent and drained penis sliding from its dribbling lodging, she murmured, affectionately, "You bastard, you. You knew I'd do anything when you have me on my back like that."

At the reconvened family meeting, it was resolved unanimously that they should all go for it, binding themselves to each other and promising to live the life in the spirit and the letter in all things great and small, whatever the individual hardships and privations that might arise.

The men had not been entirely taken up with details of the approved construction method for a log cabin or how to hunt grizzly. They had tried to compensate for their lack of social knowledge in the 21st century, dominated as it was by women and their needs, by boning up on the relationship between the sexes in the 19th, as set out in a ponderous, but authoritative, volume by one Professor Chris Tchenke, in which he, or was it she? set out the results of a lifetime's study of every aspect of the lives lived by those early settlers in their log cabins on the plains. The Professor had researched every obvious and, even more importantly, the more hidden aspects of the pioneers' lives; from their diet to their sex lives, from the division of labour to the disciplining of wives and daughters.

The women were too taken up with their romantic visions of the little white house on the prairie and they were prepared to dismiss the tome as a toy for the boys, paying it so little regard that they agreed without demur that it should be the final arbiter of any disagreements or queries that might arise, a sort of `bible' to steer their lives by.

Their romantic dream took its first dent when their clothing for the project was delivered. The men were satisfied enough with their outfits; boots, Levi's, check shirts and moleskin vests.

For the women, however, it was a different matter entirely. Celia had been imagining becoming print dresses, with a ruffle round the hem and perhaps a little lace at the neck. Amy's thoughts had been straying to something more like Diamond Lil might have worn in the Last Chance saloon. What they got instead was badly cut brown serge with indifferent hand stitching, thick woollen stockings, a pair of stays, boned like armour plate and a number of coarse calico petticoats. They got tolerably fitting boots, but made of clumsy thick leather with nails; a far cry from the delicate high buttoned creations the women had hoped for.

The really unsettling thing, however, was the lack of underwear. For the men there were woollen `long johns', all enveloping scratchy objects, but the women had no more than thin cotton shifts and their stays. Were they really expected to go `bare-arsed' under their skirts? What about those many ruffed pantalettes they had seen in the fashion plates of the period that had so fascinated them during their researches in the public library? For the first, but certainly not the last, time, Professor Tchenke was appealed to.

The Professor's message was unambiguous. Whatever the well-off women of New York and Boston might put on their elegant butts, the women who settled the plains were either straight off the boat or, at best, but a generation from the European peasants who had come to the Land of Opportunity, bringing with them all their deepest-seated customs and prejudices, including a belief that only whores and mistresses wore drawers and honest women let the air flow freely about their genitalia. Bare-arsed it was going to be.