From Stone to the Stars

[x] [Raiders] "Pick up your bows! Draw and Loose!" Leave none alive.
[x] [Hero] Focus on Detection (Expand Wolfpacks)
[x] [Action] Study Travel
[x] [Go] East

Alvar didn't have foggiest idea why, but the spirits had grown displeased with the People. The winters were harsher, longer than anyone could recall. There were stories from the elders that the elders of their youth had experienced such a harsh world, but they were only stories. The elders of that time were long dead now and none can ask for their wisdom on what had previously given the People such bounty.

Privately, Alvar had wondered, but never voiced if the spirits' displeasure was related to the massacre of the raiders as they fled. Nearly all of those who fled had been shot, either dying instantly or falling into the river to drown. Only a few had survived, and the People never heard from the North Lake people again after that day. The corpses had been swept away, but the bloated husks seemed to have dogged the People all the way back to the river branch by Crystal Lake.

Had the spirits been angered by the dead being swept to the spiritual lands in the east?

That thought had chewed at Alvar for a long time. Was his momentary desire for vengeance something that had damned the People? In the end, he decided that no, it wouldn't. In the years after the Creek Bed Battle, he had lent his voice to every initiative that would increase the People's hunting. Hunting was how they got their food. It was built on fighting, on violence, so he would try to fight the spirits.

The main flaw, he believed, that allowed the raiders to attack them was the lack of People ready to stand against them. Most of the People's hunters had been scattered throughout their valley, working in small groups, to bring home needed food. If they had found the raiders before they had entered the People's camp, the attack would not have happened.

Alvar had left the People then, for a time, in order to live among the wolves that rimmed their valley. The raiders had moved faster than the People were capable of in their hollowed logs. It didn't matter that there were many more of the People than there were raiders in total, if they could strike where there were fewer. It was almost like wolves when they attacked a herd and separated out the weak and the young. If the herd turned as one and fought back, the wolves would be crushed.

Cowardice wasn't the People's problem like it was for the antlered ones, though, Alvar reasoned, it was coordination. The antler folk could move in massive herd, traverse distances that the People could scarcely imagine and do it all without uttering a single word. To get the People to move took days of effort and countless hours talking, cajoling, and convincing.

Regardless, the People had an advantage that the antlered ones did not: the wolves. They howled when strangers approached, offering warning to the People. They just needed to figure out how to make the screen denser and more responsive.

In the end, the solution was simple. Someone need to live amongst the wolves, immerse themselves in their spirit and learn their language. The howls was little like the speech of the People, but it clearly meant something.

The People must have thought him mad as the years passed. Most of his time was spent up in the wilds and hills around the valley holding Crystal Lake. Only rarely did he come in to exchange a few kills for flint, wood, or other tools. Despite all the attempts to keep him close, from arguments of the elders to enticements from women, he continued in his self-appointed task.

He couldn't stop. The memory of his brother's corpse, the screams of the raiders as they were mercilessly cut down, they remained. To leave them vulnerable to another group of raiders would be akin to betrayal.

It took time for the wolves to get used to him, and he had to ply them with food more than once, but slowly they adopted him into their families. Wolves always organized themselves into small groups, families. The oldest to wolves would breed while their children stayed with them. After two or three years, those same children would separate from their birth family and seek out a mate of their own. Those newly mated pairs would then go on to carve out their own territory.

It was an elegant system. One that was immensely surprising when Alvar saw himself get caught up in it! He'd been feeding the wolves one morning only notice that there were more than a dozen of them and they barely snapped at each other! He'd always been quick to feed any wolves that came by his campsite. He'd hoped to encourage their numbers and get them to form permanent packs around the valley. Instead, they'd simply been following him!

No closer was he to understanding the howls of wolves, but he was able to understand their body language. Whenever another pack howled to announce a kill, his wolves' ears would perk in that direction. When the howled for strangers, their ears seemed to snap back.

It was enough that Alvar took his success back to the People. The panic that had greeted him when a small army of wolves walked back into camp at his command still made him smile. It had taken more years and more generations of wolves, but ever so slowly did they bond with the tribe's hunters. They would only work with people who had raised the wolf from near-birth, they still snapped occasionally, and fought with each other, but they could live amongst the People.

The benefits to the People's hunts were immediate. Wolves could easily run down smaller fare like glimmerbirds, orange wolves, or rodents, but they were also invaluable in taking down antler beasts. Wolves could easily separate specific targets and chase them easily into the People's waiting spears and arrows.

It took more kills to feed all of the new tame wolves, but it still allowed the People to make more kills than it cost. The risks also went down immensely. Wolves could easily separate a herd, but no longer would they be forced to go in for a kill. The People's arrows could do that. The People also no longer had to chase down a herd. The wolves could out pace and trap their quarry before they got away.

The Spirit of Man and of Wolf seemed to be made to work together.

Still, even as their ability to obtain food increased, it didn't swell the People's numbers as much as Alvar had thought it might. The weather just didn't seem to cooperate. When he was a child and young man, it seemed to actively help the People where it was now indifferent. And it continued to get worse, little by little. Something needed to be done.

In the end, Alvar managed to convince the People to move east. The raiders he'd ordered killed during their retreat stayed in his mind. They had been killed, hunted perhaps, but it felt different. A different word, because it was a different type of killing. Not hunting, not slaying... murder, he thought. An old word meaning 'to make dead'. It sounded ominous enough for a potential offense against the spirits.

They needed to go east, find the bodies on the raiders and bury them properly in accordance with the spirits' wishes.

The People had quickly agreed with Alvar's reasoning and set into preparing for the journey with gusto. A few of the raiders' hollowed logs were captured in the Creek Bed Battle and were quickly turned into templates to build more. It took a while to figure out exactly how to manage to correctly burn out the insides of the log without leaving it brittle, but they managed it quickly.

Even in just the preliminary stages of the People's move, they paid for themselves many times over. Children and the elderly could be easily carried in them, reasonable quantities of Whitestone and Berrystone could be brought, food and pots could be easily stored within them. Even when they came to a rapid that stopped them from progressing down the river, it was easy to get out and carry them along the shore.

Distance simply disappeared. Alvar knew that it wouldn't be nearly so easy once they had to go the other way and fight against the river carrying them downwards, but all of the People easily moved at a rate that would take a strong hunter running non-stop.

Half a moon's turn into their journey, the People finally came to a stop. An encampment had been cut into the forest along a bend in the river, one slightly larger than Crystal Lake had been. Hollowed logs swarmed out, bearing men and weapons. The meeting was tense and involved a lot of shouting. The words the other men spoke made little sense to Alvar. Their tongue was much more familiar than those of the North Lake raiders, but still strange.

Everything about this new tribe was strange. Their fingers plucked uneasily, perhaps unfamiliarity at their bowstrings but they seemed to move in their hollowed logs like it was second nature. They were also short and even slightly fat to Alvar's eye. Some of them had the water colour eyes of the People, but most of them were dark of hair and eye. None of them had anything similar to his ice-white hair.

Perhaps the only thing that prevented violence that day was a young woman paddling wildly to get her hollowed log in between the People and her own tribe. She shouted, shamed, cajoled, and all Alvar could think was that he ended up nodding his head in shame by the end of it. The People had obviously come to trade, she said, they weren't part of the 'Five Fingers', they couldn't be. The Fingers were to the east and the People came from the west.

After he finally comprehended what she said, he'd had a hollowed log pulled up that had been stuffed with Whitestone and Berrystone. The other tribe had been seriously impressed at the collection of glowing stones and slowly relaxed their guard, fingers coming off of tense bowstrings. The fact that the log also contained a woman and child was probably what convinced them fully, however. No one would bring woman-and-child on a raid.

Instead, the other tribe's speaker finally managed to browbeat her side into putting away their weapons and having the People put away theirs. They had everyone brought into the encampment and an impromptu feast set up. It seemed a bit unwise to Alvar, a huge risk to bring new people into the heart of your camp, but the Speaker seemed to be unable to take no for an answer.

"A gift," she promised in the language her tribe used. A broken and bastardized version of the People's own. Only one word in five was comprehensible, but it was enough if you were slow and took your time. "You shiny, we feed."

The only hick up was when they brought out the food. Instead of good meat, they offered strange dark black grains served in bowls. They were boiled until soft and then served with plants or strips of meat to go on top. It all tasted strange on Alvar's tongue, but the Speaker happily ate the meal. It wasn't foul of sickness inducing, then.

"What?" he asked, gesturing to the grains.

"Ah, water-grass," the Speaker responded. She gestured out to a series of long grasses that grew all up and down the river banks. She then pointed to a hollowed log and mimed holding the grass and then striking it. Apparently the black grains were what came off the tops of the plant. "Yummy!"

Eating slowly while his People and the Speaker's tribe ate, danced, and made merry (food always brought out celebration), Alvar chewed on the question that really bothered him, Why? Other tribes were boon and bane both, as he had learned from the raiders. Why trust all of the People when others could easily steal or kill?

On the other side of the fire, a young hunter puffed himself, obviously to show off. He grappled with one of the Speaker's tribesman and easily heaved him into the dirt. The tribesman's friends looked on and guffawed before stepping up to try their own luck. The hunter preened under the attention the young women were given and the tribesmen did not want to be shown up. The young hunter took two more challengers, but lost to the third, laughing when he ended up bouncing along the ground.

Then again, Alvar thought, peace might not be so bad.

"Not Five Fingers," the Speaker seemed to say in response to Alvar's unconscious thought. She spoke a few more words that Alvar couldn't understand beyond a few references to 'river' and 'beyond'. "Friend? Stay?" she asked.

How do the People react on meeting the River-Bend Tribe?

[ ] Set up a more permanent camp, friends!
[ ] Temporarily move in, neighbors!
[ ] Return to the Crystal Lake, fun times!
[ ] That's a mighty fine village you have there, attack! (Negated by River-Bend Diplomacy Hero!)