But we sail up the river all the time after returning from our raids? Or when Brushcrest built Lakerest, I'm pretty sure they sailed upriver to do so. I'm not seeing what the barrier there is.
I'm leery about settlements before pottery. Part of the rationale for a new settlement would be, as you said, greater food production, but hopeful wishes aside, we don't have a timetable for pottery. And before pottery, budding off a section of our populace might reduce our overall capacity for specialization. It may end with us wishing we hadn't shot ourselves in the foot.
I was re-reading the Red Rivers arc and what strikes me now-- I bet it was both funny and tragic to you-- was the way we totally ignored all the rivers surrounding us. We kept thinking in straight lines across land. I remember looking at the map when we were debating whether to go for a decapitation strike on Makar (after the initial battle at Riverbend) and just thinking about it as X miles (or equivalent) to cross, X rivers to ford. I guess that if we'd gone with that, by the time we'd have arrived at Makar, two armies would have rowed up the Clear and Brown Rivers and disembarked on opposite ends of the horizontal line that intersects Makar. With their bonfire-signaling technology, likely learned (or stolen) from Brushcrest, they would first have baited us into storming Makar, and then the two armies, like doors, would have swung shut. Outmaneuvered, in a foreign land, and badly demoralized, any survivors would have been picked off by the more agile Makarite forces. If Sparrow had actually managed to keep the army in good order and break free of the encirclement, not to mention fight all the way back to Greenvalley, it would have been a feat worthy of being called this world's Anabasis. Is that more or less the gist of it?
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In a way it's really cool that the way our thinking about this so clearly paralleled Sparrow's own understanding of war. For all our strategic advantages re: organization, morale, etc., we failed to realize that our own conception of war was strategically lacking in areas like the lowlands, which are clearly used to a faster tempo of manuever warfare. Fuck me, I just realized why Brushcrest and the rest have the bonfires. We just discarded it as "yeah whatever it's some odd thing they've randomly picked up", but it's a natural development for a style of warfare that developed from nomadic groups continually relocating and striking each other. Clearly if you've split your forces in two, which has to be a common enough occurrence with all those rivers, you'd naturally want some way of communicating. Fuck. Me.
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