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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 82: Takano 110
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 26
Tommy generally stayed away from the council meetings. Her excuse was that it was not her job to influence their decisions, so it was better that they should bring her their questions if necessary; her real reason was probably that these were usually held after dinner, and never concluded before nightfall, and she just preferred not to have to get in bed in the dark or, this time of year, to be up for long in the cold. However, tonight they specifically requested her presence. Davey was also a special requested guest. He nodded at her from the edge of the large nest in which they were meeting, as he tried to stay out of the way.
Torin’s hunting party had brought down a buck, so there was ample meat for tonight. The issue for which they wanted her present was hunting.
Torin opened the matter.
“We took our advisor hunting with us, and were about to kill a doe and a fawn when she interrupted us. She pointed out that if we kill the does and fawns, we have fewer deer to hunt next year, and that we should only hunt the bucks.”
“What’s a buck?” Sylwi asked, and everyone looked at each other. Tommy answered.
“The adult males are called bucks. They’re generally the ones that grow the antlers. The thing is, a female–a doe–can only give birth to one or rarely two babies–fawns–each year, but a buck can father dozens of them. In the extreme, if you killed all the bucks but one, you would still have many new deer the next year, but if you killed all the does but one, you would only get one fawn the next year.
“Why does this matter?” Gram asked. “If we don’t survive the winter, whether there’s food for next year hardly matters.”
Peep agreed. “We talk as if we’re going to stay here forever. When we were in the caves, if food got short we moved somewhere else where there was more.”
“Um,” Davey spoke a bit hesitantly in the crowd. “I built the log cabin with help. A couple of you have yours, and we want to get everyone in the Council into one.”
“Eventually,” said Sylwi with a frown. She had lost on the game of lots which had decided who got theirs next. “But yes. You can’t carry one of those.”
“A house untended is soon fit only for a campfire,” Davey said with the air of one quoting something. Probably, Tommy thought, the Book of Historical Quotes which she had never seen, but she was getting used to Davey’s quotes. It occurred to her that there were primitive tribes in the past who did just as Peep suggested, following the game and moving with the seasons.
“Maybe, Peep,” she said, “but are you going to find another campground with functioning water supply, bathrooms, and showers, with good fishing? God led Lauren here. I don’t have a way to find another place like it. I’m sure we could drink the water from the lake, but it would be a lot more work and a bit more silt in our diets.”
Everyone sat quietly for a moment, until Boronir spoke. “Peep is right, that if we were desperate we could move; but Tomiko is right as well, that this place is ideal, and it would be very unlikely for us to find another. No one wants to have to build another log cabin more than we have to, either. We have all been hunting, ranging around. Has anyone here seen another spigot, let alone another bathhouse?”
A few heads shook; the consensus was certainly that this was an issue. Again the group was quiet.
“It seems,” Varlax finally said, “that we are going to have to tell our people to shoot only deer with antlers. They are harder to catch, and harder to kill, but on the positive side they are usually bigger, which means more meat from each kill, and we will be more certain of plenty of deer through the summer and next year. Any objections?”
There were none.
“All right,” she said. “Make sure everyone is told.”
With that the meeting adjourned, and Tommy found her way back to her nest through the cold and dark.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #509: Character Challenges. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
