Day 18

Today K’Ylin and I went tracking in the wilderness. Last night at the festival, amongst all the talk of food for the next months, I asked her where the winter supplies came from. When I was in the wilderness two weeks ago it took me such a long time to find anything worth bringing back, but there I was eating meats that had clearly been caught out there quite recently. K’Ylin told me that there is a lot to be found out there by someone who knows where to look, and she offered to show me some of the tricks to finding enough to eat in this forgotten village.

The first lesson was how to tell if a burrow had something living in it. Things to look for include hairs at the opening or droppings nearby. The ground in the wilderness is too dry to look for prints and there are no trees close to the village so the methods of tracking I knew from Teeluw did not apply.

The second lesson was how to flush out something that lived in the burrow. K’Ylin told me that when there were lots of burrows near to each other, chances were in favour of them being connected underground. Lighting a fire at one of the entrances would scare the occupants into fleeing their home through one of the connected exists. Again, the tracking skills I acquired in Teeluw did not use this method - after all, lighting a fire in the woods would be silly. But there was almost nothing to unintentionally set on fire in the wilderness near the village. It proved to be an effective method of bringing out the small animals and directing them into snares we had set up.

Before too long we had enough meat to last K’Ylin a week but I wanted more. I wanted to try and find some without help and to show her that I had learned well. We travelled west for about five minutes - just so I wasn’t hunting in the same area as she had been. I found some burrows with earth that had recently been disturbed; it was a sign that something had passed through the opening recently. As I stood up to find more openings K’Ylin stopped me. She had spotted some pearls of frost on the ground where she was watching me from.

Perhaps to your surprise, I knew what these pearls of frost were. They were not from the cold - in fact it has been quite warm for the last few days. They were from a monster.

Last night at the festival there was a song about the history of the village and it mentioned a monster attacking and the Dwarves fighting it until it fled back into the wilderness.  It had never been seen again since but it lived on in the songs. The song also told of the signs the monster left where it had been - pearls of frost. K’Ylin was convinced that the monster was returning and she was worried about the destruction it might cause now that there are no Dwarves to fight it off.

For K’Ylin’s sake, I am going to go into the wilderness in search of this monster. I’ll try to find out why it is returning and, if I must, I will fight it. Hopefully I won’t be fighting it alone. If I go into the wilderness I might find the woman who can read the Dwarven runes and, hopefully, if it comes to it, she will help me fight the monster - I know she is skilled with a bow.

 A snare ready to catch supper.