>>6067319Culc grow as tall as every other tree here in order to break the canopy. What's different is it's bendy throughout the trunk, smooth as an egg on the bark (the youngest part, near the top, gets as smooth as wet marble), no branches up, and at the top, a single huge bulb, like a closed tulip the width of a watermelon, and inside, one seed-heart in a pool of ferment.
Twice, perhaps three times a year the culc will sprout fruit and mature, and when it does the sweet licky stinki will waft for miles, drawing small birds to come sip, and big birds for a drunk lunch. And below, on the forest floor, the fragrant culc draw babwyn, who fight over who gets to climb and get the fruit (taking the first sip for sure), and when it is retrieved, fight about whose turn it is to sip, and who did more work, and how much is much.
The babwyn fight each other over the prize until one or two die. The rest, more peaceably drunk, finish their binge and sleep it off, leaving the culc seed-heart in the midst of bloodied ground and new dead flesh.
The new culc, if it takes the ground, grows to full height in about eight years, and in twenty the culc bulbs mature in their growth cycles to strain their nectar sweet and vent their petals humid. And the sweet licky stinki will start wafting up in a new place, marking violent death from twenty Full Suns since...
Welp! The babwyn are at it again in this place. A few have been brained all around the biggest trees, and there are no others around; must have gotten too wounded while fighting to climb.
You get going immediately. Hiding your big bark-bugg sandwich in the middle of a thorn bush, your bunch of fall-trap catches in a tree, you start climbing by hugging the culc with your arms and legs, then tying ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist with vines. Using the vines as a brace rope, and leaning your body out as a counterweight, and sometimes stabbing the fuggen slippy culc bark with your Dagger for an emergency grip, you make it to the top. There you help yourself to several drunk birds, eating them live. They chirp, too late. Ahhh. Too, too late. Nice.
Then you pull the petals fully close, bind it with more vine, and start a staggered, sliding descent.
You make it back on the ground and take a listen: nothing, no movement. Quickly, you grab the sandwich and the catches and hustle back to camp.
Seafood finna be IMPRESSED.