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The sun is a surprise. After so long of a night it seems harsh and uncouth, its sticky fingers tracing over every part of your room. It clashes with the chill air as to whether you will be warmed or cooled, but you find your thick, double fur blankets decry the bout as unnecessary. You are warm, and you will stay warm, despite your only just realized nudity below the covers.
You test your fingers, they wiggle accordingly, as do your toes, wrists, ankles, neck muscles, and shoulders. You feel strange textures over some parts of your body, especially your chest and right arm. You make your investigations to find freshly changed bandages over your high ribs and around your elbow. A litany of bruises, cuts, and scrapes rear themselves about this time, and you grimace at the onslaught. Still, each one seems to have been cleaned, poulticed, and cared for by someone very well experienced in their craft.
The cobwebs clear slowly from your head, and you realize you hear singing. You wouldn’t pay money for the performance but the tune is carried sure enough. You risk a larger breach in your eyelids as the humming goes on. When the light finishes stinging your eyes, you find yourself inside one of those Indian huts. A fairly nice one with fur rugs covering much of the floor, a large room about five hundred feet square if you had to guess, with what looks like a second room that leads off somewhere mysterious.
There are pillows and tables and baskets of stunning colors. The roof is low, only a little taller than yourself if you were to stand, but you figure most time in here is spent seated or under a blanket. Two windows with primitive shutters near the top of the walls let in most of the light. Trinkets and decorations hang from the ceiling and walls. A large chest of some dark wood sits at the far end of the room.
The humming draws your attention to the door, a framed rectangle covered with long, shell curtains. The light finds its crevices here and there but it seems remarkably subdued for lacking a solid door. The source of the humming is not the door, but rather who sits beside it.
Talons-on-the-Tree is seated with one leg straight and another drawn up to the knee. He stares up at the ceiling humming a slow, wordless song, slipping a word of Maidu in at some patternless junctions. His hands hold his flint knife and a small cone of wood which he looks to be whittling into some animal or another.
You raise yourself upright, your hands behind you supporting your weight and try and speak, but two things are made apparent at the same time. One, while not broken, some of your ribs are definitely bruised. Two, your throat is so dry that any attempt at sound sticks like gum. You do manage a half grunt that turns into a hiccup, and all things considered are quite pleased to have done so.
