Quoted By:
Observation and patience are the scout’s purview. Very often your life and your pay were doled out in accordance to how well you could still your muscles. Your position is too superior to justify a more direct approach, at least without a little more reconnoiter. Having made your decision, you scuff your coat, clear a perch, and sidle up to the edge of your ridge.
The village lies arrayed in a vague L-shape, the bottom stretching towards the river and the central area standing at the joint. The homes are one room dugouts with woven roofs daube with mud. From the one you saw during your ascent you would assume that they are one or two rooms large on the inside. The rims of the daubs are colored mostly with reds and blues and with hanging decorations. Horns and antlers, feathers, woven talismans, and river shells are all on display. There are a few homes significantly more lavishly decorated than the rest, leaning into the mountains at the top of the L-shape, but your vision finally fails you when you try to make out any significant detail. You can at least tell that they seem unoccupied at the moment.
A brisk count puts the population at around one hundred and twenty, as far as you can tell all women and children. The women stand in clusters girdled by huge racks of dried and drying roots, herbs, and grasses. Pots bubble with what you assume to be salves but could just as well be supper. Water is brought from the nearby stream in large baskets, no doubt coated on the inside somehow as they do not leak. The children go about smashing and grinding acorns into meal, some of the older girls sit with the women while they handle the herb racks.
You do finally spot an old man, face clear, with a circle of young boys around him seemingly fletching arrows. Long, thick braids obscure his face. Subdued is not enough of a word for the mood. You hear none of the carried chatter of conversation, you observe little mouth movement, and absolutely nothing resembling a laugh or a smile. Something heavy is pressing down on the village, you can feel it.
Outside of the borders made by the raven poles, there are several tree stumps. If the yet unsettled earth surrounding them is any indication they were felled very recently. You take a break to unfocus and rest your eyes, and you suddenly hear the lack of natural sound. The water is perhaps the only thing you can make out. Birdsong, beavers, squirrels, the grunt of a boar, the yip of a fox, rustling grass, creaking branches, stirring wind…all the sounds of nature are seemingly atrophied to one rushing stream.
