Sticky Situations

It ended up taking four days, and part of the fifth morning to get where we were going.

Nanahan actually did fairly well for herself, all things considered. The Kan’s apprentice already knew how to set up a sling for her leg, so apparently she’s not the first with an injury to a hind leg. Her injury seems to be doing okay. She has been very stoic about the whole ordeal. Even in unguarded moments, the most she'll admit to is that the sling makes her back ache. I've been wondering whether my efforts with the butterfly clips really helped her, or whether she survived purely off her own stubbornness. Talk about being tough as nails. And thanks to her two helpers, Sodaosi and Paksh, she managed to keep up without much fuss.

My taking over her former job was actually a lot easier than I thought. Ghee was by far the most troublesome of the children when I first met them, and I figured I'd be chasing her and Nyarno around constantly. But ever since Nanahan’s injury, Ghee has been quiet and hesitant. The only few incidences I saw any hint of her old self was when another youngster got too close to the edge of the group. Then Ghee would loudly bully the would-be-wanderer back to safety. The adults in the group seemed to be okay with this behavior. I think maybe they felt it would help Ghee come to terms with her mistake. I followed their lead on this. I don’t know enough to make a judgment.

All of Ghee’s bullying meant that the other youngsters turned to quieter items of interest to pass the time. Nyarno was too busy pouncing on each and every moving object in front of him to take much interest in me, but Oshtik and Eyani spent most of the trip practically glued to my shadow.

The first day was fairly dull. I don't think anyone was really complaining, mind. Nanahan's injury was more than enough excitement for the entire trip. But as the day wore on I was starting to get a little bored. The rolling, undulating topography made it hard to see more than a kilometer or so in any direction, and I began to get very tired of climbing down a hill only to have to start back up one a couple hundred meters later. The plants and animals I could see were the same ones we'd had for the last two days, so playing the "What is this?" game with the children got old pretty fast.

By the second day, though, I was lamenting the loss of boredom. The "small biters" that Nandi had described began to appear about mid morning. There weren't many at first, so few that they didn't immediately draw attention. Only enough to make a few clan members swat or scratch absently here and there. But within an hour everyone was scratching, and tiny yellow creatures were humming through the air, seeking whatever soft, yummy piece of you they could find to chew on. The creatures seemed to target Azu-nah ears, and the thin, soft skin around the jaw and throat. They found the same places on me, but also went for the backs of my knees. They aren't blood-suckers, by the way. Which is why, apparently, they found me just as edible. They took little pieces out of your skin, like a horsefly bite. I hope I gave them all indigestion, critical hemoglobin poisoning or something, because their little nibbles hurt like a bitch.

Fortunately, the Aket-oizo called for a pit-stop soon after we realized we were infested, and broke out the repelling sap the clan had brought. I wanted to bathe in the stuff, but I had to make do with slathering it all over every centimeter of exposed skin, and even rubbed it into my clothes a bit. It stank, kinda like mildew or old gym socks. But it could have smelled like rancid elephant puke for all I cared, because it kept those evil little yellow monsters the hell off me.

The biters hung around for a day and a half, and then abruptly disappeared. Oshtik explained (with some clarification from Kohirc later), that they relied on a short, fat, shrub-like plant for moisture. The plant only grew in small pocket populations scattered across the plains. And since there was no rain or other water source for kilometers around this time of year, the biters were relatively restricted.

I was deliriously grateful when they were gone. The repellant sap was a godsend, but we had to keep reapplying it throughout the trip. Otherwise the evil little buggers would immediately home in on a place where the sap had dried and flaked away. And worse, if I didn’t slather the hems of my clothes with it, the beasties would crawl up my pant legs, or down my shirt collar and start taking pieces out of me. So I was sticking to my skin, my clothes, and anything else I touched. I had gummy twigs and leaves in my hair. By the time we escaped the biters’ territory, I felt like a grass version of Swamp Thing.

The Azu-nah seemed to be just as uncomfortable. Eyani was particularly miserable. Everyone with long manes was braiding and tying back their hair to keep it from getting gunked up or sticking to their skin. Poor Eyani kept valiantly trying to scrape his gooey forelock away from his face and tie it up, but hairs kept escaping and were sticking to his nose and eyelids. I took pity on him and bound his entire mane back in a funky French braid thing. It was cute. He looked like a little highbred pony decked out for dressage. He was inordinately happy with it, and predictably Oshtik and Nyarno immediately came running up to me and shouting “Now me! Now me!”

Oshtik wanted me to teach her how to do it herself, and I let her practice on my hair a little. I love how lively her mind is. She’s really, really bright. Nyarno… well.. I only managed to get about half of his done before something small and bouncy flitted across his path and he vanished out from under my hands to give chase. He hasn’t seemed to have noticed his unfinished state yet, and it’s kept everything off his face well enough. So oh well.

The fourth and last full day of our trip was hard. While we’d ditched the biters, we’d exhausted the vast majority of our water supply. Kohric insisted there was plenty of water, both to drink and for bathing, when we reached the new clan site. The water shortage also brought to light the reason for their odd fasting. By now I was absolutely starving. I’d used up the last of my tiny food stash the night before, and I was about expecting to start hallucinating like a cartoon, maybe think the neighbors were walking sandwiches or something. So I finally came out and asked Kohric why we were subsisting off rations that would make Gandhi look well fed.

Our vocabulary gap has shrunk enormously since I first joined D’Keda, but Kohric still had a hard time explaining this one to me. From what I could gather, Azu-nah metabolisms are far more resilient than a human’s. They can drop to very low levels when food is short, and then bounce right back when food sources become regular. The trade off is their metabolisms also require a fairly directly proportionate amount of water to process whatever amounts of food they eat. And, apparently, when an Azu eats very little, the body’s water demands drop substantially. They’ve learned to exploit this quirk of biology to reduce the amount of water (a heavy, energy intensive burden) they need to carry on a journey. Kohric also said the Sa-kudayu prefers to bring very little food so that “we do not move a plant outside its home to take another’s.” That caught me off guard, and had me ruminating for hours after. I would never have thought the Azu-nah had any concept of something as “progressive” as invasive species. They keep surprising me.

The end to my fast came this morning, when we finally reached our destination. I was staggering a little from dehydration, and my stomach still feels like it’s trying to devour my backbone, but we finally, FINALLY made it.

The old clan site was a scrubby stand of trees in the middle of high, rolling, grassy hills. This area is very different. The hills had become flatter as we grew closer, and now we’re on a broad, flat coastal plain. There’s a ridge of high, rocky palisades that stretch along the western side, and down right into the sea. The sea is shallow, only a dozen meters at most, but I only know that from checking out the satellite readouts on the Marco Polo before heading planetside. There are hollows in the seaside cliffs. That’s where we’ll be living. I can’t wait to get moved in. I’ve had enough travel for a while.

But first I really, really need a bath.