Living On The Wind
02-19-2020, 06:51 PM
The big man inquired as to the nature of her pack and Thistle laughed. The word 'pack' was generous, more a collection of rag tag families eeking out what living they could. Her native northern lands provided a harsh existence and little more, so bands of wolves were low in number and of tough breeding, otherwise they would not survive. "Aye, nomadic for sure though it'd give them airs to be called a pack. We stuck close to our kin, and the younglings wandered off if they saw a chance to breed and start a family of their own. I just happened to wander a bit farther than most. Never counted on wandering into the shadow of a volcano but," Thistle shrugged, smiling at the irony of it all. "That's life sometimes, right?" She turned towards the brilliant-coated woman, turning her question over in her mind so she might answer as best she could. How many signs? Well. That depended on who you were and where you were born. Markings back home were like accents, except instead of the pronunciation itself it was like each of the odd words boiled down into pictographs. One family might know one dozen, another ten dozen if they were in frequent contact with others, but all in all the total number was unknown. "Countless, really. You could find one for almost anything if you travelled far enough. Thing is, a marking's no good if the wolves seeing it don't know what it means. In places where bands and families moved through frequently there might be dozens, otherwise a small family group might use just a few. There are probably hundreds out there I'll never know the meaning of, but in these lands it doesn't seem to mean much anyhow." Again Thistle shrugged. "My advice is to come up with something your pack members can recognize, if you're so inclined. Better yet convene with nearby allies and discuss something that can be used by all the wolves in your area. We'd use scratches, stones, sticks, sometimes even dyed rocks. But it's all just scribbles until you're able to understand what those scribbles are trying to tell you." Thistle thought her grandparents would be proud to see her passing on their ways, even to wolves as foreign and strange as these were. She'd always been a bother in her lessons, never had taken much of a shine to the more mundane arts like leaving trail signs. It was the job of all young wolves to pass on their family's marks to the new generation but Thistle had scoffed at it in her youngest seasons. Now here she sat, trying her best to spell it out to utter strangers. Funny how things turned out sometimes. "Speech" |