By sheer luck, when it came to keeping a secret, the chicks all proved remarkably good at it, not one of them let anything slip.
But just because the chicks didn’t talk didn’t mean the secret could stay hidden forever.
Plenty of adult Feather Clan in the Hundred-Feather Tribe had noticed something was off with their own chicks lately. Before, whenever they got back to the tribe, their chicks would come scrambling out from all sorts of odd places, up the mountain, down the mountain, deep in the woods… in short, until the chicks actually showed themselves, you never knew where they’d gone off to play this time.
But these past few days, the chicks kept emerging from the same one spot every time. If it were just one chick, that would be nothing, but it was a whole group of them, coming from the same direction every single day, and that raised some eyebrows.
Day after day, it kept happening, and the Feather Clan’s curiosity kept building.
Bai Shuo had no idea his secret base was on the verge of being exposed. Lately he’d been rather busy, besides checking on the transplanted and cutting-grown seedlings, he spent the rest of his time observing the other plants around the tribe, memorizing anything that might come in useful, and after several days at it, he really had turned up quite a lot.
Since it was right in the middle of the growth season, and with no grazing animals around to compete for the greenery, the area around the tribe looked like a small botanical garden, every kind of plant in short supply individually, but the sheer variety was staggering. Fruits, vegetables, seasonings, medicinal herbs… each kind sparse in number, but with so many different types, plenty of them turned out useful. Only, a great many were already grown too large to transplant, so all he could do for those was wait until they ripened and come back for the seeds.
Bai Shuo carried around lengths of hemp rope, cut into short segments, whenever he came across something useful, he’d tie a bit of rope around it or a nearby tree as a marker, that way, when other chicks saw it, they’d know not to touch it, and later, when it ripened, they’d know to tell him. There were simply too many plants for him to keep track of alone, but with a whole flock of chicks running around all day, it saved him a great deal of effort.
Another day full of good finds, and Bai Shuo headed back to the tribe in high spirits.
But the moment he reached the base of the mountain, he found a crowd gathered around a corner the tribe rarely visited.
And that corner was exactly where he’d transplanted the Redroot tuber seedlings.
Bai Shuo froze on the spot.
And the Feather Clan gathered around the Redroot seedlings had frozen too.
The gathering party had come back a little early today, and having spent the walk back discussing how strange the chicks had been acting lately, they’d grown even more curious. A handful of concerned Feather Clan members had discussed it and decided to go see what the chicks were actually up to.
So this time, once they got back to the tribe, instead of calling out for their chicks the way they usually did, they quietly headed straight toward the spot the chicks had been slipping out of these past few days.
And then, they froze in place.
A whole crowd of Feather Clan rubbed their eyes in disbelief. What were they even looking at?
An entire, sprawling patch of Redroot tuber seedlings!
A whole patch of them!
Nearly every Feather Clan member knew roughly how much food a single Redroot tuber could yield, whenever they came across a seedling out in the wild, they’d remember the spot and go back to dig it up once the growth season ended, except searching the tribe’s entire territory rarely turned up more than a handful at once. And now, right in front of them, in this one small patch of ground, over a dozen mature Redroot seedlings stood, with several dozen younger ones planted beside the larger ones.
Seeing this many Redroot seedlings clustered together in one place made a person doubt their own sanity.
“I’m dreaming, I must be dreaming,” one Feather Clan member muttered, “I actually dreamed up a whole patch of Redroot seedlings.”
The words had barely left his mouth before the Feather Clan member beside him echoed, “It’s not a dream, I’m seeing it too.” She wouldn’t have dared imagine a scene like this even in her wildest dreams.
Everyone else felt the very same disbelief, a sight like several dozen Redroot seedlings appearing together had simply never happened before.
Only Bai Yun’s reaction differed from everyone else’s, she was searching for her own chick.
The moment she’d laid eyes on this patch of seedlings, Bai Yun had immediately thought of her own chick, the one who’d been unusually busy these past few days, and felt certain this had to have something to do with Bai Shuo.
Except there were plenty of chicks here, and Bai Shuo wasn’t among them. Bai Yun caught hold of Bai Le, who was trying to worm his way into the crowd of chicks, and asked, “Where’s your brother?”
Bai Le shook his head furiously. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything!”
Bai Yun: “……”
Bai Shuo, who’d just arrived: “……”
Bai Le’s acting skills were far too poor, anyone could tell something was up at a glance. Bai Shuo called out, “Mama.”
Hearing him, Bai Yun released Bai Le, took both chicks, and walked off to one side, only asking once they’d reached a quiet corner. “Did you bring these back and plant them here?” Her voice stayed low, only Bai Yun, Bai Shuo, and Bai Le, who hadn’t managed to slip away, could hear.
Bai Yun already knew her chick had planted several kinds of weeds these past few days, she’d simply assumed it was for fun, no different from raising the little cluck-birds, all just a chick’s way of playing around. There was nothing wrong with a chick liking to tinker with things, plenty of chicks in the tribe loved running wild all over the place, and some liked burrowing into the dirt too, compared to those chicks, their own was practically no trouble at all, he just seemed to like growing things.
But Bai Yun had never, not in a million years, expected that he’d actually managed to grow Redroot tubers. As a member of the gathering party, she understood exactly what that meant.
Bai Shuo nodded, then shook his head. “A few days ago, while digging up scallions, I saw these and wanted to bring them down to plant near the base. My brother and Wu Yan told me Redroot seedlings can’t just be dug up like that, and I was afraid you’d be upset, Mama, so I only planted the branches I’d broken off, next to the others.”
That was a half-truth. When transplanting, he really had broken off quite a few side branches to reduce water loss, the only difference was, this time, he’d gone and planted those Redroot tuber branches too.
In fact, Bai Shuo didn’t expect to keep this hidden forever, it was just that the cuttings he’d propagated hadn’t yet taken root, and to avoid trouble in case things didn’t work out, he’d kept it from the adults for now. Now that everything was out in the open, there was no longer any need to worry about that. If it had simply been about digging up food carelessly, that would call for a scolding, but since he’d done it without realizing, then brought it back and transplanted it, and the seedlings had survived without any harm done to the tribe, no one would blame a chick for that, especially not now, with this many extra seedlings on top of it all.
Bai Shuo glanced up to check his mother’s expression, saw she wasn’t angry, and immediately pressed his advantage. “Mama, I can tell everyone how I grew these, but you have to give me a share, and a few pieces of meat too.”
These past few days, Bai Shuo had come to understand, in the most visceral way possible, exactly what it meant for a growing kid to eat you out of house and home. The chicks he played with ranged from five to eight years old, and counting the three brothers and Wu Yan, that came to sixteen chicks total. Feeding that many chicks snacks was no small expense, and the meat earned from his earlier processing work had already run out, meanwhile, most of the tribe’s Feather Clan, having learned to render oil and marinate meat themselves, no longer really needed his processing services at all.
The [tn content=”[tn content=”pot’s empty, no rice to cook”]pot’s empty, no rice to cook (Qiǎofù nán wéi wú mǐ zhī chuī, 巧婦難為無米之炊) – proverb, no matter how capable you are, you can’t produce results with no raw materials to work with. Even a skilled cook can’t make a meal with no rice. [/tn], as the saying goes, with no fresh income, no matter how much Bai Shuo knew, he had nothing to actually cook with. Everything else he had of value, the little cluck-birds and the wheat seedlings, couldn’t be eaten for a while yet, at least three more months. The wheat that had already ripened was technically edible, but that was seed grain now, and Bai Shuo wasn’t willing to be that extravagant with it just yet.
Even without snacks for now, the chicks would still follow his instructions, but he couldn’t just keep dangling promises forever either, and now, this method of growing crops happened to offer a way to earn a bit of food, as encouragement for the chicks working hard every day.
Bai Yun still hadn’t quite processed everything she’d just heard when that last line hit her, and her feelings turned rather complicated, in the end, she said nothing more, and simply agreed to bring it up with Chieftain Hua Yong.
That evening, Bai Shuo came away with ten pieces of meat.
To keep the meat from sitting too long and losing its freshness, Bai Shuo worked out an arrangement with Hua Yong, two pieces a day, for five days straight, which meant he no longer needed to worry about snacks for the days ahead.
What pleased Bai Shuo even more was that, in exchange for teaching the rest of the tribe how to grow Redroot tuber, a tenth of the eventual harvest would go to him, and another tenth to the chicks who’d helped, the seedlings he’d already propagated from cuttings also belonged to him outright. And when he mentioned wanting to plant crops all around the clearing, Hua Yong went ahead and granted him the entire stretch of grassland between the clearing and the woods, land that went unused anyway.
Everything besides the caves counted as the tribe’s collective property, with Hua Yong’s word behind him, Bai Shuo could now plan out this stretch of land however he pleased. The chicks were thrilled too, from now on, they’d have a steady source of food income of their own. Sure, the tribe’s food got distributed to everyone regardless, but the hunting and gathering parties always got priority, with chicks and elders further down the list, this new arrangement, setting aside a guaranteed share up front, was something else entirely.
Bai Shuo first had everyone build oversized hoes. The ones he’d made before had short handles, sized for chicks, perfect for them, but a real strain for adult Feather Clan to use. If they wanted to dig up the wild Redroot seedlings, they’d need fresh materials to work with.
The method was the same as before, just scaled up, except the tribe’s stone knives wouldn’t do this time. Their stone knives looked something like daggers, too short and not wide enough, the hoe needed different raw material altogether.
And so, Bai Shuo got to witness the entire process of Feather Clan stone-tool making, start to finish, which, summed up, came down to exactly six words: simple, brutal, efficient, if a bit hard on the stone supply.
The raw material came from a mountain a few hundred meters from where they lived, unlike their own mountain, the rock on that one came in loose chunks, unstable enough that sheer strength alone was enough to pry them free.
A flock of Feather Clan carried massive chunks of stone up into midair, hovered to a stop at just the right spot, and released their claws.
“Boom—”
The sound of stone smashing against the ground carried a long way. The other Feather Clan followed suit, letting go of the stones they’d been holding.
Once every Feather Clan member in the air had dropped their stone, they folded their wings and dove down to retrieve the shattered pieces. Before long, a whole assortment of stones and stone fragments, every shape and size imaginable, lay scattered in front of Bai Shuo.
Bai Shuo was floored by the sheer efficiency of it all, no wonder his father had come back the very next day with several more stone knives, after Bai Shuo had used up all three of the family’s originals.
Bai Shuo picked through the pile, sorting out anything suitable for making stone knives and hoes, along with a few pieces good enough to make into stone axes with a bit of extra shaping, some of these needed grinding down, which was no trouble for the Feather Clan, they simply carried them to the river and started polishing them against a large flat rock there.
The rock used for grinding didn’t quite match the others along the riverbank, probably hauled over from somewhere else. With the Feather Clan’s strength, it never took long at all to grind a single piece of stone into a smooth, finished shape.
Bai Shuo made a stone axe first and had Bai Xun use it to cut down some branches.
Most of the branches the chicks gathered had fallen from trees on their own, either blown down by wind, or snapped off because they’d been interfering with a Feather Clan member’s flight, so most were short, and even when a branch did happen to fork, it never forked quite the way Bai Shuo needed. Rather than waste time rummaging through the firewood pile, it was simpler to just cut fresh ones.
A stone axe made things convenient, branches cut this way came out with a much cleaner edge than snapped ones, the only trouble was that too much force could cause it to jam, and it was easy to chip the axe head besides, meaning after cutting just a few branches, they’d need to switch to a fresh tool.
With the branches and stones both ready, Bai Shuo took out the hoe he’d already been using and demonstrated for them. A hoe would loosen after just one day’s use and needed rebinding, this was something he, Bai Su, and Wu Yan had to do every single evening.
The Feather Clan learned remarkably fast, after watching him demonstrate a few times, they started copying the binding technique themselves. With so many hands at work, the pace was fast, in a single evening, the whole tribe produced seven hoes, stopping only because they’d run out of rope.
Bai Shuo also brought out a hemp stalk and told the gathering party to remember bringing this plant back whenever they came across it, the raw material for making hemp rope.
Bai Yun agreed, and sure enough, the next day the gathering party came back with no shortage of Redroot tuber seedlings and hemp stalks.
Bai Shuo noticed the Redroot seedlings growing near the tribe tended to be a bit more numerous and grow a bit healthier than those found elsewhere, because the entire gathering party had only managed to bring back twenty-odd plants in a whole day, and some of the seedlings even showed bite marks from some kind of animal.
Noticing Bai Shuo staring at the bald, chewed-up seedlings, Bai Yun explained, “Something called an oink-beast has been eating these.”
Wherever the gathering party went, plenty of game animals roamed too, those animals didn’t just eat weeds, they were just as happy to eat leaf-greens and fruit, and some would even knock down whole fruit trees just to get at the fruit. This was exactly why the Feather Clan, despite claiming this whole sprawling territory as their own, still often found themselves short on food, it wasn’t just them eating, the game animals ate too, and some of them would trample and destroy young plants before they ever had a chance to grow.
Bai Shuo said, “Doesn’t matter, this kind can still take root just fine.” Redroot tuber had a tenacious life force, the reason it hadn’t overrun the wild was simply that so many other weeds competed for the same ground, on top of tree cover blocking sunlight, and wild animals occasionally taking a bite or two out of it, very few plants managed to survive under those conditions. But clearing dedicated land to grow this one crop alone was an entirely different story, just look at the wheat field, already a lush green carpet after only a few days.
Every Redroot tuber seedling the gathering party had brought back, as well as the ones the chicks had dug up during the day, was treated the same way Bai Shuo had used a few days earlier, the main seedlings were transplanted, and the side branches cut off and planted as cuttings.
To make caretaking easier, they went into the newly designated area Bai Shuo had claimed, just a few dozen meters from the clearing at the mountain’s base, close enough to see from up on the mountain, so if any game animal wandered by, they could be caught quickly. Not that game animals were likely to show up here at all, wild animals were fairly smart, and wouldn’t willingly walk right into a place the Feather Clan lived.
Once today’s planting work was finished, Bai Shuo led everyone in twisting and braiding hemp rope, another task that required real patience, but for Feather Clan who had nothing else to do once they’d finished eating, it made for a perfectly good way to pass the time.
Hemp rope wasn’t just useful for tools, it could bind and secure items too, replacing hide rope. The tribe’s animal hide all came from trading with other tribes, at considerable cost, so they saved wherever they could, never wasting even the smallest scrap that could still serve a purpose, which meant hide rope was never abundant to begin with. Having hemp rope as an alternative made things much easier.
Bai Su and Wu Yan had helped Bai Shuo make hemp rope before, and even Bai Le had lent a hand, this work didn’t require Bai Shuo’s hands-on guidance anymore, the two older chicks would explain to anyone who didn’t understand.
Bai Shuo rubbed his own hands and turned his thoughts to another matter.
Normally the gathering party only needed to pick leaf-greens and fruit, and a hide sack was more than enough for that, but now the range of items they brought back had expanded. First it was the wheat he’d wanted, then hemp stalks and Redroot tuber seedlings on top of that, with more and more categories to carry, hauling everything back had grown considerably more troublesome, and today’s leaf-greens had already come back in smaller quantity than usual as a result. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been any to pick, there simply hadn’t been room to carry it all.
A hide sack, despite the name, was really more like a bundle, just one piece of hide, or several tied together, gathered up by the corners and slung over the shoulder. Fine for carrying fruit and leaf-greens, but now with Redroot tuber seedlings needing careful handling on top of everything else, it had grown quite inconvenient. When the gathering party got back today and Bai Shuo happened to be around, he’d watched, from his own mother down to the liveliest of the near-adult Feather Clan, everyone carrying their loads as gingerly as if cradling live grenades, not daring a single sudden movement.
Continuing to use hide sacks clearly wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Bai Shuo wanted to make backpack-style baskets, with those, not just the gathering party, but the chicks too could gather things far more conveniently on their daily rounds.
Plenty of plants could be woven into baskets, and the first one Bai Shuo thought of was the willow trees along the river, there was simply no shortage of them, and the hanging willow branches dangled low enough that even he could reach them.
Such good material, it would be a shame to let it go to waste. With that thought, Bai Shuo went to call over Bai Xun, who by now looked just about ready to snap from boredom in the crowd. “Papa.”
Having just snapped yet another not-quite-finished length of hemp rope, Bai Xun was about to quietly toss it away behind his back when he suddenly heard his chick’s voice, and jumped, assuming his little slip-up had been spotted. Fortunately, he caught the next sentence before panic could fully set in.
“Come cut some branches with me?” Bai Shuo asked. Even he had trouble climbing trees, let alone cutting branches, his burly, brawny father was far better suited to this particular job.
Bai Xun immediately dropped the hemp rope in his hand and stood up. “Let’s go, let’s go.” Finally, no more twisting hemp rope, cutting down trees sounded much better.
A moment later, standing by the river with axe in hand, Bai Xun looked up at the tree in front of him. “Cut these?”
“Yes.” Bai Shuo nodded. “I need willow branches, as many as possible.”
Bai Xun said, “No need to cut these.” With that, he tossed the axe aside, shifted into feather form, flew up into the tree, and simply used his claws to slice the branches directly, willow twigs came showering down in whole clumps, one after another.
Bai Shuo watched with envy, those claws really were incredibly useful. Too bad his own feather form still didn’t have claws as large as everyone else’s, if he wanted to cut willow branches with his claws, who knew how long he’d have to wait.
Father and son hauled back a whole heap of willow branches in no time at all, by the light of the fire, they stripped the leaves off, then sorted them by thickness, too thin wouldn’t do, and neither would too short.
Of what remained, uniform in thickness and just the right length, Bai Shuo pulled out eight to start, paired them up crosswise into a figure resembling a compass rose to form the base, had Bai Le hold them steady, then took a fresh branch and tied it at the center point where they all crossed, and began winding it around the middle, weaving over-under-over as he circled outward. Once one branch ran out, he tucked the tail end in securely and picked up the next, continuing until the base had grown to about twenty centimeters across, at which point he bent the eight base branches upward and began weaving them further, working his way up.
Freshly cut willow branches were springy and bent easily, with Bai Le, strong for his age and precise wherever Bai Shuo pointed, holding things in place, weaving went smoothly with hardly any effort at all. Once finished, Bai Shuo closed off the opening and made a strap out of animal hide for the shoulder, and by the time the evening was over, Bai Shuo had finished a miniature basket, since it was just a test piece, he’d made it small, about twenty centimeters across and a bit taller than it was wide. A basket this small would never do for anyone else, but it fit Bai Le perfectly.
Some parts of the weave weren’t quite tight and even, but this was still, without question, a tool the tribe had never had before. Bai Shuo dropped a few fist-sized stones into the basket to test it, Bai Le hoisted it onto his back with ease, hopping around with delight, showing it off to the other chicks.
Watching him bounce around without a single stone falling out, Bai Shuo could tell the basket’s weight capacity was solid, and decided he’d weave a few more the next day to try out.
Stretching, working out the stiffness in his arms and legs, Bai Shuo bent to gather up the leftover branches to throw away, and as he lowered his head, he spotted all those little bits of willow twig scattered on the ground, and suddenly remembered something.
He had a vague recollection that willow bark and willow twigs contained salicylic acid.
And salicylic acid had one particular effect, it promoted root development, speeding up root growth and accelerating a plant’s overall growth.
Water soaked with willow twigs was also known, informally, as “natural rooting solution.”