Rooting solution was exactly what Bai Shuo needed right now. Whether transplanting or taking cuttings, there was always a chance of failure, with rooting solution to help, he couldn’t promise a hundred percent success rate, but at least it would raise the odds considerably, and every wild plant they dug up meant one less growing out there, the more that survived the transplant, the more food they’d have once the growth season ended.
The branches left in front of him were all the ones set aside for being the wrong thickness, or trimmed off during weaving as excess, normally these would just get tossed in a corner to dry naturally before being burned as kindling, using them to soak water for the plants instead was simply making the most of what they had.
With that thought, Bai Shuo pointed at the willow branches on the ground and said to Bai Xun, “Papa, could you help me smash these up?” The branches were too big right now, breaking them into smaller pieces would help the useful compounds dissolve more easily.
The old man, long since accustomed to doing whatever his chick asked without question, agreed at once and started smashing the branches with a large rock, one thump after another. Bai Shuo took out a bamboo tube, packed the crushed willow twigs inside, poured in some water, covered the opening with a leaf, and tied it shut with hemp rope.
That done, he picked out a few branches about as thick as a pinky finger and laid them on a rock, tapping them gently, not to smash them, but to make a “toothbrush.”
Up until now, Bai Shuo had only ever been able to rinse his mouth with water. Just now, it had suddenly struck him that the very first toothbrushes had, in fact, been made from willow twigs, so, on a whim, he decided to give it a try.
Willow branches contained plenty of fiber, and once tapped just right, the end split open into something resembling a burst toothbrush. Bai Shuo washed it clean with water and brushed with it for a while, whether it was just his imagination or not, his mouth did feel a bit cleaner afterward.
Bai Shuo decided to use this as a substitute toothbrush for now. As for toothpaste, he ground up some bamboo charcoal, mixed in a bit of salt water, stirred it together, and made a simple version, storing it in a small bamboo tube for easy access whenever needed.
Toiletries +1.
In fact, using salt together with the charcoal would have worked even better, but thinking of how little salt their family had left, he decided he’d make a proper batch next time after trading for more. Salt was one of the tribe’s most precious resources, even with their family having a bit more than most, it barely covered what they needed for cooking, using it for toothpaste was simply too extravagant to consider.
Bai Shuo made a few more toothbrushes the same way and handed them out to the rest of the family, encouraging everyone to brush along with him.
Bai Yun and Bai Su came around to it first. Bai Xun hadn’t wanted to bother at first, but hearing that brushing kept your teeth from aching so much, he decided to give it a shot.
As for Bai Le, he didn’t need to weigh in at all, by the time Bai Shuo started brushing his own teeth, Bai Le had already dived into playing with his, and ended up with black handprints smeared all over his face.
Just before bed, Bai Shuo discussed something with Bai Xun and Bai Yun. “Papa, Mama, could you cut me some more willow branches tomorrow morning? A bit more than today.”
Bai Xun agreed at once. “Don’t worry, I’ll cut you a whole pile tomorrow.”
Bai Yun, remembering the basket her youngest had carried earlier, asked, “More baskets to weave?”
Bai Shuo nodded. “Yes, I want to weave a few bigger ones, and once I’ve taught Auntie Cailin, we can weave ones sized for grown-ups too.” His hands were too small and his strength too limited, he could only manage baskets sized for chicks, the ones the gathering party needed would have to be made by the tribe’s adult Feather Clan instead.
Bai Yun rubbed her chick’s head, her voice full of tenderness. “I’ll come help you weave tomorrow when I get back.”
“No need, Mama, I’m not tired at all.” Bai Shuo waved her off, he had a whole crew of helpers, there was no way he’d wear himself out.
The next morning, Bai Shuo went down to the river to brush his teeth and wash his face, then went to sort through the willow branches Bai Xun and Bai Yun had brought back that morning before setting out. Walking over to their cooking spot, he found a huge pile of willow branches waiting, far more than he actually needed. Probably worried he wouldn’t be able to reach high enough, they’d stacked the pile low but wide, spreading it out until it nearly encircled his whole cooking area.
Had his parents hauled all this back before dawn? Bai Shuo found himself a bit annoyed he hadn’t woken up earlier. There was clearly far more here than he could possibly use, enough for himself, Cailin, and the others to work with for two or three days at least.
Just as he was thinking this over, a crowd of chicks gathered around him.
“Bai Shuo, Bai Shuo, I want a basket!”
“Me too, could you make me one, Bai Shuo?”
“I’ll trade you Redtop fruit for one.”
“My papa hauled back so many branches! Please make me one!”
Amid the chicks’ clamoring and jostling for attention, Bai Shuo finally understood why there were so many willow branches, it hadn’t just been his two parents carrying them back, it had been a whole crowd of people, which explained the sheer volume.
The original plan for today had been to teach Cailin how to weave, instead, Bai Shuo thought it over and told the chicks, “Go work first, whoever does well gets a basket tonight.”
Hearing this, the chicks scattered at once, some off to water plants, some off to gather branches. Ever since a few days ago, the tribe’s chicks had picked up a new job: watering the plants Bai Shuo had planted. The difference now was that a few days ago it had been part of a secret mission, and now it had become an official, necessary task.
A tenth of the harvest from these plants would go to the chicks once they were ready, and the chicks took the work seriously, putting in real effort.
Worried a moment of carelessness might mean a chick falling into the river or trampling the plants, Bai Shuo had Bai Su keep an eye on them, leaving only Bai Shuo and his little brother Bai Le at the original spot.
Bai Le was too young, and even with his strength, his short little legs couldn’t keep pace with the other chicks, during the day, he was confined to this one clearing. Bai Shuo watched his little brother’s restless hands reach out to pluck at willow leaves, then glanced over at the carefree chicks running and clambering about down the mountain.
Some of these chicks were around Bai Le’s age, the oldest among them weren’t even five yet, old enough to walk and run, but too young for gathering branches, and not allowed near the river either, so they had no choice but to stay at the base of the mountain.
Bai Shuo thought it over and asked Bai Le, “Want something even more fun than a basket?”
Bai Le didn’t even need to think it over. “Yes!”
Bai Shuo said, “Then go call those chicks over here to play, the more, the better.”
Bai Le immediately stopped plucking leaves and ran off to call the other chicks.
The chicks’ daily routine was mostly just play, but with so few things to actually do or play with in the tribe, life could get rather dull, their biggest headaches were where to go play next, or who they needed to get back at after losing a scuffle. Hearing Bai Le say there was somewhere else to go play, they happily followed along.
Once they arrived, some chicks, just like Bai Le, couldn’t resist plucking at the leaves on the willow branches, most of the time, the chicks only ever saw dried-out branches, and mostly from other kinds of trees at that, willow branches were a rarity, and their curiosity was well and truly piqued.
Bai Shuo pretended not to notice their little antics, and once enough chicks had gathered, said, “You can all play here.”
Bai Shuo said this and turned to leave, then, after a few steps, turned right back around, as if suddenly remembering something. “Oh, and, don’t pull off the leaves. That’s a job only for the older brothers and sisters. You’re all still too young for that.”
Having said his piece, Bai Shuo finally left for good.
In fact, not every chick there had been plucking leaves, some had been playing hide-and-seek weaving around the piles of willow branches instead. But hearing that line, every chick, whatever they’d been doing a moment ago, stopped in their tracks, watching Bai Shuo, and the moment they confirmed he’d really left this time, they immediately reached out with grasping little hands toward the leaves.
Even the ones who hadn’t wanted to pluck leaves before found the idea suddenly appealing, once they’d heard that only the older kids got to do it.
Bai Shuo poured out a fifth of the willow-water he’d soaked the night before, using it to water a few of the Redroot tuber seedlings transplanted the evening before, then came back to find the ground already scattered with plenty of leaf-stripped branches, every one of them smooth as could be, while the chicks themselves sat on the ground, heads down, plucking away with total focus. Spotting Bai Shuo’s return, they even guiltily tried to hide the evidence behind their backs.
Bai Shuo pretended not to notice their little tell, picked up the leaf-stripped branches, and went to find Cailin.
He’d originally planned to practice a bit more today, then teach the rest of the tribe that afternoon or evening, but with this many willow branches on hand now, he figured he might as well practice and teach at the same time.
Cailin had seen Bai Le’s basket the night before, and seeing Bai Shuo arrive with an armful of willow branches, asked, “Bai Shuo, need any help?”
Bai Shuo nodded. “Auntie Cailin, my strength isn’t much, could you weave me a big one?”
Cailin said, “Sure, tell me how to weave it and I’ll help.”
Bai Shuo split off the slightly thicker branches for Cailin, kept the thinner ones for himself, and demonstrated alongside her. To give the large basket extra support, he added four sturdy branches at the base, bending them took real effort, but thankfully strength was the one thing the Feather Clan never lacked. Once the base was woven, he folded the thick branches upward, had Bai Shuo secure them with hemp rope, and Cailin continued weaving upward from there.
Meanwhile, Bai Shuo worked on his own miniature version, glancing over now and then to check on Cailin’s progress. As the two of them worked, an elder who’d just finished eating wandered over.
The tribe didn’t have many elders left, with food scarcity a constant threat over the years, the Feather Clan’s lifespan tended to run short, the Hundred-Feather Tribe had just thirteen elders too old to go hunting anymore. Their daily work involved watching over the chicks too young to go out and play elsewhere, stacking neatly the branches the other chicks brought back, and butchering the hunting party’s kills, now, on top of that, twisting hemp rope. Seeing the activity here, some came over just to look, and a couple, too eager to just watch, jumped right in to help.
Bai Shuo finished securing his own and handed it off to the elder who’d learned fastest, then took fresh material to start on a second, having the elders start from the sides first. Before long, the elders had picked up enough on their own to start weaving straight from the base themselves.
The small version was fairly simple, Cailin’s, being a bit bigger, took the whole morning to finish. She used a few slightly thicker willow branches to make shoulder straps, and a basket an adult Feather Clan member could carry on their back was complete. The shape wasn’t perfectly regular, but it was far more convenient to use than animal hide, carrying it left both hands completely free to hold other things.
Cailin noticed the advantages of the basket too, and immediately said, “Let’s weave a few more, the gathering party can use them tomorrow.”
Bai Shuo had Cailin finish weaving the base of another, then handed it off to a nearby elder, the elders, having already woven the smaller version, had grown quite skilled by now, and had no trouble at all with the larger ones either.
Watching Cailin and the elders both get the hang of it, Bai Shuo counted up the small baskets, found the number matched exactly, and turned his thoughts to something else.
Willow branches were pliable and made for good weaving material, if they worked for baskets, they’d surely work for regular carrying-baskets too, and the two crafts, in fact, shared very similar techniques, once you’d learned one, picking up the other came easily. A carrying-basket could be used to hold things day-to-day, and the gathering party could bring a few along too, for chicks who needed extra care, they could simply be placed inside a basket, protected from getting jostled or squeezed by other items even packed into a backpack-basket on top of that, and if extra security was wanted, they could always be tied down with hemp rope as well.
From morning until evening, Bai Shuo, Cailin, and the others kept weaving backpack-baskets and carrying-baskets nonstop. As mealtime approached, Bai Shuo stacked the small carrying-baskets together, placed them inside one large backpack-basket, and carried off all the small backpack-baskets on his own.
And so, every chick who’d gone out to work that day received a small backpack-basket, just a bit bigger than the one Bai Le had gotten.
The chicks who’d spent the whole day plucking willow leaves saw the others had one, and instantly froze, lips trembling, on the verge of tears.
Bai Shuo quickly pulled out the backpack-basket he’d been carrying and emptied out the carrying-baskets inside.
He’d deliberately kept the small carrying-baskets aside earlier just for this purpose, to coax the younger chicks. The small carrying-baskets had turned out in good number, they could hold seeds, and double as a way to placate the little ones, extremely useful all around.
Sure enough, the chicks who’d been about to cry lit right up the moment they saw he still had more, their mood flipping in the blink of an eye.
Bai Shuo handed one out to each of them, along with an instruction: “Keep coming back to work tomorrow.”
Whether older chicks or younger ones, everyone nodded their agreement. The older chicks had already grown used to following Bai Shuo’s lead, the younger ones just figured everywhere was fun to play anyway, and since listening to Bai Shuo meant getting more fun things besides, of course they were willing to go along.
It wasn’t just the chicks who thought baskets and backpack-baskets were wonderful, the tribe’s adult Feather Clan noticed the benefits too.
That evening, the gathering party tried out the weight capacity of the backpack-baskets, and without a second word, immediately went off en masse to cut willow branches.
Willow branches could be woven into all sorts of useful things, besides backpack-baskets and carrying-baskets, Bai Shuo also tried his hand at making crates, so that from now on, carrying bowls and utensils and such wouldn’t require multiple trips up and down the mountain, everything could go up in one load.
Willow crates could also hold food. All that fruit stored down in the cave had, until now, simply sat on the bare ground, at most with a layer of dry grass underneath, with willow crates, Bai Shuo told Cailin they could now sort the fruit by ripeness, so the ripest could always be grabbed first when needed, instead of having to dig through the whole pile every time. Willow crates also let air circulate, so ripening fruit could be carried out now and then to air out, the cave grew noticeably cleaner than before, and that faint smell of rotting fruit had disappeared along with it.
Before long, everyone had come up with new uses on their own, simply tying a finished willow crate straight to a tree turned out to be far sturdier than the branch-built structures they’d used before, and crucially, it was easy to relocate too, if they ever wanted to move to a different spot, they just untied the rope and moved on.
Watching all this, Bai Shuo had a flash of inspiration and dug out the twigs everyone had discarded as too thin or scraggly, and started weaving a nesting box out of them. Since it was woven by hand, the shape and size were entirely up to him, Bai Shuo decided to weave one shaped like a gourd, wide in the middle and narrow at both ends, with an opening cut right in the middle so it could hang from a tree, or sit on the ground, usable just about anywhere.
At first, no one paid it any mind, but by the time he was nearly finished, the whole family’s eyes had turned to what he was doing.
Bai Xun and Bai Yun: If we put all the chicks inside…
Bai Su: With this, my little brother won’t go tumbling off anywhere anymore.
Bai Le: Looks like I could crawl into that and play.
Once the last piece was woven in, Bai Shuo measured it against his little brother and said, “Le, shift into feather form.”
Bai Le didn’t hesitate for a second, shifting into feather form and crawling right into the nesting box, happily flapping his short little wings inside.
A normal chick’s feather-form weight ran about two jin, Bai Le, bigger than most chicks his age, came in at around three. Bai Shuo had woven the nesting box on the large side, with Bai Le already inside, Bai Su could fit in too without any trouble, and as for Bai Shuo himself, there was no need to worry at all, even a sliver of extra space would be enough to fit him in.
Bai Xun picked up the nesting box and gave it a shake, finding that his chick had woven it with real craft, even when jostled, the chicks inside wouldn’t tumble out. He immediately loved it even more. “Next time we go out, we’ll use this to carry you three.” Put all the chicks inside at once, and there’d be no more worrying about one of them slipping and falling mid-flight.
The whole family took an instant liking to the willow-woven nesting box, after watching the entire process, Bai Yun wove a bigger version herself, one large enough to fit the whole family, and set it inside their cave lined with animal hide, sleeping in it, rather than lying directly on hide spread over the ground, felt far warmer. It wasn’t obvious right now, but come the rainy and snow seasons, that extra warmth would matter enormously.
And so, once everyone had finished weaving their own backpack-baskets, carrying-baskets, and crates, they moved on to weaving nesting boxes, and the willow trees nearby grew visibly balder by the day.
Besides willow branches, Bai Shuo was also on the lookout for other weaving materials, the reeds and cattails along the river both made the list, and even the vines out in the woods could be saved for later use, it was just that a great many plants hadn’t grown large enough yet, and would need to wait until the late growth season to harvest. For now, aside from willow branches, the most abundant material available was riverside cattail reed.
Unlike willow branches, cattail and reed couldn’t be used fresh, they needed to be cut and dried first, though last year’s dried-out stalks could be used right away once soaked in water.
Bai Shuo wove two pot lids out of reed. Having used the stone pot to cook for this long without ever once using a proper lid, at most covering it with a leaf, which tended to go soft the moment it hit the steam and wasn’t nearly as practical as a proper woven lid, he made sure to weave a handle right into the design this time, so no one would ever get burned reaching for it.
With more and more woven tools on hand, even the wheat they’d harvested finally had a proper tool for drying, instead of being spread directly on the bare ground the way it used to be.
Bai Shuo also worked out through experimentation the actual effects of his simple homemade rooting solution on plants, it really did work, and the longer it soaked, the better the effect, though he’d mostly been using batches soaked for about three days, since bamboo tubes were limited in number and soaking any longer wasn’t especially cost-effective.
Bai Shuo looked at the bamboo tubes in front of him, deep in thought.
Assuming he was running low on bamboo tubes, Bai Yun spoke up. “I’ll bring some bamboo back for you tomorrow.” With backpack-baskets now available, the gathering party could carry back far more than before, digging up a few bamboo stalks would be no trouble at all.
Hearing this, Bai Shuo shook his head. “No need, Mama, I don’t need bamboo for now.”
Even though the gathering party could bring it back easily enough, Bai Shuo felt it was still too much of a hassle, he thought the tool itself needed improving.
Right now, the tribe had four different ways of holding water: leaves, the stone pot, wooden buckets, and bamboo tubes.
Leaves were single-use, convenient to grab and go, but with very limited capacity, even the biggest leaf held about as much as a bowl, fine for fruit and leaf-greens, but not so practical for holding water, since even a sturdy leaf was still just a leaf, and tore easily.
The stone pot was sturdy, but far too heavy, several dozen jin, impossible to move around casually, it stayed put essentially permanently, used only at cooking time.
Wooden buckets held plenty and weren’t too heavy, but making one meant taking a section from a thick, sturdy tree trunk and hollowing it out, an incredibly laborious process. The whole tribe only had a handful of them, their own family owned just the one.
Bamboo tubes were easy to source and simple to make, but a short section held too little, while several joined together became awkward to carry.
Bai Shuo found himself longing once again for all the various tools of the modern age, though he knew perfectly well that plastic and metal goods were simply out of reach for now.
Still, there was one kind of item worth trying.
Pottery.