Bai Shuo discussed it with Hua Yong. Where before he’d needed his parents to relay requests on his behalf, ever since the pottery came out, that step had simply become unnecessary.
Sure enough, hearing his request, Hua Yong didn’t hesitate at all, and told him to pick whatever he wanted.
Of the tribe’s empty caves, only the lowest-level ones remained. Bai Shuo chose the one right next to Wu Cang and Wu Yan’s, besides the food-storage cave itself, this was the biggest one left.
As it turned out, there’d been a reason this particular cave had sat empty so long, being both wide and deep, its temperature ran quite cold, even in weather like this, Bai Shuo felt a chill the moment he stepped inside wearing animal hide, and mosquitoes swarmed thick around the entrance too. All in all, not a very appealing space.
But the low temperature that made it unappealing to other Feather Clan turned out to be exactly the advantage Bai Shuo needed for storage, things kept far longer in the cold. As for the mosquitoes, a bit of weeding around the entrance and a few mosquito coils would take care of that easily enough, plenty of what he stored had insect-repelling properties anyway, so if anything, this space would end up cleaner than most, not dirtier.
He cleared the whole cave out, laid down a layer of stone, and topped it with a smoothed layer of fine sand, and just like that, Bai Shuo had gained a second cave, fully his to manage.
Even though the new cave was spacious, Bai Shuo knew his own stockpile would only keep growing, so rather than immediately moving down the herbs and seeds stored up the mountain, he decided to build shelving first.
Nearly everything he owned was already packed into cattail or willow baskets, once shelves were built, he could line them up row by row, saving at least two-thirds of the space overall. Factoring in his current height, Bai Shuo decided to build the shelving in three tiers.
The raw material was still branches, he picked out the thick, straight ones for the upright posts, and slightly thinner ones for the crossbeams, reinforcing everything with a few short branches besides. Once the raw materials were sorted, he started drilling holes, rope alone tended to loosen over time, so it made more sense to interlock the wood pieces directly first, then secure them further with a few wraps of hemp rope for extra strength and load-bearing capacity.
Bai Shuo mapped out the design in his head, then used a piece of charcoal to mark where each hole should go on the main support branches, Bai Xun and Bai Yun hollowed out the marked spots for him, while for the crossbeams, matching lengths were cut, with both ends trimmed down to fit snugly using mortise-and-tenon principles. The tools available were fairly crude, so what they produced fell well short of a true mortise-and-tenon joint’s sturdiness, but reinforced afterward with hemp rope, it held up perfectly well for shelving light loads like dried herbs.
The gathering and hunting parties could only help build shelving in the evenings after they got back, the shelves Bai Shuo needed took two full evenings to finish. Once done, he tested them out, and found they held up fine even with two or three chicks standing on them at once.
That was more than enough load capacity. Once the shelving was carried into the cave, it was time to start moving in Bai Shuo’s belongings.
Most of it was medicinal herbs, along with some hemp rope and crushed plant powder, plus a few pottery pieces, since Bai Shuo had mentioned the word “pottery” a few times by now, everyone had picked up on the name, assuming Bai Shuo had simply coined it himself for their tribe’s new colorware, and since the name rolled off the tongue easily enough, that’s what everyone started calling it.
Once most of his belongings had been moved in, Bai Shuo took the opportunity to scatter a ring of bamboo charcoal and wood charcoal around the cave, to help absorb moisture. Without lime on hand, these two would have to serve as substitutes for now.
While he was at it, Bai Shuo also moved the little cluck-birds down the mountain. What had started as just over a dozen birds had, by now, grown into a flock of more than sixty. Worried they might start fighting each other given the larger numbers, he split them into three smaller groups, each holding a bit over twenty birds, about the size of a single wild brood.
Through the raising process, Bai Shuo discovered that a little cluck-bird’s courage could actually be trained.
At first, the tiniest sound from anyone besides Bai Shuo, chick or adult alike, was enough to send the little cluck-birds scrambling into hiding out of fear. But as time went on, they grew accustomed to the chicks’ voices.
The first to be accepted was Bai Su. Once, while Bai Shuo was down at the base of the mountain, Bai Su had noticed the feeding trough was empty and scooped in a handful of grass seed himself. He’d expected the little cluck-birds to wait until he’d walked well away before eating, but instead, the hungry little birds swarmed right over the moment the food hit the trough.
Next was Bai Le. Bai Le talked in the cave all the time, and gradually the little cluck-birds’ reactions to him grew less dramatic, they still felt some fear, but no longer stopped eating at the faintest sound.
After that, the little cluck-birds grew familiar with Bai Yun’s presence too, and started eating from her hand as well.
By now, the only one in the family the little cluck-birds hadn’t accepted was Bai Xun. Bai Shuo guessed it was because Bai Xun killed prey every single day, making him more dangerous than the others, and little cluck-birds, being especially perceptive, stayed frightened of him no matter what.
That guess turned out to be at least mostly right. After moving them down the mountain, when elders or chicks walked past, the little cluck-birds barely reacted at all, when a member of the gathering party walked by, they’d huddle together and wait until the person was well past before resuming their activity, but when someone from the hunting party walked by, the little cluck-birds would play dead for a good long while, not moving a muscle for half a day.
Noticing this pattern, Bai Shuo added a second ring of fencing around the outside of the enclosure, to make sure the little cluck-birds wouldn’t be disturbed, and the double barrier also ruled out any chance of escape.
Over the course of about a month, the little cluck-birds had already grown far bigger than they’d been at hatching, and their appetite kept climbing along with it. Remarkably, none of them had ever fallen sick, every single one, from the day it hatched until now, had stayed lively and active.
Cluck-birds could grow to roughly a hundred jin, with over sixty of them, that would eventually add up to some six thousand jin of meat, and even more importantly, if enough feed was stockpiled, they could keep raising them right through the snow season too, with the birds laying an egg every couple of days, providing a steady, reliable source of protein.
Seeing the cluck-bird-raising venture had succeeded, Bai Shuo began turning over other ideas.
If cluck-birds could be domesticated, why not moo-beasts, baa-beasts, oink-beasts, and quack-birds too?
Quack-birds were a kind of prey that spent all day quacking noisily, because their calls carried so far, the hunting party could hear them from a distance, and by now the population within the tribe’s own territory had nearly been hunted out, most of what they ate these days had migrated in from elsewhere.
The very first time he’d heard the name, Bai Shuo had immediately thought of ducks, and sure enough, once he actually saw one, it turned out to be exactly that, not just similar to the ducks of his past life, but essentially identical, save for size, which, in keeping with the local trend for oversized game, ran to thirty or forty jin apiece. In theory, they should be farmable, but unfortunately, since the snow season had ended, the hunting party had only caught one batch, and only three birds at that.
Moo-beasts and baa-beasts were the game animals the hunting party caught in the greatest numbers, these two species had a distinctive trait, they tended to appear in herds, so once one was spotted, more were usually found nearby within just a few days.
Oink-beasts resembled pigs, with living habits much like wild boars, typically appearing as a mother oink-beast leading a litter of young ones.
Bai Shuo did the math on timing, every kind of game animal bred around the start of the growth season, two months in, the young should already be old enough to eat grass.
Moo-beasts were large, with the young kept protected in the middle of the herd, baa-beasts were agile, able to weave freely through the woods, both would be difficult to capture. Weighing his options, Bai Shuo decided oink-beasts made the best starting point, catch the whole litter along with the mother in one go, keep the young to raise, and if the mother behaved, keep her too, if not, eat her.
Except that raised a new problem: how exactly to catch them.
Aside from the little cluck-birds, the hunting party had never gone out specifically to catch live prey before. Their usual method was to strike for an instant kill the moment the opportunity arose, since a struggling, cornered animal could turn dangerous, and fighting for its life often made it stronger too, the Feather Clan’s first priority had always been protecting their own safety.
Oink-beasts were large, with razor-sharp tusks capable of dealing a lethal blow, catching one alive by hand clearly wasn’t an option, he’d need to rely on tools.
Bai Shuo tried building a trigger-based trap, the kind suited to smaller prey, a small oink-beast stepping on it would probably work, but a full-grown one wouldn’t be caught by anything this size, oink-beasts had considerable strength, and a particularly bad-tempered one could snap a tree in half, let alone spring a trap.
After thinking it over at length, Bai Shuo gathered a few sections of bamboo strip and shaped them into two shuttles, then drove two branches into the ground, pounding them firm with a stone hammer, and went back to the cave for hemp rope.
The gathering party brought back plants resembling hemp every single day, some were from the previous year, having weathered the rainy and snow seasons, their outer husks already naturally decomposed, leaving fiber that could be used straight away after a quick rinse. Fresh-cut stalks needed to soak in the river for a while first.
Hemp rope had all kinds of uses, sometimes needed for weaving too, so whenever there was a spare moment, people would twist up a batch. Bai Shuo had also made a spindle out of bamboo and wood, which made twisting hemp rope faster than doing it by hand, and spared people’s palms from getting rubbed raw.
By now, more than half the adult Feather Clan in the tribe knew how to make hemp rope, and even the chicks could help, as long as raw material was on hand, with enough people working, it usually only took half a day to produce a finished batch.
Most of the surplus rope ended up with Bai Shuo, since he did so much work for the tribe that people generally assumed whatever was left over after their own needs, beyond what they used themselves, belonged to him by default. Now that storage had moved down to the base of the mountain, it was all the more convenient.
The cave held several baskets of hemp rope. Bai Shuo took out a portion, tied one end around each of the two tree stumps, wound another length around a shuttle, and began weaving a fishing net.
He tied a knot in the hemp rope, took a slightly wider strip of bamboo, wrapped the shuttle around it once, then tied a second knot, and once he’d reached the width he wanted, started on the second row. From the second row onward, weaving a fishing net was a repetitive process, the same motion, over and over, row after row, and the net kept growing larger. Thanks to the bamboo strip, every mesh opening in the net came out identical in size, remarkably even and uniform.
Since this was just a trial run, Bai Shuo kept the net fairly small, roughly fifty centimeters wide and about the same in length. It took half a day to finish this one section, once done, he took it off the frame to test its load-bearing strength.
The hemp rope was good quality, and the finished net proved sturdy enough. Looking at the net in his hands, Bai Shuo began working through a hypothesis, if he wove a net large enough and set an ambush along an oink-beast’s usual path, with people on the other side driving the animal toward it using sticks and shouting, then, just as the oink-beast was about to reach the trap, quickly threw the net open to catch it, would that actually work?
The net would restrict the oink-beast’s movements, and the Feather Clan could look for an opening to bind it up. An animal that ran headlong into a net would do best to back away, but prey never understood that logic, caught in the trap, they’d only fight forward with brute force, giving the Feather Clan the chance to tie them down or lift them up, then wait until the animal had exhausted itself before moving on to the next step.
And with the mother oink-beast occupied being caught, the hunting party could take the opportunity to go after the piglets, try to grab the young first and the mother would retaliate viciously, but with her restrained, going after her utterly defenseless young would be effortless.
Nets could also be used again and again, no worry there, even if one got bitten through, it wasn’t like a sweater that would unravel endlessly from a single loose thread, a net’s mesh openings were each independent, so you could just repair the damaged section directly.
And the net’s usefulness didn’t stop there, a net was a net, after all, and naturally lent itself to fishing too. Using netting, one could build a few eel traps, and weave a few fish baskets out of willow and cattail besides, the tribe’s food supply could be enriched further still.
Fish wasn’t a rare food source, exactly, most Feather Clan simply didn’t care much for it, since it was hard to catch and full of bones, both major drawbacks. But if catching it took no real effort at all, just toss a few fish baskets or fish traps into the water each day, no one would turn down free food falling right into their lap.