The Tale of the Tiger and the Toolmaker

Once the sea was a swamp, and once the swamp was a river, and once the river was a plain.  What the plain was before, no woman can say.  But the People of the Plain, who lived in the company of tigers, fled from the sun and came south.  And as they came, the plains became a river, and the river became a swamp, and the swamp became a sea.

The People of the Plain came to an island, where fish were plentiful, and where water was cold and swift.

One day, Voles the toolmaker, who was only a man, was killed by the biggest tiger in the world.  And his son, Volen, cried out, “How are we to slay this tiger so that it may never slay another?”  And he set to work making a weapon, just as his father before him had done.

But there was another toolmaker in the village, a cunning woman named Feya, and she said, “We have no need to slay tigers.  What we need are weapons to hunt food.”  And she set about making a weapon for catching food.

And the weapons made by Volen were used to hunt the large animals, and the weapons used by Feya were used to hunt small animals.  But Voles said, “Which of our two weapons is best?  For there can be only one toolmaker.”

They could not decide.  So they called upon the Four Wanderers, who visited the village in the course of time, and the Four Wanderers said, “Let she whose is best become the new toolmaker,” and they led the People of the Plain to the river.

And Feya was there, and she slew many fish with her spear.  And Volen was there, and he could catch nothing.  And the Four Wanderers said, “Feya’s weapon is better for catching fish, so she is to make all such weapons from now on.”

But sometimes, Volen’s weapon was used, when tigers came to attack the people.  And that is how it came to pass that the First Challenge happened.

Year 30,000: The Ayuté (Kufu) Have Two Toolmakers

Previous history

     Year 0: The Kufu acquire a medicine man 

Following the Earth Gathering, the Kufu tribe moved back down toward the southeast where their ancestral lands were.  As the various tribes of the Kufu moved gradually south (yellow arrows) they passed south of the Great River and began to work their way back up toward high ground.  The Kufu were soon to become isolated on this high ground during the interglacial period; when the glaciers melted and the seas rose, the huge marshy estuary of the Great River Valley would flood and become a sea and turn their highlands into an island.

Back in Year Zero, the Kufu tribe hadn't had a shaman.  The Players were adamant that the Kufu, badly scarred from their numerous battles and hunts, should henceforth have one.  They arranged matters so that the Kufu would have a medicine man of their own (Tor the Sage, of Pagh, seemed to be a spare, so they commandeered him).

The Dar tribe had stories about racism and tolerance, what with the deformed child and the telepath supposedly possessed by evil spirits.  The Uman tribe's stories had been about had been about the tension between religion and technology — they wanted rational explanations, not mystic signs.  The Pagh tribe gave me a chance to tell stories of coexistence with nature, its cycles, and how to live within the world.  For the Kufu, now called the Ayuté, I decided their stories could be about sexism and gender.

The crisis for which the Great Spirits were summoned in Round 2 involved a dispute between two up-and-coming toolmakers, one male, one female.  Voles, the old toolmaker, had died at the ripe old age of 35 after being attacked by a tiger.  It is an auspicious death for the Tiger Clan to have their only toolmaker killed by their totem animal.  Voles, the tribe decides, must have been mighty indeed.

His son, Volan, is but 19 and isn't very good at adopting the craft.  Even though the tribe is content to allow Volan to have the position of flintsmith out of respect for his father's legacy, Volan's spears are heavy and crude, and his technique just isn't yet refined.  But there is also Faya, who is but 16; she has studied the making of tools and weapons, even though it was forbidden for the women of the tribe to perform these tasks.

"Can I not make tools?" she asks.  "My tools are as good as Volan's."  Perhaps, but she is no better than he, and certainly not the match of Voles.  Her spears and slings are light, accurate, and easy to wield, but too delicate for the hunting of anything more than rabbits and birds.

"But we eat rabbits and birds all winter," she reminds the tribe.

"My spears are large and strong," says Volan.  "With it, I can kill the antelope, and keep even the Great Tiger at bay."

"We do not eat the Great Tiger.  And how often do we hunt antelope?" Faya counters.

The leader of the Ayuté tribe is Utano the Eldest (M, 49), a handy warrior who has been fortunate enough to survive many hunts and battles.  He relies upon Akun the Scout (M, 28), the eyes and ears of the tribe.  Also he consults Lanla the Medicine Woman (F, 44).  Lanla insists that women should be allowed to make tools, because the tribe is in need.  Akun agrees to use whatever weapon is best for the enemy, and wouldn't mind having both types of weapon at his disposal.  However, the Ayuté tribe isn't really large enough to support two full-time crafters.  In a hunter-gatherer society, that would be an extravagant luxury.

Utanu asks the Great Spirits for help in deciding this puzzle.

What The Players Decided

This event was right up Dave the Artisan's street.  It was another opportunity to invent new technology for a worthy tribe.  He began by asking for a more thorough evaluation of the two types of spear being made.

"Are her spears light enough to be made into arrows?" he asked.

Possibly, I said, but the Kufu haven't invented bows.

"What kind of trees do they have around here for bows?" Dave wanted to know.

Here in the highlands, I said, not much.  The environment on the hills is a little dry, and the trees get twisty and bedraggled.

"All right, so not bows," Dave said, perhaps unaware that the Mongols had once made bows out of antelope horn.  The Ayuté did hunt antelope.  But he had moved on to another idea.  "Can I invent a spear-thrower?"

An atlatl? I asked.  Sure, you can give that a try.

Dave fumbled his roll in attempting to manufacture an appropriate device.  The Players collectively groaned and made a beeline for Plan B:  lie their asses off.

"We'll set up a contest," said Dave the Artisan, laughing, recalling how the so-called contests had worked so nicely for the Drim and the Abequa.  "We'll set it up so it comes out where both weapons are equally good—"

Are they equally good? I asked reasonably.

"Yeah, we're staking the survival of this tribe on the weapons we're choosing for them," said Joe the Leader.  "Let's make sure it's a really good test."

By this point you may have noticed that my Players were allergic to taking sides.  Dave's camp on the Weaselly Middle Ground was growing into a nice, landscaped picnic grounds with full amenities.

"I have an idea," said Joe the Leader.  "Can we teach them to spearfish?"

Sure, I said.  Go for it.  It's the Paleolithic; it wouldn't unusual at all for a tribe to learn to gather food from the seas and rivers.

They gathered the tribe down by the nearest tributary to the Great River and handed out Faya's and Novan's spears to Joe, Dave, Connor, and the five named members of the tribe (Akun, Utano, Lanla, Faya, and Novan).  Each Player rolled dice, and I rolled for each of the tribal hunters, to see which spear came out best.

I don't remember now which Player had which spear, or which tribesmen.  I do recall that it was a fairly small sample size, and we did roll for it.  As it turned out, purely by chance, the two women did better than the men by a long shot.  Though Joe caught a fish with his spear, none of the three men of the tribe was successful at all.  It's just the way the dice happened to fall that day.  When you see what the Ayuté tribe becomes later, you'll wonder as I do (and perhaps as the players do) what might have happened had the dice fallen differently that Saturday.

Result
The Ayuté agreed that Faya and Novas could share the duties of toolmaking, but the success of the women at fishing tipped their culture in a more Amazonian direction:  from now on, the women would be the hunters.