Chapter 48: Technical Communication
In the front yard of the house, the moxa smoke was thick. The new moon was approaching, but the current moon was a bright half-circle, illuminating everyone's face clearly without the need for a large fire.
Of the four people who had returned from the upper reaches of the Grass River, only three were sitting here.
Hua had acted impulsively after discovering the new tribe and had been struck on the head with a stick by the civet cat. Her head still ached, so her tribespeople had carried her into a house to sleep.
The clansmen gathered around, bombarding them with a messy jumble of questions. The noise sounded like a wolf cub had stumbled into a nest of panicked geese.
The old grandmother picked up a drumstick, knocked on the pottery drum, and said, "Stop asking foolish questions. Let Jian speak."
Only then did the clansmen quiet down. The civet cat, who had been devouring a hot meal, swallowed hard when he heard the crowd fall silent.
"How many people are in that tribe?" Chen Jian asked.
The civet cat took out three small wooden sticks. "At least this many," he said. "We walked upriver and saw them on the bank of the Grass River. They also live by the water."
"In caves?"
"No, their houses are made of birch bark and wooden vines, shaped a bit like an upside-down bowl. They're very small; each house can only sleep one or two people, and they aren't very tall."
Speaking of this, the civet cat's voice held a note of fear. "Some of them look like us, but others… they seem to have four legs and are very tall. I couldn't see them clearly from so far away…"
When the tribe heard this, the quiet was broken by confused murmurs. They couldn't imagine what a four-legged person would look like.
"Could you have been mistaken? Was it some kind of beast?"
"No. Even from a distance, I saw those four-legged people holding sticks in their hands. What kind of beast can hold a stick?"
During the chaotic debate, Chen Jian was also pondering the description. Four-legged people were impossible; this world showed no signs of being magical. After thinking for a long moment, he suddenly understood.
"Civet cat, did you see any strange, large beasts there?"
"Yes! They keep those beasts like we raise sheep. The beasts are tall—as high as my shoulders—and very wide."
Few people, other than some of the older clansmen, had ever seen such a large beast. They asked one after another, "Do those beasts eat people?"
The civet cat shook his head. "They eat grass. I saw them eating grass."
Chen Jian frowned, wondering if they could be horses. If so, that would be wonderful, as it would save him the trouble of domesticating them. These people, who likely had only just learned to ride, probably didn't use horses for fighting. At most, they would be a means of transport.
That tribe only had three to four hundred people, so they probably also ate the horses for meat. Without the invention of stirrups and high-bridge saddles, they couldn't possibly have strong cavalry with their current level of training. Still, he had been looking for large animals, and this was a good thing!
But the civet cat's next words confused Chen Jian again.
"Those beasts have horns on their heads."
He spread his fingers to demonstrate. "The horns are like branches."
When Chen Jian heard they had horns, he first thought of cattle, but the description of the horns told him that wasn't right. He had never heard of a cow with horns that grew like branches.
The clansmen tried to picture this beast, taller than a person, with horns like tree branches. It was still strange, but not as frightening as before. In their experience, animals with horns didn't eat meat; carnivores were too lazy to grow them.
The civet cat tried his best to describe the animal's appearance, but after a long time, the Tian clan people were still baffled. Without seeing it with their own eyes, they couldn't understand.
"By the way," he added, "the people of that tribe drink milk from those beasts, just like little lambs."
Chen Jian quickly asked, "Do the females, the ones that give milk, also have horns on their heads?"
"No horns. They're smaller than the ones with horns."
The clansmen all looked to Chen Jian for an answer, but he couldn't provide one.
There were many strange animals in this era. As human activity expanded, many large species went extinct. The ancient peoples of North America had hunted all the native horses for meat—ironic, since the horse originated there and only returned to its homeland by boat thousands of years later. The Maori had eaten the moa, a bird nearly two meters tall that, despite being terrifyingly powerful, was no match for a creature that could use its brain. The ancient Celts hunted the great-horned moose to extinction, only to later recreate the creature in their tales of elves.
For now, he couldn't be sure what the other tribe had raised. He suspected it might be reindeer, as a subspecies adapted to temperate climates could exist in this era. Reindeer were the easiest deer to domesticate; both the Ewenki and the Sámi people of his previous life had done so.
It was best not to draw conclusions without seeing it for himself, so he just shook his head. The milk-drinking was easy enough to explain. That tribe must have learned through observation that the milk was drinkable, even if they didn't know how to properly milk the animals.
Chen Jian wanted to know more. "Besides these things, did you see anything else strange?"
The civet cat glanced around, making sure Hua's younger brother was busy tending to her.
Then he lowered his voice. "Hua's older sister was killed by them. It seemed to be a sacrifice… Some of Hua's captured kinsmen had smeared her blood on themselves. The rest were tied up with vines."
A commotion stirred among the tribe members. They had experienced sacrifices, but they had never connected sacrifice with killing. To them, a sacrifice should be a joyous event, with sweet and sour wine and competitions to see who could run fastest or shoot most accurately. How could it involve killing people?
"Are all those people going to be killed?"
"No. The ones they caught were felling trees, it looked like they were trying to build a fence around their birch-bark houses. Some were killed when they tried to escape. They also keep some sheep, more than we have—several dozen of them. And near where they live, many edible plants are growing mixed in with the other grasses."
The civet cat did his best to recount everything he had seen. He wasn't afraid of much, but the connection between murder and sacrifice, and those people smearing their own relative's blood on their faces, deeply disturbed him. It was completely beyond his understanding. How could you smear the blood of your own family on yourself?
Chen Jian listened intently, occasionally asking questions that seemed minor to the others.
Finally, the civet cat suddenly remembered something. He carefully took a small object made of wood and reeds from a jar of lard and handed it to Chen Jian.
"They use this to catch fish. I snatched one from a man fishing in the distance and threw him into the river. I saw him catch a fish as long as my arm with it."
Looking at the small device, Chen Jian marveled. To survive, people devised the most incredible things through their labor and daily life.
The object in his hand was, in essence, a fishhook, but unlike any from his previous life. It was crafted from a thin, elastic strip of wood and a small piece of reed.
The straight piece of wood was bent into a 'U' shape, with the opening held in place by the small reed. Bait would be threaded onto it. When a large fish swallowed the bait, the pressure of its throat would dislodge the reed. The elastic wood would then snap straight, becoming a horizontal bar lodged in the fish's mouth.
It was very practical, the operation was simple, and it was something worth teaching to the clansmen. Fishing with wicker baskets made it hard to catch large fish; this method could catch very large ones.
He passed the object to the men sitting next to him and demonstrated how it worked. After bending the wood strip, he gently pinched the reed, and the strip immediately snapped straight. He put the device in his own mouth to mime a fish swallowing it, and the tribe instantly understood the mechanism.
Some Inuit peoples living in polar regions used a similar method. They would take an elastic piece of whalebone, coat it in animal fat, bend it, and leave it outside to freeze solid. Then they would throw it into the snow. Starving wolves would swallow the baited whalebone, and their stomach heat would melt the fat, causing the sharpened bone to straighten and fatally puncture their insides.
This was all human wisdom, and wisdom could be shared. Just like that, the tribe had a new fishing method.
In return, that other tribe had surely learned from his people how to fletch arrows with feathers. They would also have seen a new bow-drawing method. Their original pinch-grip technique made aiming impossible, relying only on feel. It couldn't store much energy or unleash the full power of a bow.
This exchange of wisdom and experience was essential for the development of human civilization. As productivity grew and the scope of human activity expanded, the speed of this exchange would only increase. A continent without communication would stagnate, like Australia, where stone bows and arrows were still in use thousands of years later.
From Chen Jian's perspective, this inadvertent technical exchange was a net loss for his tribe. This new fishing method was merely icing on the cake for them, whereas the fletched arrows and new bow-drawing technique were a timely, critical boost for their rivals.
After careful analysis, he concluded that the other tribe had domesticated some kind of wild beast, knew how to drink animal milk, had simple bows and arrows, lived in yurt-like tents made of birch bark, and some of them had learned to ride. That was the only explanation for the "four-legged people."
The civet cat had also mentioned many fruit-bearing plants growing among the grasses near their settlement. This was likely not even slash-and-burn farming, but a more primitive method of simply scattering seeds and letting them grow on their own.
They were a primitive, mixed tribe of fishers, herders, farmers, and hunters. If they secured a good location, they could develop into a farming society. If not, they would remain fishers and hunters. The land one's ancestors occupied directly determined the degree of civilization and the developmental path of future generations.
He stared at the clever fishhook, knowing he was looking at proof of an enemy that had to be confronted.
At such a close distance, a battle was inevitable, and the sooner, the better.
Otherwise, with this technological diffusion underway, the gap between the two sides would only shrink over time. His tribe's advantages were too easy to learn.
There could only be one civilization within a hundred-mile radius along the Grass River.
That tribe would either surrender and assimilate, becoming one people with one language; or they would become a piece of history.
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