Welcome to Gaia! ::

At the crack of dawn, Maria was already up and running. She had always despised that phrase; the dawn never cracked, it comfortably slid over the horizon at the sun lord's whim. At least, that was once Maria's opinion when sun rising meant little more than the dawn hunt and another chance to dry meat.

Moon-set had been only a few hours prior and Maria now shoved her teal-striped skirt and leather vest over her body with nearly enough haste to tear the more delicate stitches. She'd passed out again, by the water's edge no less, and thus had to comb wet sticks and leaves from her black teal-tipped hair. Standing up, the young woman started back to the Man Villages, grunting with irritation as she attempted to pull a stray maple twig from a stubborn knot of gnarled hair. She needn't hurry, Maria had already told her parents she'd not be home that morning (though her precise reasons for not being in bed at that hour weren't entirely true).

Today was the first day of her apprenticeship with Quixaun, the infamous apothecary who Maria owed for services rendered for the feverish musher, Kenji. She'd once called Quixaun to save the man, and the shaman's services did not come cheap. It was now Maria's responsible to pay for the medicines and wisdom given to the musher as it was she who demanded his presence, not Kenji.
Having told Quixaun she'd cover the costs but didn't know how, the apothecary then asked her to be his assistant until the debt was paid off. Maria wondered, as she took a turn past the moldy old stump to the elk-hide covered hut Quixaun, normally a hermit, called home while visiting the Man Villages, if the old man perhaps was lonely. He'd told her his son refused to follow his father's trade and instead left for greener, more sociable pastures. She couldn't blame him for leaving, the old coot was a maniac.

Maria looked up from her hands, untangling a matt of leaves and hair, and scanned the front and sides of the hut. No smoke rose from the firehole cut open at the top of the hut and everything outside the makeshift homestead seemed relatively untouched, as if the old man couldn't get comfortable enough so near fellow men.
He's probably spent more time jabbering with the sparrows than real people, Maria thought, then she bit her tongue with self disgust. A hypocrite, that's what she was, what right did she have to criticize other lifestyles when her own communication with mankind had recently diminished. She hadn't even talked to Daniel lately, afraid he'd figure out what happened and tell the family. Dan was smart like that, and his intelligence was what Maria feared.
Turning her attentions back to reality, Maria searched more thoroughly for Quixuan. The old bone man was nowhere in sight, not behind his house or chopping wood. She grimaced at the large pile of logs stacked high near his hut; most likely chopping that wood would be her first task. She'd rather skin a horse.

If he's not here, where could he be? She leaned over at the hut's entrance and picked up a handful of mulch, bringing it close to her nose and mouth. Slowly inhaling the earth's cedar fragrance, she picked out the slightly musky scent of Quixaun's ermine cloak.
One doesn't need to be canine to notice that, and she laughed inwardly. Ermine was so difficult to catch that few villagers wore its pungent fur. Mostly it was the mountaineers or the snow dwellers who wore its hide more often, and because no one else in the village wore that cloak at the moment, she could only assume that because of its presence, and its strength, that it was Quixaun who recently stood there.

So, she pondered, He couldn't have gotten far. The rising sun, surmounting a nearby knoll, casted long dark shadows where Maria and the hut stood. A third penumbra stopped near her feet, and Maria's eyes followed the black path it cut through the woods to the promontory which the sun now shone over. Upon its granite bluffs rising twenty feet into the air and overlooking a finger of the glassy lake, opposite where Maria had slept, was the silohuette of a crooked man grasping an intricately carved wood and bone staff. She couldn't tell if he was looking at her or not, or even if he could see her, since his bum eye was facing her in profile. She could just make out his hooked nose wrinkling slightly in a sniff as a slight morning breeze drifted across the lake's surface, rising to meet the top of Quixaun's ridge.
In awe of the image before her, Maria was momentarily lost for words, but recovered her ability to speak soon enough to shout "I'm here, shaman!" before the wind died back down.

Seeing the apothecary, Maria hiked the short distance to the top of the stout ridge. Catching his last words just as she rounded a smaller hill leading to the the mica flecked granite ledge, the young woman leaned forward and said,

"But it's only morning. It comes every day, as regular as the flocks fly south or the bears raiding salmon streams each season." She placed a slender row of fingers on the edge of the cliff, fingernails digging into the pepper-patterned stone and weight pressing down on the heel of her palm, and swung her legs over the precipice to allow her scratched and dirt-covered feet, heavily callused from years of walking barefoot over snow, sleet, rock, and earth, to sway with the retreating wind.

"We wake up, shepherds tend the herd, hunters slay the deer, and woman dig tubers and weeds from the forest's edge each dawn for supper preparations. There's nothing magical about it," Maria plucked a tiny river-worn stone from a patch of tawny mottled crag grass and eyed the distant shore.
"I mean, sure--" she continued, "the sun looks pretty, but what else to watch for morn'?" With a swift flick of her wrist, belying her masculine education from her older brother, the river stone flew through the air and descended to the lake below, skipping four times before sinking under the water's surface to join its fellow pebbles below.

She accepted the sack with a bored expression and a callous attitude, frustrated that indeed was Quixaun's fetcher for the day. Allowing the contents inside to smack against one another inside the bag, Maria noted the strange jangle and hard texture as it slapped her thigh with each step away from the apothecary's camp. When the treeline swallowed her, hiding Maria's doings from the shaman's sight, she lifted the rucksack close to her face and peered inside.

"Oh...lords..." A chieftain's--no, god's--fortune in fine jewelry and precious metals were nestled innocently in the furry inner-lining of the satchel. A light, the having finally risen fully into the sky, broke through the canopy and created a dazzling effect on the treasures within. Maria winced, the twin pairs of teal circles tattooed above her cheekbones nearly meeting her upper eyelids and she raised a hand to block the resplendent glow from hurting her eyes.

If she were to sell these riches, she'd have enough to buy 10 silk bolts and still have enough wampum to fund a nice-sized dowery. Even...forgo a dowery altogether. She wouldn't have to marry! She could become chieftess and have men tend her needs without dedicating herself to any one of them.

Imagining the incredible wealth and affluence, the cushy life never dreamed of by prehistoric man or woman, Maria's face beamed with the warm glow of a good daydream. But then the light left her face, just as an intemerate white cloud passed over the salutary shine of the sun.

To acheive this wealth would mean stealing, stealing from possibly the most skilled apothecary she'd ever find, without whom her 'furry little problem' would find no help. And she doubted her incredible affluence would buy Quixaun's services; he seemed like the kind of man who'd frown upon swindlers.

With a sigh of resignation she closed the sack, both to keep the parcel safe and to cut off her view of the bewitching opulence within, and continued her journey to the Man Village trading common.

...Some hours later (ooc: because there ain't room to write all the actions inbetween)...

Pawing through the bag, Maria counted up her items. The mugwort, sage, and carrot seeds had all been readily acquired from eager traders lashing their dog-sleds to the common's mushing posts. A few metal flakes (ooc: I refrain from calling them coins) and a ring were all it took to pay for the relatively inexpensive herbs. For the mint, she was referred to an old woman who cared for a small garden of wildflowers miles from the village (and any pillaging hordes of vagrant reindeer). She was incredibly reluctant to part with the rare seasoning, so inverse in fact that Maria was forced to give up the entire pearl necklace which the old woman promptly strung around her neck with glee. She'd sighed, hoping that at least the necklace could'v been kept. It would've made such a nice gift for her mother.

For the hawk, she uncovered a hunter returning from a recent outing. Lashed on his hunting dog's back was a great grey harrier and, since Quixaun hadn't specified what species of hawk she'd have to track down, she figured this was good enough. He refused the bracelets, claiming their jangling would startle prey, but the rings he blithely accepted.

The lone red-head in the village was a solemn little girl who's 'absent' father originated from a land called Gaul, where apparently light and strawberry-haired individuals were more common (ooc: I've no clue what France/Gaul was called back then, so humor me. For a lock of hair, she asked only for the silk ribbon so neatly wrapped around the satchel's edge. Trading the ribbon for a sinew thread, Maria handed the pretty string to her while the youth awkwardly hacked off a few pieces. Last Maria saw her, the little girl was skipping down the lane chirping about haircuts and ribbons.

"Everything but the pup..." she mumbled under her breath. She now stood in the middle of the reindeer field, disregarding a splotchy white and brown female's attempt to raid her pockets for a hand-out. The pup would be downright impossible to get; village legend held that stillborns, whether human or not, were bad omens. Any born dead were taken far away from the camps and cremated in a purging fire specially sanctified for the purpose. She wouldn't find a stillborn anything...unless she went elsewhere to find it.

Maria bit her lower lip, looking out to the treeline beyond the reindeer fields. If she could find a nursing canine, perhaps she'd find a pup as well. Then maybe she'd kill the thing and pass it off as stillborn. It was her only shot, and besides taking an innocent young life, Maria loathed the idea because it meant bespeaking those beasts whom she disgusted. Disgusted because they now could not be parted from her soul.

Her once confident stride shrank into a shivering creep as the ominous trees towered above her head, as if accusing her of this deed before she ever committed it.
Why should I worry?, she told herself, it's not like a dog's life matters as much as a human's. Yet even as she thought it, Maria knew it wasn't true. Too many moonlit nights gallivanting[sp] with the Wild proved that ten-fold, but she ignored the lessons and continued to nurse her growing prejudice. To distract her from her inner monologue of doubts and curses, the young woman stared into the depths of the shadowy wilderness. Even at noon-time, the sun could do no more than cut a few fleeting bars of white light through the dense upper forest and the world required the observant hunter to rely on sound and smell rather than sight.
A sharp report echoed through the bushes and Maria's arm lept for her bow, stringing the weapon even before deciding whether the noise indicated friend or foe. As it turned out, it was neither, only a low moan from a few feet away.
Hhhhhaaaghhh...ipe!....heeellllppp. The plaintive cry prickled like static in Maria's ears then instantly cleared. She knew that sound, it was a wolf's cry, one injured, and her first thought was to run away, run away until all knowledge of the creature and its meaning to her fled from her mind.
But curiousity, and Maria's forceful sense of duty, kept her quivering feet planted on the spot. She leaned forward and, with the arch of her bow, brushed away the concealing brambles of the bush in front of her.

A whimpering female canine, Maria couldn't determine whether it was all wolf or just a halfbreed, lay on her side, several slash marks and puncture wounds riddling the sides of her heaving body. Her vulva expanded and contracted in quick bursts of energy, a pattern of behavior Maria had seen many times before in pregnant huskies.
A laboring female, what luck!, then her eyes glanced at the she-wolf's pained expression, well, not for you. She took a step closer, but the female snarled with such ferocity that, even in its present condition, Maria half-believed it was still capable of ripping her throat out.
"Whatever happened to you," she said, "it couldn't have been fun."
Maybe sabres, or over-excited hunters, either way, this dog was going to die. Yet the young woman couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy for her fellow female in distress. She grimaced, knowing what she must do.

Reaching out a hand, Maria touched the wolf's side and whispered gently in canis lingo,
"Must I end your suffering?"