Completed Signal and Noise

[Khida]

Fall 18, 513 AV morning Wearing human skin, dressed in human clothes, Khida set out from the camp and made her way not towards the city, but out into the grasses. She had her thin rope, cut into useful lengths and tucked into her belt; she had her knife in its sheath, too, though for all the sharpness of its edge the tool afforded no likely protection. If trouble found her, Khida's safety would lie with her senses and the falcon's wings, not any human gear she carried. She walked outwards with no clear destination in mind, only a general direction. After getting some distance away from the camp, she turned and changed course, ears straining to detect sounds, eyes scrutinizing the earth around her. Tracks, trails, glimpses of motion, the holes of creature burrows -- Khida sought anything which might lead her to likely places for snares, for all that those sometimes seemed more trouble than they were rightly worth. Her human eyes saw what seemed so little -- in their reduced acuity relative to the falcon's, in the inconvenience of being confined to the earth, in the slowness of human footsteps. Oh, there was grass, and rocks, and soil; she saw her own feet and hands just fine. She could see the sky arcing above, the fluff of clouds blown past by the loftiest of lofty winds. But Khida walked for what felt like very long chimes without seeing anything move, without hearing anything but the rustle of her own motion through the grass. Surely the falcon's eyes would have spotted something interesting by now. There was grass, long of stalk and dull of color, its top bent over under the weight of its own seeds. Roots matted the earth, keeping it firm under her sandaled feet. Sometimes there were the odd green shapes of leaves belonging to things not grass, strikingly out of place in the monotonous pattern of vertical stalks. But she saw no mice, no hares, no prairie dogs, no grouse -- not even finches or jays. Nothing of interest whatsoever -- not until the grass ahead of her abruptly thinned, going from a dense forest to a sparse screen to broken and bent, seedheads cropped away and stalks chewed down. Flying, Khida could have seen the signs from far away; afoot, the sudden respite came very nearly as a surprise. It couldn't be termed clear, not in the way the sky was clear, but there was a considerable difference between the tall density of undisturbed stalks and this mixed stippling of full-height and bent or eaten grass.

[Khida]

She paused at the edge of the semi-cleared space, letting her gaze survey in each direction. There was no question of what had happened here, at least in the general sense -- grazers, a rather large herd of them, passing from one place to another and foraging along the way. This fact wasn't useful to the Kelvic, though it might be of interest to her bondmate -- he hunted such large game, where she could not do so alone. Khida tucked that away for later reference, barely making conscious note of the fact. Her attention was really on the here and now. Studying the ground immediately before her, Khida saw nothing of interest -- nothing her own footsteps might obliterate, to possible later dismay. She walked forward, careful of where she stepped all the while. There was trampled grass aplenty, but between the root mat and the dryness of the earth, few tracks had actually been left on the ground; she saw mostly dimples which may have been blurry prints, or variations in the soil. There, something had scuffed at the ground -- digging? fidgeting? Did grazers even get bored, to fidget? That didn't matter, anyway. Would the herd have gone from water, or to water? To, she decided after a moment's thought, though the decision was only educated in that Khida guessed the herd to have gone away from Endrykas, and there had been little surface water along the route their little group had taken. That gave her a direction to follow, and while the grazers weren't things she could catch by snare, the hypothetical water and the broken cover of their trail might offer chances for other game. So she hoped, at least. As the Kelvic walked, she continued to study the ground. A pile of droppings, oblong and shiny black, suggested the herd to be made up of deer; a second pile, spotted some chimes later, clinched that as fact to the Kelvic's mind. Deer didn't usually leave so much disruption in their wake -- or so Khida thought, based on what she'd seen from a completely different perspective. It must have been a very large herd of deer indeed. Tracks remained blurry and vague, impossible to form into shapes no matter how close Khida brought her eyes to the earth -- once, hoping she could resolve a particular divot into the tangible memory of a hoof, she got her face very close to the soil indeed. It resolved... into nothing.

[Khida]

Khida picked up some pebbles along the way, ones about the size of a fist, which she thought might be useful to weight the thin snare rope; one got tucked into her sash with Khida's other burdens, while the other remained in-hand. It wasn't very long after that when she finally picked out something of interest on the fringe of the herd's trail -- a little dark hole at the base of the grasses with a matching counterpart on the other side. Coming up to it, she knelt down and studied the tunnel more closely. It smelled vaguely, but smell wasn't her best sense; mostly it just smelled of raw soil, a path worn down even through the root mat by little rodent feet. Rodents weren't game the Drykas would buy, especially not little things like mouse or voles or shrews -- whichever breed it was that had made this track. But a snare was a snare, and this was as sure a track as she might find to set one against; if nothing else, a little rodent would serve her for a good snack. So Khida tugged out one of the swatches of thin rope, tying one end into a sliding loop and superimposing it over the grass-tunnel for size. Then she took one of the rocks and tied the other end of the rope around it, making an anchor for the snare. The rock went beside the tunnel; after breaking a couple of grass stalks for bracing, she laid the rope over the hole. Khida sat back on her heels and studied the arrangement, idly sticking one finger through the loop. The rodent would come running along, stick its head into the noose, but not get its shoulders through; the snare would pull tight, and the rock would keep it from running away. At least, that was the idea of the thing. It was a good idea... it just needed to actually work as intended. To find that out, Khida would have to come back tomorrow. In the meantime, she straightened up and continued walking along the herd's trail, seeking other likely spots where she might place traps.

[Khida]

The trail did, it turned out, lead to water. A depression in the earth, shallow liquid forming a long mud-bottomed pool, bordered with broad-leaved plants that reminded Khida of the riverbank flowers in Ahnatep. Perhaps these flowered too, in the proper season -- which wasn't this one. She held well back from the pond, looking and listening about its edges for any noises, any chirps or rustles or rattles or growls, which would indicate the presence of other creatures. There were wrens, which she recognized from their concerned calls to one another, tucking themselves cautiously into cover; those weren't too important. The rest... ...seemed pretty empty right now. But even then, Khida didn't start forward. She turned the focus of her attention from the environment to the earth, contemplating that welter of overlapping tracks which seemed to cover every muddy patch around the pool. The vast majority were the pointed double-oblongs Khida associated with deer, suggesting the identity of the herd whose track she had followed here. Their many prints had obliterated anything else she could pick out from where she stood. Edging forward, careful to put her feet on grass clumps or soil whose imprints were blurred beyond any reading, Khida continued to study the watering hole. There were the four-toed tracks of little perching birds, probably the wrens, possibly jays or sparrows or finches or any number of other kinds. Here was only half of a print with rounded toes in a shallow arc and no claws -- feline, small; probably one of the spotted ones with short tails. The huntress continued on, picking her way around the pool's edge, trying very hard not to get frustrated each time her robe snagged on a stiff-leaved plant or the grasping barbs of stickers. Only when she stopped to disentangle it did she realize the hem of her robe was absolutely covered in prickly seedheads... she would be a long, long time picking them off when she got back to camp. Khida tried to smother her frustration at that, too. Having the distraction of tracks to puzzle over helped considerably. That one wasn't deer, though it had a family resemblance -- ovoid, pointed at one end, but the shapes curved inwards as if someone had set two large claws facing one another on the earth and pressed them in. It still wasn't anything she could reasonably hope to snare. She straightened and moved on, only to freeze as sound exploded from the thick grasses ahead. Instinctively, the Kelvic tensed and bent her knees, shoulders hunching up as if to poise the wings she didn't presently possess for flight... tracksTo clarify, the non-bird tracks Khida observes here are deer, bobcat, and pronghorn.

[Khida]

The noise receded, and seemed to bob about as it did so, some creature bolting pell-mell into the grasses. Smaller than it sounded, Khida was certain, though she caught no glimpse of the actual animal. Just a sense of motion, flashing through the stalks. The noise stopped in short order; the Kelvic only slowly relaxed in its absence, straightening bit by little bit and continuing to stare towards the area the noise had come from. Eventually, curiosity replaced caution. She moved towards where it had started from, a miniature thicket of growth near the edge of the pool. Careful parting of the grasses let her examine the earth beneath; damp as it was from the seeping water, Khida thought she might find a print, some identification of the creature which had fled. If it was as small as she'd thought, it could be quarry for a snare... Nothing really evident under the grass -- the roots firmed the earth too much for even the mud to take a clear print. But when she widened her inspection to include the pond's edge, Khida found sign -- one large oblong print and half of another, too widely spaced to be from anything but separate feet. But separate feet which moved together: the hind feet of a hare or rabbit, she thought. The bobbing retreat made sense now; that sort zig-zagged when they fled. If the hare watered here often, and it probably did, there would likely be a trail. Khida scanned for indications of flattened grass, but didn't see anything which stood out to her eyes -- probably because the growth was thicker here. She could try leaving the snare here, near the water, and hope the hare usually drank from the same place... That seemed reasonable to do. The fist-sized pebble she'd brought along wouldn't weight a rabbit snare enough to keep the animal from bounding off. Khida dropped that into the grasses, and thought about other options. Maybe she could run the snare between two larger rocks? If she could find suitable ones... perhaps in the pond. Water tended to expose rock, after all. Rolling up the hem of her robe and tucking it into the sash -- stickers and all -- she waded into the water, probing with her feet until she found a stone of likely size. Then Khida waded back out, bringing her find with her. It was heavy enough, she thought it would serve... The rock went to the ground with a thump, landing near where she thought the rabbit must come to drink. She nudged it over a little further, to where it nestled against a clump of grass -- helping to obscure the rock from approaching creatures, and make it seem less a new part of the local terrain. Then Khida fitted a new noose, tying one end around the stone and laying the loop on the ground... no, it couldn't stay there. She needed to lift it up to actually catch a foot... Fetching back the pebble she'd discarded earlier, she cut another length of cord in half, tying one end to the loop and gently tucking the other over the pebble, just enough to hold it in place. The pebble lifted the snare off the ground, but the cord would pull out if force were exerted against it. There. That would do. Stepping away from the pond, Khida continued on to find other places to lay snares, until at last she ran out of cord and had to return to camp.

[Khida]

Fall 19, 513 AV dawn An evening circuit of her snares the night before had found nothing, so Khida left them in place overnight. When morning came -- no, when morning impended, the sky lightening in the east, birds twittering in the grasses, but twilight still shrouding the land -- she set out again to retrace her steps from the day before. She found the trail of the deer herd again, less obvious than it had been earlier; what grass could recover from their passage was well along in doing so. Following that track, she came to the place with the little rodent snare at the little rodent burrow, and knelt to inspect it. Disappointingly, there was no rodent to be had from it. In fact, there was no snare, only a truncated length of cord wrapped around a rock. The end of the rope was a bit frayed; maybe the mouse or vole or whatever had been able to chew through it, and fled with a new necklace. Khida untied the bit of rope that was left and tucked it into her sash, mostly because she didn't know what else to do, and continued on. At the pond, she found first a small covey of pigeons -- gray-bodied birds whose iridescent feathers remained dull in the morning non-light. They whirred and clucked and scuttled off into the grasses, concerned at her presence, but not yet worried enough to take flight. Khida couldn't hunt them in this shape, so she ignored them, walking around the muddy pool to where she had left the second snare. Apparently the rock hadn't been big enough. She found the space where it had been, and a fresh scrape through the mud, a trail of bent and broken grass pointing to where it had gone. Half-crouched, senses honed towards the space ahead of her, Khida edged forward, seeking the remnants of her snare and the creature it had caught. She found the rock first, where it had come to rest snagged on a dense clump of grass; followed the cord to where a hare huddled motionless, snared leg outstretched in a way which didn't seem quite proper, its ears held low and its flanks fluttering with the cadence of its shallow breaths. It seemed a little small, for a hare -- probably one of this spring's young, not yet to its full growth. She bent to pin the hare and slit its throat with her knife, putting a quick end to its fear and distress. Then, with no further ceremony, she collected the snare and continued on her way, leaving the rock and the pond and the pigeons all behind. Her other snares all proved emptier than the first, with no sign of having even caught anything. But when Khida returned to camp, it was with a kill in hand, and one she hadn't shifted to obtain. That was victory enough for her.

[Translucent]

Congratulations On Your Hard Work!

Khida:
XP: +4 observation, +1 planning, +2 tracking, +3 trapping, +1 hunting, +1 butchery
Lores: Grass can recover from trampling quickly, Hares and Rabbits flee in a zigzag pattern, Human eyesight is not as keen as a Falcons.

Rewards :

One small hare, weight of two pounds. Pelt is still in good condition.

Notes: A nice little solo. Don’t forget to delete your grade request.

As always PM me if you have issues.

[Traverse]

Grade Addendum: Experience: Hunting + 2 Land Navigation + 1 Tracking + 2 Wilderness Survival + 2 Lores: Identifying Consumed Grasses and Foliage Following a Single Trail in Order to Find More Water: A Good Place to Find Tracks and Prey Tracking Technique: Identifying Quantity and Identity of Dung Tracking Technique: Avoid Disturbing Current Tracks Trapping Technique: Ensure Rope is Thick Enough that Prey Cannot Escape Before you Find Them Translating Different Overlapping Tracks