Celestial Roots

Chapter 10 - Encountering the archféar

The days were passing by, identical and unsurprising. The children woke up early to accompany their néach. The group thus formed spent most of the day searching for animal tracks. If they were fresh, the adults would go ahead and try to trap the game.

Each outing was led by different hunters. Sometimes there were only two of them, other times a large number of them would leave together. Each person's techniques complemented each other and gave the children an overview of how to proceed to successfully catch game.

Araïg, Furig and Vorn, Taghna's keepers, preferred to disperse to increase their chances of finding a trail, while Coséanta and Buráras, the keepers of Caïséan's culéan, stayed one behind the other and traced at wind speed. Each method was viable, and adults, depending on their personal preference and how they shared their knowledge, explained in more and more detail the advantages and disadvantages of their techniques.

Despite their mastery, failure was part of their daily lives. The inhabitants of Séaroën didn't want to waste time and energy if their efforts did not feed the village and they preferred to focus on larger prey.

The children, who were always on the sidelines, felt that they were not making any progress. They were moody. Learning was difficult and the vague words of the néach didn't improve the results. No matter how much they turned the sentences in their heads, such as "be fast but don't rush" or "don't use your eyes to observe", the animals' tracks remained furtive.

Taghna was especially impatient to discover new clues, but since her success on the first day, she had not been able to repeat her feat. She thought to herself with bitterness that Slavan and Asgeül had been right, that she had only been lucky.

Faced with the passivity of the majority of hunters in their teaching, the little girl could not help but wonder if they were deliberately not helping them. This technique, however, wasn't meaningless. This forced the children to cooperate and draw on their own resources.

Taghna and Færn spent a lot of time together. Their relationship had improved significantly, to the detriment of their link with their classmates. The mutual trust they felt for each other was growing so much that Færn was able to anticipate his friend's moods and often managed to calm her down. When this wasn't possible, such as when everyone listened to Asgeül with their mouths wide open, the two children moved away from the group and took care of their own activities.

Taghna shared the slightest of her doubts and observations with the little boy. One thing she noticed about adults was their particular approach. Their steps were so silent that she couldn't know in which direction they were going if she closed her eyes. For a long time, she had detailed their movements and realized that they were gently extending the sole of their foot, while all the children were putting the heel down first. This gave her enough time to spend with Færn to adopt this approach. He encouraged her in his own way, with an open and enthusiastic attitude.

The training with the spear was not neglected either. After controlling the throw on the stationary baskets from a safe distance, the children started throwing them into the air. For a while, this occupied the apprentice hunters.

Taghna had long been able to anticipate the trajectory of such a target, so much so that she was now able to kill flying insects. The large beetles were heavy and easy to reach. So she turned to the birds that were flying under the canopy. She concentrated, followed the animal with her eyes carefully and skillfully unleashed her spear. Every time she thought she would succeed in impaling them, the birds would change races at the last minute.

Even if she failed numerous times, she took great pleasure in perfecting her gesture, perceiving and anticipating the movement of the living beings around her. She would go so far as to dissect each error so that she would never repeat it more than once or twice in a row. However, the birds remained unreachable. Meanwhile, Færn, who was much less skilled than she was, stayed with the rest of the group to train at his own pace.