William, back in Aprait.

It took us weeks to get over the failure of the mana improvement test. Even after all our careful planning and preparations, we still lost too many of our fellow warriors. It is strange to see how immediate loss seems to count for more than more substantial damage in the future. Now the family representatives are complaining about risking their youths as well, while completely ignoring the fact that if we don’t expand, we will, in fact, all be eliminated in time.

The complaints got so bad that we had decided to skip the first monthly meeting so that everybody's tempers had a chance to die down. Time not only heals wounds, but it can also mellow out tempers and help people to look at things objectively. Though I must admit that my family too had taken losses and the friends and direct relations of those lost in battle kept hounding me about being exempt from sending people for the expedition that is to come.

It doesn’t help us that the mana levels in different areas are always in flux, so if we want to use the ones that were already scouted by the Stallwar family, then we will have to send out the expedition team soon. As such, I have been training young Arthur from my direct family to be among the first of the groups. That means I have been going out into the wilderness with him twice a week. Just staying out in mana dense areas and killing and eating strong prey will make us stronger.

We have been hunting so many different targets because, besides the mana obtained, it is also essential to have a wide range of experiences. Different prey requires different types of traps, different materials to make the traps from and leave different tracks to notice. Arthur is young and promising but has been coddled, so I am just here as a backup.

With the map of the areas around, and the experience to know what type of animals likes different biomes, we can ascertain our targeted prey about half of the time before setting out.

This time we ventured out further, to an area which is too risky for regular scouts and is, therefore, both dangerous and an opportunity. I do have provisions on me, but Arthur does not know that, and we have forbidden him from bringing anything but a knife, a bow, and four arrows.

I also don’t tell him that the scraped off bark from the trees in our surroundings was not done by antlers but by the claws of a bear. Antlers leave random scrapings in the bark based on the random placing of the different tines. A bear, on the other hand, uses evenly spaced claws to leave deep grooves. Both will scrape off the bark, but there is a slight difference in damage remaining in the tree, and the shape of the bark scraped off.

He believes that due to size differences the height of the scrapings indicate antlers as bears scrape about half their height. To me, this means that the bear we are pursuing is going to be massive and very strong.

He is going to have to learn to pay better attention to things, even when they are obviously not part of the test. It makes me nervous that he doesn’t seem to have noticed that I am keeping my bow at the ready and am incredibly vigilant. Even if we are generally able to hear a bear coming from a relatively safe distance, we are at risk when we stumble upon the bear while it isn’t moving. Also, earlier warnings, even when not necessary, are always welcome. Arthur has been leaving large spring snares around, which would be great for deer but would only slow a bear down and make it angry.

My family focusses on knowledge, which includes tracking and trapping, and we employ most of the medical staff around. We are also known for having the best eyesight and hearing out of all the families, which helps us find animal tracks for trap placements and shoot our bows more true.

When battling, we like to team up with the Stallwar family as they are the family with the most physically imposing members around. As such, we have always been encouraging our children to befriend theirs, though they themselves are usually too honest to use these sort of future planning tactics.

Now, however, as a training exercise we are on our own — just the two of us, and a bear somewhere nearby.

Even though I am known for liking books and knowledge, basically a nerd, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the adrenaline rush of hunting something so mighty it could rip both of us to shreds if it catches us in its claws. The constant need for full focus, where every sound could be either innocuous or a dangerous predator.

With the added tension that in the wild, we are not limited to one type of danger. We might be hunting a bear now, but we could just as easily run into a venomous snake or be attacked by a great eagle.

This is a part of the danger of our hunting methods that most others don’t understand. Most think of trapping as a method of hunting where you stay away from danger, but they forget that to lay traps you still need to enter dangerous regions, stay vigilant while placing the trap, and then hope that your snare both hits something and hits hard enough to trap or kill.

Then you need to check on your traps regularly so that nothing else has the opportunity to steal your kill and the associated mana, or else your efforts will have been for naught, and finally, you will still have to face off against a trapped animal.

Finally, if you were to misinterpret the signs, as Arthur is doing right now, you could run into an unexpectedly mighty foe while under-prepared. I just hope his lapse in focus is a result of feeling safe with me around rather than youthful indiscretion which could get him killed next month when he joins the expedition.

Tomorrow evening we will have the first meeting after our previous fiasco, and we already have four of the families behind us who will vote for bringing the scheduled expedition forward to next month. That will be enough to push the issue, and once it is decided, there is no possibility that any family would shirk their responsibilities for fear of losing out on having power in a new settlement.

In fact, Andrew and I have made a list of people of the younger generation and stronger ones of the older generation, and if families don’t send people from the list, this would already result in a loss of influence. How can a branch family member possibly stand up to a main family branch member? Though we are equal in name, most parents tend to focus on their own children more than on the children of other family members, and that means that stronger parents create stronger children as a general rule.

Just consider what I have provided to Arthur. I have taken him to areas with beasts so dominant that more than eighty percent of my own family would not be able to survive there save for sheer luck. As such, he has been able to take more mana than any of his peers have and is stronger overall. This doesn’t mean he can’t lose a fight to a more specialized person or someone with more experience, but it does mean he will always have an advantage.

For the next meeting, I will be bringing Arthur with me into the session under the guise of training a successor. At least I will have to use that excuse in the first half of the gathering until we have voted on sending the young and then I can openly support him as my contemporary in the new settlement. If I can establish him as influential before he even leaves will make obtaining a high position easier.

With strength and influence attained, as long as the settlement survives, we will have a springboard to controlling the most mana dense areas.

This multitasking is not the easiest of things to do. I have trained myself to cover the topics of the next meeting twice daily, especially an important one like tomorrow. However, we are hunting a bear right now, and I am the only one who knows. Even with a warning, we would be woefully unprepared for a close quarter fight.

If we make it through this encounter without any damage sustained, and through the meeting tomorrow without too many objections overruled, we need to start training for the more mundane perils that one might encounter in the wild.

Our children don’t grow up checking their tent every morning for snakes attracted by the body heat of the residents. Or checking shoes for spiders who might have crawled in thinking it to be a small cave of sorts where they can try to catch prey, but find a foot to inject their lethal venom into. The mosquitoes here may be annoying, but they aren’t disease-ridden, so we haven’t taught our young yet how to keep them clear of a campsite.

Our teaching methods are focused on our current area, and only when something different comes along or if an adventurous powerful wonders out to new and unexplored regions does it require additional knowledge to be imparted. I see our current education system as a tree where the roots are the daily encountered situations, and the rarer an encounter might be, the less time is spent on it and the later it is taught.

Every family member of seven years old can make a basic snare to catch rabbits and frogs with. By ten they can make spring-fall snares and deadfall traps, and some of the more talented youngsters might even be able to make a bird pole trap. However, as we don’t have any large body of water nearby, even some of our most experienced hunters have never had to make a fish trap.

As Arthur climbs a tree to get a better vantage point, I quickly double back a bit and set a deadfall trap with a rock, massive enough to both knock a bear out and make enough noise to warn us that we are being pursued.

It takes less than five minutes after I got back to Arthur’s tree before I hear the deadfall trap spring and the silent whimper that follows. Knocking an arrow on my bow and stepping into an area where I have a straight line towards the trap I shoot the arrow almost blindly towards where the animal if trapped would have fallen while Arthur is trying to get down as fast as he can without actually falling.

As I confirm from a distance that the bear is not moving, though still alive and breathing I wait for Arthur to reach the ground so that he can finish the kill. It would be best for him to notice how wrong he has been about the danger that we were facing as that would be the optimal method of learning, but even if he does, I will still go over all his mistakes with him a second time. These kinds of things can turn out to be fatal, and I need to ensure that he doesn’t keep these faults with him.

While Arthur kills the bear and begins with the dressing of the body, I do a quick once over the area and get back to my pondering.

With a group heading out into a new zone, I will choose two powerful from my family to accompany them. One who has extensive knowledge of different trap types and I am planning to send our doctor. His disciple should be far enough along with his education that he can take over the practice, and having an experienced doctor in the new settlement will surely increase their survival chances tremendously.

I know the stallwar families will volunteer a seasoned fighter with extensive experience in hand to hand combat with many different types of beasts and send a young representative who is on his way to become just that.

The Fogg family will send their fastest runner who will keep the communication between the two settlements active as well as Andrews own son, whom I know is being secretly trained to be a leader. I have known about the Fogg families ambition to turn leading the meetings into becoming the de facto leader. I suspect he is going to introduce a motion to have the new settlement start with a single leader to keep decision making fast and efficient and then move that as his son is the only one trained in the art to be that designated someone.

Honestly, when he does, I am not sure if I will support that idea. It makes sense to have a centralized decision making organ, but being a leader without the knowledge of all the required fields as well as having to give up some of my own ambitions goes directly against what I have spent my life doing.

I think that during this meeting we will end up deciding a system of what each family should send to ensure that all families both send enough to make success likely but not so much power that they could take over. It would be something along the lines of a main family branch member and either two powerful, or one powerful and a bunch of citizens.

The Fogg family and Stallwar family will probably send two powerful with their team. We will send one powerful and a group of medics to accompany the doctor and will also be in charge of documenting their experiences for future expeditions.

I have also spoken to the Northman who are going to send a powerful and a team of crafters who are going to make and take care of our weapons and eventually the furniture of the new houses.

I think the Miros family will send two powerful, one to fight and one prospector to look for resources in the wild, and will send gatherers later on when the available resources are known. The Arderne should send one powerful and a team of builders and architects, and the Foremann family would send farmers with their powerful.

The expedition then should have enough strength to take over a weaker area should have the knowledge to survive, and specialists to thrive.