Part 8 begins with… ALONG THE EAST RIVER
The following pictures will give you a guided tour you from the back of Get, along the East Riverand down to the Migty Zom.
THE STABLE
The stable and the horse pasture with the Regent and His new horse.
The front of the stable. Notice the warding lanterns on the boundary fence posts.
The stable was once a cattle barn. Growing cattle in the magic of a Dragon’s realm meant that Djona and Simone Reddish raised the largest, fattest cattle in the world. No wonder the dragons could not resist eating them.
Frustrated from the constant loss of cattle to the dragons, the Reddish family converted the Barn into a horse stable in hope that the Horses would be to bony to be desirable dragon food. They were right. Now the Reddish family breeds and raises the biggest and best horses in the world.
Of all the Get RED girls, Sha was the only sister to really take to the horses. The pasture grasses grew so fast that the houses could not keep up with them. When Djona and Simone took the trade boat to spend some extended time in Port Atune, the Get middle REDs sisters partitioned half of the Horse pasture behind the RED house. They saved the other half for Sha to raise the horses, and her other sisters use their half of the pasture land to raise wild flowers, herbs, date nut trees, and sword bush.
The horse pasture is right up against the jungle and the edge of the East River. The jungle and all it’s deadly pets want in. The first village witch taught all the Get farmers how to create and maintain spells in the warding lanterns to keep the creepies and crawlees at bay.
CHATCY’S CALLING
Once Sha won the Hogsmead Bar in a card game and turned it into a successful Inn, She had her hands full and needed help with the horses. The rest of the Get RED sisters had their hands full with their successful enterprises and could not help. And her parients were in down in Atune Harbor trying to make one baby boy with out the influence of the magic of Dragon’s realm. Other wise they might end up with their forth set of red haired triplet girls.
Chatcy was an orphened child. When she was six years old her parents and twin sister, met their death by jungle causes, the Bushy family took her in and made her their own.
Although well loved and cared for by the Bushys she kept to herself and was some what of a loner. She spent most of her time sitting on the horse pasture fence talking to the horses. By the time Chatcy was 13 she was riding them bare back and jumped at the chance to help Sha raise, exercise and take care of them.
INSIDE THE STABLE
A view of the stable with the top off.
Now almost 18 years old, Chatcy is raising and breading the horses full time. She falls in love with each horse and cries whenever she has to put one on the trade ship heading dow the river to Artune. Sha has mentored Chatcy well and has passed a lot of the daly responsibility of raising and rearing the Get horses to her. Orders for the Get horses have increased with their reputation.
Because of the climate of the Zom, the stable only needs to house the horses for special reasons. Chatcy has converted a back stall in the stable into her room and moved in.
The Valley land mass that lies East of the East River is equal to that of Get village and if fields. When the East valley is cleared of jungle by the next settling, it will have three times more room for the development of agriculture and horse breeding. All the original field space of the Get farmers will be moved over to that side of the valley and be doubled. The Pasture lands for the horses will also be increased, and a new and larger stable will be built. When it is time to move the fields and farm buildings over to the East Valley the original stable built by Djona Reddish will be dismantled, moved over next to the new stable and converted into housing for feed cattle. There is no way that they will put the cattle out to pasture to tempt the passing dragons over head.
What Chatcy doesn’t know yet, is that when every thing is in place, Sha has commissioned for a home to be built for Chatcy in the new Farmers-Fishing village that will be built on the Zom River shore of the East valley.
When Sha lets Chatcy know that she has her own home, she will also inform her that Chatcy will be no longer be working for Sha because Sha intends to make Chatcy an equal partner in the Get RED horse breeding business.
Shhhh! keep it a secret until the surprise.
RIVER WEED HARVEST
Jed is harvesting fresh river weed.
In this picture Jed is harvesting some fresh river weed with his long harvest hook. The hook allows him to collect the weed from one of their half-bridges with out setting foot on the center island. The half-bridge allows Jed to stay off the low island and stay out of Ned’s attack and capture range. Ned is the crocodile that you see in the picture, in whose hunting territory this patch of river weed grows.
The Jameson Triplet boys, Jed, Jarvis & James, harvest river weed just as their father and grandfather did. The process is easy. Just pluck it from of the river bank, river islands or shallow part of the river where it grows, Hang it up until it’s translucent outer skin hardens to a solid green, cut it up into sausage like sections and ship it off to Port Atune.
River weed taste like the cucumbers grown up in the North continent. They last a long time in the pantry without being refrigerated and can be pickled to be stored for a much longer time. The only problum, is that Crocodiles live amongst the river weed. Oops!
The Crocodile is 200 million years old and one of the few dinosaur species left living on this planet. Whereas all of the other dinosaurs are only found near the proximity of a dragons lair, crocodiles have spread out all over the world.
The closer you get to a dragons lair, the larger the crocodiles grow. In the three rivers surrounding Get Village an average adult Crocodile’s weight is over 1000 pounds and length is at least 25 feet long.
Crocodiles are very fast over short distances, even out of the water. Crocodiles feed by grabbing and holding onto their prey, as they drag them into the water to drown. They have 80 razor sharp teeth built into their sinister smiles. These teeth are built for tearing and holding onto flesh. With powerful muscles that close the jaws and hold them shut, Crocodiles can bite down with immense force.
After the crocodiles kill their prey they stuff the bodies under logs in the water for storage.
Crocodiles are known as ambush predators. They use stealth as they stalk their prey and will not attack unless they are sure of a capture or a kill. They are smart and patient and will watch a prey for days to find the place in their movement pattern where they are most venerable to an attack. They also hang out in the same area and will defend a prime hunting territory from other crocks.
The same Crocodile hangs around where the Jameson Triplet boys harvest river weed. The boys call him Ned. You can tell by his dark color that he has been around a long time.
Having Ned around the river weed patches is a good thing, and a bad thing at the same time. Ned knows the patterns of the harvesting activities of the Jameson Triplets, but at the same time the Triplets have an intimate knowledge of Ned’s hunting habits, strengths and weaknesses.
Even though Ned stalks the boys as potential prey every time they are harvesting river weed, the boys are very aware of his presence and know how to avoid him while accomplishing their task. Ned is slow, missing lots of teeth, but is still strong enough to defend his territory.
The Jameson Triplets want to keep Ned around so they have made an agreement with Zohnjon, the village leather smith. Zohnjon will not kill Ned for his skin and when Ned dies of old age the boys will bring Ned’s body to him. The Jameson Triplets would prefer that Ned guards his hunting territory, which includes their river weed harvest patch. That way Ned will keep the younger faster, more aggressive and less predictable Crocodiles away from them and make their work a little less dangerous.
HANGING HOUSE
At the bottom this picture, Jarvis is carrying a fresh river weed to the drying racks and James is cutting up the dried weed.
The Jameson Triplets have divided up the three main job descriptions of river weed harvesting. Jed harvest the river weed from the river. Jarvis carrys the fresh river weed to the drying racks and hangs them up to dry. James takes the dried weed, cuts it up and prepares it for shipment to Port Atune.
The sweet smell of drying river weed wafts over the east end of the village. It is not a bad smell, just unique. Even though they bath regularly, the Jameson triplet brothers have that smell imbedded in their skin. You can easily tell if one of them is in Hogsmead when you walk into the Inn and take a whiff.
No Get girl would want to live in the Hanging House surrounded by drying river weed. So when they move the farmers huts over to the East valley the Jameson triplet brothers will each get their own new farmers hut, It’s time for them boys to marry.
The original Hanging House will be moved to the east side of the river, further up river and up wind from the new Farmer-Fishing village. If the attempt to turn turn a portion of the East river jungle into a central valley park is successful and effects the Jameson Triplet’s river weed patch negatively, the boys will move the hanging house next to their new river weed patch in the dam pond.
COCONUT ORCHARD
The village coconut orchard.
Most of the venomous crawly things of the jungle have been successfully kept out of the Get valley with the use of the warding spells that ring the village and fields. But the villagers found out that the poisonous tree spiders were intragel to the production of coconuts.
When they transplanted the coconut trees in the valley with out the poison spiders that live in the top of the trees, the trees would not grow coconuts. Maybe the spiders acted like bees by spreading pollen from tree to tree, we are not sure. When they introduced the spiders back into the grove, the trees starting producing coconuts again.
THE COCONUT-BANANA EXCHANGE
The coconut-banana exchange between Bo Bo and Zahar.
Monkeys are not bothered or attacked by the spiders, so the villagers trained four jungle monkeys to fetch the coconuts for them in their orchard. For every 10 coconuts the monkeys pick and throw down, they receive one banana.
When Bo Bo is holding his tenth coconut for his quota, Zahar peels a banana for him and offers it in exchange.
Bananas are easy to get if your a woodsmen, as they grow in abundance throughout the jungle, but they have not been successfully transplanted and tamed in Get village so far. Zahar and her twin sister, Zeehar, Depend on the woodsmen to bring them bananas for their monkeys. They have a plan to domesticate banana trees that just might work. Like the Get Red’s wild flower patch, the twins will re-plant wild banana trees just outside the East valley boundaries then transplant them in their expanded orchard. If their plan works all Zahar and Zeehar have to figure out is how to keep the monkeys out of the banana trees orchard and working in the coconut orchard.
THE COTTEN HARVEST
The Bushy family cotton patches. Notice the warding lanterns.
The Bushy family harvest enough cotton a year to equal cotton harvested in a normal land mass 10 times the size of their three small cotton patches. Notice the warding lanterns
This coming Settling, Yamay, the youngest twin, will go down river to Port Atune. During the Get winter rains she will learn how to spin cotton into thread, how to die the thread into diffrient colors and how to weave cloth. When she returns, the family will start producing cloth and cotton thread from their raw cotton to ship down to Port Atune.
When the Bushys move their farmers hut and cotton bushes into much larger fields over to the east valley, Yamay will build a weaving craft house on this side of the river and move into her independence.