The past day they'd spent hunting and subsequently slaughtering the rabbits. Toutouye and Woe that is. Woe grew inured to the sensation of snuffing out small and cute animal lives. he could separate the wild from the domestic, and those rabbits had been an utter nuisance, getting into cubbies and nooks and crannies, plundering pantries, being overall pests in the truest sense of the word.
By the time Woe'd decided what to do with their bodies, the rabbits had already been skinned and their pelts set aside, gently on a dry surface. Woe had set aside the meat for Gloom's perusal, and to check that it was sutiable for eating. After satisfying himself with the quality of the meats, he nodded and had them in a basket, ready for washing and then cooking into some spiced coney pies or so he said was the plan. Woe had no objection to it. A meat pie sounded alright at this point. And they could share with their neighbors even, as there was likely to be a good amount of excess.
Woe had just about nailed the last of the pelts to a wooden plank the skins stretched taught and wide as they could be, when he heard the sound of a cheerful whistling, approaching from the north side of his cabin. Toutouye perked up, from where he sat, scraping the meat and fat from the latest of the pelts.
The mortalborn meanwhile took it upon himself to mix the brains of the rabbits with some vegetable tanning solution. A trick he'd remembered from his former life as a slave, working in Erastus' leatherworking operation in Rynmere. There were some benefits to that experience, afterall, and he'd be a fool to ignore the knowledge gained from his life as a slave, simply because of the associated pain.
The rabbits brains and tanning solution smelled foul, enough to get a wince out of him. But once he'd mixed it, he took notice of the whistling approaching from the north, and saw the fox-cadouri Manos Wittleskins arriving with a stick, from which hung several rabbits.
Woe took a break from his tanning solution to greet the ranger. "Hello Manos. Here for the bounty?"
"Aye!" Manos said cheerfully, and then whistled when he looked at Woe's catch. "Paying yourself for those then, are you?" Manos chuckled. Woe didn't think it was funny, but shrugged.
"I'm going to have a little bit of a project with these skins, actually." He replied, and pointed toward the pinned notes on the tanning rack. There, he was sorting the hides by color columns, and rows by quality. Fortunately, for the sake of sorting by quality most of them were not very good, as Woe was very rusty at the tanning, so it was simple enough matter to sort by the number of blemishes, hides that had been scraped to vigorously, or even pierced.
Toutouye sat down next to Woe, gathering up each hide as he finished with it, and then tying it to the rack, stretching it. The mortalborn called out to his adoptive son, "Fetch whatever colors you fancy, Toutouye.” Woe pointed toward the skin rack where they had been stretched and tanned. “We’ll make something today.”
Toutouye looked intrigued, but sped along on the insistence of his father. He grabbed browns, dappled grays, all those sorts of colors. The kind that blended in well with terrain. A woodsman to a fault, was Toutouye. Woe thought he’d made the right decision setting him up with an apprenticeship as a future Ranger. Hopefully Oram would find a suitable mentor for him soon.
The furs gathered, Woe began with the needle, threading it with a bit of stretched rawhide string. There was a lot of it, which he’d gotten from Mudge’s Tannery. Obviously not the same rawhide as from the rabbits, that would’ve been ill-advised, given the thinness of their pelts. Woe deliberately pushed the string through the eye of the needle, and then began threading it through the hides, testing their suppleness for now. He wasn’t ready to stitch them quite yet, however. That would follow the cutting of the hides, to shapes suitable to their position in the project.
Woe began categorizing the furs that Toutouye had selected for him. Positionining them on the ground as Magnus watched, and began skinning his own catch, to stretch his hides. The cadouri ranger would join Woe’s efforts when he was done, or so it had been promised.
Woe set the furs up categorized due to color, size, and relative toughness of the hide. The thinner hides were placed at the fringes, so that their lack of durability would become less of a factor if they ripped or unraveled. The thick ones toward the center. All through the process, he focused on assorting them due to toughness over color, and made those compromises as they were needed.
Finally having assembled about twenty of the pelts, he began cutting them, to fit a pattern that would become Toutouye’s own rabbit-skin mantle, to keep him warm next winter, when he’d likely start his apprenticeship.
He didn’t speak much as he worked at cutting the excess hide. He merely discarded those shreds, and set them off to the side. Perhaps a use could be found for them later, but for now, his attention was on the whole hides.
He shaped and cut. Soon he found a cohesive pattern with them, which was a roughly upturned smile shape. Or an arc, depending on who you asked. These, he began stitching with the rawhide that Mudge’s apprentices had produced for this purpose. The rawhide string was more durable than the rabbitskins, but then Woe had a layer of leather beneath the rawhide rabbit pelts, to keep it from disintegrating due to any stress put on the twine later.
So the double layered mantle, laid on the leather of a hart, eventually came to fruition. Pelt by pelt, he fit them into place around each other, stitching them double ways, through the main leather piece, and through each other to keep them in place.
After about a break or two of work, with some minor adjustments and fixes by Manos, the shoulder wrap was ready to be debuted. Woe brought it up, and stood from where he’d been working. He beckoned with a cant of his head for Toutouye to approach.
The wild child tentatively approached, and gave a slight jump when Woe draped it over his shoulders. He wrapped the end over his neck, and with a bit of leather cordage in the frong, secured it in place. There, he stood back to behold the handiwork.
It was a basic quality piece of fur. However Woe had no doubt many other children in the ranger corps would envy him the warmth it brought him during winter. For perhaps the first time, he felt a sudden rise of warmth well up from somewhere unkonwn in his heart.
He frowned, he had no right to feel that way. No. He suppressed the feeling of joy, but allowed himself to revel in the accomplishments of his adoptive son, who’d slain half of those rabbits himself.
He came up to Toutouye, and guided him by the shoulder toward the cabin. “Gloom is making some nice rabbit pie, Toutouye. Won’t you come in?”
And for the first time, perhaps bewildered by the circumstances, Toutouye forgot that he was going indoors, and did indeed join them inside.
Gloom was waiting with a feast of rabbit pie, and lemonade, with a side of steppers soaked in cream sauce covered in dill herbs. It was all a little overboard, but Woe even thouoght he spotted Gloom weeping when Toutouye dug into his home made meal.
Woe steeled his jaw, and shrugged, then began eating his own portion. Gloom really could be so dramatic. But then, this was a first for them all. Woe was determined to enjoy it.
Skills and capstones used
Woe is using his discipline capstone all through the crafting process:
Slow and Steady
, which allows him to produce the best possible product (therefore an item with a + affix to it due to its quality)
