The Quiet Hunter of Red Cloud Mesa

The plainstrider never saw him coming. This is true of most plainstriders, which is how Red Cloud Mesa keeps its reputation for being so peaceful: nothing out there lives long enough to complain.

Ruminant Cudsong had been in Camp Narache for less time than it takes a kodo to finish a mouthful. The tauren say they were once a nomadic people, roaming the Barrens and hunting the mighty kodo, and the chronicler has heard that line recited at every new calf who ever stepped into this camp. It is accurate. It is also, to a youngest son who grew up on a farm below Bloodhoof Village singing to the herd instead of hunting it, a slightly odd thing to hear in his first hour.

Grull Hawkwind, the chief’s son, had a task ready before Ruminant had finished looking around. Seven plainstrider feathers and seven pieces of meat. The camp’s stores had run low, and the old customs hold that a tauren proves himself to the Chief by feeding the tribe. A druid is not a hunter by trade. Ruminant went anyway, which is the honest definition of a first day.

He turned the question over as he walked, the way he turns every question over, and he found the plainstriders no more interested in a philosophical discussion than the chronicler would have been. They gave him their meat and their feathers, which were, strictly, not theirs to keep. Somewhere on the slope of the mesa the strength of the Earth Mother settled into him, and a pillar of gold light stood up out of the grass and left him a little taller than before. Level two. Another rung on a ladder that never ends, though this one at least came with a view.

He carried his bundle back to Grull and was thanked. The camp was pleased, in the economical way of people who say “you show promise” and consider the matter closed. And then the quest-givers of Camp Narache did what quest-givers always do the moment a stranger proves useful: they handed him more work.

There was a hunt that continues, because hunts do. There was a humble task from the Chief himself, who wants someone to look in on his mother at the well southeast of the camp, which is the sort of errand that sounds like nothing and ends with a speech. And there was a note.

The note was the one that mattered. The Verdant Note points him to Gart Mistrunner, the druid trainer of Camp Narache, who teaches tauren the Earth Mother’s old ways, the ones the night elves kept when everyone else forgot them. His mother would have cried at it. Grandmother Ohsa would have said something dry about waiting years for one of them to say something interesting.

Sixty-seven copper for the day. A new level. Three open quests and a letter he has not yet answered.

He logged out in Mulgore, seven minutes into a road that will be a great deal longer. His road runs through rougher country than his brothers’, the chronicler hears. That is for another night.

The note is still in his bag. Gart Mistrunner is still waiting.