A Stable Food Supply – Part 03
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Translator: Kell
“We don’t need preserved food anymore? Why?”
The next day, I retracted my previous statement to the people gathered at the tavern. The governess, Bear, and everyone else looked puzzled.
“With the witch and me around, we can hunt even during winter,” I said. “And there should still be fish in the river.”
My explanation convinced them easily.
“Not that I’ve done it before,” I admitted, “so it might not work out.”
Bear slapped me on the back. “What are you saying? You’re a battle-worn mercenary! Both you and the witch.”
The governess quickly took out a piece of parchment. “Let’s calculate how much game we need to hunt for a hundred villagers to last one winter. That will make it easier to devise a hunting schedule. If we fail to hunt and starve, that’s when we turn to the government.” Her words were reassuring.
Winter came.
I went hunting out in the snow, relying on Zero’s divination for guidance.
“We can help, too,” said one man. “You’ll need help carrying the catch.”
I had to forcefully turn down all the strong-looking men offering to help. My leaving alone would greatly reduce the village’s strength. If I took several men with me into the forest, the village would be completely defenseless for a few days. Zero could easily fight off bandits, but I didn’t want her to be the village’s shield.
A Mage who lived on the outskirts of the village and could create new Magic was the right position for her, in my opinion. Regardless of how she felt about it.
Zero tended to say things like “I will protect you,” or “Leave it to me,” but I wasn’t shameless enough to put everything on her shoulders alone. Besides, what good would it be if I couldn’t even hunt one prey that I already knew the location of by myself?
“Footprints. A boar’s.”
Once I found hoofprints on the thin layer of snow, I took a sniff of the cool air. Following the tracks, I found frozen and dried dung, and further ahead I came to a mountain cabin.
“What? A cabin?” I cocked my head, frowning.
The boar tracks circled around the hut, but there was no sign of the animal nearby. Surveying my surroundings, I stepped into the cabin, its doors left carelessly open. Bags of vegetables and wheat were piled up inside. It was a pantry, I realized.
“Why is there a pantry in the middle of the forest? Which village owns it, I wonder. Why is the door even open? You gotta be more careful.”
The stockpile didn’t seem like a lot; certainly not enough to last the whole winter. Maybe the other villages were having food shortages, and we just didn’t know because we had not interacted with them. Perhaps their crops failed. In that case, I could offer them meat from the hunt, providing us a foothold for commerce.
“I sense someone.”
Oh, shit. If they see me here, they’ll think I’m a thief.
I bolted out of the pantry and came face to face with it.
It wasn’t a human being. It was the old boar, angry and agitated. It had a formidable body, like it was a mass of muscle. Despite the cold season, it had gained a lot of weight and seemed invincible.
I chuckled. “Came here for the food, did you?”
Judging from the hoofprints around the cabin, the boar knew there was food inside. The door was probably closed at all times, so it couldn’t get in. It could only wander around the cabin. But today the door to the pantry was wide open, and just when it was about to happily jump into the food, a Beastfallen came out.
Talk about brave.
The boar was raring to fight me for the contents of the pantry. A direct hit from a boar’s charge can crush a person’s internal organs, killing them. If its upturned tusks caught your stomach, it could bore into your ribs and send you spinning.
And right now, I had no armor. Not that it mattered.
I had faced gigantic boars that were taller than me a few times. Compared to Wenias’s endemic monstrosity, the Ebl Boar, normal-sized boars were cute.
Standing my ground, I faced the onrushing boar and clenched my fists. A fully-powered downward swing cracked the boar’s skull. The creature’s momentum caused it to plunge to the ground. It convulsed a few times, then stopped moving.
“Instant death.”
When I saw that the boar was completely dead, I breathed out a sigh of relief. I was sure it was the same animal that Zero divined, which meant the first day of hunting was a success.
When hunting, finding a target takes time. But if we could find prey so easily, we wouldn’t have to worry about food for winter, even without nonperishables.
The human presence I felt in the pantry had already disappeared. They probably got scared of the boar and me and ran away. I’d do the same if I were in their shoes.
Someone realized they forgot to lock the pantry, and when they rushed back, they found a Beastfallen and a boar killing each other. Of course they’d hightail it out of there.
The kind thing to do would be to take my catch and leave immediately. For a moment, I thought about stealing something from the pantry, but I decided against it.
I don’t need to steal anything. I can gather my own food and feed the people in the village.
I peeled off a tree bark that had dried in the winter air to make an improvised sled, laid down my catch on it, and hurried home.
The villagers might be surprised to see me return with a catch on the same day I left to go hunting.
People were waiting for my return with high hopes. I was still a little unaccustomed to it, and while it was embarrassing, it felt quite good.
“So, how exactly did this happen?”
A huge pile of flour bags was sitting in front of us.
Flour is nonperishable. But the only way to get flour is to grow wheat, or buy it. Like salt, it was impossible for us to procure it, when we had not established trade with others. Yet for some reason, we had a lot right now.
It was greatly appreciated, of course, but I had no idea how the flour was delivered to the village, as I was too focused on dressing the boar down at the river.
“Apparently, there’s this boar that ransacks pantries every winter,” Bear said.
“A boar, you say…” I glanced at my catch. “You mean this thing?”
“Apparently.”
That’s ridiculous. No, wait.
I did, in fact, come across the boar near a pantry in the woods, but if it was being ransacked every year, wouldn’t you normally have a couple of lookouts?
The pantry I saw was not only unguarded, the door was left open. I sensed human presence, but the place was too defenseless despite being raided every year.
“Well, actually.” Bear shot me an amused look. “The pantry you saw was an offering for the boar.”
“What?!”
“It’s been five years now since that boar started raiding pantries. They sent hunters to kill it, but they gave up after many failed. After that, the people of the neighboring villages built a pantry in the forest for the boar to raid. They store some of their winter food inside.”
“They could’ve just asked the local governor to send some soldiers!”
Bear waved his hands in front of his face. “No governor would care about a wild boar rampaging in a remote village that gives him barely any tax revenue. Plus there are no churches around these parts.”
The Church is an organization that helps those that society abandoned, and royalty and nobility always strive to please the Church. So if there was a problem in a village with a church, the governor would allocate troops even at a loss, but villages away from the Church’s influence were neglected.
I looked up. I get it now.
Despite living here until I was thirteen, I was completely ignorant of the surrounding villages. Now that I thought about it, the whole village must have protected me. If the neighboring villages learned of my existence, they would have definitely insisted on getting rid of me.
“So the poor villagers,” Bear went on, “who had no choice but to keep feeding the boar, went to check on the pantry one day, and found that a Beastfallen had killed it with a single blow.”
“They must’ve been scared shitless.”
“Sort of. But they were grateful. The Beastfallen didn’t steal anything from the pantry, and only took the boar. They came to say thanks and brought some of the food that was supposed to be for the boar.” Bear tapped the bag of flour.
I was so glad that I didn’t give in to the evil thought that crossed my mind back then.
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