"Hm. Well, I must say, your head is more often than not in the right place, and I feel we'll need more than our share of clear thinking on this perilous mission. And I think you might find your city-born talents quite useful out here, if you were a bit more comfortable with the great wilderness. And who knows, it may be I won't be around to lead the survivors back home, and someone else will have to guide them.

"Very well. I will show you a little, if I can, of this land and how to make your way in it. The Brothers of the Stone Dragon are known for our ability to track orcs for miles across hard ground, and then take them apart like a butcher might joint a rabbit, or perhaps a better analogy would be like a gemcutter cleaves a crystal. That is what we are known for, but such abilities come from a source that few expect. Other dwarves have fought orcs as much or more as us, and yet understand them less. Why?

"The Stone Brothers approach the problem from a broader perspective, and with a broader philosophy. To track orcs, one learns to track any creature. To learn an orc's strengths and weaknesses, one doesn't look at one orc, or a hundred orcs, but at the grand scope of where and how the orcs live, the creatures that surround them and affect them, and their weaknesses become apparent. In short, we learn about nature first, and any particular creature or task is just a piece of that broad tapestry.

"I promise you, I will teach you things much more specific, and concrete, but it begins with this big picture. And the awareness that in this vastness, you yourself, even all of dwarvenkind and humankind, are really a rather small part. As the miners often say, "You cannot move the slab, and you should not try. But you can know where the slab will go. Learn to know what the rock will do before it does it, and get out of the way." These mountains, these forests, they have come before us and will leave after us. We dwarves and the orcs try to own it and control it, and pretend it is ours, which is foolish. But the Brothers of the Stone Dragon watch the mountains, the rivers, the animals, understand their comings and goings -- and then the traces of orcs appear like ripples in a pond, revealing the thrown pebble by their disruption."

(If we happened to be passing a pond or puddle or something, Barik demonstrates what he means. Alternatively, the same point can be made by tossing a stick at a bush with a grouse under it, or a tree full of birds.)

Click here to return to Fantasy - and not the X-rated kind home page