Elven Herdsman

Many elven tribes have become merchants, and some have become raiders, but elves are by nature nomads and herders. They are possessed of an independent spirit and a wanderlust unmatched in any other Athasian race. This free spirit causes other races to regard elves as deceitful and lazy - which, even I must admit, is more or less true if your perspective is that of an honest craftsman or a hardworking merchant-house agent. What other races fail to understand is that the elf would rather live a short and happy life than a long and cheerless one. Elves have adapted to the rigors of the Athasian wastelands in a unique way: they embrace the inevitability of death and hardship and make no attempt to escape it. In their view, the future is bleak and terrible - so one should do all he can to enjoy life today! Admittedly, this outlook makes elves notoriously untrustworthy, but only where outsiders are concerned. Within their own tribes, they follow a strict code of honor regulating what liberties they can and cannot take with the property and rights of others. Of course, this code does not apply to those who are not members of the tribe (elven or otherwise), and strangers are expected to look out for themselves. This free-for-all attitude applies even in the area of courtship. When a young warrior is ready to take a mate, he spies upon other tribes, trying to pick out a suitable woman. If he finds one he likes, he hides outside the camp until an opportunity comes to steal her. If the elf has already approached the maiden and she is agreeable to being abducted, she will no doubt make his wait a short one and accompany him with only a token show of resistance. However, if the maiden does not wish to go with the warrior, his wait may well be a long one, and when he finally does have an opportunity to seize her, she just might kill him. It should also be noted that I have met several elven women who, wishing to stay with their own tribes, stole the male elf of their dreams in this same manner. Whatever the sex of the victims, once they have successfully been taken to the abductor's camp, a messenger is sent to the old tribe to announce the safe arrival of the newlyweds. The abductees then become members of their mates, tribe, and all ties with their old tribe are broken. Even if they returned, they would be regarded as outsiders. This may seem a cruel custom, but I doubt that most elven marriages would last for more than a few weeks without it. Elven tribes vary from other herders in more ways than their cultural customs, however. Erdlus cannot travel for long distances at the rapid pace elven tribes prefer, so elves prefer to keep kanks instead. Generally speaking, the giant insects are an inferior herd animal - but are ideally adapted to the elven temperament and lifestyle. Kanks can eat nearly anything, so their keepers can wander deeper into harsh wastelands and stay longer than most other herders. In hives, kanks instinctively divide themselves into vicious guards, food producers, and brood queens, so the elves have very little to do in the way of animal husbandry. This leaves them free to devote themselves to their favorite pastime: frenzied feasting and wild revelry. Of course, there are a few drawbacks. The only food that kanks provide is a thick green honey secreted by the food producers and stored on their abdomens in melon-sized globules. If the tribe wishes to move, it must either move very slowly (for elven tastes) so the food producers can keep up, or remove all of the honey droplets from the kank abdomens. While kank honey provides plenty of energy, if you eat it for more than two or three weeks without a supplement of edible vegetation, you start to lose weight and grow weak, just as if you were starving. In addition, the meat of the kank itself is inedible - when a kank is killed, its flesh begins to emit an odor so foul that not even a starving man can stomach it. Aside from its honey, the only useful thing that a kank provides is a chitinous armor - providing an elf is patient enough to sit outside camp and use sand to scrub the stink of the insect's flesh off the carapace. Because of these shortcomings, elves are forced to spend more time hunting and foraging than other tribes. It is when the hunting is bad, or when they find themselves in dire need of something they cannot acquire through foraging, that they must turn away from their free-spirited way of life and become merchants or raiders.