GREENWAYS
D. B. REYNOLDS-MORETON
Greenways
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Story Copyright © 1998 by D. B. Reynolds-Moreton
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The Invitation.
Kel was trotting nimbly along the well worn pathway in the middle of one of the main branches, occasionally glancing upwards to look for whip tendrils when he saw something move on the path ahead. He stopped dead in mid stride.
This sudden halt was almost automatic through years of training and realizing the possible consequences of not doing so when confronted by the unexpected.
Just ahead of him, the pathway was brightly illuminated by a shaft of light from the Greater Sun, which had somehow filtered down through the dense green canopy overhead and the path looked normal enough, but something had moved on the surface of the track, and that didn’t usually happen.
He had only caught a glimpse of movement, a mere twitch of the surface, but that was enough to tell him that all was not as it appeared to be.
Kel moved a little closer to the suspect portion of the pathway but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, except perhaps a tiny crack in the worn surface of the bark which covered the mighty branch.
He should have been carrying his stave with him as they all did when away from the group, but as it was only a short journey to the Story Teller’s cave, so he hadn’t bothered this time.
Kel broke a small twig off a nearby bough to act as a marker on the pathway, and then went back up the track to where he knew there was a stave plant growing in the crotch of a side branch.
The stave plant had to be treated with a fair amount of caution, as the juice from its severed end was deadly if left in contact with the skin for any length of time, so a little ritual had been devised to protect the stave gatherers from the deadly liquid.
From the outer edge of the main clump Kel selected a stave of the right length for what he had in mind, and withdrew his lesser cutting knife from its pouch on his belt. Very carefully he made a deep incision around the base of the bamboo like stave, making sure that his feet were as far away from the plant as possible while still maintaining his balance in a crouching position.
Having completed the encircling cut, he gathered up several handfuls of assorted leaves which had accumulated at the bottom of the plant, and pressed them around the now oozing cut on the stave, making very sure he didn’t allow any of the corrosive juice to get on his hands. Reaching up into the clump, he then pulled off two of the long ribbon like leaves from the stave plant and bound the leaves into a loose pad encompassing the cut at the base of the stem.
Taking a firm grip on the stave at shoulder height, Kel now rocked the stem back and forth and from side to side, the milky white juice spurting harmlessly out into the pad of leaves and trickling down the remainder of the stem, eventually no doubt to be reabsorbed by the plant, for nothing went to waste in the forest.
When it looked as though all the deadly sap had been drained from the stem, he repositioned his grip and bent it down towards the surface of the main branch on which he stood, throwing all his weight behind the last thrust as the stave came level.
There was a sharp crack, and the stave was now free, but the end was still covered in the sticky thick milk-like fluid and so was not safe for him to use as yet.
Positioning the base of the new stave between his feet and turning it slowly, Kel allowed a small trickle of his urine to run down to the cut end, which he held just above the surface of the pathway.
Someone, a long time ago, had discovered quite accidentally no doubt, that the uric acid in urine reacted with the plant juice, converting it into a hard and harmless resinous substance and so the ritual of stave manufacture had been passed on down through the generations to the present day, although the actual chemistry of the process would have been well beyond their understanding.
Slowly the milky-white fluid on the end of the stave began to thicken, turning a pale honey brown colour, and while the hardening process continued, Kel got to thinking of the day when he would be presented with the Greater Cutting Knife, a sure sign of manhood and a place of respect within the group.
As far as he could make out, there were only a few more cycles of the lesser sun to bring him up to the age of manhood, and then he would have a proper long-bladed cutting knife, a truly fearful weapon.
The cutting knives were the group’s most treasured possessions, and responsibility for their safe keeping was drummed in at an early age and then reinforced again later when the coming of age ceremony was held.
Kel had been on his way to the Story Teller, hoping to learn about one of the lesser stories, the one about the cutting knives, when the journey had been interrupted by the bark moving on the pathway.
The blob of resinous compound on the end of the stave had now turned a dark brown colour and hardened, and it was at this point that Kel knew it was safe to use the stave as the juice within it had been rendered harmless.
He needed some bait to put on
