Chapter 6: New Item Found

Things moved along swiftly and prosperously for our village. The new infants were all birthed without trouble or issues of any kind. I am told this was a first for the village as the number of infants was almost triple what was normally birthed and in the past one out of three would not survive yet all of ours not only survived but were much healthier than any previously birth infants.

We got another surprise about a week after all the births.

All the horned female horses birth colts. These which I had started calling horns for short. They were closer in size to donkeys but both male and female had the horns. These were sometimes stubborn but could pull and carry loads easily and with their horns were not bothered by any other animals.

The horses which looked and acted like horses I continued to call horses. They did not mind having a rider in fact seemed to enjoy being around people and having people around them they were much faster than the horns. The only drawback was they did not seem to like pulling travois being loaded as a pack animal did not seem to bother them at all.

That made it easy as horns would do most of the packing and all of the pulling jobs. Horses would just be used as pack animals and rides for us.

Gogon and Kaalaa both were in agreement with me that we should send out another hunting party to try for more of these horses.

Another task that Wenok had delegated to the village was enlarging our pasture area and having fenced off almost an acre of grazing land with what would look like four strands of barb-wire except there were no barbs. They used vines with sharp poking spikes growing all along them. He wanted to double the herd of Goaws and provide a somewhat save area to keep them.

I thought this was a great idea but we needed a more reliable system to protect or guard the Goaws.

I was thinking about trying to domesticate wild dogs or wolves to serve as man’s best friend. I knew this idea would be a hard sell but I just had to come up with the right way to present it.

It would turn out that the smaller coyote like animal would be the perfect choice. The coyote version here was about the size of a large German-Shepard maybe 10-15% bigger and about 50 pounds heavier which was a good thing if you wanted them for guard dogs.

We caught sight of a prairie fire about two days away from our village during one of our hunts. When we were riding through the burnt area we heard the sound of whining or whimpering. On closer inspection we found a group den of what appeared to be several coyote families. There were what looked like four pairs of adults all dead from the fire and smoke that were trying to protect their young. We found several pups that looked to be 1-2 year olds that were also dead. The surprise was finding the seven babies that could not be more than 2-3 months old. There were two males and five females.