I knew this day was coming. I had shaken up the status quo too much, and now that it was paying off, the new tribe chief was simply defending the position he had finally stabilized.It had started much like any other Uli’s story, at least one who reached adulthood. I reached the necessary Blood to become a tribesman, and though it was delayed due to our exile from our new home until we settled much further up the coast—in a significantly worse region for unclaimed tide pools—soon enough I was joining my first mirulu hunt.The first living mirulu I saw was awe-inspiring. Though I had vague memories of animals like elephants from Earth, I hadn’t ever got up close and personal with one. The mammoth mirulu wasn’t like an elephant or woolly mammoth from Earth, exactly; it was more like a giant boar. It was a huge six-legged nomadic omnivore that cut through all the low-growing scrub as it traveled, but there wasn’t enough of that to sustain its size, so it would also happily charge down and eat other animals, too. It had the massive tusks which we prized for the ivory, which it would use to gore prey, and something we had to be incredibly cognizant of during a hunt.Upon finding one, hunting it as a group involved hassling it into giving chase back towards camp, since carrying the large animal in full was impossible. It was a delicate balance, since we couldn’t allow it to reach camp, but the closer we got it, the less back and forth travel we needed to do. Once it was close enough, we would swarm it while it was still tired. Uli mostly used Blood techniques to kill, which resulted in a bit of waste since a lot of meat and hide was ruined in the process, but the mirulu was so large that it wasn’t deemed a problem. We could only preserve the raw meat for so long.The meat was for the tribe, and there was no concept of earning your keep when it came to food. Everyone was fed. The tusks and hide, on the other hand, was generally split (...)