“Grand Roba,” my aide said, stepping into my office. “Hunt Leader Ma-umo Quil has returned.”“Send him in,” I said, looking up from my work and leaning back in my seat.I sat at a large stone desk, covered in various-sized pieces of truly abysmal quality parchment. Our ink was also still pretty terrible, but I needed some way to record information, so I made do. Thanks to stone construction, we didn’t need as much hide for structures, though a lot of it was needed for clothing and boats. A small amount went towards record-keeping and trading information between our various settlements. It didn’t last as long as carved stone or bone, but it was much quicker to write with, and better for recording information that would change regularly.Picking up a piece of parchment with the current active expeditions written on it, I quickly scanned it for the name Ma-umo Quil, and found that his team had been on one of our inland expeditions. After years of pushing back the uqandu, we started making good progress towards uncovering new resources further from the coast.One such resource was a small, skittish herbivore, its population starting to rebound now that their natural predator was being killed off. They were decent game, and we had a breeding program already underway to try and raise them in captivity. If they calmed down a bit, they could be the Uli’s first domesticated animal.Of course, some escaped captivity and began repopulating, and now they needed to be hunted regularly so they didn’t completely strip all the minimal plant life around. That would ruin our attempts to domesticate them and keep them long-term. Expeditions inland reported vast swathes of land that were mostly barren of plant life, the ground cracked from recent desertification. If I had to guess, that drove all the herbivores away or sent them into population decline, and that was why the local uqandu had migrated towards the coast and started hunting (...)