The Wildmane managed to steady herself on her wobbling legs with her friend’s support. Signing her appreciation, Rufio took her long grass leaves and sat down a short few feet from the other girl. With wide, curious eyes, she watched as her friend laid out the leaves in rows.
Quiet learning settled into her posture and her freckles features as she followed Rue’s direction and laid her grasses out. When Zulrav tugged at their materials, Rufio chuckled quietly, mischievous Father her sign chided the wind-god, as if He were an annoying grandfather or uncle.
Taking the rest of her grasses, Rufio lifted her bottom and set them under her seat, satisfied her body weight would stop them blowing away. Her gaze watched Rue’s hands weave the strands she had a chime, absorbed in remembering the pattern.
Then she tried. Taking a strand, she folded one of those sitting on the ground back, and slipped the new strand under it. With a quick check of Rue’s work, the Wildmane wove it over the next leaf in the row, and then under the next, and then over, and then under. Her dark brows furrowed as she worked, her jaw set and her lips puckered in concentration.
The weaving wasn’t complex but she had to keep reminding herself ‘over, then under, then over, and ov- no under next’. Lifting another strand of broad grass to copy the pattern, and again, and again. Soon, the woven grasses began to hold structure, the square pattern beginning to look like the mats her cousin wove with their grandmother for sitting on sometimes.
"L- look, Fi." Rue’s laughter bubbled into the quiet chimes the girls had spent working away, and Rufio looked up to find her friend wriggling her fingers through the holes of her mat. Rufio, brow still furrowed and expression serious, lifted her own with two hands. A screen in front of her face with gaps in between the grass, some big and gaping, others tighter. Peering through it, she hmmmed.
"The worms will get us on this mat!" Rue laughed, and wriggled her fingers at Rufio. This tempted a smile across the freckled face, and she laughed too. “So will the rain.” She looked up at the grey clouds, and suddenly started as a bird hung above. “Zith!” Rufio whispered with alarm.
Giggling impishly at her trick to startle her friend, Rufio shifted into a crouch and held her woven mat over her back, like a tortoise, shielding herself from view. “If the zith find us we can blend into the grass,” unseen, she whispered to Rue with a grin.
“Let’s get out of the wind.” She gestured to where it was deepest in the hill, and went to lie in the dip. As she went, she snuck on her tip-toes and cast glances to the kite that drifted above. Quiet, quiet, "Watch out for grasses roots," noisiest. When her sneaking was suddenly broken by a loud growl and gurgle—her tummy!
Rufio grinned ruefully, tossing her wavy hair out of her face, she hugged her belly. “What dinner do you like the best, Rue?” deer, rabbit Meadnwhile, the Wildmane thought about how to stake the mats so they’d make a lean to. Her eyes returned to the stick that had been cast away, and she went to pick it up, showing her friend. “If we put this in the middle, like the pavilions?” mats over.
Suddenly she beamed with amused inspiration “The stick can go through a hole, like this.” The child demonstrated, putting the end of the stick through a hole in the edge of Rue’s mat and then hefting it up so it made a triangle shaped roof construction, what think? "I hope there are berries at the pond, the black ones are the best." sweet, sweet, forage, hungry.
