"So... do you understand?"
Slowly setting down the pebble in his hand, Chiba looked over the various relatively detailed yet simple structural diagrams on the ground. Then he raised his head and looked at the three children intently studying the lines carved into the dirt by the stones, drawing a quiet breath.
Could they understand it?
He was not sure himself.
What he had drawn on the ground was the structure of a trap. He had learned this highly effective wilderness hunting trap from Hirohiko, a wilderness survival expert who had learned it from Jiraiya.
It was a trap passed down through the countless experiences accumulated by ninjas surviving in the wild—simple, convenient, and with a fairly high success rate.
Though it was ordinary enough for ninjas, it might not be so ordinary for these children.
He did not rule out the possibility that they had used simple, crude traps to catch small animals before. But simple, crude traps were still simple, crude traps. Sometimes, even when they caught prey, the prey could break free.
Moreover, these children's wilderness survival knowledge was likely limited to knowing what they could and could not eat. They probably had not delved into methods of acquiring food in the wild, and were lacking when it came to hunting.
The solution he had thought of was to set traps in the abandoned town and kill those small animals. Zong Mi had been frightened by small animals there more than once, so they likely appeared frequently in that place. If they made several traps, catching small animals should not be difficult. Given their current situation, no matter how little they caught, it would ease their immediate crisis. As long as they did not go completely without food, they could move on to the next step.
"So