"Belch! Brother of the tribe... this... this life in the Wasteland is just too... too hard!..."
As night deepened, everyone had drunk too much and was growing hazy. The lame Zu Shazi drank with his head down, and in the end he was the first to topple onto the ground, roasting by the firepit as he fell into loud, snoring sleep. And from the way Woodpecker E-Zhuo was stammering when he spoke, he did not seem far from getting drunk either.
"Isn't that the truth! Thinking back now, I don't even know how we survived those twenty years. The tribe was just like a pack of wolves, running back and forth across the Wasteland, chasing after anything we could eat..."
The red-haired chief Mikui drained another bowl of wine. He shook his head, savoring the sweet yet astringent taste of the fruit wine, his face filled with indescribable emotion.
"Brother! Do you know what my name, Mikui, means?"
"Wh-what is it?"
"It's Mesquite, Mesquite! You don't know? It's a kind of tree out on the Wasteland that grows pods. That stuff is bitter, and if you eat too much your stomach hurts, but you can eat it, and one tree grows a whole lot of them!... Back then, we gathered those pods as our summer rations. Haaha! You had to fight for that stuff. Lots of tribes would struggle over it, even to the point of using spears and stone axes..."
At this point, the red-haired chief Mikui shook his head and said with a laugh, "Heh! Don't laugh at me, but before we went south to the lands of the Otomi People, I'd never even eaten a single meal of Corn, and didn't know what Corn was... The first time, I took an old ear of Corn and gnawed