Cairn: The Oozy Chipmunk

Yesterday was the beginning of our final Cairn adventure! Here's last time.

It's been a few weeks since the death of Brock Westarwart. It's now early autumn, the days still long and warm, and the denizens of Cairn are starting to harvest the stuff that gets harvested at this time of year. 

One afternoon, Snootabur Shadowbough gets a letter from her mother, who lives on a peanut farm outside of Cairn. Her mom asks if Snoot can visit - there's a "wee problem." Just if she has time.

Snoot immediately finds the other Traveling Knights and translates. If mom says it's a "wee problem," it's probably a bigger issue than she's letting on. Also she never says "just if you have time" unless it's something immediate. The four of them head out of town and reach the farm as the shadow lengthen and twilight falls.

Snootabur's mother, Kinkin Shadowbough, is out working the fields in her adorable sun hat and greets them all warmly (she recognizes Rumdiggle Sunsong as the composer of "Yeet the Noodle" and says that she often sings it to herself while working, which delights Rummy). She takes them to the edge of her farm and shows them the issue - there's a whole section where the peanuts have been dug up and removed, and the area brushed over to hide the tracks. 

This, of course, is what Russelet Leatherwind is great at. He examines the area and finds that the trails leads into the woods, where he finds multiple sets of tracks. Snoot looks carefully and sees that the tracks look like they belong to pika, which is weird. Pika absolutely would take peanuts from the farm without asking (pika have a loose sense of property and ownership), but they wouldn't cover their tracks because they wouldn't think there was anything wrong with what they were doing. The Knights follow the trail (Kinkin goes back into the house and starts on dinner), and they wind up in a clearing between three oaks.

Ratatosk Longberry scampers up the tree and talks to a bird there, and the bird informs him that the pika dug into a hollow beneath the tree. Rummy plays a song to reveal hidden things, but nothing appears (Russelet easily spots the covering on the hole, however). The Knights brush back the covering and find the snoot of a young pika.

Snootabur asks this pika ("I'm a lookout! I never looked out before so I don't know if I did it right...") to talk to an adult, and a grown pika emerges. He introduces himself as Tritch Diggerheart, and confirms that it was his people who ate the peanuts. They covered their tracks, though, because they're being pursued by a stalker (a wolf). 

The stalker has been hunting them for a few days, and there's something wrong with it. They had to drop the provisions they were carrying and the stalker ate them, and it also took one of their number (at this Tritch becomes quiet and somber). They didn't approach the farm because they didn't want to lead the stalker there; for the same reason, they haven't headed towards Cairn.

Snootabur tells them to gather everyone up, and they head back to the family farm. Kinkin is happy to have visitors ("och, I haven't had so much company since your father passed!") and starts working on a bigger batch of peanut stew ("Snoot, asks your friends if they eat crickets, I can't remember!" - by the way, Kinkin Shadowbough sounds exactly like Nicky from GBBO, and I wish I had a supercut of her talking). Rummy turns into a bear and plops down in front of the farmhouse, and Russelet takes to the sky to see if he can find the stalker.

It isn't hard. He finds the creature stumbling through the forest. It's obviously in bad shape; Russelet can hear it panting and whining. He flies back and warns the others, and they take up positions to watch. When it breaks the treeline and sees the Rummy-Bear, it snarls and prepares to charge, but Russelet puts two sleep arrows in its snout and it collapses.

Rummy holds it down (just to be sure) and Snoot fashions a quick muzzle for it. Ratatosk looks it over, and sees bites on its haunches - it's clearly been driven out of its pack. He guesses the stalker might have been poisoned or sickened somehow, and he senses a hint of Unnatural on - or in? - the creature. He decides that it may have eaten something that did this, and mixes up a quick emetic. 

The wolf responds quickly, vomiting up the contents of its stomach, and then shakes off the poison and scampers off into the woods (away from the damn bear). Ratatosk pulls on a pair of gloves and examines the goop, and finds, horribly, two bodies within. One is a pika, obviously the one that the troop lost. The other is a chipmunk, horribly mangled...but somehow the body is still bleeding. 

Ratatosk assembles the Knights and explains this, and they decide to split up. Russelet flies back to Cairn to fetch Whisper Greendawn, the priestess. Snootabur finds Tritch and tells him that they've recovered the body; Tritch quietly informs her that the dead pika was his husband. Kinkin offers him a spot in the Shadowbough family plot, and Tritch tearfully accepts. They bury the pika, marking the grave with the traditional pika headstone - one word, "Stay."

The Knights fashion a litter to take the chipmunk's body towards Cairn, and meet Russ and Whisper on the way. She casts a cleansing spell and drives something away from the body, some powerful, but worse, deliberate magic. Ratatosk has seen this kind of necromancy before, back when the Knights encountered the mysterious and horrifying Blood Walkers. The oozy chipmunk carcass stops bleeding and now just smells gross rather than gross and Unnatural, so the Knights decide to burn it just to be safe.

That done, they decide to get some rest and then head into the woods and try to track backwards and find where the stalker ate the chipmunk to begin with. Russelet goes to find a tracker and woodsman he knows to get a sense of where the wolf pack's territory generally is. If there are more of these bleeding chipmunks out there, the Knights need to find and eradicate them.