The Research Accessibility Aid Is: IN!!!

@jacktrash The best part is that I originally made the Research Accessibility Aid after helping you look up gluten-free baking, and I remember seeing you talk about the Sami folk around the same time!

Ok so! You say you need starting points more than summaries, and you need ancient Sami specifically and ancient arctic peoples in general.

First things first, arctic cultures don't really have a famine food the way cultures from more productive land do. So little grows that everything that can be eaten is a staple, and everything that can't is indigestible. Also, nomadic people like the Sami tend to just leave areas struck by famine, or assimilate into better-off tribes rather than try to stick it out like more stationary cultures do. The problems your characters will be facing are going to be less about food availability and more about lack of knowledge and experience. Same end result, but with a different set of solutions.

Now! for research!

First up, food:

• Tree bark was one of the many foods in the Sami diet. When a tree was harvested for timber, the inner bark was ground up into flour to make bread. In snow-free months, vertical strips were taken off of live trees, leaving at least 2/3 of the circumference so that the tree would live to make more bark. Oddly, this was the opposite of a famine food- the "rich" Sami with bountiful herds were said to collect the most pine and birch bark.
• Mushrooms such as chaga can be extremely healthy foods, and were definitely on the menu.
• Sami also ate insects like the reindeer warble fly, though not in great quantities. (warning: images are kinda body horror)
• the reindeer themselves constituted a large portion of the diet. Specifically for the coastal Sami like your tribe, the herd was small and never meant for meat. They were for milk and cheese production, and for attracting wild reindeer. The wild ones were the reindeer that got eaten for the coastal groups.

Next up, random links

• a website about sami culture by sami people
• a research paper on swedish famine food (as a whole, sami people ate these things on a much more regular basis)
• a research paper on scandinavian bark peeling for food
• a research paper on modern and historic sami plant use

Basically, every member of the tribe was involved in the food gathering process. There wasn't a secret aspect of hunting that only men knew, there wasn't a secret aspect of cooking that only women knew. Food was so tight at all times that most modern non-nomadic societies would consider it famine. Their staple foods were famine foods just about everywhere south of them. Every child over the age of "can't hold a stick" knew how to make a fish spear or bait a hook. Every teenager had been hunting with the family for a few years already and while they weren't the best they were still pretty OK at it. In the Sami people, there wasn't famine-specific food, there was just food. Then when there was less food, they went somewhere where there was more food.

But you're still short a lot of folks in the tribe, and life is tough. Luckily for them, it's summer. The experienced or smart cookies will start catching food as quick as they can, then smoke, dry, or salt every ounce of it. They'll collect berries, nuts, roots, shoots, herbs, weeds, grasses, pine bark, birch bark, birch sap, anything they can stuff in a jar of brine or jam or vinegar or fat. They'll get the crippled guy who survived the attack but lost his legs to teach them tricks for trapping, they'll get the half-senile granny to give them pointers on reindeer, they'll antagonize the shit out of the shaman to work a little magic for them. When autumn comes and the reindeer go into rut, they'll slaughter, butcher, and jerky-fie all the wild reindeer that visit their herd, and they'll use the skins to make new boats. By the end of winter, the purely physical stuff will have been replaced. Next year, they go find another tribe and either ask for lessons or assimilate until they're aged up.

That's the good-luck scenario. The bad-luck scenario is that the teenagers are young enough to have not been hunting and there's no one but the kids and the drunk shaman who has been too busy shamaning to learn the skills of surviving. They get the news of the raid early in summer and start rationing. The kids end up having to kill and eat the reindeer in their herd. The wild reindeer aren't lured in. Foraging and fishing holds off total starvation until winter arrives. Winter rolls in and the river and the forage is frozen over and buried under the snow. Kids starve unless another tribe finds them. If the other tribe takes them in, they live happily ever after. If the tribe doesn't take them in but does teach them necessary skills, or better yet lends a few men and women, they have a rough winter but everyone lives happily ever after. The tribe won't choose to just leave them to die, because thats an incredibly shitty thing to do to people you are 100% likely to be distantly related to.

the no-good-very-bad-luck scenario is that they never get news of the raid and don't rationing until one day they realize that they're on their own. Another tribe doesn't find them until someone wants to visit their aunt in that one tribe of sea sami and when they get there they find bones under the snow. A few of the most recent ones have been chewed on.

Last but not least: some wikipedia pages on related subjects!

• Sami people
• Sami cuisine
• list of sami dishes

 

can I just say, I absolutely can't wait to read this book

 

This sounds pretty much exactly like what they would go with. As for why they don't join up with casimir's dad's tribe, it could be quite as simple as they just straight up can't find them. Sami are nomadic, and if the reindeer decide to move all the way to the Kola Penninsula, the Sami will follow. Odds are, if the dad's tribe isn't in the area, the decimated tribe will be just shit outa luck. Now, another part of being nomadic is inter-tribal breeding is very common so tribal warfare or other help-precluding disagreements were super rare, so another tribe in the area could drop by but decide that resources are too tight to help with more than just knowledge. This would mean that the scenario that led to them searching for the dad's tribe could be resolved, while still leaving resources super tight until the tribe grew enough to split their attention safely.

Honestly, I'd say that the first winter would be for-sure the hardest, but they wouldn't get much easier for 5 years or so, until confidence and population grew. A series of illnesses would probably be the thing to tip the balance in a bad summer rather than drought or blight. The illnesses don't even have to be lethal, they just have to lay people up for a week or two. That leaves the number of mouths eating the same, while cutting down the hands gathering to almost nil. The illness strikes right as the wild reindeer come in the fall, and suddenly there's no jerky or fall berries for the winter. It takes them into december to finish off the fish, and maybe if you want to make life really hard for them they kill off a bunch of trees by girdling the bark. It was a practice that the Sami avoided at all times out of respect for the tree, but maybe with the famine they just can't afford not to. The killing of the trees angers some or all of the gods, and suddenly a call-for-help that may have cost only a reindeer sacrifice or a bear hunt now requires a full-on human sacrifice.

Either way, this story goes hard as hell and its gonna be the best thing since the god eaters and i cannot WAIT

 

Well, that does vary a bit with the specific human sacrifice. I imagine the guy who spends a year partying it up as a living embodiment of Tezcatlipoca and then gets sacrificed at the end is probably the main guy going "so please don't send jaguars to eat everyone again kthx," but the captured enemy warriors having their hearts ripped out for the glory of Huitzilopochtli probably have a bit less input. Unless the Aztecs figured everybody would be able to get behind the sun not getting eaten by star demons.

 

hoo boy would that be awkward. the famine lifts, and everyone starts celebrating, and little timmy crawls his ass out of the bog and just says "the pine trees are kinda pissed, so look out for dead-falls next year, but Ruohtta says he'll lay off" and starts coughing up bog water.

stars, that'd be hilarious

Also, for avoiding the Dead Mom Curse, Sami shamans use a drum and joiking to do their workings. A curse of muteness or a quasi-crushed voice box and put a fist through the drum head, and there's nothing she could do beyond what a non-shaman could. She can still share info through writing, but no magic ever again until she can make a new drum and get another shaman to cure her voice. If none of the local shamans are up to it, or the gods don't approve, that could mean never.

 

My favorite variety of human sacrifice is personally the 'The land is failing and the king is shit. We must ritualistically execute him and find a new one to fuck the land goddess so we don't all fucking starve to death,' variant. That's a fun one. The king is the Face of his people. He is the one in good with the land goddess. Or Is Fucking Supposed To Be Since Her Being Happy With The King Is Why We Get To Live Here At All.

So it's his neck on the line when the crops fail spectacularly.

 

Nah, you're not being a pest, this is super cool plot genesis we're watching here!

My first suggestions are a couple of fiction books. They're both very plausible stories, and honestly they read a hell of a lot better than most non-fictional accounts I've found.

1. Hatchet is about a 13 year old boy stranded deep in the wilderness with nothing but the titular hatchet following a plane crash in northern Canada. While the crash happened in early summer and he was rescued towards the end of summer, there are several sequels, including one which is an alternate ending in which he is not rescued and must survive winter in the wild.
2. My Side Of The Mountain is about a boy who decides that he wants to live alone in his great grandparent's abandoned farm, which has been reduced to a foundation being reclaimed by the forest. He still was connected to society and visited/was visited by members of the nearby town, but his lifestyle was entirely self-sufficient once he got set up.

Following that (since i can't find a properly sourced account), I'd read the accounts of those feral children. Children only really get considered feral when there's a loss/absence of language involved. Other than that, their accounts still describe how those children stayed alive, and from the wikipedia article, not all of them were adopted so much as they weren't driven away. The kids still had to figure out how to stay warm, how to get food and water, how to stay sheltered from the weather. They got into their situations at different ages, some as old as 8, and stayed out there for different lengths of time. It stands to reason that people don't just suddenly stop ending up stranded in the wilderness for years at a certain age, they just stop being considered feral.

Specific to your character, a 13 year old Sami kid is old enough to have been hunting before, old enough to have learned to fish, make traps, and forage. He's not without any resources or tools since the tribe sent him off with spare goods. He'd have absolutely helped his family smoke, salt, or dry meat, so he knows how to make sure there's food for winter, and he knows how to assemble a warm shelter that'll survive the winter. Basically, he's got all the knowledge to survive, he's just not got enough manpower to thrive. Furthermore, if you want to be really safe and head off teenage stupidity, maybe one or two tribe members aren't so happy with his exile so they give him as much pointers as they can, or leave care packages for him when they're in the area.

In this situation, "Nature People Forest Skillz" really honestly is the difference between dying before summer ends and living for ten years with nothing but a knife and the clothes on your back. If someone wasn't raised in a nomadic subsistence-level tribe, getting suddenly exiled means either starvation or moving to an area where they aren't exiled. If someone is from such a tribe, it means they miss mom and dad real bad, and they miss getting days off. Sure, both kids are teenagers, but Teenager 1 dies because he didn't know you could eat that, and Teenager 2 is fine because she knew you could. Knowledge is everything when you have nothing.

You can use this as an opportunity, too! It's a chance to explore Sami food and culture, by having young Casimir reminisce about how his mom used to make such and such dish with him, but he could never get it right during his exile since it was really a two-person job to get the timing right, or how he used to miss this activity or that craft so badly. Show the reader just how close the Sami lived to starvation, and subtly direct them to the conclusion that this could have been so very grimdark indeed if he hadn't learned well.

The last bit I've got for you is a suggestion for search terms- while I didn't find properly cited accounts, i did have a lot of luck finding news articles by googling "teenager stranded in wilderness" and a length of time. The down side is that they are universally about someone trying to work their way back to civilization. I get the feeling that the ones that stay in the wilderness voluntarily just get labeled "feral" or "hermit" depending on their age.

 

Absolutely! I'm glad to be a help!

For out-of-biome survival, it all depends on how mean you feel like being. A lot of the plants are the same or closely related, the problem will be the lack of trees for making things. If you really feel like being just a jerk, you can also look up plants native to both areas and try to find some that look similar but the steppe one is poisonous.

On another note, how bizarre is it that we both have stories involving orcs on the steppe? mine are ex-mushroom farmers forced into raiding by the advancing Golden Horde that really just wanted to be left alone in their burrows. As soon as they went outside they said "this sucks, i want a roof" and proceeded to take over a town to get some shade. In short, absolutely no one was happy with their situation.

 

Hello @cosmofex a long time ago I remember a comic about stories, where these green beings write them and send them into the sky and one of them makes ugly sinking things and they ask him why, and it illustrates like why unhappy stories are good sometimes

I’ve been trying to find it for a long time and I just can’t get the keywords right can you help?