yesss, FRIEND is PROUD which is CORRECT because he is AWESOME.

mmmmm, fish...

Zisel cuts himself his own spear in a jiffy out of a suitable stick nearby and demonstrates some improvements, though: "You're already doing quite well at this really."

She's clearly very happy at the praise, though very awkward about how she shows it. (It's entirely possible that she's gotten more positive reinforcement today than she has in the last few years of her life.)

She explains that she'd initially learned using the technique she'd overheard from a hunter who was passing through the village, crushing poison berries under a rock upstream to make the fish slower as they swam through it.

"I stopped doing that once I found Damisa - he's smaller than me and the fish are most of what he's been eating after he finished off my dried meat, so I wasn't sure it'd be safe for him."

"A crutch to get you started and drop when you don't need it, or mustn't need it," Zisel agrees, stabbing a carp and flipping it up into the air for Norur to catch in her mouth.

O:

Her first several fishstabs miss, on account of the New Shiny Distraction.

Then she shakes her head, clearly annoyed with herself, and stabs two in quick succession.

MORE FISH for Damisa! His FRIEND is SO good.

She presumably knows how to clean a fish since she's been eating them for a while, but she can watch Zisel do it too if she wants. Norur licks the guts off his hand.

She watches closely, then guts one of her own and asks a few questions about the differences - some of them are stylistic, but she's also been cutting away a few parts that are in fact fine to eat.

(Damisa will happily follow Norur's lead. Lick lick lick!)

And this kind of tree over here is a good way to get salt, if you want to salt anything to preserve it for later or make it taste better.

Ooooh! Source of salt! She has some already, but didn't have a way to get more. Gather gather gather.

...can he show her how to use salt to preserve food? She's never done that before, and was worried about doing it wrong and wasting precious supplies.

Sure, this isn't the time of year that's most important to do it but waiting till then wouldn't be smart. They can salt a fish. It's pretty simple really but you do need to keep it wrapped up (he likes this kind of leaf for it) so that it doesn't wind up with the salt rinsed or licked off.

Neat! And then it's just... safe to be stored like that? Presumably not forever, but for a season or so?

She has follow-up questions about food preservation and storage strategies - she had a lot of half-baked ideas for how to survive the winter that she's curious about, even if some of them are probably not going to be necessary now that she's going to be a ✨ druid ✨. (She ran away in the spring precisely because she knew preparing for winter would be the hardest part of surviving, out here - she might be young but she's not stupid,)

Sometimes mold will set in on it but you can avoid this with magic or by storing it in the right sort of place.

She nods thoughtfully. 

Now that Damisa is fed and both he and her are competent to walk long distances, maybe they should reloca -

(her stomach grumbles)

 ...eat and then relocate? She's foraged a lot in this area.

Yup. They can have a bit of fish now, it's fine raw if you don't see any worms in it, and then forage on their walk.

Neat! (Raw fish is not as good as cooked fish, but that's okay.) 

...she's able to carry all her supplies in her biggest bag, but since it's not a proper backpack, it's awkward enough to be slowing her down, some.

She'd be slow anyway with the infected leg, though hopefully that's clearing up with some circulation getting through it cleanly sans wound. They can have a leisurely walk and pick berries and greens. Does she want a deerskin backpack or does she have something else in mind?

(Her leg does indeed seem to be clearing up pretty well! She's rather hale, for a teenager or even a random adult - good endurance, perhaps?)

Berries and greens! She's enjoying the increased dietary variety, and even manages to comment on this after thinking it for the third or fourth time.

She's never made bags before and isn't sure what the considerations are, but a deerskin backpack sounds fine to her.

Then she can have one when she brings down a deer. They can make her a bow tomorrow.

!!! She nods excitedly, eyes wide. 

When they've gone a few miles inwards and Damisa is clearly getting tired, she starts pointing out places she thinks would make good campsites (both dry and rain variants, since he didn't say if it would rain or not tonight) and why she thinks so. 

She is sometimes just wrong and sometimes interestingly wrong and, once, right. She can park there and he will be over thataway.

With correction, she's rarely wrong in the exact same way twice, though of course there's many many ways to be wrong. 

She takes a minute to mentally review her lessons from earlier and then sets up her camp in her spot, looking it over with a critical eye. 

He has walked SO FAR and now it's NAP TIME.

Zisel looks it over and does not appear to have anything to say about it, which is probably a good sign.

He makes his camp Thataway, as promised, and then disappears into the trees without his bear for a minute and comes back with a dead bird and makes a fire.