I didn’t need the drawings to tell me that the tree had become a bustling buzz of activity: I could see that from the ground. The depictions one sees nowadays of the first Oak colony are often fanciful, and what many now consider charming and quaint I thought of as primitive, rustic and “shipwreck architecture.” The best known is certainly Carat’s watercolor, done from memory years later and very definitely stylized and “quaintified”, looking along the main branch at the pile of sprawling habitations. The round white birchbark cabins taper upward, clinging to the trunk, roofed by cones of leaves, pinecones, and shingles of bark. I’ve heard it compared to Hopi Pueblos, but to me the notching of round bark “towers” to resemble castle embattlements, and the whole positioning of the pyramid of white cylinders looks suspiciously like the “Enchanted Kingdom” logo of Disney films.

I can attest to the presence of nests and horizontal bark tubes hanging suspended from higher limbs, but not in the “flying carpet” suggestion they carry in Carat’s luminous pastel-toned work. I also question the cute crowd of kits peering out the door of their burrow at the top… it was much higher up than that and definitely did not have a gleaming brass door made from the lockplate of the Ruin. Greater Than would have seen to that.

But most obviously misleading about the painting is the (also Disneyesque) presence of squirrels and chipmunks and birds. It’s true that we eventually did achieve “petting relationships” with these fuzzy rodents, but not at that point in our history here. And the idea of a brightly colored songbird hovering outside cunning round windows taking food from the hands of beautiful young doe with Carat’s bluepoint coloration is fanciful in the extreme, and the idea of a kit riding a flying cardinal like a cowboy is absurd on the grounds of physics alone.

But still, in between the Castle in the Sky image you have all grown so fond of and the Attempting to Survive scenario of reality–dozens of beings inhabiting a rickety makeshift of unfurnished huts without plumbing, lighting or cooking facilities–there is a reality of those days that I could partly see from my vigil on the ground below. It was shelter amid the trees and housed a growing sense of exploration and confidence in our new home. It seemed that each day brought some new possibility to light. Some finds were more felicitous than others.

It was Carat who discovered cobwebs, but she didn’t look back on her contribution with great pleasure. She had stumbled into a web in the dusk and sticky strands had tangled in her chest fur and tickled across her eyes. Her squeals brought the aid of several males, who helped her clean up while not hiding their heavy interest in the cobweb material. Fine, light, flexible, silky and so strong they had to strain to break it: it was immediately seen as a rich resource and they started searching for more.

Meanwhile Semi found the spider itself, about as alien a lifeform as any we had seen here, or could imagine. Equal and Euro quickly classed it as dangerous and possibly evil, but Semi was crooning over the exotic beauty of it. The hard, black glossy carapace, the dainty legs, the bold red hourglass marking: she saw a stark, hard beauty in it and was studying it avidly. Apparently this “black widow” was less pleased to be discovered, and the bite came close to killing Semi. She was completely unconscious for a night and following day, sweating and convulsing as Tilde and Point worked on her, attempting to extract the unknown venom and keep her fever down. She lay in my chambers for five days, her suffering from fever, chills, nausea and spasms not born at all stoically. I had already grown very fond of her, but was not at all unhappy when she recovered sufficiently to return to her little cottage in the trees. But silk, spooled on twigs, became part of our repertoire of artifacts and useful items.

Other items were being found and evaluated for construction by crews increasingly under the direction of At. Certain trees yielded superior twigs or stronger bark, certain breeds of leaf were better suited to various tasks, mosses were found and used for bedding and cleaning. Fortunately, after Stroke’s mishap with the poison ivy we found no further plants that were actually dangerous to our health. Although looking back from the present time, I realize how lucky we were in that regard. With mushrooms, for instance.

These edible fungi were discovered and examined by many different judges: At, Ampersand, Greater Than, Point, and myself. They were worthless for construction of utility, but they somehow just suggested the idea of food and there was a great debate on whether to try eating them. A debate dominated by Greater Than’s predictable reaction: he spent his life eating the bland, indestructible Trinchan rations, so wasn’t bothered by the lack of variety in our diet. The debate was resolved when we found that the kits had been eating mushrooms for quite some time but hadn’t told us because they didn’t want to share them.

Although completely alien to anything in our experience—both as cuisine and even as biological objects that confounded Ampersand’s attempts to classify a form of life that has no equivalent on our home worlds—they were immediately a taste sensation for all concerned. Especially when Tilde started filleting them and frying them on her brass grilltop. Her first dinner of sautéed morel was the most enthusiastically received meal to date. She oiled the grill first, which greatly improved the flavor.

Her possession of oil was a tale in itself. She and Backslash had tramped along the shoreline and creekbed examining stones until the settled on the perfect textures and shapes for grinding. Once these were hauled back to the settlement by males seduced by promises of future delicacies, she was able to reduce acorn meat to meal and even an inferior form of flour. And in the process discovered that they contained oil, which could be strained out of the mash through cloth. Specifically the lining of Point’s helmet, the only fabric we owned at the time. It was a lot of work to gain an acorn full of oil, but the strained mash was useful as flour and could be consolidated and cooked as a sort of crumbly pancake. So we stuffed ourselves on morel and mushrooms cooked to a nutty golden brown.

There were also a certain amount of grass seeds starting to show up in the “kitchen”. Anything bearing seeds was immediately investigated and some of the kernels were useful, if only as flavoring sprinkled over nutmeat and mushroom. But there was also the real possibility of being able to make flour and even bread from some of these seeds. If only we had an oven. Tilde was dropping ever-stronger hits about the need for an oven, but so far nobody had been able to figure out anything to adhere stones well enough to withstand firing so that project was a future wish rather than reality. Meanwhile great possibilities were being derived from cattail, white clover, and dandelion. We enjoy salads, but there was also the enticing possibility that some of these odd specimens might be able to yield a replacement for chark. In fact we had started to drink a warm infusion of cattail, burdock and dandelion root, though it had none of the stimulant effect of our familiar brew.

It was an exciting time in many ways. We were free of fear or want, the promise and beauty of the new world compensated for our lack of comforts and possessions, and we were eating better every day. A spreading thirst to explore fired our spirits, though it was generally trammeled by Greater Than. Imagine our surprise, then, when it was he who made the most important, shocking, and destabilizing discovery to date.