“The early bird gets the worm.” - Old folk saying.
When the group of goblins headed for a bamboo grove around an hour’s travel away from the village, Aideen pieced together the clues – like the very early morning hours and the stack of large baskets she helped carry for them – and figured out what they were after.
The sight of the grove itself had not surprised her. Bamboo also grew natively to Elmaiya and the western regions of Ptolodecca and often used by the people living there for various purposes, including for food, which Aideen suspected the goblins also did. There were differences between the bamboo grove near the goblin village and those in the south, though.
As for the region, the temperature felt about right. The bamboo groves she saw in the south mostly grew in the warmer, more humid regions, which definitely fitted the region the grove in the jungle was in. Perhaps it was the even harsher heat and humidity, or it was something unique to the region itself that made them different, though.
Where she was used to bamboo that grew to be about ten to fifteen meters or so tall, typically yellowish to green in color, the bamboo grove near the goblin village was anything but that. Most of the bamboo easily pierced through the upper canopy of the forest around them, which must have been at least twenty or more meters in height, while the occasional fully grown broken examples she saw measured nearly double that in length, after what she suspected to be a decent chunk of it had decomposed.
They were massive, sturdy examples of the plant, with a dark purplish exterior that made them look nearly regal to the eye. Aideen noticed that some of the spears used by the goblins still had that shade of dark purple on one side, so they clearly used it like wood themselves.
As for why the color was only on a slight strip on one side of the spear shaft, it was because the bamboos themselves grew so large that the biggest specimens were as wide as a human torso, with segments that easily measure as tall or even taller than a human. From the fallen examples she saw, the walls of the segments were thick enough that the goblins could easily cut off a section and simply rounded the corners to make a spear shaft that would fit comfortably in their hands.
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The dozen goblins had spread out, with six of them standing on guard, forming a perimeter around a wide area of the grove while staying in sight with at least two others at any one time. The other six asked Aideen for the large woven baskets which they then placed on their backs before they went out to the grove to forage.
Some of them carefully stepped around, feeling the ground with the soles of their bare feet. A couple youngsters went down to their hands and knees and carefully felt the ground with their hands instead, not experienced enough to do the same using their feet yet. Another simply used his earth affinity to do the searching instead, walking at a faster pace compared to the rest.
Every now and then, they would stop, crouch down, and use a small wooden spade to carefully dig the ground, harvesting young bamboo shoots that had yet to emerge from the soil. Sometimes the shoots were too small to be harvested so the goblins covered it back up with soil, while at other times, they plucked the entire shoot out and placed it into their baskets.
Despite the massive towering behemoths they grew into, the young bamboo shoots were only as thick around as Aideen’s forearm at most, and about as long for the largest ones harvested. Most were only around half to two-thirds the length of her forearm and similarly more slender in size, though they all had a similar dark purple outer coating like their grown brethren.
The use of young bamboo in cooking was far from uncommon, though Aideen usually saw examples that used larger and older bamboo shoots. Those tend to have more bitterness to them that needed some soaking and processing to get rid of, and had a more fibrous, tougher texture. On the other hand, young shoots like the ones harvested by the goblins were considered a luxury, since picking them that young meant getting less food from each plant, and it was difficult to find them in large quantities.
Which was clearly not the case with the goblins. It only took them less than an hour or so before the six that went out to hunt for shoots returned with six large baskets full of them.
“They grow abundantly around here, but if we don’t come this early, it’s hard to find the good ones,” explained the old goblin of the bunch. The language used by the goblins had a lot of similarities to the orcish language used in the plains, close enough to be dialects of each other, so Aideen could understand and converse using orcish with them. “These ones are no good if they get out of the ground. Gets too hard very fast.”
“I guess they do differ a bit from the ones I know of. Where I’m from it’s most common to eat the slightly tougher ones that have grown out a bit out of the ground,” replied Aideen to the old goblin. “Small, tender ones like these are pretty much luxuries back home, but then again, our groves are usually nowhere near this large or produce this much.”
“A lot of the animals love eating them too, so we have to get to them fast or there would not be any left for the day,” explained the old goblin with an understanding nod on what Aideen was getting at. “Probably why so many of these grow every day, since not many actually get to grow up at all, and instead end up getting eaten one way or another.”