Vignette: Big Stump
Long ago, there was a giant named Big Stump. He would find a mostly dead tree, grasp the top and kick it apart near the middle, then pound the jagged top flat with a rock until he had a nice sittin' stump.
One day, another giant saw him do it, and thought it was a fascinating idea. They got to talking, and it turned out Big Stump had lots of cool ideas, just not much initiative to get them going.
Take armor cats, for example. Big Stump had seen an armor cat drop down on a big deer and kill it dead in seconds. It took a giant a whole day of throwing pebbles before nailing on of those deer. Big Stump was pretty sure that if you tied a long rope to the armor cat, and carried it around until you saw a deer, then kind of gently tossed the armor cat near the deer... you'd have a meal by noon. You'd have to yank the cat back, of course, and you'd have to hunt two deer, to feed the armor cat, but with so little effort involved, what giant would mind hunting two deer?
The only problem was getting the rope, and the armor cat. Big Stump wasn't real motivated to go to all that effort just yet.
Big Stump's BIG idea, though, was war. He'd seen little orcs fighting each other all the time, and they weren't very good at it. They'd run at each other, hollering and banging on their drums, and then they'd throw little prickly things at each other, and then some of them would die and the rest would run away.
Big Stump figured, orcs made pretty good beer mash, hunted better'n giants, and were pretty smart... they just couldn't fight worth a damn. So maybe a trade could be arranged.
The other giant thought about this some, wrapping his mind around Big Stump's convuluted trade agreement, then solemnly nodded. It sounded like a pretty good idea, as long as they weren't fighting each other.
Big Stump had thought of that, too. If two giants were working for orcs on both sides of a fight, they wouldn't target each other. It would be a gentle giant's agreement.
With a friend to help him on this new idea, Big Stump finally got motivated. He began looking for other giants, explaining to them his vision, and talking to orcs (the ones who didn't flee immediately) and making trade agreements. He learned a lot in that first year, like how to dodge boulders until he got in range to talk.
Now, a few dozen years later, Big Stump was getting on in years, and it was mostly his sons, cattle-fed muscleheads (he was so proud), who carried on war making for orcs. For the most part, Big Stump was pretty happy with life. Sure, a giant occasionally got killed by a swarm of orcs mad about some relatives' death, but giants were used to that anyway. It happened whether there was war or not, and this way, there was a lot more food and sittin' on stumps to go around.
Not that he sat on stumps anymore. A dragon had explained to him, about twenty years ago, that mountainsides were just as kind to the tush, and that giants weren't big enough to fight with dragons, either. But that was another story.
Today, Big Stump had a problem. A lot of orcs were moving west, and starting to hire giants to go with them. Word had trickled back, though, because giants were getting killed with alarming regularity. There was a valley, a very nice valley to hear orcs talk about it, that everyone wanted, but someone already had. And that someone was kicking everyone else's tush into powder, giants included.
Big Stump had sent a pair of his best stone slingers with the armor cat orcs when they'd declared that they were going to go take that valley, tail-kicking or not, to test the waters and see how well they did. Now his best pair were dead, and the armor cat orcs were kicking anyone's tail that talked about it... which meant it went badly.
Big Stump was going to have to think about that, and decide what to do. And that meant no sittin', for a while.
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