
Bosk
The Wagon Peoples grow no food, nor do they have manufacturing as we know it. They are herders, and, it is said, killers. They eat nothing that has touched the dirt. They live on the milk and meat of the bosk. They are among the proudest of the peoples of Gor, regarding the dwellers of the cities of Gor as vermin in holes, cowards who must fly behind walls, wretches who fear to live beneath the broad sky, who dare not dispute with them in the open, windswept plains of their world.
"The bosk, without which the Wagon Peoples could not live, is an oxlike
creature. It is a huge, shambling animal with a thick, humped neck and long,
shaggy hair. It has a wide head and tiny red eyes, a temper to match that of
a sleen, and two long, wicked horns that reach out from its head and suddenly
curve forward to terminate in fearful points. Some of these horns, on the larger
animals, measured from tip to tip, exceed the length of two spears.
"Not only does the flesh of the bosk and the milk of the cows furnish the
Wagon Peoples with food and drink, but its hides cover the domelike wagons in
which they dwell; its tanned and sewn skins cover their bodies; the leather
of its hump is used for their shields; its sinews form their thread; its bones
and horns are split and tooled into implements of a hundred sorts, from awls,
punches and spoons to drinking flagons and weapon tips; its hooves are used
for glues; its oils are used to grease their bodies against the cold. Even the
dung of the bosk finds its uses on the treeless prairies, being dried and used
for fuel. The bosk is said to be the Mother of the Wagon Peoples, and they reverence
it as such. The man who kills one foolishly is strangled in thongs or suffocated
in the hide of the animal he slew; if, for any reason, the man should kill a
bosk cow with unborn young he is staked out, alive, in the path of the herd,
and the march of the Wagon Peoples takes its way over him."
From Nomads of Gor pp. 4-5
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