Wheeling Gull Isle i am clawing at porcelain

a wild naturalist thread appears! :0

A satisfied breath expels itself from Witchdoctor’s lips as he studies his morbid collection: skulls and spines of small rodents, a collection of smaller, ritualistic bones in a small bird nest he’d snatched off the ground after dumping the eggs out after the nest had presumably fallen from a tree. The fate or lack thereof of birds was hardly his concern and certainly not his problem. He scoops the large fan leaf acting as a package around the lavender hyssop he’s collected from the mainland — taking advantage of what’s left of the sandbar — into his mouth and walks three steps before he deposits it in the empty poison cache. A giddy sense of excitement fills him as he tucks the leaf packaged flowers into the hole in the earth he’d meticulously dug and then works to re-cover it. Though in small doses it can soothe coughs and be used as an antiseptic he has gathered it for the the epileptic reactions it can induce if taken in large doses. The Witchdoctor is careful to mark the toxic cache: with a squirrel’s skull not yet picked entirely clean: bits of flesh and fur hangs from it in places. It will work nicer as a marker for the children because while it’s toxic to adults it can cause children to have seizures and convulsions.

If there is anything of him in the older children and the newborns ( when they got old enough to venture out of the den ) then they’d be smart enough to understand the warning …or better yet leave his medicinal/poison caches alone. Period. They are his and if they want to play with flowers there are plenty of harmless wildflowers for them to frolic in and munch upon; and if that wasn’t good enough than the little beasts had what was coming to them { enter assholish, supercilious shrug here }. Witchdoctor might not be able to avoid being a father to them but there was never any promise that he’d be a good father.

The voices in his head were quieted, muted, tempered by the Isle; though if he listened close enough he can hear faint whispers. He doesn’t listen. Instead, he studies his little decoration/warning and picks it up betwixt his lips before moving it to the left an inch before he takes a step back and bows his head low to study it, ensuring that it sets just right over the earth stamped down by his paws.