So, ye be wantin’ me to tell ye things about the monkey boys? Why, I cannot fer the life of me figger. Them gangly dancin’ critters cain’t even hold their liquor – not like us dwarves. They be loud, uncouth, ambitious and arrogant. But I’ll tell ye as best as my elders have told me.
Long have we dwarves lived in these mountains. We’d finally come to a cease-fire with the Elves. Didn’t like ‘em, still don’t too much, but we decided fightin’ with ‘em just wasn’t gettin’ either of us anywhere. Our war axes were all stashed away and we’d gotten back to the business we love most, digging through the rocks and building our cities of pure solid rock.
Don’t exactly know where they came from, but if ye’d be askin’ me, I’d say they were offshoots of troops of great apes we’ve seen in the jungles. Great hairy fat elves, they be, slower and uglier than any other two legged critters that ever existed, and weaker than most. I’ll give them their deserves, though, they learn quicker than anyone else. And their human women, have attracted more than one Dwarf and Elf.
So, these clumsy creatures gathered in the meadows fightin’ off sharp fanged beasts with pointy sticks. They shivered together in shelters that weren’t nothing more than hides draped over other sticks. Twas our womenfolk that gave them a limb up, else they woulda gone extinct on their own. I think the women saw them as children who needed guidance. We men objected to interfering, but if ye’d ever met a Dwarven wife, ye’d know how … “insistant” they can be. Dwarven men know better than go directly agin Dwarven womenfolk. It just ain’t possible.
The first thing the womenkind did was to take some fire and food to the humans. It lasted as long as the fire held out. We told the womenfolk how silly they were to try, and they apologised for it, and to our chagrin, they promptly took the humans flint and steel and SHOWED the humans how to make the fire. Don’t ye know it took them 15 minutes to learn it, and they gleefully went about burning just about everything they could light up.
Then the womenkind ‘gently suggested’ we menfolk get involved. So, we grumbled our way to building the humans a real firepit and a real longhouse. Before we were done, those monkeyboys were climbing the poles and actually helping the constructin’. With fire and their pointy sticks, they were able to establish a good colony, and we begged the womenfolk to back off.
One thing about those humans is they have very nimble hands. The next time Dwarves came to check on them, they had learned to build their own little houses with thatching on the roofs. They had woven cloth and made some nice clothes. They had made baskets for all their surplus, some so finely made they could hold water. They had scratched holes in the ground with their pointy sticks to plant crops and had excesses of grain.
We had coincidentally suffered a shortage of food, so we devised a plan to trade with the humans (another thing we Dwarves love to do). We first offered them stout drink to soften ‘em up, and it worked. We traded them our worn out knives and axes, rusty shovels and picks for their fat corn and wheat. But then, wouldn’t ye know they learned brewing themselves! They cain’t brew like a Dwarf, but some of their drink is purely passable.
Every time Dwarves came up with a new thing to trade to the Humans, they learned how to make it themselves. First the basics, then the brewing, then blacksmithing. We suspect that the Elves got involved too and that’s where the Humans learnt weaving, clothmaking and growing stuff. It has always been a tradition between Dwarves and Humans to come up with something new they can’t do themselves. As far as I know, now, it’s their taste for metal ore, gold and gems that we can dig up and they can’t, that keep us trading today.
Yep, them monkeyboys learn fast. They still cain’t dance or drink, but they can fight. They have their share of good ‘n bad people, but they aren’t afraid of trading ’cause they might get took. They be friendly enough. They be useful allies, but I wouldn’t want to live with ‘em.
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