41 The Plan

After bathing with chimeg and making sure she is fully satisfied i left for tulga's hut. Today we are supposed to join together with the other six people who have gifts that will help in eradicating Zukr. The Ilphyr orchard surrounds the village in a semicircular fashion. It starts in the east side of the village and grows all the way to the west.

The entire Ilphyr orchard is divided into seven sections and we are supposed to start today from the section in the east and work all the way to the west.The eight of us will work in a single section together and scour for every zukr infested tree. Once we have melted, cutted, crushed or in my case sent the Zukr vines to oblivion we can move to the next section.

The Zukr vines once cut down will take around 50 to 60 days to grow to its full length again. The villagers used this period to make sure they do a full circuit of all the sections in the orchard and cut down the vines before coming back to repeat it from the first section.

To always reach the zukr vines before they mature and to finish a full circuit of the orchard before going back we will have to scour all the trees in a section in 7 days.It is a tight timeframe to do that with 8 of us.

In the meantime the rest of the villagers will split and go into every section of the orchard and check if there are any Zukr vines that are dangerously close to smothering the trees and inform us.

They will also pick any lhasa, tree roots, flowers or leaves they could get their hands on. I thought it is better for us to send people first into the orchard to find every tree with dangerous zukr vines in all the sections and people in our group can split and go to every tree one by one and kill the zukrs before continuing the same thing again and again.

When i mentioned this to tulga she said that the villagers had tried this long past but in the middle of yosdu large portion of the orchard will have big zukr growth and they didn't have enough people with gift to send them to every one of the trees.There were stories in the village that a large portion of the orchard was lost to the zukr's that period.To make matters worse the time that zukr vines take to mature become shorter every bloom. So, it has become even more dangerous to try that method.

She also said that its difficult splitting our group and sending them to different sections as well as some of them can't kill Zukr vine by themselves and need somebody else working in conjunction with them.So the current plan is the best the village has.

I also asked her if the village has lost any trees to the zukr the previous bloom. She said the village only lost around 4 or 5 trees and it is the lowest amount the villagers know of losing during yosdu.

One good thing is Jargal, Oyuun and Sarnai will work with the eight of us in the same section to pick Lhasa, fruits and roots in our section or in jargals case pluck the Lhasa from the tree I grew.