| The bosk is the most important creature to the Wagon People, a revered animal that is often said to be the Mother of the Wagon Peoples. They probably could not exist without it, at least not without radical changes to their entire way of life. The bosk is a huge, ox-like animal, with a vicious temper to match that of a sleen. It is a shaggy beast with a thick, humped neck. It has a wide head and tiny red eyes. It also possesses two long, horns that reach out from its head and suddenly curve forward to terminate in deadly points. Some of these horns, measured from tip to tip, exceed the length of two spears. There are fifteen varieties of bosk including the brown bosk, red bosk, black bosk, snow bosk and milk bosk. The books do not name all fifteen varieties. The bosk is indigenous to the plains near Turia though it is also commonly bred and raised by people all over Gor.
When a tribe is traveling as a group, the bosk herds form the vanguard, the front line, and rampart, a barricade, for the wagons. A number of outriders though will generally scout out the area in front of the herds.
"The wagons are said to be countless, the animals without number." (Nomads, p.21)
Though it may seem that way to someone watching the huge bosk herds and wagons pass, both assertions are incorrect though there are large numbers of both.
"Then for the first time, against the horizon, a jagged line, humped and rolling like thundering waters, seemed to rise alive from the prairie, vast, extensive, a huge arc, churning and pounding from one corner of the sky to the other, the herds of the Wagon Peoples, encircling, raising dust into the sky like fire, like hoofed glaciers of fur and horn moving in shaggy floods across the grass, toward me." (Nomads, p.10)
Each large herd is comprised of several smaller herds, watched over by their own riders.
Besides creating a huge cloud of dust, the approach of the herds also brings its own distinctive odor, a musky, pervasive and pungent scent combined with the smell of grass, dirt, dung, urine and sweat. Yet Tarl spoke eloquently about this odor.
"The magnificent vitality of that smell, so offensive to some, astonished and thrilled me; it spoke to me of the insurgence and the swell of life itself, ebullient, raw, overflowing, unconquerable, primitive, shuffling, smelling, basic, animal, stamping, snorting, moving, an avalanche of tissue and blood and splendor, a glorious, insistent, invincible cataract of breathing and walking and seeing and feeling on the sweet, flowing, windswept mothering earth. And it was in that instant that I sensed what the bosk might mean to the Wagon Peoples." (Nomads, p.22)
The importance of the bosk to the survival of the tribes cannot be underestimated. The tribes use basically every part of the bosk, wasting nothing of any use. And these uses fulfill so many functions for the tribes. Without the bosk, there would be many needs of the tribes that would need to be addressed in other ways.
"Not only does the flesh of the bosk and the milk of its 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 hoofs 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." (Nomads, p.5)
A terrible crime among the tribes is the wrongful killing of a bosk. If a person foolishly kills a bosk, then his punishment is to be either strangled to death by a leather thong or to be suffocated in the hide of the animal he killed. The key is obviously the definition of "foolishly" though it is not defined within the books. Now, if a person kills, for any reason at all, a bosk cow with unborn young then the punishment is even worse. The offender is staked out on the prairie, alive, in the path of the herd so that he will be trampled to death. In this case, even if the killing was inadvertent, an accident, you will still be punished. |