Boalar
The arctic strain, with extremely heavy shaggy white-blue fur. They prefer to walk on all fours "and only on two legs when within cities and towns, so as to not be deemed as wild." They are guides across the snowy wastes, with "heightened snow vision," and can "map most any snowy terrain."
Eight feet upright and the largest of the people. A Boalar on all fours in winter coat is the heaviest thing on two legs in this class outside the Fathari, which is a sentence that only makes sense once you have watched one stand up.
Body
The back-cloak is at its heaviest here and does the same work it does everywhere: coarse, hollow, oiled at the root, throwing wet clear of the chest, except that in the far north the wet is snow and the cloak carries it in a crust that has to be knocked off. White-blue through the whole coat, hooked claws, round ears almost buried.
The snow vision is the strain's own and is the reason they are worth what they charge: they read a white ground that gives every other people nothing at all, and they map it and keep the map.
Ninety to a hundred years against a Boalden base of about a hundred and thirty is not a fault in the strain. It is the country. The Boalar live where the cold does the arithmetic, and thirty years is what the ice takes off a body that would otherwise have had them.
Country
They do not build stilted villages, because there is nothing to build them out of and nothing in the ice that climbs; they cut into snow and into the lee of rock and the den house is a chamber at the back. Their traplines are hundreds of miles long and are walked once a season, which is as much of the taboo against the unwatched set as the country will allow.
Society
A Boalar guide who has agreed a route will get a party across ground where every other people would die, and will charge for it, and will not be hurried. They keep the Two Sayings with the order reversed, since in the far north the Hunter is thanked first.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Why the Boalar live thirty to forty years less than the rest of the people
- How a line hundreds of miles long is held against the taboo on the unwatched set
- Where the snowy wastes lie, and what is on the far side of them