Stagger-Vetch
Stagger-vetch is the herder’s enemy of the Windscar. It comes up among the thin grass of the shelves of the High Scars and on the rim slopes of the Rimward Basins, thickest after a wet season, and a beast that grazes it goes mad on its feet: it walks in circles, stumbles, and falls. Orc herders burn it out in wet years and argue over it in their disputes.
Appearance
It is a low, sprawling plant, a hand to a shin high, of many grey-green, hairy stems spreading from a deep root. Each leaf is a feather of small paired leaflets, silvery with fine hair. In spring after rain it carries short spikes of small pea-flowers, purple, blue-violet, or cream, and then puffed, papery pods that rattle with seed when dry. In the grass it looks like any small vetch, and that is the danger. It has a faint, rank smell when crushed.
Habitat and Range
It grows on the dry, stony ground of the shelves and rim slopes, along wash edges, and around the camping grounds where the soil has been disturbed. It springs up after a wet season and dies back in drought, so it is worst in exactly the years when herds spread out across the shelves.
Behaviour and Temperament
Its roots go very deep and it survives years of drought as a root. After rain it comes up fast, ahead of the grass, and is the first green on the shelves, which draws the herds to it.
Life Cycle
A long-lived root sends up new stems after every good rain, flowers, and seeds within weeks. Seeds lie in the stony soil for many years.
Uses and Dangers
Its harm is slow and certain. A herd beast that eats a little of it over weeks comes to want it, seeks it out, and grows dull, thin, and wild-eyed; then it staggers, walks in circles, rears at nothing, falls, and does not rise. A beast that has once begun seldom recovers. Herders know the plant and keep stock off ground thick with it, pull it by hand around camping rings, and burn whole slopes in a wet year before the herds come up. A beast that dies of it is a loss counted in the herd and argued over: a kindred whose herd was grazed on poisoned ground by another’s escort, or on a pasture claimed to be clean, wants beasts in answer, from a route moot if it can get them and by raid if it cannot, and the dead beast is entered in its reckoning.
Its seeds are not eaten. It has no known use.
Lore and Belief
Orcs say stagger-vetch grows where a warning was not given, and a slope thick with it is sometimes named after a guide who failed there. Some herders hold that a beast that has eaten it sees the dead walking with the herd, which is why it rears. Children are taught to know it by its hair and its rattling pods before they are trusted with a flock.
Raiders are said to drive a rival’s herd onto a vetch slope before a fight, so that the beasts bolt and scatter the camp.