"I've been told of your plans to dissent." Said the chief, taking as I settled onto a cushion inside his rent. Reaching out, he poured me a cup of thick white liquor, a fermented milk beverage with enough strength to rival whiskey.
"I've decided to settle," I said, taking a sip of the warm liquor. It was sweet, but the bite of alcohol was present underneath.
"Settle? And give up your freedom?" Asked the chief.
"If I desire it again, I'll return." I said.
The chief sat there a long time, pensive.
"It is easier to sit than stand," he said, "and hard to stand once you've sat. But only the standing man can act."
"I'll be fine, father. I promise." I said, and downed the rest of my drink. It had settled, the sweet colloidal bits floating to the bottom beyond the reach of my tongue, and now tasted only bitter.
I left the next day, or rather I stayed behind. The tribe moved forward, wandering, on the run. But I built a farm in a nearby village, and tended crops, and found a wife.
And as the years passed, I had children. And my thoughts turned once again to wandering, to the life in which I was raised. I longed for new lands, and the sweetness of fresh wind on my face.
"But the crops!" Exclaimed my wife when I proposed we find my old tribe, "who will care for them? They will die without a hand to tend them."
"We will have no need for them, and the land will return to as it was before." I said.
"But your work will become nothing. And the animals? Do you forget the harvests we save to buy the new cow?"
I paused. We had gone hungry many nights that winter to afford the cow.
"The cow will be here when we get back," I said.
"It might. Or we may not return. And what of the children? Do you expect them, them and I, to adapt to this life."
I sighed, and looked the the window, where I knew my tribe wandered in the distance. And I knew why they wandered, why they always moved.
It was stopping they feared. Stopping forever.
Settling like the liquor in my glass, until the sweetness of life can no longer be tasted.