---

⬅ Rawhide

---

---

Introduction

---

He Who Uses Rawhide Well, more commonly known as Rawhide, is a Apsáalooke hunter and sharpshooter who lives alone in a cabin at the edge of the woods. Despite appearing intimidating, he is polite and reserved, rarely seeking attention or company. Most of his days are spent hunting, maintaining his homestead, or working quietly with his hands. He has a deep fascination for firearms and understands their mechanics particularly well. During his quieter hours, he often carves small wooden figures or sketches the landscapes and animals around him. He carries the serenity of someone who's already long buried what once mattered, and the readiness of someone who might have to again.

---

History

---

Rawhide was born in the winter of 1852 into a Apsáalooke band in northern Wyoming. From a young age he showed strong practical skills, crafting and repairing tools, tack, and equipment, which earned him his name. Quiet and distant, he developed a reputation as a weary but responsible marksman, and began to ride with small hunting parties by fourteen. Despite his reliability, he struggled with authority, ignoring orders he considered foolish or unsafe and was often scolded for his stubbornness.

As a boy he undertook a vision quest, expected to return with spiritual guidance or purpose. He endured the fast and isolation but received no vision, leaving him worried that he lacked the strength for proper spiritual discipline.

Rawhide frequently clashed with one particular leader he viewed as reckless; his own father. Before a planned raid against the Lakota, he openly criticized the strategy but was dismissed once again. Out of spite, he attempted to dishonour his father by misleading both sides during a trade meeting between the tribes. Threatened by the Lakota intermediaries, he revealed far more than intended and warned them of the raid. The attack failed disastrously, and suspicion quickly fell on him. Though others spoke the accusation, his father's silence confirmed it. Shamed and condemned as a traitor, Rawhide left his band at sixteen.

During his many years wandering the plains alone, many odd things happened to him: he was held at gunpoint after being mistaken for a horse thief, he was robbed of his horse and supplies while he slept, and he was left ill and delirious for several weeks after drinking bad water, and at some point even contemplated suicide by firearm before moving on from the thought. Lastly, he was asked by a traveling photographer to take his portrait. He never saw the photograph and does not know if it still exists.

In 1874 he encountered a wounded soldier, Corporal Winters, separated from his unit. Despite his hesitation at the sight of the uniform, Rawhide helped treat his wounds and stayed with him until he could move again. Before parting, Winters suggested Rawhide join the army as a scout. With nowhere else to go, Rawhide tentatively accepted.

At the fort, Winters introduced him to the officers, who questioned his tracking and riding abilities before assigning him to ride with other Crow scouts. He learned enough English to follow orders but remained reserved. During the Great Sioux War he was shot from his horse and nearly scalped when mistaken for dead, leaving a scar across his forehead. Though respected as a skilled sharpshooter, he refused leadership roles, saying he could not be trusted to guide others. He was discharged after two years and briefly spoke with Winters once more before leaving.

After wandering north, Rawhide came upon a remote cabin inhabited by an elderly woman named Hatchet. He offered to hunt, chop wood, and haul water in exchange for food, and she allowed him to stay. Over time they shared the homestead quietly: she taught him to read and write, while he handled the physical work. Already suffering from Bright's disease when he arrived, her health slowly declined. Rawhide remained with her until she died one autumn. He buried her on a nearby hillside and continued living in the cabin afterward.

---

Personality

---

Rawhide has never fully settled what to make of his exile. He did not want men to die, but he knows that deep down he had already wanted to leave. He does not grieve his people so much as he grieves the feeling of belonging somewhere, a thing he has not found since and is not sure he will. He has seen what it means to be responsible for others and has since not trusted himself with it out of a fear of what it would cost him if he failed. He has lived alone long enough to have made peace with it, but in a way that anything else feels not quite right to him anymore.

He distrusts people as a rule and is quietly startled when proven wrong. Genuine kindness unsettles him more than hostility does, as hostility he knows how to meet. Praise easily flusters him, though he usually deflects compliments with a brief nod or muttered reply. He despises liars, cowards, and exploiters, yet often speaks bluntly to victims, urging them to toughen up, though he does not examine why closely enough to recognize what he is looking at.

With the few people he allows close, he does not become warm exactly. He remains distant more often than not, and his care tends to come out sideways, as a practical gesture or unsolicited advice. When the moment calls for something more direct he usually finds himself without the words for it, often landing awkwardly. He is aware of this. It does not seem to get better with practice. He has a dry, unhurried sense of humour that surfaces sometimes. His jokes are delivered so flat and plainly that it takes a moment to realise he has made one at all. He does not wait to see if they land.

Rawhide is aware of his own strength and has never pretended otherwise. What troubles him about violence is not the act itself but what happens to him inside it. The rush of violence leaves him ashamed, yet he cannot deny that it makes him feel vividly alive.

Deep water terrifies him as he never learned to swim, and seeing his own reflection distresses him enough that he avoids mirrors and still water.

There was a period during his wandering years when he grew very tired; of the feeling that he was surviving without living, that his continued existence served no purpose he could name. Those thoughts have quieted since, but they have not entirely left. What he wants, if he allows himself to want anything, is to belong somewhere and to be needed and loved by someone. He does not believe this is available to him, and is not certain he would know how to hold it even if it were.

---

Trivia

---

---

Gallery

---