Keep watch and defend the settlement

Without an agreed answer to an injury or a killing, the answer is revenge, and revenge is answered. Blood feuds of this kind have run for generations wherever there was no court. Settle the rule by the group's decision rule before anyone is hurt:

• Who may use force: only to stop an attack in progress, or a person the group has named for the task.
• How much: the least that stops it.
• Who judges afterwards: the group, in the open — not the injured family.
• What settles an injury or a death: compensation paid to the family, exile, or another agreed penalty, so that revenge is not the only answer.

Compensation in place of revenge is among the oldest written law — Anglo-Saxon wergild, the Irish éraic, the diya of Islamic law — and later becomes the court.

Defence is time: an intruder who is seen and delayed is rarely a danger for long.

• The water, the stores, the animals at night, and the young, old and sick go in the core — the part you will actually hold. A settlement whose well is outside its fence is besieged on the first dry day.
• Clear the approaches of brush and low branches far enough that nobody reaches the edge unseen, and keep one or two ways in, each past the watch post.
• Build a perimeter you can watch: a thorn hedge — thorny branches piled and interlaced, points outward, as East African herders build against lions — a ditch and bank, or a palisade of pointed stakes set in a trench. It delays and channels; it does not stop someone determined.
• Keep it short. The length of the perimeter is the number of people it takes to watch it.

• Two awake at once, so one can raise the alarm while the other keeps watching, and neither falls asleep unnoticed.
• Shifts of 2–3 hours on a written rota that every adult takes a turn in and nobody changes without telling the next watch.
• Watch from the dark, against a wall or a tree, never beside a fire. Full night vision takes about 30 minutes to build, and one look into a flame loses it.
• Walk the perimeter at irregular times, and check the stores, the animals and the fire points.
• Hand over in person: what was seen, what was heard, what is out of place.

• Distinct signals — horn, drum, bell or struck iron — with one pattern for fire, one for intruders, one to gather. Everyone learns them, children first.
• A station for every person: who carries water to a fire, who gathers the children, who goes to the animals, who goes to the gate. Write it down.
• Drill it, at night as well as by day. The first drill is chaos; the third is not.
• After every alarm, count heads at the gathering point. The missing person is the emergency.

• Guard dogs at the houses bark at strangers and at night noise — an alarm that needs no rota.
• Livestock guardian dogs protect flocks from wolves, dogs and big cats. They are raised with the animals from about 8–16 weeks old, so they bond to the sheep or goats rather than to people, and they live with them. They do not herd; they stay, and drive predators off.
• Two or more guardian dogs for a flock in predator country; one dog alone can be overwhelmed.
• Rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms start. Wash any dog bite at once with soap and running water for 15 minutes, and vaccinate dogs where the vaccine exists.

Fire is how raiders drive people out, and how a settlement burns with no raider at all.

• Space thatched and timber buildings so one cannot light the next — see fire breaks.
• Water and beaters at every cluster of houses: filled barrels or pots, and wet sacks or green branches on poles for grass fire.
• No open fire left unwatched, and a fire check on the last round of the night watch.
• Stores split between at least two buildings, apart from each other.

The best-defended settlement is one nobody has reason to attack.

• Agree and mark boundaries with neighbours — see boundary and tenure. Most fights between groups are over land, water or animals.
• Trade regularly. A neighbour you exchange salt, tools or seed with loses by raiding you.
• A neutral meeting place and a mediator both sides accept, for disputes between groups.
• Answer a theft with a claim, not a raid: name the loss, ask for its return or compensation, and settle it as you would within the group.

• A refuge inside the core — the strongest building, with water and a day's food — where the children, the old and the sick go first.
• A retreat plan for when holding is not possible: flood, fire, or a threat too large. A meeting point away from the settlement, the route to it, and what each household carries.
• The seed and the record go first. Houses can be rebuilt; the seed stock and the written record are the next start.
• Count heads at the meeting point, as in the drill.