Salt Weed from the Frozen Wastes

News came to the more populated villages and towns quickly when sensational broadsheets were posted all around detailing Bassingfinch's find in the Frozen Wastes.   It has only been discovered in the past decade or so that the Frozen Wastes The Frozen Wastes are not barren and sterile. Inhospitable, yes, but explorer Rory Bassinfinch lead the exploration team that discovered that the Waste Lands host a strange plant. He reported his findings after spending months scouring the desolate icy wastes. The explorers wanted to try to use the new drill technology used in the south to try to get core samples from the ice region. Bassingfinch had the eccentric notion that some record of the past might be found by digging deep but rather small holes and pulling the sample of the core of the drill to the surface to study and compare to the present surface of the Frozen Wastes.   Bassingfinch and his team were surprised to witness a small white furry animal drawn the noise or perhaps the shaking of the earth that their work was causing. The creature looks somewhat like a rabbit but is all white and has a longer tail. What the explorers found most intriguing was the fact that if an animal inhabited the Frozen Wastes, others might as well and they concluded that the snow rabbits as they nicknamed them must be getting food from somewhere.   For weeks the team spent time working on their core sampling as well as trying to discover what the snow rabbit lives off. By the creatures' teeth, the leading scientist on the team posited that the snow rabbit's teeth showed that it most likely survived on a plant diet. But the men hadn't seen a plant at any time on their trek to the area. Not since they left the Diamond Mountains, had they seen a living thing until the mysterious snow rabbit. Team members were fascinated by the puzzle. One day, two snow rabbits appeared at their working site and they concluded that the one rabbit wasn't some sort of outlier or 'fluke' of nature.   It  wasn't one of the scientists who discovered the plant. It was a simple cook. A dumb man, without the ability to speak but a smart and motivated lad had bet with his friends that he could solve the mystery of the snow rabbit's existence. Because he had the inability to speak, he told his friends that his sight was keener than average. Whether there is a true causal connections between his dumbness and his ability to see cannot be tested but on his second day looking, he found a tall think plant that wasn't very impressive but was a plant that lived in the Frozen Wastes.   The lad, being a cook who longed to be a great chef, tasted the plant and remarked that it had a similar taste to salt was intriguing. The plant provides both a milky liquid and chewy vegetative fleshy stem. The explorers were more excited by watching the snow rabbit eat the strange meal than they were at discovering that the earth below the ice and snow was frozen though it was dirt. The explorers all made sketches of the small mammal as well as many of the plants.   The lead scientist on the tear brought a sample of the salt weed back to the central north university to be preserved and studied. Though Bassinfinch was slightly irritated that reporters and citizens weren't asking him about his work with the cores and were much more interested in the rabbits and their habitat but he was a man of honor and no one hearing him answer numerous questions about the rabbit and the plant daunted him. Hze intertwined the news of the cores in with the lore of the white rabbit.