One hundred adult maidens was a number the South Mountain Tribe could only produce in its most bountiful years. After all, the South Mountain Tribe had declined, with a total population of barely thirty thousand.
Normally, the South Mountain Tribe's annual coming-of-age ceremony also involved inviting various large and small tribes to select maidens for marriage, just as the North Snow Tribe used to do. However, they didn't invite many, and most marriages were internal. They didn't have the North Snow Tribe's rule forbidding internal marriages.
This was why the South Mountain Tribe could barely maintain a balance between their birth and death rates, preventing a situation where they traded away their people until the tribe died out.
