Salvage-man
The salvage-men, or savages, are an enigmatic group of people inhabiting all continents of Nuclearth. Living apart from conventionally civilized society, the salvage-men make little or no use of preapocalyptic materials, living off the land and the products of their own manufacture. Though often thought of as primitive or regressive, in fact the salvage-men often have very sophisticated cultures, albeit cultures quite different from those of the typical towns, and have well developed means of producing what they need from the means at hand.
Etymology
The name of the salvage-men is a bit deceptive, since they are about the only people except the ferals who do not make extensive use of items and materials salvaged from preapocalyptic cities. Some have justified the name by claiming that it refers to their salvaging their needs from nature, but that's obviously a stretch—the word "salvage" refers to the reuse of damaged or abandoned materials, and natural resources don't seem to qualify. In fact, the origin of the name has nothing at all to do with salvaging, in that sense, but comes from a cognate of the word "savage". The salvage-men got their name from a member of the Feudal fraternity called Nicolais of York, after an archaic term for the nude or leaf-clad wildmen of Renaissance pageant and iconography. The name spread even among those ignorant of its origin, and seems to have stuck.
Culture
The salvage-men are made up of many different communities, which outsiders usually refer to as "tribes". The tribes show huge diversity in culture, language, and even in ethnicity, though some do seem to be related. Two salvage-man tribes can be so different as to suggest an entirely different origin. In general, the only thing all salvage-men have in common, other than their rejection of preapocalyptic goods, is the fact that they're so different from the mainstream civilizations—though they may be just as different from each other!
Salvage-men seem to speak their own languages—and despite the assumption on the part of many people not well familiar with them that there is one single salvage-man tongue, it is indeed languages; two salvage-men tribes may speak very different languages that may or may not be mutually comprehensible. Nothing prevents a salvage-man from learning another language in addition to his native tribal language, however, and some salvage-men do speak English or other "civilized" tongues, though often with a noticeable accent. The salvage-man languages do not seem to be pidgins of the other local languages, or in fact to bear them any relation at all; they are separate languages unconnected to the language of the towns, or even necessarily to each other. One of the few things that is more or less constant among salvage-man tribes is the nature of their names. Salvage-men are given descriptive names after animals or other natural features, which may change over time.
The attitudes of salvage-men toward outsiders vary as much as everything else about them. Some salvage-man tribes are very friendly with townspeople, even if they have no interest in sharing their lifestyle, while others want nothing more than to be left alone, and still others are implacably hostile, staging repeated attacks on nearby cities for no readily obvious reason. Nor are all salvage-men necessarily friendly with each other; relations between tribes can be cordial, strained, or starkly antagonistic.
Of course, salvage-men are as free-willed as any other people, and rarely some of them do leave their home tribes to join other tribes, or even to abandon the ways of the salvage-men entirely and follow the ways of the predominant culture. The reverse also happens, though even less frequently; salvage-men have been known to adopt into their tribe outsiders who have helped them out greatly or impressed them in some other way. They can even, to some degree, be tolerant of such adopted outsiders still using some preapocalyptic items, perhaps reasoning that it will take them time to unlearn old habits.
Salvage-men are sometimes confused with ferals and with hillmen, but they are distinct groups with very different lifestyles and, apparently, very different origins.
Industry
Though they refuse to avail themselves of the products of postapocalyptic technology, salvage-men do have more than adequate manufacturing abilities of their own. Salvage-men may not use guns, but they can make very effective bows, slings, or atlatls. They are perfectly capable of manufacturing tools of stone or bone which, while not the equal of the best of the preapocalyptic remainders, are certainly better than anything that the average modern "civilized" townsperson could create.
Salvage-men do not use preapocalyptic fabrics and clothing, any more than other preapocalyptic materials. Some tribes, and some individuals within other tribes, do not bother with clothing at all, but others produce their own clothing out of skins, woven fibers, or various plant parts. (It seems to be a tribe who dressed in loose tunics made of leafy plants that brought to Nicolais's mind the Renaissance salvage-man.) In addition to or instead of clothing, some tribes use other adornments such as body paint or jewelry made of shells or other materials.
In some aspects, the salvage-men's ability to live off the land seems to outsiders little short of miraculous. Salvage-men somehow thrive even in arid deserts where water seems impossible to come by, and in frigid wastes where it seems they should all be freezing to death. Somehow, the salvage-men manage to get by in such inhospitable terrains where any other men would have great trouble surviving.
Structures
The one exception to the salvage-men's universal eschewal of preapocalyptic remnants is in the use some tribes make of the old ruins for dwelling places. Even then, they use nothing else from the ruins except the shells of the buildings themselves, but the fact that they are willing to use those structures as shelters seems at odds with their usual practices. There have been a number of suggestions proposed as to why the salvage-men seem happy to take advantage of the ruins of preapocalyptic buildings while avoiding use of anything else of preapocalyptic manufacture, but in the end no one really knows.
The salvage-men who live in the preapocalyptic ruins, while an interesting anomaly, are, however, the exception. Most salvage-men make their own buildings out of whatever resources are at hand. Adobe brick, plaited leaves, fitted stone, and interlocked wood are among the most popular materials for salvage-man structures. The layouts and arrangements of those structures vary as much as most other aspects of salvage-man culture.
Magic
It is widely believed—though seldom by the scholarly—that the salvage-men are possessed of some sort of mystic power, which allows them to produce magical effects including curses, summonings of spirits, and enchantment of various kinds of talismans. It's sometimes claimed that these magics give the true explanation for how the salvage-men are able to survive in seemingly unlivable environments; it's not just a matter of living off the land, but of augmenting their natural resources with magical effects. Some whisper that the salvage-men's powers extend to actually raising the dead—and a few desperate people have sought their aid to bring back loved ones. Many scholars scoff at the idea of the salvage-men's possessing magical powers, but it's difficult to dismiss the possibility completely, given that there's so much else about the salvage-men that remains unexplained—and especially given all the other things about Nuclearth that seem scientifically problematic.
It is occasionally proposed that the so-called magic of the salvage-men is really only a development of the psionics that some mutants seem to possess, but most people who believe in the magic of the salvage-men see it as a completely distinct force from psionics. Besides, not everyone believes in psionics, either.
Origins
The origins of the salvage-men remain mysterious. The two most obvious explanations for their existence is that either they are splinter groups who split off from civilized society, or a holdover from primitive groups that existed before or just after the nuclear war. Neither resolution, however, is particularly satisfying. The first leaves too much unaccounted for; how and why would the splinter groups develop their own languages so quickly, and in such abundance, and how in the brief time since the war would they have established such detailed customs and cultures? How could they spread across the Earth with their limited technology? Or, if they are supposed to have arisen independently all over the Earth, this seems equally unlikely for other reasons.
But the second possibility is little better, since there are no known groups around before the war that resemble the salvage-men that closely—and if they're supposed to have arisen from groups that fell to primitivism in the war's immediate aftermath, that raises the same questions as the splinter-group explanation. The salvage-men are frequently assumed to be descended from Native Americans, Australian aborigines, and/or similar "primitive" groups, but there's little good reason to think this is the case. There may be some superficial similarities between the lifestyles of the salvage-men and some Native American, aboriginal, or other indigenous peoples, but they are not deep enough to suggest any real links—besides, there were very few, if any, such native groups that still held fully to their old customs by the time of the apocalypse. The only possible evidence that has been found to support this is some apparent tenuous parallels some scholars claim to have discovered between certain languages of the salvage-men and certain indigenous languages, but these supposed parallels are very far from being definitive enough to close the matter, and do nothing to explain away the many other difficulties in the theory.