Once they were finished with breakfast and Karl's inventory was loaded with as much stuff as he could possibly hold, which appeared to be a normal situation for the locals when they headed out on an extended trip, he prepared to get on his way.
He would be headed away from the road, following the directions from the quest reward. The fact that there were supposed to be no villages at all for the entire northern region of the nation next to them seemed very odd to Karl.
Perhaps they meant no Elven or Human villages, but the complete absence just didn't seem like the sort of thing that would normally happen.
There wasn't anything that Karl could do about that, though. The supposedly perfect beast was in that direction, and he wasn't about to pass that up.