Ok, I've finished reading those chapters in the manual. The part about nodes is still kind of mystifying, especially how to connect them to get what I want, but I'm trying to digest it.

My random question of the moment is:

Is the "grey map" (one of the nodes on the material settings for the hair that I posted above) supposed to be a bump map? I noticed it's connected to "bump." (Sorry if that's really obvious.)

I'm playing around with settings on the hair to see what happens. I finally succeeded in turning it yellow, but at the moment it's too yellow, so I'm working on making it more natural-looking.