Mammoth Boy
Authors: John Hart
Mammoth Boy
Mammoth Boy
John Hart
Copyright © 2012 John Hart
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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To the memory of Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola who discovered the
cave of Altamira in 1879, thereby opening the magical world of
prehistoric cave art to modern eyes.
Contents
S
mell drifts in the air, brushes on to the boy from those plants that grow only here as he crawls through them, trying not to touch their acrid leaves. To a hunter’s eyes no two plants stir alike in a breeze. This the boy knows.
Plants that thrive only here, in the shade of the overhang. Bits of white stone from the scarp overhead fleck the dark slope of soil where the plants root. He creeps onwards till he sees the cave-like hole just beneath the scarp. A scrape of bare earth shows where something climbs to its lair, then skids back down through the plants.
He watches till the sun moves behind the scarp, chilling the air, and he shivers, not only from the chill. On knees and elbows he worms backwards through the plants, faster and faster until he is able to get up and run down the combe, legs working with a will of their own, through the bracken down to the tree-line and the sun-lit meadows beyond, where women are moving slowly from bush to bush, one holding an infant, another suckling her child under her short summer cape.
They espy the boy – not one of theirs – and go on with their berry-picking. One gestures at the bushes; for the stray boy, a sign that says ‘eat’.
The mothers. They know nothing of the smell, the rank weeds below the cave, his secret place.
More smells drift, home smells, soot and charred bones. These the boy often dreams of, stirs in his sleep when he does.
Good times of burning fat, suet, marrow, plenty.
The boy trots ahead of the women into another combe, wider, well-treed, with a brook running down its centre forming pools and cascades. Far up the combe looms the distant bluff that seals it off from all beyond. The boy trots on, to turn towards wisps of smoke filtering through brushy growth on a rock face.
He hoists himself to peer over the cave ledge. Only the old woman is there, by the fire. She rocks on her hunkers, mumbling, grimy and shrivelled. At his appearance she shrinks back: fear of beasts, of males, of violence on old women. But it is only the boy. She cackles, prods the fire till blue flames lick up the smoke.
Fire-crone, guardian of warmth.
“Food?”
Again she cackles, tooth stubs worn to the gums.
Old Mother, feeder of young. Her long-gone young. This boy. A young male.
She holds out a thigh-bone, broken off at one end. Meat hangs on it.
As he gnaws, sinews running through his teeth, flesh filling his mouth, she crinkles with pleasure.
“You like?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I keep for you. One day you strong hunter.” He is used to her broken speech. Unlike most of the women, she has never learnt the clan language well. She was traded from far away, from beyond the mountains – when she tells the boy, her hand flaps over and over for the many days travel to a high land where the great ice lies, even in the warm times – and from a language she has never unlearnt.
Land of herds, of plenty, of her young time.
Often she rambles back into the tongue of her girlhood. He listens, staring with wonder at the strange sounds. His mother had lulled him in her tongue too, sweeter, less rasping than fire-crone’s.
His mother, her woman-smell under the furs, unlike any other woman’s. That he remembers.
Maggots slither out of the broken end of the bone on to the rubbish-strewn floor of the cave-shelter, squirming into the debris, droplets of life for the boy to squat and catch. They taste of unripe, milky kernels. He taps the bone on a flat stone to knock more out, a whole handful.
The old woman watches, her leathery face creasing with pleasure to see him eat, the motherless boy, a no-one’s child.
She draws beasts in the dirt for him, scratching outlines with a bone pick.
“Bull?”
“Not bull.”
It is bigger even than the aurochs, glimpsed deep in woods on the low lands.
She scratches in huge ears, hints of shaggy hairs on the flanks, adds tusks, croaks the name in her own tongue. The boy repeats it, with mounting excitement.
On the flank now she draws the shape of a heart, colours it with pinches of reddish ash from her fire, makes spear-casting gestures for the boy to mimic. An urge grips him to dance round the sketch, stabbing at the heart, in the high-stepping dance of men before a hunt. She chants him on, a hoarse rhythm, clapping in time.
They had been alone in the shelter, under the escarpment, that day. A good day. Old Mother, succour of waifs, her cackle of pleasure. Her old-woman reek.
Mammurak,
she had said,
mammurak.
“Boy, what are you doing?”
He fled, down the slope, stones pelting past as he ducked and wove.
Blows. An old woman’s wails. Men, the beaters, punishers, strong hunters, stealthily back by the fireside in their strength, thighs gory, arms and arm-hairs clammy from the gralloch and the huntside feast of kidney fat and offal. They exulted. Together they had overcome the bull, the solitary of the deep woods. Their kill made them one being, limbs moving in unison, a single tireless file, as tireless as the bull hunted down, hewn into cuts and borne to the shelter for the feasting.
Beyond the firelight, round the shelter walls, huddled the women, children clutching tresses, holding on to fur tatters, groping to suckle. Tonight there would be meat for all, bones to gnaw, whole collops even from the hissing and sizzling in fire-crone’s hearth. Delicious smells filled the air, well-being lulled the hunters sprawled round the fire, the seven sires, their clouts cast aside in the warmth.
When he judges the hunters have gorged themselves into a drowse, or disappeared beyond the firelight with a woman, the boy creeps back, stomach twitching at the roast smells.
“Boy.”
He flattens himself, the small threatened animal.
“Boy. Here!” It is Blueface, so called from a birthmark across his jowls. He is not the worst. The boy senses this summons means no harm.
“Boy, what were you doing?
“Dancing.”
“Dancing what?”
“Dancing
mammurak.”
“What, dancing a what?”
“A
mammurak.”
The boy sees the old woman looking up at him from her grovel amid the ashes at the word, her word.
“Bah.”
Her girlhood, the land over the hills, land of herds and plenty. No maid had fetched more spear-points, antlers engraved with tiny deer entwined, the does of the women-spirits, than she at the great meet of the tribes that year.
This the boy would remember.
Remember the mammoths. Her. She who had known his mother before her death, who knew his mother had called him Urrell.
He waited till it was safe to crawl in and sidle past the hunters sprawling glutted with meat from their kill. Scraps abounded. Gnawn bones, crackling, half-eaten lumps of meat lay in the rubbish of the shelter floor, food galore for a waif. No-one bothered him. The women had ceased bickering over their share of the feast and nursed infants, groomed one another, nipped lice, rubbed berry juices on their faces and breasts. Newest among them, barely older than himself, a girl was streaking dye in bars across her cheeks; berries threaded her hair, a foreign custom. Under her loose cape the boy glimpsed young breasts, rounder, paler than other women’s.
This would be fire-crone’s last year. The men had spoken. When the time to trek came, as the cold began, she would stay by her hearth. Another would carry the fire-log. Food would be left for her. By next spring, the shelter floor would have been picked clean. Only the black patch of charcoal and ashes would be there, ready. Thus it had always been.
The boy knew. She knew.
That summer the boy wandered further, stayed away longer, unheeded. He knapped his own flints, fire-hardened his own spears, and practised with a cast-off spear-thrower as he had seen hunters do. His strength was not enough yet to hurl a full-sized javelin. The old woman watched him whenever they were alone, pleasure creasing her wizened face. When sinews parted she helped him twine new ones. One day she reached under her rags and pulled a kind of necklace, black with age, over her head. It was threaded in a sort of string, something unknown to the boy who knew only plaited thongs. Perhaps it was a keepsake from her girlhood, or a trade swap. The cord was unbreakable, a true material for binding. The boy’s surprise over its strength gratified the old woman.
“Where from?”
“From plant.” She uttered a name that meant nothing to him.
As she had drawn the mammoth for him, he said, “Draw for me.”
On a shoulder-blade bone she outlined in charcoal a small plant he recognised immediately.