Authors: John Hart
“You gather. Put in water.” With effort she described to the boy how to ret fibres from the plants by steeping them in water, then twine them into cord, skills recollected from her girlhood, skills for which no words existed in the boy’s language.
With interest, almost a passionate desire to learn, the boy carried out her instructions, delighting the old woman. He waited till the hunters and the women were out foraging to bring his ill-twisted yarn to her. She showed him how to ravel it on a wimble she made for him with sticks bound together, then how to tighten the strands into an unbreakable cord. Her fingers followed movements taught them many years ago when she had learnt to braid fibres and mammoth hairs into cords and bindings for the hunters of her tribe. The boy saw her face grow young as her fingers took her back in distance and in time, tears smearing the grime of her cheeks, although she was not being beaten.
She told the boy tales of her folk, how great beasts roamed her land, some with stripes and fangs, strange horns, woolly flanks, and of huge bears that did not flee from hunters as did those of these valleys.
He knew this must be so when he found an engraving on a rockface high up the valley where birds nested. He was stealing eggs. It was the outline of a bear, faint under the lichens. He scraped it clean, excitement mounting as he revealed the top of the head, the little ears, a humped back graven to show the bear lumbering away into the past. His shoulders trembled. A quivering inside him. He placed berries in a crevice as offerings, with a perfect spearhead in red flint he had found and kept as a charm. This for the bear.
Father bear. Old bear. His secret bear.
In his search for nests – eggs and nestlings, delicious morsels – he sometimes found wild hives in clefts and looted them in a frenzy of honey-lust, an orgy for the sweetness found in nothing else, a lust which led hunters to scale cliffs and risk swirling swarms of bees that sent them to their deaths below. Bees that women clapped to their limbs to cure aches, and to their bellies to quicken with child.
Untaught, the boy learnt to follow a single bee till it led him to its hive. Often his patience ended at a cranny or hole too deep to pillage, thus he learnt the wisdom of this best of flies.
He roamed ever farther afield, nothing and no-one holding him back. He lived off the food of summer – berries, grubs, nests, nuts, fungus. He stalked does in the hope of tracing their fawns. Once he found one, lying still in the bracken, a few hours old. It fed him for several days, raw, the surplus flesh wrapped in the pelt. The kill made him feel manly, a hunter, although larger game ignored him, busy grazing, browsing, fattening ahead of the rut and winter survival. Herds might look up, shift uneasily, then settle back to eating, sensing this lone manling was no threat.
He was several days easy travel from the bear engraving when he reached the head of the valley. Here the escarpments closed in from both sides. Where they met, a long thin waterfall spattered down, little more than a snail’s trail as seen from a distance. This was the source of the brook he knew so well as it tumbled down his valley, past the cave shelter and wound down to the lowlands and the far-off sea. When he reached the foot of the fall he lay and drank, startling small fishes in the deep green water. He savoured the cool, damp air under the ferns and hanging plants of the wet rock-face.
The boy looked up at the fall. It led on and up. On impulse, he started to climb. A jumble of boulders brought down by centuries of spates blocked his way. Among and between them he squirmed, spears in one hand, bag over his shoulder, lithe as the lizards he startled but did not stop to snatch. Beyond the rockfall his way rose clearer, less impenetrable than it appeared from below, beckoning him on. The waterfall itself helped: ice and snowmelt had cut steps where the rocks were softer, forming pools from which the water spilled cascading to the next level.
Water-fowl, unused to men, scarcely heeded him; smaller birds called warnings at this intruder crossing from one side to the other in search of the easiest way up. They darted from overhanging banks where eroded roots hung, ideal places, as the boy knew, for streamside birds to sling their nests among the rootlets, beyond the reach of egg-thieves. Against his instinct he ignored them, impelled by desire to reach the top.
His climb lasted till early afternoon. He surfaced, at the hottest hour, on a scene new to him: an undulating moor. It stretched as far as he could see. Beyond, so remote as to dissolve in a haze, ran a range of mountains, from one side of the world to the other.
Fire-crone’s mountains, land of mammoths.
He set off at a trot towards them, his feet springing on the moorgrass and the ling.
As he went, the boy stunned lizards sunning themselves on stones; or spied on the flight of moorland fowl to guess where their nests lay cupped in the tussocks and heather. This way he found clutches of good-sized eggs that he ate on the spot, fresh or half-hatched, crunching them as he crunched the lizards, scarcely pausing in his onward trot.
By nightfall, the long sundown of summer, he was far into the moor, drawn towards those mountains that lured him on, ever-receding into their haze. That night he curled up in a hollow, snuggling into a patch of bracken, and slept with the immediacy of an animal, safe in this open land of wheeling hawks, moor fowl, hares and silence.
Three days he travelled, in a relentless line towards the mountains, never coming nearer, till late in the third afternoon the light changed as though after rain and the air grew transparent. His eager eyes could see snow on the summits and shoulders of the vast range, but what excited him most were the streaks of ice, huge glaciers, reaching down the valleys.
Land of ice even in the summer time. Old Mother’s girlhood homeland. She who had drawn him a mammoth.
He pressed on now. The hot weather continued. Trying to reach water in a peat pool he sank into a moss-hag and only by dint of crossing his spears on firmer tussocks and spreading his slight weight was he able to wriggle to safety over the quaking slime. Thenceforth the boy sought water in stony outcrops where sometimes small pools formed in hollows of rocks, tiny inland seas for water-boatmen to navigate and dive in fright as his face appeared above them.
On one such outcrop he chanced on a hawk’s nest and stole the nestling’s meal, a half-eaten hare, and was pursued and bombed by an enraged parent bird as he scurried away gnawing his prize.
Perhaps the fifth, perhaps the sixth day the moorland ended abruptly so that the boy found himself, soon after sunrise, high on the rim of an escarpment, higher than his home one and no longer overlooking a valley and familiar brook but unbroken forest in every direction. These trees were darker than his home ones, his mixed woodlands, for these were conifers. To right and left, as far as he could see, the scarp ran unbroken.
He sat on his hunkers in the buzz of summer insects, the sunlight slanting from his left side as he waited to know which way to go. No wish to turn back welled up. That much he knew.
Far beyond the vast forest, no nearer now than when he had set out, rose the mountains. He waited for an impulse to guide him onwards, as a grazing herd drifts one way or the other, or a beast of prey slinks this way or that, following no plan, yet ready to bolt or spring when the need arises.
The boy waited. He knew he would go on, but which way? He knew too that the summer warmth was short and the buzz of insects would be cut almost overnight as the long iceland winter covered the land. To be caught in that cold meant death. Strong hunters seldom survived a winter alone. All this the boy knew but it was not on his mind at present as his eyes focussed, alert to the slightest signs of movement, his hearing quickened to catch the least untoward sound, each helping his flared nostrils to sense what might be alive and stirring in the forest below. Out on the open moors he had felt safe; down there he would not.
He gathered his spears, his satchel holding spare flints, scraps of food, the trinkets a boy collects and keeps through his boyhood, and set off to his right.
He had gone a day and a half along the rim with no way down, and no sign of anything to tempt him down, when he saw what seemed like wisps of smoke rising from among trees below. There he settled for the night, comforted that perhaps humans existed down in the woods. He ate berries and bivouacked under briars and bracken above the spot, to be ready to spy further as soon as light broke.
When he awoke all signs of smoke had vanished like morning mist. The conifer canopy stretched away below him. He resumed his way along the cliff top, eating berries as he went, but moving cautiously, the carefree days on the open moors behind him. There was no knowing what the forest might conceal. Any tracker could be tracked. His boy’s spears would be as much defence against hunters as a fawn’s kicks against him.
Yet he felt drawn to find those people, danger or not, after so many days alone. Perhaps they knew the land of ice and mammoths.
It was a while before he found a place that led down to the forest.
The overflow from a tarn had cut a ghyll or chine down which a small beck ran. He scrambled down the incline and followed the stream till it ended at tree-top level before it tumbled over the edge into a pool below. The boy crouched, scrutinising the forest for signs of life, before daring to scale down the remaining part of the cliff. He threw his spears and satchel ahead and climbed down after them, grasping the small trees and tangle of roots that the fall of water had encouraged to grow along its margin.
Once down, his spears and pouch retrieved, he lay under the boughs of a conifer to gather his breath and to listen. There was nothing to hear. Not even the twitter of birds. He drank from the brook and backtracked in the direction of the smoke, the cliff-face now to his left. He was feeling a need for human proximity.
It was cool in the gloom of this forest, the densest he had ever seen. He travelled by instinct, trotting along the pine-needle floor, among these endless trees. There would be little to eat here, few clearings for raspberries, bilberries, little by way of recognisable fungus, and no game that he could sense.
W
henever he saw a hollow or overhang at the foot of the rockface he approached it cautiously, half-hoping to find a hearth, half-fearing he might. But no sign of human habitation appeared in any. Once he disturbed bats and several times old droppings showed that game animals huddled in these natural pens for shelter.
Spoor and signs of bigger beasts along the foot of the cliff made him redouble his alertness. Any breaks in the forest canopy, where sunlight encouraged drifts of raspberry canes and other food plants to thrive, made him especially wary. So when he came to a small clearing where he would need to cross open ground and was approaching with especial stealth, stooping under the sweeping boughs of firs, he saw something that stopped him dead: in the open, its huge head bowed till its shaggy underlip brushed the ground, stood a full-grown bison bull.
It was motionless. Urrell remained still too, under a downswept bough. A rogue bull bison was more than a grown hunter would face single-handedly, let alone a boy. He was about to draw back to make a detour through the forest when a slight movement in the thickets opposite caught his eye. For a while he saw nothing more. Then, as the brushwood stirred again he knew it was being moved by a living creature, and that the creature was a hunter stalking the bison.
With his attention now intent on the far side, Urrell saw not one but several hunters slowly closing in on their prey from behind brushwood screens. The men were invisible. Only their camouflage, as they inched forward, revealed their presence to Urrell, if not to the bison.
Urrell’s excitement rose as he watched. The bison must be wounded or exhausted, having been harried, perhaps, for days.
When they judged they were within range of their quarry, five hunters rose as one man from behind their screens and hurled their javelins at the bison. Urrell glimpsed the points of the weapons, their tips longer and sharper than those his clansmen fashioned. The movement alerted the bison, but too late to avoid the missiles which struck its flank. It bucked and snorted, shrugging its body as it strove to dislodge the spears, its small eyes alight with anger as it turned to confront its tormentors. Three javelins remained embedded. Faced by the bison the hunters withdrew with their brushwood shields, shorter stabbing javelins held ready. Urrell guessed they were enticing the beast to charge, ready to jump aside and drive their javelins deep between its ribs.
The bison appeared to guess this also, feinted a charge, then turned and galloped off down the clearing into the forest. Only then did Urrell notice that its left rear hoof was entangled in a sort of wickerwork box-trap which, for all its bucking and kicking as it fled, the beast could not shake off.
In his excitement Urrell jumped up in sympathy with the hunters – but as quickly quailed back. Too often had he seen the killer lust of hunters injuring hapless creatures that got in their way.
The men picked up their javelins and examined the points. One showed the others the broken tip of his, no doubt embedded in the bison’s side, a good hit after all.
They were clad in leather breechclouts made from pelts of smaller animals, and skin jerkins, much like Urrell’s clansmen. All wore belts hung with pouches and pokes while one, perhaps the leader, wore a baldrick, whereas Urrell’s clansmen out hunting seldom bothered with more than a pouch slung over one shoulder into which they stuffed spare scrapers, cutters and scraps of meat. These men, moreover, were streaked in ochre and white on any bare brown skin, with white zags across their faces. Urrell shivered a little at the sight.
They appeared to be in no hurry to take up the chase. Instead they squatted, emptied food from a satchel and set to. As Urrell watched his stomach gurgled with hunger until he feared they might hear him.
There was nothing to do but wait. Not far beyond the clearing there must be an encampment where Urrell knew he might cadge scraps from the women and any camp-bound old men, as well as rummage for food amid the rubbish strewn around in the abundance of summer’s good hunting. No-one would bother about a scavenging lad while food was so plentiful.