At last, however, there were signs which gave them encouragement: signs that other hunters had passed that way not long before. Twice they came upon clearings made in the trees and marks where fires had been lit. Once they discovered a broken bow.
“Soon we will find them,” he promised.
At the end of three weeks they came upon a sight which confirmed all Hwll’s fears, and determined the course of the last stage of the journey. This was the estuary of a huge river that rolled impressively towards them from the west, so wide and deep that it was clear they must now turn inland to follow along its bank. At this point, it ran almost parallel with the coast and as they walked along it, they could still see a line of the cliffs a few miles away to the south.
It was later that day that Hwll saw what he had feared: five or six miles away to the south, the line of cliffs was broken. The sea had breached it, formed a gully, and then poured in, flooding a large part of the low-lying area between the coastline and the river. He looked at it with dread.
“You see,” he explained to Akun, “the sea has come through the cliffs. It is breaking in everywhere. The sea has not only cut us off, but I think perhaps it will wear down all the cliffs and swallow up the whole land. That is why we must find high ground.”
He was right. In the coming centuries, the sea would break through again and again, flooding the coastal areas and wearing down the chalk cliffs. The whole chalk coastline of southern Britain would disappear under the waves, and miles of land be flooded. The great river Solent, on whose banks they stood, was to disappear completely into the sea, and all that remains of this original chalk coastline of Britain is the single, diamond-shaped chunk standing off the southern coasts that is called the Isle of Wight.
“But first we must camp,” she reminded him. “The children cannot go on.”
“Soon,” he replied, but he could see that she was right. Vata no longer even opened her eyes as she walked. The little boy had fallen three times that morning.
Now Hwll picked him up and put him on his shoulders.
“Soon,” he promised once again.
Still with their faces west towards the setting sun, the little family turned inland, and Hwll began to look for a suitable place.
The next day he discovered the lake.
It was a small, low hill about five miles inland that first attracted his attention. It looked like a place from which he could spy out the land and where they could camp at least for the night. When he reached the place, however, he was surprised and delighted to find that hidden below it and in his path lay a shallow lake about half a mile across. At its eastern end, a small outlet carried its waters away towards the sea. Tracking round the lake he found that it was fed from the north and the west by two small rivers. On its northern side was a flat, empty marsh.
The water, sheltered by the hill, was very still; there was a sweet smell of fern, mud and water reed. Over the surface of the lake, a heron rose and seagulls cried. Protected from the wind it was warm. It did not take him long to make a small raft and cross the little stretch of water.
From the top of the hill he looked inland; all the way to the horizon now, he could see low wooded ridges succeeding each other. He turned to Akun and pointed.
“That is the way that we must go.”
There were two months of summer left. This was clearly the place to rest and recoup their strength.
“We shall stay here for ten days,” he said. “Then we go inland.” And with a sigh of relief, Akun and the two children made their way down the hill to the shallow water’s edge.
The lake turned out to be a magical place, and Hwll was delighted to find that it abounded in game. The hill embraced the water like a protective arm, and animals that he had never seen before paraded themselves there: swans, a pair of herons, even a flock of pelicans waded by the water’s edge. On the open ground beyond the marsh, the soil was peaty and covered with heather, and a troupe of wild horses galloped across it one morning before vanishing towards the low wooded ridges to the north. In the rivers he found trout and salmon; one day he even crossed the Solent on a raft and reached the rock pools by the sea, returning with crabs and mussels which they cooked over the fire that night.
The children were beginning to recover their strength. Hwll smiled one morning to see Vata being chased by her little brother along the shallow waters by the lake’s edge.
“We could stay here for the winter,” Akun said. “There is plenty of food.” It was true; they could build their winter quarters in the shelter of the hill. But he shook his head.
“We must go on,” he said. “We must find high ground.”
Nothing would shake his fear of the terrible force of the sea.
“You will kill us,” said Akun angrily. But she prepared to move on.
The end of Hwll’s remarkable journey was in fact closer than he thought. But it was not to be accomplished alone.
Before leaving the lake, Hwll had decided to reconnoitre the land immediately to the north, and so one morning he began to work his way up the river, towards the first of the low ridges he had seen from the hill. The banks were lightly wooded and the river, which was only thirty feet across, glided by at a gentle pace. River fowl ducked in and out of the rushes; long green river weeds waved their tendrils in the stream and he could see the large brown fish that paused silently just beneath the surface. He had followed the river five miles, when to his great surprise he almost walked over a camp.
It was in a small clearing by the bank. It consisted of two low huts made of mud, brushwood and reeds. The sloping roofs of the huts were covered with turf and they seemed to grow out of the ground like a pair of untidy fungi. Tethered by the riverbank was a dugout.
Startled, he halted. There was no fire, but he thought he could smell smoke, as if one had been put out recently. The camp seemed to be empty. Cautiously, he moved forward towards one of the huts. And then suddenly he became aware of a small man, with narrow-set eyes and a crooked back watching him intently from the cover of the reeds, fifteen yards away. In his hands he held a bow, fitted with an arrow which was pointed straight at Hwll’s heart. Neither man moved.
Tep, who was the owner of the camp, had watched Hwll’s approach for some time. As a precaution, he had hidden his family in the woods, before taking up his position; and although he could have killed Hwll, he had decided to watch him instead. One never knew, the stranger might be useful in some way.
As Hwll would discover, he was a cautious and cunning hunter; but apart from these two attributes, his character had no redeeming qualities whatever.
He had a face like a rat, with narrow eyes, a long nose, a pointed chin, pointed teeth, unusual, carrot-coloured hair, a shuffling walk and one very distinctive inherited peculiarity: his toes were so long that he could even grip small objects with them. He was mean-minded, vicious without provocation, and untrustworthy. Some time before, he and his family had lived with a group of hunters fifteen miles to the north east of the lake; but after a furious quarrel about the distribution of meat after a hunt – where he had demonstrably tried to cheat the other hunters – they had cast him out. He was a pariah in the region and few of the scattered folk there cared to deal with him. But Hwll knew none of this.
Hwll made a sign to indicate that he had come in peace. Tep did not lower his arrow, but nodded to him to speak.
In the next few minutes the two men discovered that although they spoke different dialects, they could make themselves understood well enough with the aid of sign language and Hwll, anxious to secure aid if he could, told this curious figure about his journey.
“Are you alone?” Tep asked suspiciously.
“I have a woman and two children,” Hwll told him.
Slowly Tep lowered his aim.
“Walk in front,” he instructed. “I will come and see.”
By the end of the day, Tep had inspected the new arrivals and decided that it would be wise to make friends with the stranger from the north. He had a son who would one day need a woman; perhaps Hwll’s girl would do.
When he understood that Hwll was looking for high ground, his calculating eyes lit up.
“I know such a place,” he assured Hwll. “There are many valleys, full of game, but above them there is high ground,” he indicated a great height, “many days journey across.”
“Where?” asked Hwll.
Tep looked thoughtful. “It is far away,” he said finally, “and the journey is not easy; but I can guide you.” He paused. “Hunt with me first,” he suggested. “Then I will show you the way.”
Although Hwll was not sure he could trust the little man, this was not an offer that any hunter could refuse; and indeed, after the endless days of loneliness, he was not sorry once again to have a companion.
“I must reach the high ground before winter,” he said.
“I promise that you shall,” Tep replied.
Thus began the curious relationship between the hunter from the tundra and the hunter from the southern woods. Tep had four children. His first woman had died, so he had travelled to the west and stolen another from a band of hunters, when she was little more than a girl. Her name was Ulla and two of the children were hers. She was a round-faced creature with large brown eyes that wore a perpetually frightened look, and a scrawny body. The children all resembled their father, running swiftly through the woods on their long-toed feet and catching small animals with a ferocious dexterity that was frightening.
It was Tep’s intention, by whatever means, to keep Hwll and his family with him until he had reached an understanding that, at the least, he should have the little girl for one of his sons. But, disingenuous though it was, his offer had advantages for the newcomers. While Hwll made his camp in the clearing, Tep showed him all the best fishing grounds. One day he also took him some miles west along the seashore and showed the northerner something he had never seen before: an oyster bed. Soon he had taught Hwll and his son how to dive for the oysters and prise them from the bed below with a knife; so adept did the boy become that they called him Otter, like the little animals who built their houses under the water, and the name stuck. That night both families feasted by the side of the lake on trout, mussels and the oysters which were swallowed whole, while the reflection of the stars shimmered on the clear water. Never had the family from the tundra eaten so well, and again Akun demanded:
“Why not stay here?”
But Hwll was anxious to go on and the next day he reminded Tep of his promise to show him the high ground; once more, however, the cunning little man temporised.
“First, let us hunt deer together,” he insisted. “When we have killed a deer, then I will show you the high ground.”
Hwll was reluctant this time to delay any further, but he finally agreed to this plan.
“But after that, I must find the high ground before winter,” he insisted.
“I promise,” Tep assured him. “We hunt at the full moon.”
There was one other reason why Hwll agreed to delay. Skilful as he was in the tundra, he saw clearly that in these southern woods, Tep was a better hunter than he.
In the open tundra, where game was so scarce, men hunted in groups and followed their prey for days, wearing it down before moving in for the kill. But Tep hunted alone, in woods where game was plentiful and varied. Roe deer, the swift wild horse, hare, grey partridge, swans and geese were all easy prey. More dangerous were the wild boar and brown bear; and fellow hunters were the polecat, the fox, the wolf, badger, stoat and weasel. Blackberries grew on the edge of the clearings, and juniper berries. There were edible fungi and grasses. All these animals and plants, the narrow-faced man with the bent back understood. He knew everything that was edible and where it could be found.
His weapons were more varied too. In the tundra Hwll had carried a single spear and a bow and arrow. The ends were made of flint, carefully chipped to a razor-sharp serrated edge, and bound to the shaft with twine. But Tep’s weapons had many different heads, each one for a different animal. They were smoother, usually chisel-ended rather than pointed; his arrow heads fitted neatly into a notch in the shaft, and some of his spearheads had a socket into which the handle could fit snugly. The spear he used to catch fish had barbs so that the fish would not slip off; in particular Hwll admired the delicate, lancet-like arrows Tep used to kill the fox so that its fur remained undamaged.
Nor were these the only differences. Tep’s clothes, unlike his, were close-fitting and sewn together with twine made from animal gut. He wore a single jerkin and loincloth in summer, and added long leggings in winter. But he could also dress himself as a fox, or a deer, wearing the animal’s head over his face to complete the camouflage. And Ulla made baskets of osier and beautifully carved bowls of wood superior to anything Akun could have attempted.
For though he did not know it, Hwll was one of the last of his kind. All over the northern hemisphere, the Palaeolithic hunters, the wanderers of the tundra, were gradually being displaced as the warm forests crept northwards and more sophisticated Mesolithic forest hunters like Tep took over the land.