With suppressed excitement, they made their way along the riverbank, in the early dawn when the birds had just begun the first, tentative sounds of their dawn chorus.
“Let it still be there,” Hwll softly prayed, as he searched the darkness.
The first grey light was appearing when they reached the place where the auroch had been the day before. As the earliest tinge of dawn lit the horizon, it was just possible to make out, about half a mile away, a dark shape by a bend in the river. His hand clenched on the handle of his axe.
“It’s there,” he whispered.
The hunt was conducted in silence. A faint wind was blowing from the south up the river. The four hunters fanned out, keeping up wind in the cover of the trees, or the clumps of reeds in the clearing.
The sun rose over the ridge, breaking through the grey clouds. The auroch continued to graze, and the hunters remained invisible.
The attack was sudden. In perfect unison, all four hunters rose and hurled their spears. They came from three sides, and were all within thirty feet of the auroch when they threw. It had been an expert piece of stalking.
Hwll watched the auroch’s head jerk violently as it let out a bellow that echoed down the valley. And at the same instant, he knew the attack had failed.
His own spear had been well aimed. It had struck behind the shoulder but it had failed to penetrate deeply. Otter’s had struck the auroch’s throat, but had not done much damage either. Both Tep and his son had missed completely. It was the worst possible combination: the animal was enraged but not badly hurt.
The disaster took place in seconds.
In a fury the auroch wheeled about, stamping its huge hoofs and searching for its attackers. It was Tep that the auroch saw: for he had come across the clearing with only the reeds for cover. The auroch put down its tremendous head, and charged. The cunning little hunter with the long toes had no chance. He faced death calmly, his hard, mean little face staring straight at the huge form rushing towards him. At the last moment, knowing that it was useless, he made a dart to one side, but the auroch’s great horns caught him and with a single burst of blood, Hwll saw his small body broken apart. Tossing the body high into the air, the auroch thundered forward towards the trees and a moment later he could hear the great beast stumbling about in the wood, snapping the spears off against the tree trunks. The hunters made no attempt to follow.
Tep was dead: a sad little mess of flesh and blood, scarcely recognisable. Without a word, they carried him back to the camp and that evening they buried him on the high ground, under a small cairn of stones.
The death of Tep left the little community with a new problem, and one that had to be solved quickly. Ulla was still of child-bearing age, and her family, except for her son, who was still a youth, had no protector. But there was no available man in the area. They could not be sent down river again alone.
No words were spoken between Hwll and Akun on the subject but both of them knew what must happen.
Two days after the death of Tep, Akun herself strode down the hill to the camp by the river and brought the family there up to her own camp on the hill. There, forty paces along the slope, they set to work to build a new shelter: it consisted of two parts, one for Ulla and one for her children.
Ulla said nothing. It was hard to know whether she was frightened by the loss of her protector or glad that Tep, who had always bullied her, was gone. In any case, her new status was uncomplicated: she and her children were now under Hwll’s protection. Akun inspected the girl carefully while they built her new home. She was a stringy, unsatisfactory creature used to being treated as a workhorse by Tep. But she had survived, if nothing else, and Akun had no doubt that she would have more children.
She explained the matter to Ulla simply and succinctly:
“Hwll will be your man now; we shall both be his women. But I am the senior woman and you will obey me.”
Ulla said nothing, but made a token nod of submission. For many years she had learned how to submit.
It was Hwll who was most affected by the change. Akun had been his woman for many years and when he thought of a woman, it was she alone who came into his mind. Now all was to be changed and it gave him a profound sense of unease.
While the two women prepared Ulla’s new home, the hunter went off alone. He was gone several days and when he returned, he said nothing about his absence, but moved quietly about the camp with a new look of satisfaction on his face.
During his time away, he had wandered along the valley to the west. Some miles away he had often noticed an unusual slope above the river. There, instead of the usual chalk, the ground exposed a long rib of soft grey rock with a wonderful texture and colour, quite unlike anything else in that area. He had passed it many times and noticed the curious grey light it seemed to return when the sun struck it. The only stone that he had any use for was flint, and so he had passed by the grey stone without giving it much thought. But now, in this crisis in his life, a strange new idea had formed in his mind.
At the rockface he had searched the ground for some time, picking up lumps of stone and discarding them, until finally, with a grunt of satisfaction, he found what he was looking for. It was a lump about the size of his fist, oval in shape and smooth to the touch. The stone was not hard, and settling down on his haunches beside an oak tree, he began to work it with a flint.
That night he stayed by the grey rockface, and the next day he strode up to the high ground he loved. All the time he worked the stone, hardly pausing. Several times he washed it in a stream, and by the end of the second day he had begun to polish it. On the third day, his work was finished, and putting the stone in a pouch, he went back to the camp on the hill.
The figure that he had so painstakingly carved was remarkable. It resembled a short, squat female torso and head. The face was indicated by a ridge for the nose and three little holes for eyes and mouth. It was crude. And yet, taken as a whole it had an extraordinary beauty: for this primitive little sculpture was nothing less than Akun herself; the heavy, full breasts, the rounded, fertile stomach and hips, the big, muscular buttocks – it was the essence of his woman that the hunter had created, and he stroked the little figure lovingly.
What had possessed him to carve in stone? He could not say. Something about the feel of it, the way it caught the light, the wonderful heaviness of it had taken his fancy. Perhaps the challenge of the thing. At all events, he was pleased with it. Akun was fertile, the mother of his children. She was everything that he knew about a woman; and the curious little figure, he felt sure, would bring him good fortune.
The following day, taking the little stone figure with him, Hwll went to the hut where Ulla awaited him, and there he lay with her for seven days before returning to Akun. This practice he repeated, at different phases of the moon, all through that winter and the following spring. And in the autumn, Ulla produced a child: a handsome baby boy which, unlike its half brothers and sisters, did not have long toes.
For seven more years Hwll continued this pattern of life, producing three more children. And always, each time he lay with Ulla, he took with him the little stone figure he had made.
If Hwll was the father of the valley, there was never any doubt about who was the senior woman.
Akun had not come so far, against her will, not to enjoy the advantages that were now due to her. In her high, sheltered camp near the top of the hill she would come out each day onto the little lip of ground that formed a sort of natural walk in front of it, and as she moved along the line of gnarled trees, it was the signal for the girls and younger women in the camp below to run up to her and do her bidding.
She taught them – how to skin game, how best to trim the skins of every different animal, how to cook and preserve their meat. Sometimes she would lead all the women into the woods and direct them in their search for herbs and roots, moving about herself briskly, prodding the ground with a stick.
Only once, as the new family of Hwll grew up, did Ulla attempt to challenge her authority, by rashly giving her own daughter an order contradicting Akun’s instructions. She had done it in front of the whole family, including Hwll. For a second, Akun looked at her with contempt, then gave her a blow that sent her flying off the edge of the lip and rolling thirty feet down the slope over gnarled roots and thorny bushes. No one said anything. Bruised and bleeding, Ulla looked up once, with rage in her eye, at the powerful stocky form above her, then reverted at once to her usual submissiveness. She did not cross Akun again and the camp lived in peace.
The future of the valley seemed assured. The little tribe which Hwll and Tep had fathered hunted the area with skill and success.
Because of Hwll’s protection, even Tep’s sons were able to find brides in the region. He saw his own son now lead the hunt. Soon another generation would take over, and Hwll was content.
Yet he was not content. At first he could not say why. He and Akun, both in their thirties and approaching old age, could look back upon great achievements: he had led his family on their epic journey from the tundra; he had found the warm lands. They had hunted well and raised fine families. Both of them were now treated with honour and respect – surely he had done all that it was possible to do.
But with each passing season, the feeling of unease and disquiet grew stronger within the old hunter: it was a deep sense that his work was not complete, that something of vital importance was still missing from the life of the place where the five rivers met. It distressed him and it would not leave him.
He took to visiting the high ground alone, withdrawing somewhat from the life of the camp, even from Akun herself, whom he loved. He would spend days up there. Sometimes he would make a small sacrifice to the moon goddess who had watched over him so faithfully; at other times he would find a high spot from which there was an uninterrupted view in every direction and he would gaze for long hours over the empty landscape of wooded ridges which reminded him of the bleak spaces of the tundra. It was the huge elemental forces – the open sky, one day azure blue, the next grey, lowering and savage, the ridges that swept endlessly to the horizon like a sea, the whistling breezes and the great silences – it was these things which both frightened him and comforted him as well.
At such times Hwll would remember his father and the many things which he had told him about the world and about the gods who directed the huge forces of nature; he would remember the directions that had been handed down to him and which, despite the fact that they had proved inaccurate, had nonetheless brought him south on his epic journey. He thought of the terrible things he had witnessed on that journey, and the meaning of it all. The contemplation of these things moved him profoundly.
And to the gods he would whisper:
“Show me what it is that I have failed to do, what further act I must perform.”
And one day, as the wind hissed over the trees, he heard it give him his answer:
“You must tell it, Hwll. You must tell the story of your journey, and of your ancestors, and of the gods, so that these things will be remembered and not be lost.”
He heard it distinctly; there was no mistaking the whispering voice. But still he was troubled.
“How shall I tell these things?” he cried out loud.
Then the voice of the gods – for this was surely what the whisper must be – replied:
“Listen.”
It was evening when Hwll came down to the camp; and his family never forgot his look when he approached them: for his wrinkled face was suffused with a radiance they had never seen before, and his eyes had a faraway stare.
Whatever it was that Hwll had heard from the gods, it was not to be told just yet. For only a few days after he came down from the high ground, the long winter began.
It seemed to be endless that year; at times the old hunter wondered: did I come so far, only for this? The cold was bitter, as bad as he had ever known in the tundra. The river was frozen over so hard that it took the men most of the day to break through a hole through which they could fish in the water beneath. In the valley, a great silence had fallen, and for days on end only a few birds appeared to move. Soon they were dying, and the silence grew deeper. On the high ground above, there was no movement and no sound either, except for the steady, persistent hiss of the north east wind, day after day, bringing snow like a wet haze, snow that drifted quietly into piles so deep that when he looked out now, Hwll could not even see the trees.
Thanks to Akun and the women, they had plentiful stores. Fish could still be caught; sometimes there was a little game. Hwll consoled himself with the thought: this will never be like the land we travelled from. When spring comes, there will be game again.
Only one thing grieved him: Akun.
She had known for some time that soon a winter would come which must be her last. At first there were only small signs – a slight stiffness in the joints, a tooth unexpectedly loosening, or cracking on a bone. Twice recently she had lost a tooth, felt it suddenly under her tongue, tasted the blood. On each occasion, she had stuffed grass into the gap and hoped that Hwll had not noticed. She did not want to admit what was taking place.