Mammoth Boy

by John Hart

  Urrell was now to see the purpose of the long lines.

  “You stay behind bushes and hold.” Agaratz handed Urrell one end of the thongs. Then he tied a bundle of reeds into a small raft, divested himself of jerkin and leggings, and entered the water, the thick hair on his neck and shoulders much the same rusty sedge colour as his raft. The end of the lines he held in one hand. Head barely above water behind the raft, he drifted towards the honking, bustling geese. Urrell watched as first one goose, then another vanished underwater with barely a ripple. Agaratz might have gone on all day without the flocks noticing but when he had enough he signalled to Urrell to haul him in.

  He waded ashore with nine fat geese, necks broken, tied by a leg to a line. Rakrak bounced about with excitement. The flocks went on as before, oblivious to their trifling loss.

  “Now return,” said Agaratz, draping five geese round his neck and the remainder round Urrell’s.

  On their way back they collected mushrooms. Agaratz uprooted clumps of wild, pink-flowering garlic, plucked thyme and marjoram for his pouches, pointing out herbs to Urrell and naming them in his own language while Urrell, where he could, gave names he had learnt from foraging women in his clan who gathered ingredients for their potions and old wives’ cures. Each had uses and virtues according to Agaratz, his lore far outdoing anything Urrell had learnt.

  Once back and up the climbing pole, which Rakrak had managed, if clumsily, to scale, they set about plucking the geese as the fire was building up for a roast. Agaratz signalled Urrell to pack the down and breast plumage in pouches; the quills and feathers they discarded.

  When the fire was hot enough to roast a goose Agaratz gutted one, something Urrell had not seen done before, and gave the giblets to Rakrak, saving only the delicacy of the liver, which he halved with Urrell and they ate raw. Into the cavity Urrell watched Agaratz stuff heads of garlic, mushrooms, handfuls of thyme and clumps of marjoram, the reason why he would soon learn as the goose roasted under its heaped embers while they plucked the remainder: odours such as Urrell had never known increased as the cooking went on. His belly gurgled.

  CHAPTER 13

  Never had he smelt anything so appetising. By the time the goose was cooked, its companions plucked and hanging from one of Agaratz’s frames, Urrell’s belly, empty all day but for handfuls of berries plucked on the way to the Nani and back, was quaking for food. Beside him, Rakrak whimpered and pawed the floor.

  That goose was a triumph, to man, to lad, to wolf, as they set to in companionable gluttony, hands, faces, paws soon fragrant with goosefat, Urrell’s tastebuds lingering on the garlic-flavoured meat and grease, an aroma of thyme, marjoram and other herbs mingling in sensations new to him and memorable for life.

  As the last bones and scraps disappeared into Rakrak, the wind rose outside the cave, warning of weather changes coming fast. The flames blew from side to side in the gusts.

  “Now make cold-time furs,” said Agaratz, more to himself than to Urrell.

  “Cold-time furs?” The strangeness of the term intrigued the youth.

  “Furs for cold time. I show next day.”

  They slept that night huddled in the recess, in a torpor of overeating, as the weather outside worsened.

  What Agaratz meant by ‘coldtime furs’ Urrell was to learn over the next few days as the weather grew colder, rain lashed down into the gulch and they retreated deeper into the cave to avoid the worst of the wind.

  Agaratz brought out pelts that he had collected over the year, some from hunts with Urrell. From a bundle, he rolled out bone needles, flint knives and burins and set to, cutting the skins into large pieces and piercing holes round the edges with burins or redhot sticks. Urrell was handed tools to do the same.

  Over several days and into the nights they worked away till the pile of squares was enough in Agaratz’s eyes. Urrell watched to see what came next. This was to sew the squares with thongs and sinews into pokes that Urrell was detailed to stuff with goose down. Thus quilted, the stuffed squares were sewn into jerkins, overgarments, leggings and breechclouts. Agaratz even made double-soled, padded moccassins for their usually bare feet. Such industry was new to Urrell, more accustomed to the free and easy life of his hunting group where the only sustained effort was the pursuit of quarry, not scraping, cutting, sewing. At most, that was women’s work.

  By the time their garments were ready, the weather relented, though remaining cold as they issued into the sharp sunshine in their new outfits, glutted on gooseflesh and nuts. Rakrak dashed about, letting off pent-up energy.

  “Now collect grasses,” said Agaratz.

  “Grass?”

  “For sleep, for warm.”

  Ah bedding, Urrell thought, to snuggle into when down by the sea his clan would be wintering, men, women and children huddled round fires in caves, not daring to go out into the white wilderness for food. Gales would drive floes ashore, blizzards would blind hunters seeking flotsam, carrion and shellfish, even wrack, along the strand. The weak would starve: he had seen the dead in caves when the thaw came too late for them. How Agaratz meant to survive, inland, nearer the iceland of the mammoths, Urrell knew not: he entrusted himself to his mentor, whose doings and behaviour he shadowed and copied. Agaratz, who seldom explained, this time said:

  “When great cold, stay in grass in cave – like bear.”

  Grass-gathering he found wearisome work. Tuft by tuft they piled it on a hide for Agaratz to gather by the four corners and hump up the climbing pole into the cave. Rakrak entered into the spirit of the task, happy to run about tossing mouthfuls of tore, or dry grass, in the air, pouncing on the summer-fat morsels of mice and voles she disturbed. Most of a week they spent thus, between foraging, benefiting from the cold dry spell, till Agaratz said: “Now woods.”

  They dragged logs and boughs, bundles and faggots, skinloads of pine cones, to the cave foot. Agaratz let down lines to which Urrell tied loads to be hauled up and stowed deep in the cave.

  By the time Agaratz was satisfied that their fuel store would last the winter, Urrell felt his muscles hardening like a man’s as he hauled and dragged timber through the early snowflakes with Agaratz. Their flint axes were no match for the trunks of trees, so all their wood was windfall dead wood, to be gathered before snow hid it till spring.

  “Soon cold come, Urrell. Then we hunt bison and horse.”

  Hitherto their biggest quarry had been deer, and that sparingly – Agaratz hunted almost reluctantly. Urrell must have shown doubt.

  The grin warned him to expect something untoward.

  “Get ready, Urrell. First go to mammurak cave, in morning.”

  Urrell could not believe what he heard. Another of Agaratz’s asides? He preferred not to ask.

  By way of preparation, Agaratz took a flat stone hollowed in the centre to form a shallow dish. In this he placed some goose fat, then collected embers in a fire-box much like ones Urrell knew from his own clan, plaited wisps of grass and greased them. All this he stowed in a pouch as they set off, Urrell agog at that mention of mammoths.

  Three or four spear-casts along the cliff line, the snow now falling thickly, Agaratz pointed at an unremarkable recess in the cliff. “Mammurak cave. We go in.” He thought a moment, then added, “Otsoemek come.” The wolf, aware she was welcome, pranced with pleasure.

  It was not much of a cave, more a hole into a small chamber. Urrell could sense its size in the dark, Rakrak pressing against his legs.

  “Make light.” Agaratz opened the fire-box and blew on the embers, his long face faintly lit by the glow, till the grass wick flamed and he stuck it in the lump of goose fat; Urrell’s first lamp.

  In the still air the lamp burnt clear, lighting the walls of the chamber, smooth and unremarkable. Another tunnel led from it. To this Agaratz moved and beckoned him to follow.

  The secret place. The rank weeds. His boyhood fear.

  More than fear, elation seized him, the elation he had felt when the bees crawled over his arm, as
here, lit by the lamp, he saw four tiny engravings of horses and a bison, none bigger than a hand, etched to perfection at eye level. All four beasts were heading into the tunnel at full tilt. As Agaratz moved on with the light they faded from Urrell’s lingering sight. Even Rakrak was loth to move and had to be coaxed.

  This tunnel to the next chamber was as short as the first one. But as the light spread inside Urrell stood in fascinated silence, in a trance of attentiveness: on one flat expanse of rock were the concentrated outlines in red and black, superimposed one upon the other, of a fauna of shifting beasts of all sizes — bison and horses, with deer running hither and thither among them – while a frieze of feathery-antlered reindeer topped the display’s upper edge where light met dark. To one side, on a separate slab, a vast boar, its bristling mane roughly chalked in, eternally charged towards the centre of the earth.

  As the flame steadied – Agaratz had set the lamp down before the mural – more detail smote the boy’s ravished gaze. The light, from floor level, revealed a welter of engravings, a criss-crossing of scratchings, each the outline of an animal inter-mixed by overdrawing into a puzzle for his eyes. He saw that the flanks of horses and bisons were shaded in ochre, the white of their bellies carefully picked out, regardless of how they might mask earlier outlines and engravings, as though each artist consumed with a frenzy of creation had possessed eyes only for his own work and had sought a place in this one expanse of rock because he fed on the work of his numberless forerunners, was adding to them, not obliterating. Urrell felt an urge to jig before them, in unison with the gait of bison, horse and deer.

  As his gaze travelled to the rim of the gooselamp’s range, his widening eyes caught sight of three shapes that nearly stopped his heart – three bulbous forms marched in the shadow on an errand of their own.

  Old Mother, Old Mother of the Mammoths.

  “Mammoths!” he shouted, his voice echoing and sounding into hollows and caverns beyond sight, as though caught up by giants and passed one to another, roused from immemorial slumber by this over-excited youth. The lamp-flame flickered in sympathy. Rakrak shifted uneasily in Urrell’s grasp on her neck.

  Only Agaratz was unmoved. “Mammuraka,” he said. Then he added, “olds, olds,” and to show how old he rolled his hand over and over, as though reeling the mammoths back to the beginning of the world.

  Some sign of the purpose of the visit to the chamber now began to make itself evident to Urrell. Agaratz’s behaviour changed. He started a chant in his own tongue, directing the song at the mural, oblivious to everything, eyes deadened, his spirit absent. Urrell noticed how Agaratz aimed his chant at a spot in the rockface where it echoed best. His lowest notes carried into the darkened galleries where Urrell’s shout had hardly ceased to bounce and rebound. Agaratz’s notes rippled into the distance, in pursuit. Before him the crouching shape chanted on and on in the now failing light of the lamp. One false move – touching the hunchback perhaps – might snap the thread that held Agaratz of the gleaming eyes and sly grin to this misshapen crooning creature. At this point the lamp died. Urrell gripped the thick, warm fur of Rakrak’s neck lest she flee and leave him alone, trapped in the blackness of a light suddenly dowsed, a blackness deepened by the aftermath of gleams and flashes under his frightened eyelids.

  Urrell stood helpless. He heard Agaratz speak but in another voice, a high thin one, repeating words that sounded like “Mamu, Mamu, Mammurra.”

  Then without transition Agaratz spoke again in his natural voice: “Urrell, wait,” followed almost without a pause, as though Agaratz could see in the pitch black, with a touch on Urrell’s arm and the word “follow,” he led lad and wolf back out into the falling snow.

  “Now ready for hunt.”

  They returned the short distance to home cave. Rakrak, subdued, trotted at Urrell’s heels. Snow was falling thickly, in the first true snowfall of the winter, and all three knew, in their own ways, that this was the onset of the great cold. The only sound was the crunch of their feet on the stiff grass now disappearing under a palm’s depth of fresh snow.

  CHAPTER 14

  In the cave, Agaratz returned the fire-box and the lamp to their ledges in his methodical way, then selected spears, a spear-thrower as well as a shorter, thicker javelin tipped with a long point, almost the length of a man’s forearm, of a stone Urrell had never seen. It was dark green, its finely-flaked edges twinkled in the firelight where they had been delicately chipped to the keenness of a blade. It was beautiful in the young man’s eyes. Agaratz noticed his interest.

  “My father, his father, his father make it.”

  As it was too short and point-heavy to cast, Urrell could not divine its purpose but knew better by now than to ask. Agaratz would reveal by example, his usual way.

  “Wolfs help hunt,” he said.

  “How, wolves?”

  “Wolfs. You see. They come.”

  Besides the spears, Agaratz selected his best flint knives, an axe, bundles of thongs and his biggest pouches. These he gave Urrell to carry, taking the weapons himself. In his belt he inserted an elderwood phial of his hunting bane. Thus accoutred they sallied forth from their home and into the snowing grasslands, Urrell following with his usual unquestioning faith in Agaratz’s decisions though wondering how a hunting party as small as theirs might overcome big game, alone, in the snow, the more so since most large herds had already migrated to lands beyond his, or his clan’s, ken – to the lands whither the geese flew for all anyone knew.

  But the experience in the cave that morning portended something exceptional. Agaratz had given enough proof of his powers – when he outfaced the bear or stopped the hunter in mid-throw to save dear Rakrak’s life – for Urrell to have any qualms. Whispered stories overheard when women told tales, or hunters wondered at strokes of freakish luck, hinted darkly at strange forces. Women made magic signs, wore amulets, to avert ill fortune; men marked their spears with totemic designs to help them fly true. Yet none had ever done what he had seen Agaratz do. To Urrell nothing lay beyond the crookback’s powers, even the control of wolves.

  They had progressed some way when Agaratz paused, hunched a little and became a wolf. He raised his face and howled with such accuracy that Rakrak joined in. Urrell felt again that fear of wolves which had rooted him to the ground the day they had taken Rakrak. No chorus replied, Agaratz unwolfed, and they went on. Not till they had travelled far into the whiteness did a pack sing back.

  “Rakrak know these,” he said.

  The sounds drew closer as they veered in the pack’s direction. Urrell’s apprehension – fear of wolves in winter when hunger sometimes drove them to eat humans – was not entirely stilled by Agaratz’s unconcern.

  Another sound now intervened, immediately recognisable: hooves pounding the prairie as bison cantered towards them, driven by wolves.

  “Now ready.”

  Agaratz fitted a javelin to his spear-thrower, smeared the point with the bane from from his elderwood phial, and all three crouched and peered through the driving snow for sight of an approaching herd, a small group to judge by the drumming hooves, a bull or two and perhaps three or four cows, laggards from the major herds.

  Agaratz’s readiness was not misplaced, the bison were on them in seconds, looming out of the snow, coming straight at them. Urrell darted aside and glanced back expecting Agaratz to follow, but no, the hunched form held its ground until almost within touching distance of the lead beast, a bull. He stepped away at the last moment, making no attempt to lance it. His aim he saved for a young cow just behind, little more than a heifer, prime quarry, which his javelin struck in the flank and held fast. Hardly had the bison appeared than they vanished into the snowstorm, their tracks filling no sooner made.

  “Follow,” called Agaratz and set off behind the bison.

  Only then was Urrell aware that they were not alone – a half-moon of silvery-grey forms trotted silently with them. They ran together, men and wolves, Urrell finding it hard to keep up,
encumbered with so much equipment and stiff in his new quilted winter outfit. He called to Rakrak to stay with him but she was drawn by the excitement of her kin and the chase. Soon he was panting along alone, outrun by hunters and hunted. His was not fear of being lost but of failing Agaratz who would need his equipment to butcher and save a kill. There was no way of telling which way a wounded beast might swerve, wolves or no wolves.

  He had been in this plight a while, his pace down to a weary trot as exhaustion and cold began to affect his movements, when he thought he saw a shape close by, startling him back to alertness. Another appeared on his other side. He could almost have touched them. His first jolt of fear at the apparitions subsided when he realised they were escorting him. Together the wolves swung half right, and he swung too, letting himself be herded, too tired to care where he went. Much farther on, through driving snow, a dark bulk showed up in the whiteness. He saw shapes around it as he drew nearer: the fallen bison. Agaratz was holding the short spear with the long beautiful blade, bloodied halfway up the shank where he must have finished off the cow where she fell, brought down by the bane or by the wolves. Round the kill silvery-white wolves milled.

  Tears of exhaustion, mixed with snowflakes, blurred his vision. He felt inadequate, a weakling, deserving the clouts and shouts that Blueface and the others would have given him had they been there. But instead Agaratz said, “Good, Urrell, you good,” and then, “now share with wolfs.”

  He relieved Urrell of his load of knives, axe, pouches and thongs to proceed with carving and parcelling the carcass, ready to transport the best cuts home.

  Exhaustion overtook Urrell and he sank to the snow, warm from the sweat inside his quilts. He was shaken awake:

  “No sleep, Urrell, no sleep, or die.” Agaratz spoke with unaccustomed urgency. “You look,” he said, and gripping Urrell’s shoulders fixed his eyes on his. A surge of energy ran through Urrell; his fatigue vanished. “Now help,” said Agaratz in his everyday matter-of-fact voice.