by John Hart
Urrell’s face healed, the cracks closed, his skin grew smooth again. He felt well; down hung a finger’s width on his upper lip and cheeks; his body muscles and hair were becoming a man’s.
“Soon you grown,” said Agaratz.
“Good, then I can hunt better with you, Agaratz, and help you more.”
Agaratz remained silent. Then he said, as if coming back from a distance: “Soon you need woman.”
The notion had not occurred to Urrell, although there were times when he thought of the youngest woman of his tribelet, she of the chaplets of berries and the small breasts beneath her summer cape. The memory did agreeable things to him; but nothing more.
“Me? But you have no woman, Agaratz.”
Again silence. That remote expression that betokened an area of Agaratz’s life not open for revelation.
“Where are women, Agaratz?”
“When hot weather, we go to mor, to place tribes meet. There girls.”
“Where?”
“Far, far. We take things for trade.”
“Don’t you want a wife, Agaratz?”
Deep silence. Urrell shifted uneasily. But then, as though to clear up something difficult to explain to a child, Agaratz spoke:
“When konkorartz, not for womens.”
He did not expand and Urrell knew best not to ask. Their silence was relieved by Rakrak whimpering for food, most unusual for her.
They ate honey – humans and wolf – that night, after nuts, herbs and meat. Urrell, whose turn it was to cook, strove to invent variants in their fare. The near smile on Agaratz’s face told Urrell his efforts had not gone unnoticed. Then he watched as Agaratz went to his stores and returned with what looked like a stick or a tube with small holes bored along it.
Agaratz squatted by the fire, the light illuminating the long face and russet sideburns, coarse reddish hair hanging down past his ears. But for the translucent intelligence of the eyes, almost yellow in the firelight, the hunched figure with the thin hairy leg and its cloven foot might have been some odd woodland mismade animal rather than a man.
Agaratz turned the tube one way and another, squinted down the hollow centre, put an end to his mouth, while Urrell watched and waited. Swaying gently Agaratz blew into the tube. A sound such as Urrell had never heard, or could ever have imagined, rose from it. Then another and another.
The lad sat enchanted. Even Rakrak pricked her ears. The flute carried its notes beyond Urrell, far into the gallery, yet entering into him in a sensation so new that he shivered. Agaratz’s fingers moved up and down the tube, stopping and unstopping the holes as he blew, swaying more and more, playing without looking, to Urrell’s surprise. Instead, the player’s eyes seemed to be fixed beyond their cave, their small ice-bound gulch in a cliff-face overlooking the vast prairies where summer flocks of bison and herds of ponies filled the horizon as far as the mountain land of mammoths and huge cave bears. Urrell’s skin fristled. He felt like soaring, hurling spears vast distances, leaping hills.
When Agaratz stopped playing the melody went on running through Urrell’s whole body. He nodded and skipped to it, possessor of something never-to-be forgotten, of a turning in his life, of a precious thing that he wanted for himself. This skill he must master. “Agaratz, teach me that.”
“One day. If you can.”
If he could? He could, and he would. Nothing would stop him, not even travelling to the land of the mammoths. But he knew there was no use in asking; Agaratz might show him the very next day or perhaps next spring.
Other things occupied his mind. “We go fish.”
“Fish? Where?”
“Nani.”
The river would be frozen over. Urrell felt loth to ask how they could fish through ice. He would wait and see.
As it was to be an expedition of several days and nights, in cold that froze to death any creature caught in it lame, lost or hungry, Agaratz displayed his skill and foresight in the preparations for the trip, one he must have made often before on his own, thought Urrell, who took in every detail, only too aware, since his frostbite, of the dangers of the great cold.
Agaratz dragged out the travois used earlier in foraging expeditions for nuts, seeds, bulbs and the like. He dismantled the bison hide from across the cave entrance and thawed it by the fire, before piling on it extra pelts, food, weapons, tools, fishing lines and bone hooks. When all was ready to his satisfaction, with Urrell’s help he broke through the snow wall to get the bundle and travois out and on to the snow-drift just below the lip of the cave. On the travois he fixed the hide with its contents, handed Urrell packets and poles, then slung a line over each of his shoulders and they set off.
“Wear all furs, Urrell. On face too.”
He draped a fox fur across his nose, fur inwards, and Urrell did likewise. Both pulled down fur caps over their ears. Rakrak trotted beside them as they issued from the gulch on to the hard snow of the open lands. In the windless air their breath froze. They moved slowly, deliberately, lest breathing in too sharply might freeze their lungs. They took frequent turns to pull the travois.
Urrell, unused to the silence of deep winter, his mouth and nose muffled, made no sound. Nor did Agaratz. They spoke in signs. Rakrak, too, conserved her strength, wolf-like, with the easy trot of her kind. They were alone in the world, three figures in the emptiness – a hunchback, a wolf and a youth – on their way to the river Nani and its waters gliding to the sea beneath thicknesses of ice and snow. Urrell stopped wondering how they would catch anything.
Far out in the open the snow depth grew shallower. Winds and blizzards had driven it towards the cliffs leaving patches where grass showed through, forage for reindeer, or snowdeer as Agaratz called them. When they passed groves and spinneys, the surface bore signs where grazing animals had sheltered and pawed through the snow for withered grass, leaves, pine-needles, anything to eat.
“See, snowdeers,” said Agaratz, half muffled.
The cold was so intense that the air scarcely carried the sound of his voice.
The Nani’s belt of trees afforded more cover for animals, now as in summer, evidence of life that surprised Urrell, accustomed to all beasts as well as humans migrating away from these wastes before the long winter. Hoof-prints, droppings, streaks of urine, told of grazers and browsers remaining behind. Spoor of big cats showed that they too remained. It was good to be wary and armed, thought Urrell. Yet Agaratz, intent on his purpose, ignored these tell-tales and plodded on. Only Rakrak showed interest, reconnoitring and sniffing such proofs of living things in a sterile world.
“Stop here,” mumbled Agaratz when they arrived at a spot among trees he plainly foreknew. “Build shelter.”
Using the downswept boughs of a fir as a roof, he and Urrell made a shelter from poles left from previous visits. Through these they pleached fir branches, laid the bison hide over and scraped snow against the sides to freeze in place and make it wind-tight. They scraped the ground bare inside, then lined it with more fir branches and twigs. It looked quite cosy to Urrell. When Agaratz had found several fire-blackened stones and made a hearth, their shelter was ready.
They ate a handful of nuts, chewed bison fat and got ready for the next task. It was past nightfall, but in the whitish gloom of winter their eyes picked out everything, helped by a shy moon in a still, clear sky.
“Take, Urrell.” He was given flint hand-axes, some rough boards and wooden scoops.
Agaratz stepped out on to the snow-covered river at a bend Urrell remembered from earlier visits, recognising the trees. There had been a deep pool where they were standing. Agaratz scraped snow away till he reached ice, a patch two handspans across. “Now work, Urrell.” Work it was, as they picked at the ice with their axes and antler points. Soon, hot inside his furs, Urrell suffered thirst. He knew better than to suck snow in such weather. Later they would melt some in quaiches by the fire, dropping hot stones in, a tiresome business but the only way to obtain water. Rakrak would have some too, though in
the manner of her kind she fended for herself, seldom needing to drink.
By the middle of the night they had chipped a good way down, lying on the snow to do so.
“Tomorrow finish. Catch fishes and get water.”
Under their fir tree, its branches lit from their fire through a smoke vent in the roof, they braised meat. Snow they melted by the fire in wooden vessels that Agaratz dug out of their hiding place. They were black with smoke and age, larger than anything Urrell had ever seen. “Who made these, Agaratz?”
“Olds, Urrell.”
Urrell must have looked uncertain. He repeated, “Made by olds. Olds men.”
“How did you get them, then, or your folk?”
“They give. Now gone.”
That was it. Urrel knew better than to ask further.
They each ate a piece of honeycomb, Rakrak sitting on her hunkers for a share, before they crawled under fir branches for the night, fully clad, drawing every spare pelt they had over themselves. It was warm enough. During the night Agaratz rose several times to replenish the fire and Urrell sensed that he expected something but by morning, when Urrell wriggled out of his lair, he noticed nothing new. All was quiet, no sound of beasts moving despite the evidence of animals they had come across on their way to the river.
Agaratz grilled meat, sending savoury odours wafting into the tree overhead, tickling the nostrils of both lad and wolf as they waited for it to be done.
“Today wolfs come,” said Agaratz. Urrell must have looked blank. He added: “Rakrak know.”
Rakrak, eating, seemed more interested in her food than the arrival of her kind.
“But what wolves, Agaratz? How do you know?”
“I know. I tell. Come for fishes.”
Muffled in their furs, they set off to their hole. Agaratz dragged a short, heavy log with him. Both got down to further chipping.
At a distance a herd of reindeer passed, their antlers forming a frieze as they raised their heads to survey these two humans out in the open scratching in the snow, then, surmising they were no threat, back down the frieze went to ground level to paw and scrape for whatever lay hidden and edible underfoot.
“Soon see snow oxes too, Urrell.”
Not sure what they might be, Urrell said nothing, too cold to talk.
They had scraped and chipped till midday when Agaratz stood up.
“Break ice.” He up-ended the log and Urrell saw its purpose: to batter the ice plug they had been chipping away. It took several blows, with all Agaratz’s might, to break through the ice and reveal the dark water running beneath.
Into it Agaratz dipped a scoop and brought up a mouthful of water. “For you,” he said, passing the vessel to Urrell with a faint grin on the ice-stubbled face. Urrell sipped the water, ice-cold, savouring the liquor, so different from melted snow. They drank thus, in turns, very slowly lest the coldness numbed their face-bones and froze their mouths. Rakrak had hers too. “Now fish, Urrell.”
Urrell watched as Agaratz unmittened his hands and showed him how to weight the lines with stones, bait the hooks with scraps of meat and skin, and drop them into the hole. There were two lines, one apiece. They crouched on the ice and waited.
But not for long. Urrell felt a tug, and with it the excitement only the fisherman knows at contact with his unseen quarry. He jerked his line and his first fish was hooked. It came up through the hole and flapped on the snow, a foot-long beautiful thing.
“Give to Rakrak.”
He did. An ancient observance, something unspoken? Henceforth he, Urrell, would know.
Rakrak took the fish, placed a paw on its head and the other on its still flicking tail and picked at it as at a bone.
The next fishes both humans ate raw, tearing at the taut skins almost before they ceased to twitch. Then they set to and in the space of two hours had caught enough char, chub, trout and other fishes unknown to Urrell, and to Agaratz only in his own tongue, to form two piles on the snow. It was easy work, the fish biting readily, to Urrell’s surprise, and he soon learnt to let the fish hook itself before tugging at the line. Despite the cold this hunting was so engrossing to Urrell that he noticed nothing until Agaratz nodded across towards the bank.
“See. Wolfs.”
Slinking out of the trees the silvery shapes of Rakrak’s pack came out on to the ice. Urrell recognised the pack leader and Rakrak’s mother, and others of her siblings despite their winter livery. Rakrak ran to meet them, rolling on her back to her father, then prancing greetings to others in a ceremony new to Urrell. This accomplished, the pack advanced and squatted round the fishermen, expectancy on their alert faces.
The big lead male came up to Agaratz and they sniffed as Urrell remembered from their meeting in the ravine.
“Urrell, give fishes to wolfs, like me.”
He took fishes and handed one to each wolf in turn as they came forward in an order of their own, and withdrew to eat their prize. It fell to Urrell to feed the mother and siblings of Rakrak. They touched noses. The she-wolf ’s eyes met his, held them, and he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, deep in her bluish depths another’s gaze. Startled, he glanced up at Agaratz. The hunchback was looking at him, part wistful, part absent.
Old Mother, Old Mother of the Mammoths.
He rued then his forgetfulness of her. Now he would remember.
When each wolf had eaten its fish – a dainty morsel rather than a meal – they raised their muzzles and joined their pack leader in a long, musical call, again a new one to Urrell, to which Agaratz and Rakrak responded in unison. Then they turned and left, disappearing the way they had come through the woods.
“Wolfs now help hunt,” said Agaratz.
As he had seen scant game, despite tracks and droppings, Urrell wondered.
“Hunt? Hunt what, Agaratz.”
“Mammurak.”
“Oh!” It was a moment before he realised the tease.
“No, Urrell, not mammurak.”
Those three nights spent by the Nani Urrell determined should stay in his memory.
The days remained dull counterparts of their nights. Through the overcast sky a faint, far-off sun glimmered, doing nothing to lessen the intense cold. Life, apart from their threesome, seemed to have fled. From the hole, which refroze overnight and had to be re-broken, they pulled a never-ending harvest. Some they baked, some they gnawed raw; most Agaratz packed in bundles till their catch outweighed what men and travois could carry. Urrell wondered how Agaratz intended to transport so much.
“Now hide fishes, Urrell.”
He beckoned to Urrell to help him carry the frozen bundles to the foot of a massive fir, one broken off halfway up and regrown where a branch had become the new lead shoot, forming a saddle. On this platform Agaratz proposed to cache their surplus fish.
With a bundle strapped across his shoulders he swarmed up the tree, using every knurr of the deeply creviced bark and every foothold on downsweeping boughs, as if from memory. He was soon down again for another parcel, prepared by Urrell. In less than an hour all surplus fish was stashed beyond the reach of passing scavengers.
“Perhaps see lion,” said Agaratz.
“Lion?”
“Old lion. Die soon.”
They had neither seen nor heard lions, and few other beasts. It was almost too cold to wonder what Agaratz was talking about. Urrell felt as if he had only half heard the words so had half forgotten them in the preparations of breaking camp, dispersing the shelter poles and hiding the hearth stones when he stopped, immediately alerted by snuffling and whimpering from nearby brush.
“See, Urrell, lion come.”
They both stopped and watched as a lion, weak and thin, limped out of the undergrowth and squatted twenty paces from the humans and the wolf. It was a lioness, her winter coat matted and shaggy, and she was starving. “You feed, Urrell. Give fishes.”
Urrell hesitated. Agaratz urged, but seeing the lad still wavering he took a fish himself and placed it before the lioness t
hen stepped back. “See, Urrell, hungry, hungry.” The lioness, with a little pounce, seized the fish and crouched to crunch it, giving out little gurgles of contentment.
“Come, Urrell, give food.” Agaratz beckoned him over.
Much as Urrell trusted Agaratz since the meeting with Rakrak’s wolfpack, his confrontation with the bear and his judgement in so many matters, he still wavered. But Agaratz’s insistence won and he sidled over, within a hand’s touch of the animal. She, intent on her food, ignored him.
Agaratz handed him another frozen fish. “You give, Urrell.” He dropped it by the lioness and saw how thin she was under the mat of winter fur.
“She come with us. Or die. Too cold for her hunt.”
“Take the lion?”
“Yes, you see. She come.”
“But Rakrak…”
“Rakrak know.”
When the last fish was scrunched and swallowed, the old lioness rose and followed them to the campsite. Rakrak sat watching. She made no move of acceptance or resistance, the lioness acting likewise.
“How did you know the lioness was coming?”
“I know.”
“But how?”
“My people know.”
“But tell me how, Agaratz.”
“One day you know too.”
The cold left little energy for discussion. They muffled up, each slung pouches across his shoulders then took up a handle apiece of the travois in a gloved hand and the long trudge home began.
Beyond the trees they found their own tracks and followed them back over snow frozen hard enough to bear their weight. Apart from the criss-criss of the trailing travois poles on the snow crust all was silence. Rakrak led, the lioness brought up the rear. Their first stop would be a clump of small trees, one of the few features in the expanse and which Urrell knew had a watering-hole in better weather.
It was over two hours before either spoke when Agaratz unmuffled to ask: “Urrell, you know big forest deers?”
“Big deer?”