Mammoth Boy

by John Hart

  When he was shown some brownish globules and lumps of a tinder-like substance he had to shake his head.

  “Is juice of tree.”

  “Sap? Resin?”

  “Uh-huh. Grow long, long way.” Agaratz dropped a globule on a hot stone by the fire, incensing the air. Urrell sniffed, overcome by the perfume, pursuing its wisps with greedy nostrils, never able to suck in enough as it faded away.

  Next a blackish fungus, unremarkable. “Is…”Agaratz sought a word “…like perretjikac. Few times grows. I know place. Too much kill.”

  At last a black piece of rind, from a nut, he explained, from intchaur. “We get from place of bear.”

  “Walnut! Green walnut rind.”

  “Yes, juice good for skin, for teeth.”

  “Will you show me these plants, Agaratz, in summer?”

  “I show. Now I show you make pipe and music from…” the mischievous grin, “from mammurak tooth.” Urrell’s eyes followed his finger to where the tusk lay at the edge of the fire-glow. He thought he saw it quiver, then he looked closer and it appeared to writhe, its point directed straight at him. His hair prickled. The hole under the overhang. The rank weeds. He blacked out.

  CHAPTER 18

  Agaratz was holding Urrell sitting upright when he came to, shivering with chill but clear-minded. Nothing had changed in the cave. Piura dozed, snout to the fire; Rakrak crouched, head on paws, her eyes on him.

  “You better now, Urrell.”

  Indeed he felt fine, cleansed, smooth. He had been through something, and was disconcerted to find everything the same. He glanced up the gallery, into its blackness: there was nothing to cause concern. Agaratz had dragged the tusk closer to the fire, that was all.

  “You help, Urrell. First watch.”

  Agaratz marked off lengths and scraped and sawed with flints at a line he had traced round the tusk. Urrell could not see how the fossil-hard ivory would ever be cut. Every few strokes Agaratz was obliged to stop and sharpen his flints by knapping and flaking them. It was the most tedious of tasks.

  “Now burn.”

  Urrell could only look enquiringly.

  “Yes, burn. You see.”

  To prepare for this he placed resin globules on a hot stone. With a bone pick he smeared the result round his shallow cut, lit a spill from the fire and, as Urrell slowly turned the tusk, Agaratz burnt a ring round the ivory. The scorch did not go deep but he repeated the operation time and again, all that day and the next, scraping out any charring till the encircling cut began to show. Only when the incision was deemed deep enough after the two days’ work did Agaratz lay the tusk across two stones and strike the weakened spot with a heavy flint hammer. He smote it so smartly the single blow snapped off the end of the tusk cleanly. Urrell applauded.

  “Give me hand, Urrell.” Urrell held his hand out. Agaratz measured the span of the lad’s hand along the severed length, plus a half handspan more, stained the place and, apparently satisfied laid it aside for later. It was time to eat and rest.

  Several more whole days were to be spent cutting off the span-and-a-half length of ivory, to be followed by burning and drilling out the core. Agaratz would leave the work aside a while, cook or do other chores, but always returned to it with a sort of relentlessness unfamiliar to Urrell. Under his direction, Urrell took turns at the task. All this time they remained confined to the cave.

  “Now for ghost.”

  Urrell wondered but remained silent.

  “Mamu, Urrell, mamu of mammurak.”

  He squinted down the now hollowed ivory tube, blew into it, and tapped it with a lop-sided antler implement that Urrell had noticed hanging up. To Urrell, quietly expectant, nothing seemed to be happening.

  “Now catch mamu.”

  Agaratz marked five dots, with great care, along the piece of tusk, dots that reminded Urrell of the dots on the rock-face to which Agaratz had chanted on their way to the hoard of tusks.

  Now began the drilling. A bone awl, tipped with flint, twirled between both palms, was aimed at the first dot on the length of ivory. As he drilled Agaratz kept up a low chant, again reminding Urrell of those dots on the cave wall which had sealed off whatever lay within the cavern from whoever dwelt without. There were no words to the chant. It was not speech as Urrell knew it, nor one of the tongues that Agaratz seemed to know but was sound from otherwhere. He was wondering if Rakrak or Piura understood it when it was his turn to twirl the awl.

  His palms grew sore from his stints rubbing the awl back and forth. By the time Agaratz was satisfied with the holes and the sound they made when he blew down them, ten or twelve nights must have gone by. As each one was completed he poured honey in it and muttered, “For Mamu.” Still Urrell waited to see what the outcome of this would be. Nothing Agaratz had undertaken so far occupied the adolescent’s attention so wholeheartedly for so long.

  Agaratz’s final step was to fashion a bone insert and fit it painstakingly into the narrower end of the tube. When it was in place he signalled to Urrell that an important stage had been reached, and that they were to make ready.

  They groomed themselves, Agaratz by combing his hair and mane, singeing the ends and attending to his nails, while Urrell scoured himself with tufts of grass and dried herbs dipped in snow water to scurf the grime from his body and counter the smell of smoke and sweat that hung around him. With a brand he burnt off his fuzz of beard and was pleased how soft his face felt from weeks under shelter. Indoor life and good rations had also let Rakrak, and especially Piura, grow sleeker in their winter coats.

  A ceremony was about to begin. Urrell waited, his only experience being the coarse cavorting of hunters of his clan after a kill, and some swaying and stomping by younger women in time to chants and clapping, usually when the men were absent.

  Agaratz stripped down to his loincloth. He placed the pipe in the centre of the floor with both hands, as though it were a great weight, signalled to Urrell to stoke the fire with bundles of twigs and kindling to light up the cave, and then began a slow dance round the tusk. His shaggy shoulders and hump, one leg ending in its cloven foot, danced in projected shadow on the cave walls before Urrell’s mesmerised eyes, and those of the watching wolf and lion. As he jigged, Agaratz chanted an invocation, reciting a tale it seemed, in words that meant nothing to Urrell, yet which drew him in, part of the dance.

  Then it happened: Urrell saw the shadow move along the cave wall where the hump-backed human’s shape had been – huge, tusked – and he leapt up, casting off his jerkin and leggings to enter the dance in a mimickry he would never be able to recall later. He was outside himself. The chant seized him. How long he danced he would never know either. Old Mother appeared to him – he saw her, as from afar, veiled in a haze that nothing he could do would disperse.

  She vanished as the trance lifted. He looked around. There crouched Agaratz, still in his loin-clout, by the fire, pipe to mouth, making sounds that Urrell felt he had always known yet had never heard till now.

  “For thee, Urrell. Thy pipe.”

  He took it in both hands, like an offering, watched intently by Agaratz.

  “You mammurakan now, Urrell.”

  He felt caught up in the sense of expectancy of a ceremony not yet completed. Something would be revealed. As he stood there undecided, still holding the tusk, warm in his hands, he felt it stir and wriggle as though trying to free itself from his hold.

  He felt impelled to put the end to his mouth, as though the pipe knew its own way; his fingers found the holes of their own accord, and he blew. From the tusk came sounds as from a huge distance, bearing him along in his favourite dream of soaring through the air over all earthbound things. The sounds made him dance to exhaustion, round the hearth, round Agaratz, Piura and Rakrak, playing as he went, till he recovered and saw the circle his feet had left in the hard dirt of the cave floor.

  CHAPTER 19

  Provisions had dwindled in the weeks they had stayed indoors. Their bison meat was all but gone;
much of the fish eaten. Nuts, roots, grains – things that Agaratz doled out as treats – were low too. The hungry weeks before spring were drawing in, while winter continued as raw as ever. Often wolves called, driven near the cliffs by scarcity. A fox had taken to sniffing at the bison hide across the cave entrance, enticed by food smells. To Urrell’s surprise Agaratz lured the silvery creature close with scraps until it came daily and daily grew tamer, eating from his hand.

  “Is lame, Urrell.”

  It was. Starving drove it to beg. Urrell, too, fed it, watched by Rakrak, head tilted. In his clan a poor scavenger like this would have been pelted with stones and bones – Agaratz’s action delighted Urrell, and he recalled the young woman and her pet squirrel.

  “Will it stay, like Rakrak?”

  “When warmer, find mate, Urrell. Not for us.”

  That evening, as they gnawed bones, Agaratz said: “Go for fishes, Urrell. Piura stay. Rakrak come. Help.”

  “Help how?”

  “Perhaps hunt.”

  “Hunt? Nothing to hunt now, Agaratz, is there?”

  “Snow-deers perhaps.”

  Before dawn they set off, dragging a travois, Agaratz pulling, Urrell behind with spears and thongs, Rakrak scouting about, pleased to be out of the cave. They made good time over the hard snow. As Urrell had thought, game they saw none. The seasonal transhumance had swept all life away to milder parts. Yet here Agaratz survived. It puzzled Urrell and he had once asked him: “How did your people live here, all year, in the cold, without game?”

  “Not so cold then, Urrell, big ice long way,” and he had waved his hand into the distance, northwards.

  They arrived at the foot of the bent fir of their fish cache. “Make fire, Urrell, I fetch fishes.” He climbed up, despite his thick moccassins and the cold, gripping the bark till he reached branches and thereafter the ascent was easy. As Urrell rummaged out the hearth stones and assembled kindling from low-lying fir boughs, Agaratz dropped packages of frozen fish and scrambled down after them. They feasted with the abandon which comes from recent dearth of food, scrunching whole rudd, char, daice, roach, half-cooked, deliciously fresh, in the pine-scented air with the cooking smells from grilling fish eddying round them. Rakrak joined in the meal. Not another creature in their empty universe seemed to notice them as they lay back finally, glutted and content. They rested a long while like that till it was time to pack the travois with bundles of fish for the return journey. Before they left, Agaratz sneaked off to look at their fishing hole, now frozen over but clearly visible. He seemed to commune with it. Urrell wondered if he was performing some private ceremony, as he did so often to mark events and places according to a calendar of his own.

  They made such good time back, taking turns to pull the travois, that the fire was still warm when they arrived, with Piura huddled by it. When she rose to greet them, stiff from age and inertia, Urrell grabbed her head and nuzzled her, his lioness, Piura. Then she and Rakrak touched muzzles.

  Soon the fox appeared, peeking round the hide. It came half way in for a fish, only to scuttle away with its prize. Urrell looked out to see which way it went: up-gulch. There would be its den, its own place, to eat at leisure, later to raise cubs.

  With food assured, Agaratz set to carving lengths of tusk into disks, drilling and honing them to make necklaces and ornaments, while Urrell practised on his flute, between helping, perfecting melodies that Agaratz hummed to him. He was discovering a skill in himself revealed by the mammoth flute, by Agaratz, which allowed his spirit to soar and wander. Agaratz slyly approved. Now he, Urrell, was impressing his master.

  “Play mammurak, Urrell.”

  “Mammurak? How, Agaratz?”

  Agaratz laid down what he was polishing by the light of a resin torch stuck in a cleft overhead. He stood, circled and began a low buzzing sound, his slow gyrations throwing a shadow on the cave wall that, to Urrell’s eyes, grew and shrank by turns. The chant rose, the gyrations went faster, the shadows heightened and shifted, while in Urrell’s grasp his flute felt warm, a prelude to something happening. All a-quiver he waited. The tusk seemed to move – he could not be sure – and with a sort of elation he joined Agaratz. Putting the flute to his lips, he discovered sounds coming from it that were not his own, though his breath blew them, his fingers formed them. They matched and underscored the chanting of Agaratz as it rose into animal trumpetings, snarls, gurglings, expanding a line of music unbidden by the flautist whose role appeared to be to jig to the sound and blow into the instrument, piper and pipe one thing. He was one thing too with Agaratz. He would remember little of that night when he danced the mammoth before the attentive eyes of wolf and lion, Piura growling low, under her breath, as a lion might in the presence of so mighty a beast.

  They danced and made music to exhaustion, slept where they fell and when Urrell woke Agaratz was already at work carving. The foxy glint in those yellow eyes told Urrell he had travelled somewhere only Agaratz knew. He had crossed – been led across – a boundary.

  “You play mammurak, Urrell. Mammoth now” – he pointed at the pipe – “in there.”

  Never before had Agaratz said anything like that. Now he, Urrell, the lone youth, could summon the mammoths.

  Old Mother, would that she had been there.

  CHAPTER 20

  In a lull in the weather, a hint of spring softening the air, Agaratz said in his sudden manner: “Go dance mammurak.”

  “Go where, Agaratz?”

  “In mammurak cave, Urrell. You take flute.”

  “Ah.”

  There would be no point in asking more. In his own time, Agaratz would lead the way.

  It was two nights later when he did, as though a propitious moment had arrived, noticeable only to him.

  Agaratz took torches for them both. From his collecton of pouches and bags he gathered an antler with a hole drilled in the shank. This he hung with a thong from his belt. He also produced a deer thigh-bone drilled to make a pipe, stuffed it into a belt pouch with several bark boxes that Urrell knew he used to store herbs and dried fungus for his medical potions and poultices. They donned heavy outer garments, Agaratz gathered embers into a fire-box and off they went, both Piura and Rakrak of the party. Even the lame fox tagged along for a while.

  They turned left, hugging the cliff, the direction whence Urrell had come that first day. He expected a long march and determined not to forget a single landmark, memorising each tree, jut, fissure. This time he would not be left facing blank rock. Even so, alert as he was, Urrell was to be confounded when Agaratz vanished into the cliff a few paces ahead of him.

  Look as he might, Urrell could not see where Agaratz had gone. Low brush grew thick at the cliff foot, which he shoved aside to look for an opening, but there was only a long vertical crevice little wider than a hand’s span, certainly not big enough to disappear into. He was wavering there, scanning the cliff in the dark, when a faint, teasing tune seemed to come from the rock, through the crevice, mocking him for not finding a way in.

  He listened, wondering if he had really heard the elfin sounds. They paused then began again, apparently from lower down where the crevice widened enough to allow nothing much bigger than a fox to get in. Into this he was meant to crawl?

  The rank weeds. The women far down in the meadow.

  He brushed aside his boyish terrors. Headfirst he wriggled into total darkness, the flute music egging him on – Agaratz must be close ahead – comforted by Rakrak creeping behind him. Piura, too big, would wait outside. On his elbows he slithered and dragged himself forward along the muddy tunnel as the music drew nearer. Not far and he shot into a torch-lit chamber where Agaratz crouched playing his deer-bone flute, absorbed in his music-making, a shaggy figure in a pool of light, oblivious to all else. Rakrak followed Urrell, stood up and shook herself, breaking Agaratz’s absorption.

  “Ah, Urrell.”

  Urrell hesitated. He felt an intruder. Agaratz, mud-free and dry, compared with Urrell’s muddy elbows
and leggings, and Rakrak’s mud-caked paws and belly, seemed to be the denizen of this place into which they had blundered from the outside world.

  Agaratz resumed his playing. As Urrell’s eyes adapted to the torchlight he looked eagerly round the chamber walls for engravings and paintings: they were blank. Without stopping his music, Agaratz signalled Urrell to come and squat in front of him, in the light. Rakrak followed, sat on her hunkers, looking at both. The piping went on, a monotony of notes, sequences, pre-melodic tones, thin whistling sounds from the deer-bone flute that Urrell felt no desire to join.

  This went on a good while, part of something Urrell felt would be revealed. Finally Agaratz rose, freed one hand from the pipe without ceasing to play, unhitched the antler on its thong from his belt and before the watching eyes of youth and wolf whirled it in time to his playing as he began a slow, stomping dance round the torch, stirring the air so that his shadow flickered on the smooth walls of the chamber. The performance went on and on till the torch began to gutter. Urrell followed Agaratz’s look and nod to his pouch and took out a new torch, which he lit from the stump of the dying one, all this without Agaratz stopping playing, dancing and whirling the antler. He evidently set store on ceaseless movement and music. Why, Urrell no more knew than how Agaratz had managed to vanish into the cave and appear in it dry and mud-free.

  Still the dance went on, never gathering tempo, almost stately, Agaratz pivoting on his goat foot, shaggy shoulders bare of tunic, which he had laid by his pouch with his outer garments. Urrell seldom saw him so lightly clad.

  Then, so suddenly that Urrell, lulled by the monotony, scarcely had time to notice, Agaratz was back to his squatting position and the music had stopped, though it seemed to float on in the air. This time Agaratz opened his pouch himself. From bark boxes he took contents, like jerked meat but which Urrell saw was dried fungus.

  “Chew, Urrell.”

  “For mammurak?”