His big, tall body was dressed in fur from throat to toe. His long shanks wore tight-wound wolf-skin leggings, fur inside. His moccasins, of twofold bison leather, had tops reaching almost to his knees, and were plentifully tallowed against wet. His body was wrapped in the pelt of a cave-lion, arms fitting inside the neatly skinned forelegs, mane muffling his neck and chest. Fox-fur gloves protected his hands. All openings and laps were drawn snug by leather laces. Only his great head, with golden clouds of hair and beard, was defiantly bare to winter.
Leaving the village, Hok paused to strap his feet into rough snowshoes. The Flint Folk had developed such things by watching how nature made broad the feet of hare, ptarmigan and lynx to glide on top of the snow. Hok’s weapons were a big bow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a big keen axe of blue flint. At his side hung a sizeable deerskin pouch, full of hunter’s gear and provisions.
Away he tramped, his blue eyes scanning the horizon. Far off was a black bison, snow-swamped, with wolves closing in. Nearer, gaunt ravens sawed over a frost-killed deer. Winter was the hungry season—eat or be eaten was its byword. Hok’s people would eat plentifully of Gragru’s carcass.… Hok journeyed west and south, to where he had once noted a grove of pine and juniper.
It was all of a morning and part of the afternoon before Hok reached the grove. He smiled over nearby mammoth tracks, large enough for him to curl up in. The prey had been there. It would return. He began preparations.
He set up headquarters in the center of the grove, scooping out a den in the snow and laying branches above it for roof. His bow and arrows he hung to a big pine trunk, away from damp. Then, axe in hand, he sought out a springy red cedar, felled it and trimmed away the branches. Dragging it to his camp, Hok laboriously hewed and whittled it into a great bow-stave, twice as long as himself and thicker at the midpoint than his brawny calf, with the two ends properly tapered.
Bending the bow was a task for even Hok. From his bag he took a great coil of rawhide rope, several strands thick. With a length of this he lashed the bow horizontally to the big pine. To each end he fastened a second line, making this fast to a tree behind. After that, he toiled to bend one arm, then the other, using all his braced strength and weight and shortening each lashing. The stout cedar bent little by little into a considerable curve.
Next Hok affixed his bowstring of rawhide, first soaking it in slush. When it was as tight as he could make it, he lighted a row of fires near it. As the string dried and shrank in the heat, the bow bent still more.
Meanwhile, Hok was cutting an arrow to fit that bow, a pine sapling thrice the length of his leg. From his pouch he produced a flint point longer than his foot, flaked to a narrow, sharp apex. This he lashed into the split tip, and with his axe chopped a notch in the opposite butt. The finished arrow he laid across his big bow.
“My weapon is ready to draw for killing,” he said with satisfaction, and put himself to new toil. A lashing of rope held the arrow notched on the string, and Hok carried the end of this new lashing backward, around a stump directly to the rear. With braced feet, swelling muscles, panting chest, he heaved and slaved and outdid himself until the bow was drawn to the fullest and his pull-rope hitched firmly to the anchorage. He stepped back and proudly surveyed the finished work. “Good!” he approved himself.
He had made and drawn a bow for such a giant as his old mother had spoken of, long ago in his childhood. The big pine to which the bow was bound stood for the archer’s rigid gripping hand. The back-stretched rope from the arrow’s notch was the drawing hand. All that was needed would be a target in front of it.
And Hok arranged for that.
He cut young, green juniper boughs and made to heaps, three strides apart, so that the arrow pointed midway between them. Then he hacked away branches and bushes that might interfere with the shaft’s flight. It was evening by now. He built up his fire behind the drawn bow, toasted a bit of meat from his pouch, and finally slept.
At dawn he woke. Snow was falling. Hok rose and gazed along the little lane in front of the arrow.
There came the prey he hoped for.
Gragru the mammoth, tremendous beyond imagination, marched with heavy dignity to the enticing breakfast Hok had set him. A hillock of red-black hair, more than twice Hok’s height at the shoulder, he sprouted great spiral tusks of creamy ivory, each a weight for several men. His head, a hairy boulder, had a high cranium and small, wise eyes. His long, clever trunk sniffed at one stack of juniper, and began to convey it to his mouth.
Hok drew his keen dagger of reindeer horn. The mammoth gobbled on, finished the first stack, then swung across to the second.
Hok squinted a last time along the arrow. It aimed at the exact point he had hoped—the hair-thatched flank of the beast. Hok set his knife to the draw-rope—sliced the strands—
Hoong! With a whoop of freed strength, the bow hurled its shaft. A heavy thud rang back, and Gragru trumpeted in startled pain.
“You are my meat!” yelled Hok.
Gragru wheeled and charged the voice. Hok caught his bow and arrows from their hanging place, gathered the snowshoes under his arm, and danced nimbly aside. “I shot you!” he cried again. “I, Hok!”
Blundering through the brush, Gragru looked right and left for his enemy; but Hok had sagely trotted around behind him. A savage exploration of the thicket, to no avail—then Gragru sought the open again. His blood streamed from wounds on either side where the pine-shaft transfixed him, but he still stood steady on his great tree-stump feet.
Hok came to the fringe of the junipers. “You shall not escape!” he yelled at the mammoth. “Hok will eat you!”
This time Gragru did not charge. He knew that death had smitten through hair and hide and bone, to the center of his lungs. No time left for combat or revenge—time only for one thing, the thing that every mammoth must do in his last hour.…
He turned and struggled away southward through the snow.
Hok watched. He remembered the stories of his fathers.
“Gragru seeks the dying place of the mammoth, the tomb of his people, that no man has ever seen or found. I shall follow him to that place—learn the secret and mystery of where the mammoth goes to die!”
Quickly he bound on his snow-shoes, gained the top of the drifts, and forged away after Gragru, now a diminishing brown blotch in the middle distance.
CHAPTER II
When Gragru Died
Even the elephant, degenerate modern nephew of Gragru’s race, can outrun a good horse on a sprint or a day’s march; and the beast Hok now followed was among the largest and most enduring of his kind. Despite the wound, the shaft in his body, and the deep snow, Gragru ploughed ahead faster than Hok’s best pace.
The tall chieftain, however, had a plain trail to follow—a deep rut in the snow, with splotches and spatters of blood. “Gragru shall not escape,” he promised himself, and mended his stride. The rising wind, bearing more snowflakes, blew at his wide shoulders and helped him along. Ahead was a ravine, its central watercourse many men’s height deep under old snows. Gragru sagely churned along one slope, into country more than a day’s journey from Hok’s village. Hok had hunted there only a few times.
They traveled thus, hunter and hunted, all morning and all afternoon. Evening came, and Hok did not pause for a campfire, but gnawed a strip of dried meat as he marched. His longest pause was to melt snow between his ungloved hands for drink. Then on into the dusk. The clouds broke a little, and the light of a half-moon showed him the trail of Gragru.
With the coming of night he heard the howl of winter-famished wolves behind. They were hunting him, of course. The safety of a tree, or at least a rock-face to defend his back, was the dictate of discretion; but Hok very seldom was discreet. He paused only long enough to cut a straight shoot of ash, rather longer than himself. Then, resuming his journey, he whittled it t
o a point with his deerhorn knife. This improvised stabbing spear he carried in his right hand, point backward.
The howling chorus of the wolves came nearer, stronger. It rose to a fiendish din as they sighted Hok. He judged that there were five or six, lean and savage. Without slacking his pace, he kept a watch from the tail of his eye. As they drew close to his heels, several gray forms slackened pace cautiously. Not so the leader—he dashed full upon Hok and sprang.
Hok had waited for that. Back darted his reversed spear. The tough ash pike met the wolf’s breast in midair, the very force of the leap helped to impale the brute. There rose one wild scream of agony, and Hok let go of the weapon, tramping along. Behind rose a greedy hubbub—as he had foreseen, the other wolves had stopped and were devouring their fallen leader.
“The bravest often die like that,” philosophized Hok, lengthening his stride to make up for lost time.
The long ravine came to a head in a frozen lake. Across this, to the south, brush-clad hills. Gragru’s wallowing trail showed how hard he found those hills to climb, and Hok made up some of the distance he had lost on the levels. As the moon sank before morning, Hok caught up. Gragru had paused to rest, a great hunched hillock in a shaggy pelt. Hok yelled in triumph and Gragru, galvanizing into motion, slogged away southward as before.
* * * *
Another day—second of pursuit, third of absence from home. Even Hok’s magnificently trained legs must begin to suffer from so much snowshoeing; even Gragru’s teeming reservoir of strength must run lower from pain and labor. Given a chance to idle and nurse himself, he could let the air clot and congeal the wounds, but the shaft still stuck through him, working and shifting to begin fresh bleedings. The trail now led through impeding thickets, and after a brief spurt by Gragru, Hok had a new advantage, that of using the mammoth’s lane through the heavy drift-choked growth. By afternoon more snow fell, almost a blizzard. Lest he lose the trail entirely, Hok tramped in Gragru’s very tracks instead of on the firmer drifts beside.
“He weakens,” Hok told himself, eyeing new blood blotches. “At this point he rested on his knees. Yonder he fell on his side. Brave beast, to get up again! Will he reach the dying place?”
Full of admiration for Gragru, Hok half-wished the animal would triumph, but he did not slow down. Hok was weary, but warm from his exertions and far from faltering.
Night again. During the darkness Hok again kept up a dogged march. Up ahead somewhere, Gragru was forced to make a halt of it. His wound was doing its grim best to heal. Once or twice the mammoth’s trunk reached back and investigated that lodged shaft. But there was too much wisdom in that high crag of a skull to permit tugging out of the painful thing—that would mean bleeding to death on the spot. Once again, as the deepest dark heralded the dawn, Hok drew nigh to his massive quarry. Once again Gragru stirred to motion, breaking trail for the third day of the chase.
The mighty stumpy feet were shaking and stumbling by now. Gragru fell again and again. He rose with difficulty after each fall, groaning and puffing but stubborn. A fresh hunter might have caught up—but Hok, however much he would not admit it, was himself close to the end of endurance. His deep chest panted like a bullfrog’s. He breathed through his mouth, and the moisture made icicles in his golden beard. Frost tried to bite his face, and he rubbed it away with snow. Only his conscious wisdom kept him from tossing aside his furs as too much weight. By noon he made his first rest-stop. Knowing better than to sit down and grow stiff, he leaned his back to a boulder and gulped air into his laboring lungs. After he had paused thus, and eaten a mouthful of meat, he was no more than able to resume the pursuit, at a stubborn walk.
“Gragru,” he addressed the fugitive up ahead, “you are strong and brave. Any man but Hok would say you had conquered. But I have not given up.”
The afternoon’s journey led over a great flat plain, rimmed afar by white wrapped mountains and bearing no trees or watercourses that showed above the snow. Almost on its far side was a gentle slope to a ridge, with a peculiar length of shadow behind. Hok saw Gragru ahead of him. The mammoth could barely crawl through the drifts, sagging and trembling with weakness. Hok drew on his own last reserves of strength, stirred his aching feet to swifter snowshoeing. He actually gained.
Narrower grew the distance between them. Hok drew the axe from his belt, balanced it in his gloved right hand. Coming close, he told himself, he would hack the tendon of Gragru’s hind leg, bring him down to stay. After that, get close enough to wrench out the piercing shaft, so that a final loss of blood would finish the beast. Then—but Hok could wish only for camp, a fire, sleep.
He toiled close. Closer. Gragru was only fifty paces ahead, tottering to that ridge of the slope. At its top he made a slow, clumsy half-turn. His head quivered between his big tussocked shoulders, his ears and trunk hung limply. His eyes, red and pained, fixed upon Hok’s like the eyes of a warrior who sees death upon him. Hok lifted his axe in salute.
“Gragru, I am honored by this adventure,” he wheezed. “Eating your heart will give me strength and wit and courage beyond all I have known. You will live again in me. Now, to make an end.”
He kicked off the snowshoes, so as to run more swiftly at Gragru’s sagging hindquarters. But, before he moved, Gragru acted on his own part. He stretched his trunk backward to the shaft in his wound.
Hok relaxed, smiling. “What, you would die of your own will? So be it! I yield you the honor of killing Gragru!”
The mammoth’s trunk surged with all the strength it had left. Fastening on the head of the lance, it drew, dragged, pulled the shaft clear through and away. A flip of the trunk, and the red-caked weapon flew out of sight beyond the ridge. Then, blood fountaining forth on both sides, Gragru dragged himself after the shaft. He seemed to collapse beyond the ridge.
“He is mine,” muttered Hok into the icicles on his beard, and lifted his axe. He ran in pursuit. So swift was he that he did not see what was on the other side of the ridge until too late.
There was no other side, really. Ground shelved straight down from that highest snow-clad point, into a vast, deep valley. There was a drop of eight or ten paces, then the beginning of a steep muddy slope. Hok felt a beating-up of damp warmth, like the rush of air from a cave heated with many fires. He saw thick, distant greenery below him, with a blue mist over it as of rain-clouds seen from a mountain top. All this in one moment.
Then his moccasins slid from under him on the brink, and he fell hard.
Striking the top of the slope all sprawling, he rolled over and then slid like an otter on a riverbank. Perhaps something struck his head. Perhaps he only closed his eyes as he slid.
In any case, Hok dropped into sleep as into warm water. He never even felt himself strike a solid obstruction and halt his downward slide.
CHAPTER III
The Jungle Beneath the Snow
Hok stretched, yawned, opened his eyes. “Where have I fallen?” he inquired of the world, and looked about to answer his own question.
He had plumped into a great bushy thicket of evergreen scrub, and had lain there as comfortably as in a hammock. By chance or instinct, he still clutched his big flint axe. Above him was the steep slope, and above that the perpendicular cliff with a crowning of snow. But all about him was a spring-like warmth, with no snow at all—only dampness.
Hok wriggled out of his branchy bed, examining himself. His tumble had covered his garments with muck. “Pah!” he condemned the mess, and used his gloves to wipe his face, hair and weapons. A look at the sky told him it was morning—he had slept away his fourth night from home.
Then he gazed downward. The valley seemed to throb and steam. He made out rich leafage and tall tree-summits far below. One or two bright birds flitted in the mists. Hok grimaced.
“Summer must sleep through the cold, like a cave-bear,” he decided. “I will go down,
and look for Gragru’s body.”
There were shoots and shrubs and hummocks for him to catch with hands and feet, or he would have gone sliding again. The deeper he journeyed, the warmer it became. Now and then he hacked a big slash on a larger tree, to keep his upward trail again. Those trees, he observed, were often summer trees, lusher and greener than any he had ever seen.
“Is this the Ancient Land of safe and easy life?” he mused.
He threw off leggings and gloves and the muddy lion-skin cloak, tying these into a bundle to carry. Further descent into even more tropical temperature, and he hung the superfluous garments in a forked branch of a ferny thicket. “I will get them when I return,” he decided, and went on down, clad only in clout and moccasins. Bow, quiver and pouch he slung from his shoulders. The deerhorn dagger rode in his leather girdle. His big axe he kept ready in his right hand, for what might challenge him.
The first challenger came, not up from the valley, but down from the misty air. Hok saw gray-green pinions, four times wider than his own arm-spread, and borne between them something like an evil dream of a stork. The wings rustled as they flapped—he saw, as they settled upon him, that they were un-feathered membranes like a bat’s—and two scaly rear talons slashed at him.
“Khaa!” cried Hok, revolted, and set himself for defense. He parried the rush with his axe. The side, not the edge, of the flint struck that monster’s chest, blocking it off. Down darted the long lean neck, and the sharp-toothed beak fastened in Hok’s hair. A moment later the clutching lizardy feet closed on the axe-haft. Hok found himself carried shakily aloft.
The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK® Page 30