I was lowering myself into a little wooded ravine when the mammoth charged just about straight uphill. The mankiller had picked his spot well. He had a dry stream bed to climb while I was pinned on a V-shaped slope made slippery by pine needles. I had nowhere to go but down.
He smelled of musk and pond water as I dodged the initial thrust. Leaping over his left tusk. I launched myself downhill, bouncing all the way down to the trail in three 20-foot jumps. The needles made it like skiing black diamond moguls.
The meteorite club was banging off my leg as I ran. I pulled it from my belt and held it like a relay baton. The mammoth backed down to level ground and quietly trotted in my wake. I would guess I had a 100-yard lead, but with each stride, he pulled a foot or two closer.
We ran that way down the trail, me picking up ground in the thick trees and losing it everywhere else. I leaped a dry stream and glanced back to see the mammoth had cut my lead to about 30 yards. His mottled ears were tucked back. Enraged black eyes. Each step of his massive feet sent up quiet puffs of dust. The earth didn’t shake like in the movies. Earlier in the race, the only sound behind me was the occasional tearing of brush, breaking of a low limb and, once or twice, trees being mowed down. I knew he was really cutting the gap when I could hear his steady breathing. Wet and a little raspy. Strong.
Suddenly, one of the grape vine roadblocks appeared ahead. I dove headfirst into the brush, wriggled to the bottom and crawled through a gap to the secondary trail that circled to the left. Crabbing free, I was looking behind to see if the trick had confused the mammoth when I ran smack dab into the hindquarters of a hairy black sow.
The pig was busy eating fallen grapes and never heard me coming. The collision bounced me to the ground against a tangled wall of vines. Quick as a mongoose, probably scared half out of her mind, the pig spun to slash out with her four-inch tusks. Luckily, her swipe came up a couple feet short.
I was in no position to protect myself if she charged, but she stopped to study what kind of beast had made the surprise attack. I slowly rose to one knee, the pig staring me down the whole time. Eye to eye just an arm’s length away. Foam appeared at her mouth as she ground her lower tusks on the top ones to sharpen them. The meteorite club was cocked and ready as she turned to quickly hop off the trail and crash into the brush. Howling squeals stopped me in my tracks.
The pig rose high in the air, pinned to the mammoth’s mighty tusks by a furry gray trunk. How that rogue got so close without either the pig or me hearing him, I’ll never know. Even at this moment, covered in his blood, it still scares the crap out of me. With four mighty strides he was on top of me. I felt the whoosh of air as he slammed tusks and pig down with a mighty boom. I dove to the right at the last possible millisecond, rolled forward and came up running. Mr. Meteorite was still in my hand.
They all said it was quite a sight when I broke from the trees, running through the blackened field with a bull mammoth hot on my tail. The pig had become skewered on the right tusk, slowly working its way down to the bottom of the sweeping curve as the rogue trotted in my wake. I imagine it is the only thing that kept him from catching me out in the open ground. My lungs were about to burst as I swung wide away from Gray Beard’s patch of trees and down the dusty trail to the cliff. Faint shouting registered in my brain. Something was wrong behind me.
I turned to see little Suzie running for her life toward the trees. She had gotten bored waiting and worrying back at camp and walked down to see how the hunt was going. Something like that. One of the male pups, Sparky we called him, followed her. I never saw them as I ran by. The pregnant girl had the good sense to hide with the dog behind a clump of tall grass. The bull must have picked up their scent about the same time I began pulling away. He quickly tracked them down and flushed them from the hiding place. Suzie set off screaming for Gray Beard’s trees.
Three steps behind and closing fast, the mammoth pulled to a stop when Sparky darted in, barking and yapping like crazy. He nipped at the beast’s giant feet, sprinted away to turn and double back for another harrying attack. The pup showed more backbone than I ever thought possible from one of the old man’s mutts. The bull stood panting for a few slashing runs, then whirled with lightning speed to snatch up Sparky with its trunk and toss him 50 feet straight up in the air. The bull watched the flight from start to finish. The instant the dog smacked down to earth, he shuffled over to stomp the broken body.
I jumped up and down, waved my arms as he turned to resume his chase of the girl. The first atlatl bolt caromed off its domed skull when it turned, but the second buried deep between its ear and eye socket–exactly where Gray Beard said to put it. Stunned for only a second, the mammoth turned my direction. Trumpeting and bellowing, he charged straight toward me–and the cliff.
I saw Jones hustling to get in position for a side shot as I worked my way toward the flat area where the old man had ordered us to slay the monster. The weight of the pig seemed to be taking more of a toll on the bull as he picked his way through an old rockslide down to the dusty, two-acre plain fronting the cliff. Jones missed high and then connected to the right front foreleg with a shot the bull didn’t even seem to notice. I was the focus of all of its hate. He was determined to make me pay.
I inched toward the cliff, waving my arms to keep the bull’s attention. The air was suddenly filled with atlatl darts. One after another found its mark in the giant animal’s neck and head. Each took its toll, but the beast was still moving slowly towards me when Jones ambled close to rocket his final dart straight down the ear canal. The mammoth collapsed with a mighty sigh, rolling to its side, pulled over by the weight of the 300-pound pig.
Jones came up to slap me on the back. We shook hands and embraced as I heaved to catch my breath. The others joined us amid much whooping and hollering. Maria and Suzie hugged their men tight, both shedding tears of relief. Gray Beard wasn’t satisfied until Jones and I stood atop the mammoth’s head and gave it ceremonial raps with our weapons.
Soon everybody from camp was there to help. It turned out nobody but Gray Beard and Fralista had ever butchered a mammoth before. Those two ended up doing most of the cutting while we worked in teams to do the rest of the work, like pulling back the thick, rubbery hide and carrying meat.
We toiled buck-naked, shedding our clothes to save them from the awful mess. The old man clucked his approval as he inspected the hide to find we did not poke any holes in the middle portions of the precious skin. I can’t imagine what he plans to do with it. The hide alone must weigh more than ton.
They slit the beast from mouth to ass straight down the belly. It took more than an hour’s worth of cutting with stone tools, and pulling as a team, before we peeled the hide free. We laid the four-inch thick skin on the ground and used it as a sort of tablecloth as we cut the bull into bits small enough to carry. Gray Beard dissected it more than he butchered it. Individual muscles, cut free from their tendons, still sheathed in silver-white membrane, were handed down as we collected them on the hide for the crew of meat haulers to carry away.
The reason for killing the beast at this particular spot became clear when the clan’s people began toting the sections of flesh off to a nearby cave. Inside the cave, a race of earlier people had discovered the tunnel was packed with pure sea salt. I mentioned sea levels must have been pretty high to leave a cave full of salt this far in the mountains and Maria said it may have been a saltwater spring that slowly clogged itself shut over the millennia. The earlier clan had carved wide shelves in the salt walls and left well-preserved oak poles that could be fitted in notches to form rows of curing racks.
Fralista’s clan had known about the cave for generations and used it yearly to cure pork and goat. They carried the mammoth meat to the cave by torch light where they plopped it on the ground to roll in the salt and ashes of countless smoky fires. One-legged Karloon couldn’t haul or cut so he served as the cave’s foreman. Pointing with his crutch, he directed where to roll the meat and where to stac
k it once it was coated in a salty, gray-pink paste. Someone used an adze to split the pig in half. It was carried up with the flattened dog to take up a whole rack of their own.
Even after the sun went down and the temperatures dropped low enough for us to see our breath, Gray Beard worked by firelight to claim as much meat as possible. At about two or three in the morning he called a halt. We had at least 1,200 pounds of mammoth stacked in the cave, choice sections of loin and shoulder, all the organs. Karloon started an acacia-wood fire just inside the mouth then bossed the women as they positioned a thick wall of pine boughs across the entrance to trap the smoke.
Dawn lights the morning sky over the mountain peaks. It’s going to be a hot, sunny day. Indian summer. We’ll be leaving this network of valleys soon. Gray Beard says we’ll separate the head today and push the rest over the edge of the cliff. The waste is incredible. More than enough to attract all manner of nasty scavengers. If it was allowed to rot close to the cave, there would be no way for the clan to protect its supply of salted meat.
We have tons of carcass to move, but the clanspeople are motivated. They are anxious to get at the hide. They want to cover it with salt and (if I understand correctly) piss and shit to start the curing process.
The skull and tusks will be left at this spot to commemorate our great hunt. I’ll remember it as the day the hunter became the hunted.
TRANSMISSION:
Duarte: “How much do you think this mammoth weighs?”
Kaikane: “Now?”
Duarte: “No, not now. When it was whole.”
Kaikane: “I have no idea. That’s your job, babe. Measuring and counting things.”
Duarte: “I have a number in my head, but would like to have somebody else corroborate my estimate.”
Kaikane: “What is it?”
Duarte: “I can’t tell you my number. It would influence your guess. Give me your estimate first.”
Kaikane: “Let me think about it. You look good in red. Anybody ever tell you that?”
Duarte: “Feels like I’ve been painted with rubber.”
Kaikane: “Twenty tons.”
Duarte: “Don’t you think that sounds high?”
Kaikane: “What did the notes in your computer say, they could reach up to 12 tons? Those bookworms never dreamed of a bull this size. What was your number?”
Duarte: “I don’t really have one yet. I’ll measure the femur and should be able to extrapolate to find the weight within one hundred pounds or so.”
Kaikane: “Why did you ask me, then?”
Duarte: “I just love to see the Kaikane mind in action.”
Kaikane: “You do have a number. I know you, Maria Duarte. Tell you what, I’ll bet you. A back rub. I’ll take 20 tons and you make a prediction. Loser rubs.”
Duarte: “I’ll say 17.8 tons.”
Kaikane: “We’ll see.”
Duarte: “How do you know I won’t cheat?”
Kaikane: “Like I said, I know you, Maria Duarte.”
From the log of Maria Duarte
Chief Botanist
Fralista and the girls cut my hair today. We were luxuriating in the hot pool, settling in for a good soak after recovering from the shock of our bitter cold stream baths. Camp rules dictated we all thoroughly wash off in the cold stream before plunging in the hot pool–where water is slow to circulate and easy to pollute.
The stream’s bracingly cold water was tolerable, even enjoyable, after the long walk from the salt flats. Men and women shucked their blood-soaked gear on the bank and waded into the current to wash away the gore accumulated from two days of standing in the belly of the beast. We bathed in a pool just below the camp, upstream from the toilet. Using flint knives, flat stones and pieces of bark, we scraped a sheen of oily grime off our arms and legs and off each other’s backs. Vigorous rubs with sand helped scour away the film of fat and blood that had turned us red.
People of the Blood. That’s what I nicknamed our crew out on the flats. We became so thickly coated in the stuff we were all just red beings with white eyes and teeth. By the time the last section of vertebrae was pitched unceremoniously into the scree of jumbled rocks and trees 500 feet below the cliff’s edge, we had truly become People of the Blood. It dried to a purple black on our skin, building layer by layer to freeze the expressions on our faces and crack at the joints of our arms and legs. Welded to the grotesque coating were flecks of fat and bone, hairs and leaves and insects. The smells of those two days, the memories of them, at least, are something which will never wash away.
The day after the hunt made the first late night seem like a picnic. The flies, bees and carrion arrived early to blacken the sky. We awoke to a squawking, buzzing free-for-all. Gray Beard put us to work, separating us into bird shoo-ers and meat haulers. Jones brought a few vultures down with well-launched darts from his atlatl and that discouraged the birds enough so that once we toppled a ton or so of mammoth over the cliff, they mostly left us alone. The flies and bees didn’t take the hint. They swarmed the carcass and feasted upon bloody scraps until the last bit was gone. They feasted on us too, drinking our sweat and tears, and landing in droves to worry our cuts and sores.
To help start the tanning process, we were encouraged to void our bowels and bladders on the mammoth skin once it was cleared of bloody litter. The Cro-Magnons were not shy, and had no compunctions against letting rip in public, or skating around the resulting slurry to stir the soup. Thanks to several dozen gourds of water brought from the river, we all managed at least one good piss.
Before we could leave, we had to wait for the first two guards to arrive. Jones and Suzie volunteered for the duty, and had scurried back to camp to wash and collect their sleeping gear. They walked back, smiling and holding hands, as Gray Beard finished stoking the cave’s fire and supervising the placement of a semi-circle of leathery hide, flensed from the mammoth’s skull, over the cavern’s mouth. Even with holes from Jones’ darts, the hide did a far superior job of trapping smoke inside the cave than the previous screen of limbs.
As we left the spot of the kill, carrying tools and salted meat for camp, I turned back to see the skull was crawling so thickly with insects and birds it seemed to have become a living thing.
It was a quiet march back to camp, most of us too tired to converse. The cold stream revived us, and the warm spring’s bubbly waters relaxed us to a point of harmony I had not yet experienced in the poor, hard-luck community.
I was nuzzled under Paul’s arm, thinking about the hunt and how close I had come to losing him, when Fralista produced a flint knife from a low ledge. Looking at me, she made a sawing motion which brought titters from a few of the clan’s women.
“Be gentle,” Gray Beard called out, drawing laughs from everyone.
I consented by holding my palm out and nodding. Soon I was surrounded by chatty women. Reaching as one, they grabbed fistfuls of my hair–one hand held close to the scalp and the other spread an inch or so above to leave room for Fralista to saw with her knife. The reasoning behind the technique became obvious as each thrust of the relatively dull blade threatened to yank the hair right out of my head. Ouch! The women did their best to keep the blade from pulling my scalp, holding tight until the last strand was cut, then yelling and splashing away with their handful of hair. One by one, they stacked the clumps in a tall pile at the edge of the pool.
When she was finished, Fralista held my cheeks in both hands, turning my head back and forth, inspecting her handiwork. She ruffled my now-short hair before playfully dunking me under the water. I swam back to Paul and he welcomed me with a hug and kiss.
“You look wonderful,” he said.
We rested in companionable silence until the sun set in bright orange and red hues over the mountains. Fralista protectively gathered up my pile of hair and took it with her when she left.
Dinner tonight was (what else?) mammoth. The meat tastes like a cross between old beef and rank mutton. Not my favorite meal. I didn’t see
anybody clamoring for additional portions. Gray Beard assures us once it is properly aged and smoked we will find it quite tasty. He rubs his belly and makes contended grunting noises to convey the point.
I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. Paul began snoring the moment he laid his head on the fur-covered floor of our cave. The comfortable, igloo-shaped hole in the limestone belonged to a couple with three children. The father was torn to bits by the mammoth and his family succumbed to the troubles which followed. Their clothes, tools and toys still hang from the network of poles which crisscross the ceiling. They also sit in neat piles along the floor’s perimeter. We can’t bring ourselves to move them lest the poor souls somehow return. We know we are but brief interlopers to this valley they held so dear.
There is some sort of ceremony planned for tomorrow. We will be leaving the next day. I’m hoping Jones agrees to depart with us. He has become quite attached to the pregnant girl. Though we have not broached the subject, I get the feeling he’s thinking about staying. Gray Beard seems worried too. He promises Jones to bring him back once he finds and collects his lost clan.
The old leader is convinced I know exactly where to find his people. All I have is a hunch based on a cryptic note carved in wood. Even if I correctly deduced the course they will take, we’ve fallen way behind schedule. We hoped to intercept them a month ago as they came down the Rhone. That seemed like a good bet. Possible. If we have to chase them all the way to Nice, we have a hell of a long way to go.
The days are getting shorter. I fear we may be too late to get in front of the Italians and their mischief.
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