'Think about it, boy ... Rockshaper is the one who died. He is no great loss.'
Treeclimber considered his leader's uncaring bluntness and dropped the matter. He started ushering the onlookers away from the crime scene, clearing a path for Caverunner striding behind, who called back to Bushwalker over his shoulder.
'Replace that bloodied mat with some fresh grass. I detest an untidy cave.'
* * * *
'Tough as old roots.'
Yowlar had to agree with Jinku's assessment of Upright meat. The old gracile had been a most unappetising takeaway to break his fast. The hyenas scavenging Rockshaper's meagre remains at the bottom of the acacia the baboon and panther were treed in on the other side of Scraggly Bush begged to differ, judging by the happy crunch of bones as their powerful jaws made short work of the carcass below.
Yowlar hissed at the pack of maniacal scavengers below. Sniffing out his kill in the predawn darkness, they forced the cat and his monkey minion to seek the safety of the trees. Not even in his former guise as a proper Sabretooth would Yowlar have squared off against those ten mangy curs. ‘I won't lose my next kill so easily,’ he vowed.
'May our next meal be tenderer,’ hoped Jinku. A warning snarl from his master put him back in his place. ‘Did I say that out loud, sir? Terribly sorry. I was just wondering why you took such old prey?'
Yowlar condescended to explain his motives. ‘The elderly, because of their age, are typically the shrewdest. By depriving a pride of its smarts, you sheath its claws. Don't worry, monkey-boy. We'll be feasting on younger meat soon enough.'
Jinku brightened. ‘What's our next move, sir?'
Relaxing on the branch that was keeping him out of Bonecruncher reach, Yowlar yawned. ‘Soak up the sun and get some sleep.'
'After that?'
'To hamstring the Upright pride,’ purred the panther. He was beginning to enjoy this game of cat and mouse with the man-apes.
'How do we do that?'
'By you showing me their leader's cave.'
* * * *
The grotto seemed so empty. That was far from the case of course. The assorted piles of Rockshaper's collected stones filled his narrow workshop to overflowing. Later that same awful day Bushwalker wandered in, feet scrunching on the shavings from her slaughtered pal's toolmaking littering the floor. She trailed a lazy finger along the cave wall. Sighing deeply, she slumped on the basalt worktable in the shaft of illuminating warmth provided by the skylight. Surrounded as she was by rocks of varying size, shape and colour, Bushwalker keenly felt the one thing that was missing and her heart began to break.
Loss was nothing new to Bushwalker, her parents both perishing during the long drought of recent years. She had oddly not been stricken by their early deaths for they were virtual strangers to her: a mother as scatterbrained as the wind who regarded her daughter as the burden that kept her already wanderlust mate firmly at a distance. But this bereavement was something altogether different.
Grief welled up in Bushwalker like a surging flood, muddied by guilt. The oldster had been her dearest friend and confidant. Her inaction cost Rockshaper his life, or so she irrationally figured. Had Bushwalker rashly made a move against the panther to warn her elderly pal, she would have joined him in death. It is always harder to survive than die.
Rockshaper's scent lingered hauntingly in the musty air and she could almost hear his ghostly hammering echoing through the vaults of Home-rock. Fighting to frame the concept in her primitive mind, the forlorn maid wondered if the essence of her chum continued on after death, could live on in a place better than the world the body had been butchered in. Was this the faint stirring of human spirituality? Nature understandably remained the guiding force in the hominin world, bringing fair weather and bad, but periodically they felt the whispers of a huger unseen force at play. Undersized brains coped falteringly with the nascent inkling of souls and a higher power, beliefs that would not mushroom into budding religion for another 40,000 generations. Dismissed as the by-product of a grieving mind, mysticism would take a backseat to animalist thinking until Neanderthal shamanism blossomed in the undreamt future.
'I thought I'd find you here.'
Bushwalker lifted her tear-streaked face as Treeclimber wormed his way from the bottleneck passage into the tiny cave. Stopping a few paces back from the pensive female, he leant nonchalantly against a rock ledge. ‘What do you want?’ she barked crabbily.
'To see how you are.'
'Don't trouble yourself. I don't need you or any other male looking after me. I can take care of myself.'
'I'm sorry about what happened to the old fella.'
Bushwalker sprang up. ‘Don't lie! You never liked Rockshaper.'
He backed up as his casual girlfriend stormed toward him, her grief finding an outlet as rage. ‘I admit I thought him odd.'
'You called him crazy!’ she shrieked.
'Stop splitting hairs, Bushwalker. He was nuttier than a Bonecruncher. That's not to say I didn't...’ Treeclimber clattered backwards over a pile of quartz pieces to land flat on his back. He lay there blinking as the enraged maid hovered over him blacker than a thundercloud. ‘I can't pretend in order to spare your feelings,’ he surrendered. ‘I'm glad the old-timer is gone. Maybe now you'll start acting proper and tidy yourself up. You look a fright.'
'Oh, you're so horrid!’ ranted Bushwalker. Bending down, she grabbed for one of the stones scattered by Treeclimber's clumsiness and threw the rock at him. It struck him squarely in the chest with a dull thud, followed by an oath of pain and surprise. She stooped again and Treeclimber scrambled to his feet, making for the exit. He grunted when the second stone clipped his ear and shattered on the cave wall behind.
'We could have used an arm like yours yesterday,’ he groused, ducking as a third missile whizzed over his head to sail into the passageway. Treeclimber wisely chose to follow the departing rock's lead.
Bushwalker scooped up another stone to hurl after the insufferable male and paused mid-throw. She had inadvertently picked up the hooked pebble-tool she helped to name. Having second thoughts about chucking the exquisitely shaped quartz at the reprobate, Bushwalker contemplated the descriptively titled cutter and smiled forebodingly.
* * * *
Tension was high.
Despite Caverunner being adamant that the alleged perpetrators of the home invasion that saw Rockshaper killed would in no way return to commit more crimes, the gracile Uprights remained jumpy. As it happened their unimaginative leader was proved right and no robusts raided Home-rock. Sadly, that did not stop the killing.
Five days elapsed before Yowlar and company struck again. The hominins were starting to relax and believe in the confidence of their chieftain that no more attacks were forthcoming when tragedy ripped Caverunner's world out from under him.
Bushwalker, having swiftly cleaned up herself and her act after deciding that life went on, first knew something was amiss when a commotion woke her. Taken to occasionally sleeping in Rockshaper's workshop—whether for security or out of a compulsion to be close to his essence, who knew?—she fumbled her way down the constricting passage in the greyish gloom of predawn to gain the shelf of rock from which the citadel reached for the sky. Hollers betraying confusion and fear rang out in the steely morn. Poking her head out of the crack of an entryway, Bushwalker made out in the dimness the snout of Raincatcher, one of Treeclimber's hussies, protruding from the grotto next door. Swallowing her pride, she asked, ‘What's all the fuss about?'
The rival female rubbed her eyes and cackled in a sleepy voice, ‘Sounds like Leafpicker and Caverunner are having a domestic.'
Bushwalker held her jealous tongue. There was no love lost between the floozy and her. She honestly did not know what Treeclimber saw in Raincatcher's sagging breasts and grey-flecked pelt. Obviously he had a thing for oldish women.
'I think it's more than a family squabble,’ came a second opinion. It was Cloudlooker, slightly younger and perter. Treeclimber l
iked keeping his harem together.
'For once I'm in agreement with you,’ muttered Bushwalker, boldly emerging from the fissure unescorted. The other females stared in wonder. Their timid compatriot had undergone a profound change during her week and a half of seclusion by the way she jauntily strode uphill to where the leader's cave was situated.
Bushwalker marched with uncharacteristic purpose to find a throng of whispering males anxiously crowding the entrance. Leafpicker could be heard sobbing loudly before Caverunner's anxious plea lifted above the murmur. ‘My son is missing. Find him!'
She was stunned. Troublefoot? He was just a boy. Bushwalker experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
'Someone organise a search party,’ entreated the distraught leader.
Treeclimber jumped predictably to the fore. ‘I'll do it, chief. Boys, follow my lead.’ A ragtag party formed around him, milling about in the gloomy morn. ‘What are we waiting for?’ he demanded.
'Daybreak, moron,’ came the unanimous reply.
First light dawned tortuously slow for the loitering hominins. When the eastern sky finally turned golden, Treeclimber and his mob poured downslope in search of the missing child like a flooded river overflowing its banks. Caverunner stayed back, comforting his favourite mate and mother of his cherished son. Indisposed to stay behind with the other frightened females, Bushwalker set off to join the hunt for Troublefoot.
His mangled corpse was found well after the fiery heavens graduated into the depthless summer blue. A summoning hoot heard from Ditchjumper a mile away alerted the searchers that their manhunt had come to a saddening conclusion. Bushwalker raced to the spot south of Home-rock the scouring males were converging on, where the sparse acacias of Scraggly Bush melted into the grassed vastness of the emptier savannah and a termite mound, on which a lone Jackalberry bole had long ago taken root, swarmed with the searchers. Ditchjumper pointed a shaky finger up at the branches of that aged tree he trembled under. There, draped on a stout bough stripped of fruit some thirteen feet aboveground, limply hung Troublefoot's half-eaten body. Nauseated, she sank to her knees, faint with fear.
Treeclimber arrived last of all in a breathless rush. ‘Somebody go fetch Caverunner,’ he mouthed hoarsely after taking in the grisly find.
The sorrowful leader arrived shortly thereafter. He viewed the teeny, wretched corpse with hard eyes. ‘Get my son down,’ he ordered between clenched teeth.
Treeclimber volunteered. It was his natural ability after all. Scaling the branched tree with enviable ease despite the handicap of his stiffly healing arm, he hoisted Troublefoot's remains over his banged shoulder and descended, solemnly laying his burden at Caverunner's feet.
The Upright chieftain's lower lip began quivering while he surveyed his butchered son. Most of the boy's torso was eaten away and a gaping hole existed where his right eyeball should have been: bloody evidence of how Yowlar's canines pierced the socket and punctured the back of the head when the panther seized the sleeping boy in his killer jaws, crushing Troublefoot's fragile skull. Wordlessly, Caverunner picked up his dead, mutilated son and bore him solemnly back to Home-rock, the males forming up unasked into a funeral procession behind. Before joining them, Bushwalker recovered her shocked senses enough to note the indisputable claw marks fissuring the trunk's blackish-grey bark.
The day remained dreadfully subdued for the hominins. The greater part did not dare venture outside the questionable safeness of the caves. Those who tempted fate slinked about Scraggly Bush, fearing every shadow and jumping at all sounds while they scrounged the already ravaged bushland. Those hungry souls scurried back to the citadel well before dusk claimed the land for the coming night. The fading sun of early evening only served to heighten the disquiet of the Uprights. Their worries came to the fore during the tribal meeting convened by general consensus in the descending twilight.
Bushwalker took her usual place amongst the females grouped in the middle as Treeclimber cleared his throat to announce his intent to chair the gathering. ‘Since Caverunner is indisposed,’ he began, ‘I'll be handling things in his stead.'
The leader and his preferred mate were too distraught to worry about anything except minding Troublefoot's body bizarrely lying in state up in their cave. Traditionally, Upright dead were left out for the scavengers to dispose of. It was a practical, if morally unpleasant, system of refuse collection. But as ethics belonged to the unformed future, the practice continued undebated.
'Who died and put you in charge?’ challenged a lone male.
Treeclimber identified the objector. ‘You got a problem with me, Quickstep.'
'Yeah, I do. Caverunner is still chief, so what are you doing taking his place without his sayso?'
'The boss is hardly in a fit state to make decisions.'
'That's beside the point. You haven't the authority to act in his stead.'
'I've always been his unofficial second.'
'Only recently.'
Treeclimber winced at that truth. ‘What are you getting at, Quickstep?'
'Maybe we should consider another for temporary chieftain.'
'You have someone in mind ... yourself, perhaps?'
Quickstep chuckled annoyingly. ‘I'm not that egotistical. Might I suggest that the oldest and presumably wisest of us lead instead.'
Accepting the shrewd proposal, Treeclimber deferred to Plainswalker. The elder shook his head unwillingly. ‘Old I may be, stupid I am not. We're in the middle of a crisis and I don't want to have to be the one to walk us out of it.'
Treeclimber smirked. He already guessed the old boy's reaction beforehand. ‘Any other candidates, Quickstep?'
The troublemaker bit his lip sulkily. His objection had fallen flat.
Gloating over his minor victory, Treeclimber attacked. ‘The trouble with you, Quickstep, is that your mouth is as fast as your feet, so you speak before you think and more often than not it's utter tripe.’ He rose and paced before his squatting peers. ‘Okay, everybody, I'm going to do things a little differently than Caverunner. I'll talk and you'll listen, without interrupting me. This is not going to turn into an open debate and as I speak for Caverunner my word will be law.'
'Power sure went to his head fast,’ Quickstep muttered laconically to his neighbour.
Ignoring the gibe, the self-appointed interim head of Home-rock pressed on. ‘Four of ours have been slain, two killed on our own rockstep, by those damnable robusts. These heinous murders must be avenged. I urge you all to disregard Caverunner's caution and follow me in...’ Faltering, Treeclimber gawped as Bushwalker slowly stood. ‘What are you doing?’ he spluttered. ‘This is highly irregular!'
Bushwalker barked nervously before boldly hooting, ‘What you are saying is wrong.'
'Females are not permitted to speak in counsel. Sit back down immediately.'
'No, Treeclimber, I'll not be silenced like a rowdy child. I will be heard.’ The females surrounding Bushwalker got to their knees and commenced backing away from her, distancing themselves from their rebellious comrade and her potent words.
'I order you to sit!’ Treeclimber commanded with a shriek, looking to his fellows for support. The other males were too stunned to react as Bushwalker took the floor.
'If Treeclimber is about to say what I think he is, he's proposing to lead us on some vengeful folly that'll only result in more of us dying,’ she pronounced, ‘which is even stupider considering the robusts are not responsible for the deaths of Rockshaper and Troublefoot.'
Murmurs of surprise and disbelief circulated the cavern, sourcing the inevitable query from Quickstep. ‘Well, the old geezer didn't expire of old age, girlie. So how did he die?'
'A clawfoot took him.'
A deathly hush settled over the astonished Uprights.
'That's rubbish,’ sneered Treeclimber, determined to play down Bushwalker's outlandish claim. ‘Everyone knows Roarers are poor climbers.'
'I never said a Roarer was the culprit,’ she stressed.<
br />
Treeclimber gave a hoot of triumph, thinking his argument won. ‘Hah! If it wasn't a Roarer that just leaves Bighand's troop.'
'There are breeds of clawfeet other than the maned kind,’ the clever maid pointed out.
'This talk is nonsense! Bushwalker, take your seat and be quiet, or I'll have you thrown out of the cave.'
She stiffened, preparing to respond to the threat, but the rebuke mouthed at Treeclimber came from another.
'I want to listen to what she has to say, sonny,’ demanded Plainswalker. ‘Let's hear her out.'
Treeclimber glared at the elder untouched by greyness and surprisingly relented. Maybe her tongue would trip her up.
'When you're ready again, girlie,’ prompted the oldster.
Reasoning in the manner Rockshaper had extolled her for, Bushwalker thought it through aloud for the benefit of her audience. ‘Troublefoot was snatched and eaten. Presumably Rockshaper was made a meal of too. In no way can the robusts be accused of this—they simple don't eat meat.’ Her statement clouted the troop like a rockfall. The truth was just as irrevocable and damaging. The pause gave her confidence and she seized the moment to proclaim, ‘All of you know I was sharing the cave Rockshaper slept in the night he got taken. What dragged him off was no Upright, but a clawfoot devil blacker than the dark with eyes like the yellow night-sun.'
'You lie!’ scoffed Treeclimber.
'Girlie may be right.’ All eyes in the cave centred on Plainswalker. ‘When Caverunner investigated Rockshaper's disappearance, Bushwalker mentioned she may have seen a clawfoot. He asked me if a Roarer might have made the climb. I told him I thought it improbable, but not entirely out of the question. He rubbished the notion out of hand.'
'That proves it then,’ Treeclimber decided. ‘Caverunner thought her idea twaddle too.'
'And his son is dead because of it,’ Plainswalker poignantly added.
'How many more of us must die before you lot accept the truth?’ implored Bushwalker. ‘There's a giant black cat stalking the caves every few nights to kill us in our sleep. He leaves scratchings in tree trunks as his marker. That is the real threat, not the robusts.'
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