Legend of the Celtic Stone

by Michael Phillips

  To all appearances their prize was dead. The old man rushed forward, heedless of the cries of his son, whose watchful eye yet detected the movement of breath from powerful lungs housed deep inside the mighty form. His father ran forward to the head, grabbed one of the tusks, and ran his hands up and down the smooth trophy. The wounded eye was black and void of sight, crusted with blood and a thick oily discharge. But had the Wanderer—less observant now with the advancement of his years—examined the other eye carefully, he would have seen yet the gleam of lingering wrathful life.

  His son hastened cautiously to the back side of the head, shouting warnings to stand away.

  “Away . . . get away, Father!” he cried.

  Mesmerized by the color and texture and feel of the great tusk, the old Wanderer hardly heard him. He remained standing in the very face of the beast. His son raised the stone axe high in the air, then brought the blunt edge of stone crashing down upon the head of the mammoth just above the eyes, from one of which still dangled his spear.

  A great crack could be heard as the skull began to split.

  A final roar of death sounded as the giant brute let out the spent conclusion of its fury. Suddenly alert to his danger, the Wanderer jumped back from the bellowing open mouth as his son raised his club for another blow.

  But as Providence had shed its light on the aged man only moments earlier, now that light was extinguished by its dark counterpart called Fate.

  It was too late for him to escape the tangle of tusks and suddenly twisting trunk. As it roared its last, the beast raised its head in one final frantic, jerking motion off the forest floor. The powerful serpentine trunk caught the old man’s legs, trapping him, and threw him to the ground.

  The second blow from the son’s club fell with perfect aim against the huge wrenching head. The stone accomplished its work. With its neck arched upward, the beast breathed its last, and its twisted head now fell lifeless back to the ground.

  But even in death it had its revenge. For one of the smooth, thrusting tusks found the Wanderer’s torso where he had fallen in a tangle with the trunk and was now struggling to free himself. The sharp tip gored him through. He was pinned to the ground by the very treasure he had sought. Man and beast emptied their lungs together in a lengthy gasp of death.

  The great cry that now rose heavenward from the forest floor was uttered by him whom the gods had suddenly made eldest among them. It was an honor unsought, and accompanied by huge tears of grief and wails of torment for not keeping his father away. As his father had done for him so long ago, he immediately shielded his own sons from the gruesome sight.

  Quickly he led them away, that they might grieve in solitude. The tusks and skin and whatever meat they might retrieve must wait.

  Their elder was dead. It was a solemn occasion. Honor was due, and they displayed it by kneeling and weeping.

  At length the Wanderer’s son rose. They returned to the grisly scene of death. Somehow, with the help of his sons, they must extricate the corpse of his father from the tusk of the mammoth.

  It took some time to wield the shaggy head such that the limp body could be pulled free.

  Bloody, repulsive work it was. None of the four would forget this awful day. At last the son who had traveled far lifted the broken form of his father in his arms and bore him home, followed silently by his three weeping but stalwart sons.

  Manhood did not come easily to those who made this region their home.

  It must often be won at great price. Though only hours earlier two men and three boys had gone in search of the great mammoth, four men now returned, bearing the lifeless body of their patriarch before them.

  Eight

  It took two days for son and grandsons to prepare the Wanderer’s grave. Eubha-Mathairaichean made a new drawing on a small piece of hide depicting a colossal beast and a white-haired warrior facing each other in mortal combat. She would lay it on his breast, bordered with intricate interconnected links and shapes symbolizing the continuity of life. She would say by her art that the great man lived on and had gone to become one with the earth.

  The grave was not of great depth. It did not need to be. The earth spirits would soon take the body. No man nor creature was likely to disturb it then.

  They lined the trough with what thin pieces of rock they could gather, pointing the venerable white head toward the north, whose frontiers he had pursued all his long life. In the crypt, along with the drawing, they placed a chunk of the tusk that had ended his earthly sojourn, to bring him pleasure and comfort during the travels toward whatever world now lay before him. At his side they laid the long shell-saw, dulled with years of use, which he had fashioned decades before with his own hands and with which those who remained had sliced his grave out of the turf. They had since replaced the tool with new and better, but this had always remained his favorite. A handful of his most cherished flints they set in his cold, stiff hand, and alongside his body a skin filled with fresh water should his journey require it.

  A brief ceremony followed, with suppliant chants to the unknown powers above and below in whose hands their revered father now rested. The four men and two women joined hands around the grave, gave the white beloved face a final, tearful, stoic farewell, then silently took hold of the three great slabs of turf set alongside the hole and gently lowered them onto him. Then followed the gathering of many stones to pile atop the grave as protection against beasts, and as a monument with which to remember the fallen Wanderer.

  The chief of their tiny clan was now gone.

  The next days were busy ones. The great fallen beast, won with such a sacrifice, now offered a variety of wealth to the migrant family.

  They could only hope to salvage a small portion of the flesh. The afternoon of the Wanderer’s death they had torn off what was possible to eat within a few days and taken it back to roast over the fire. The tasty meat, however, had contained no savor in their mouths, and they had consumed it in silence. Meat was necessary to survive. But nothing could remove the bitterness that went down with every bite. They would dry an additional quantity in the reasonable hope of storing it a few months. But it was too early in the year and there was no snow about to freeze more. The rest they would have to leave to the buzzards and the wolves.

  The thick hide, if with their crude knives and scrapers they could tear it off in nearly one piece, would serve as enormously valuable protection against the elements, both above them as a roof, and around their bodies as warmth. There was easily enough to make new shoes and garments from the scraps and leg sections. Teeth, bones, and hoof-nails could be used as implements for a variety of life’s needs. The second tusk as well as several of the huge rounded ribs they were able to cut out and dislodge from the hulking mass would serve as strong and sturdy plows with which to dig in the hard soil.

  It was a tedious and bloody process. After four days, the putrid stench from the giant open carcass became nearly unbearable. When his own three sons could tolerate the rancid fumes no longer, the Wanderer’s son excused them to stand watch and guard him against incursions from other even more dangerous wild beasts who were prowling daily closer and closer.

  They built three large fires to surround the scene of their labors, the reeking shell of blood, fat, muscle, gut, and bone in their center. They hoped the smell of the smoke would confuse the nostrils of nearby carnivores. If not and they ventured too close, the flames would dissuade them of further approach.

  On the fifth day, the Wanderer’s son still worked on, standing knee-deep in rotting entrails between the open bones and the stomach he had cut apart with his long, sharp shell knife, beating against the base of one large rib bone with a great stone held in both hands, trying to break it off at its base.

  With a loud crack, suddenly the bone split and gave way at his blow.

  The weight of the stone and the force of the swing threw him headlong off his feet. He fell facedown into the fetid mire with a bloody, liquid squish. Struggling to his feet,
covered with the blood and viscera of his own victim, he staggered a moment, then retched violently, then again and a third time. His own vomit spewed onto his legs and feet, mingling in sickening warmth with the cold chill of death under him from the mammoth’s rotting innards.

  Holding his heaving stomach and pulling himself together as best he could, he staggered away, out of the disgusting pit of death, and to the solid ground where his teenaged son watched with revulsion.

  It was enough! There was nothing more they could take from this beast. The time had come to leave it to whatever other animals could yet make use of it. The rest could rot.

  He gathered his sons to help him retrieve the last of the booty. They would haul it to their camp while he sought one of the small nearby lakes in which to remove from his skin the last memories of the animal who had killed the man he loved.

  Nine

  One morning a month after his father’s burial, Wanderer’s son, the mammoth slayer, rose early.

  A chill breeze met his face, portending storms a few months distant, readying themselves even now in the arctic to sweep southward toward the lands of men. The moment of restlessness had come again, as it always eventually did. He had anticipated this day, though it saddened him that his father could not enjoy it with him.

  He squinted, then breathed in deeply.

  He knew that tangy smell of northernness. He and his father had pursued it since he was nine. Always it had called them farther up, farther toward its origins. Away from human habitation they had trekked, into the face of the wind and the cold itself—northward, ever northward.

  Now it was an odyssey for him and his own woman and their children to continue. The blood of the solitary septentrional pilgrim pulsed in his veins more strongly now that he found himself the new head of the infant clan.

  The urge to move filled his soul. And he could not remain in this place of his death.

  He turned to walk back to the hut. There stood his wife waiting. She had heard him leave and knew what he felt. She felt it too.

  Their eyes met as he approached. They smiled. Both knew the call of the north had spoken.

  That very day, with one accord, they began making preparations. With wife, daughter, and sons, the Wanderer’s son gathered their belongings, heaping all of the mammoth’s wealth they could pull on their two wooden sledges, and took up once more the exodus into the unknown, in the direction toward which they had pointed his father’s head and toward which, he had no doubt, the old man’s spirit was still bound.

  Through the hilly region of lakes the Wanderer’s son led them, then down onto a plain until, encountering the body of water that would come to be known as Solway Firth, he was forced inland. Making his way slowly around it to the east, through the boggy mouths of several rivers and streams at its head, he finally turned northward again, entering at last into the land which, though given many names through the years, would always be known by those who loved it most deeply as Caledonia.

  Wherever he journeyed in those northern regions, his stories and tales and recountings of past travels always grew out of his love for the father with whom he had spent a full life. And it was from that father that he chose his name.

  He could have been called many things—Mammoth Slayer, or Adventurer, or He Who Sojourned from the White Mountains. But in his own estimation, and by the love that pulsed in his heart, there was but one thing that set him apart with such worthiness as to give him an individuality and identity.

  He thus ever after let himself be known simply as Son of Wanderer.

  His own sons would continue the example, taking his name by which to designate their own, thus perpetuating a genealogical appellative pattern whose roots lay in remembrance of the fathers and chiefs who had gone before.

  But with this patriarchal pride, he would also pass to his wife, Eubha-Mathairaichean, she who was the mathair, the source of life to daughter and three sons—and in memory also of her who had given him birth, her whom his father had called Eubha-Beanicca—the prerogative to extend his own heritage to his sons. Did not life spring from woman? Should not she, therefore, pass on its legacy?

  Thus, early in this land’s history, out of the reverence of the Wanderer and his son for the latter’s mother and wife, did matriarchy come to share honor with patriarchy in the hearts of the people of this land.

  Ten

  It was a harsh and unforgiving land the descendants of the Wanderer occupied, and over which they took gradual dominion as millennia gave way to millennia.

  What had lured them in this direction, even the Son of Wanderer himself could not have told. He was driven by what flowed in his veins—the urge to explore, to move, to gaze beyond the next river, to climb and look past the farthest peak.

  Season after season, as he moved steadily northward, he came to lands where cold and water made settlement difficult, where economic and political oneness would be hard to come by in future centuries. The ruggedness and wetness of the terrain discouraged homogeneity and unity. The scars left by the retreating glacial ice—mountains raised high, and valleys carved low, with lakes and swampy bogs everywhere—provided built-in barriers to movement and settlement.

  The first of these encountered by the family of Son of Wanderer was a quagmire of swampland that ran east and west between the firths of Clyde and Forth. Only in one spot could this boggy morass be breached. At the location which would one day be known as Stirling, the ice had left a narrow ridge of solid ground and natural rock, over which the east-west bog could be traversed, overlooked by a towering miniature mountain of solid stone. This site would in time become the land’s most strategic fortress and would hold the two halves of the country together.

  But for now the Son of Wanderer did not cross this natural bridge but settled his family in the fertile lowlands between the two great Caledonian firths.

  His own sons would in a few years bring this prehistoric odyssey to its end. It would be they who reached the northern extremities of this arm of the European continent. From the few forests that existed, though they were neither dense nor high, they would fashion boats with which to subjugate the isles that lay off the western shore. They would hunt the animals that roamed the land and the fish that swam its seas, both of which would give them meat to live. They would learn to make the land’s very starkness their chief ally in combating enemies of their own kind who would one day rise from the south against them.

  Before his own days were done, the Son of Wanderer would know what had driven his father toward the north. Many would be the sights to meet his eyes in the soaring Highlands that would one day be his final home. His heart ached that the old man might see them with him. He would behold other beasts, magnificent in their own way, though none so mighty as the mammoth, that would speak to his spirit concerning this land to which he had come.

  The Wanderer’s three grandsons, each in their turn as manhood overtook them, extended the Wanderer’s clan into the farthest reaches of west and north.

  The eldest, known as Hunter, Son of Wanderer’s Son, would migrate east, across the fertile plain between the Clyde and the Forth where his father had settled, managing to cross the treacherous bog which made of northern Caledonia essentially an island, and thence up its eastern coast.

  The memory of the giant mammoth-kill never left him. Though it brought grief to his heart, the elemental clash for supremacy, pitting brain and ingenuity against the terror of sheer size, remembering the image of his father’s bravery facing the charging beast, kindled within his bosom a restless impulse to match his own humanity against the fierceness of the lower species. Ever after, the pangs of hunger in his stomach could be sated only by meat outmaneuvered and slain by his own hand.

  The nomadic spirit drove Hunter’s steps, just as it had driven his grandfather before him. He explored the lowlands along the northeastern coastline, inward to the edges of the central Highlands, and northward around to Moray. For the rest of his days he sought the footprints of those whose k
ind had killed his grandfather. Though he never saw their like again, his canniness was challenged to its full by the great brown bear which stood higher than he himself, by the mighty stags with racks of antlers, and by the most feared predators of all—ferocious packs of pale-eyed wolves.

  He was the first of the homo sapiens genus to lay eyes on the long, narrow loch called Ness. The hunting there was not good, however. It revealed little evidence of creature life. The region surrounding the fog-enshrouded, murky body of water seemed eerily somber and empty, as if some preternatural presence lay near. Even the few birds that chanced to fly overhead glided silently on the breeze, whatever invisible spell that warned beasts away silencing their overhead songs as well. Hunter remembered the thrill of following his father and grandfather after the elephantine prints. But no such feeling filled his breast walking through this valley beside the strange water.

  Sensing ominous forebodings which not even his fearless instinct desired to question, the Hunter shivered, then turned his back and with his own son began making his way northward toward the coast. If by chance there was some beast here, it did not belong to the earth and was not one he wanted to encounter. This was no place for man.

  Boatdweller, second Grandson of Wanderer, would ply his skill toward proficiency in crafting boats and learning to sail them. He would explore the Western Isles of Mull, Uist, Skye, and Harris, and as far north as Lewis, before sailing south to the largest of all the islands which would come to be called Ireland, where his progeny would remain for centuries.

  His descendants would not only learn to navigate upon the deep greenish gray waters, they would develop ingenuity in taking their sustenance from under it as well. The sea gave life. Boatdweller’s descendants would discover its secrets. They would come both to fear and love it.

  Out of his loins would come a hundred generations of fisher people, scattering and spreading themselves north, south, east, and west through hundreds of islands besides the Green Isle, eventually peopling the encircling coastline of the entire Caledonian mainland, and in time returning from Eire to reconquer this very land of their origins.