Mammoth Boy (11 page)

It must have worked, thought Urrell, when he came to from a dreamless blank. Rakrak slept quietly beside him in the hay and leaves, her snout nuzzling his side, scarcely breathing. He spent several worried minutes rousing her. Agaratz was nowhere to be seen. Boy and wolf unstiffened their limbs and eased themselves out of their hay-filled den, both compelled by an urgent need to urinate before anything else. They hurried down the gallery, accustomed to the route in the dark. Urrell guessed he must have slept for a number of days and nights, such was the pressure on his bladder and the painfulness of its contents’ discharge.

This over, Urrell returned to see where Agaratz might be. Finally, he lifted the hatch flap and looked out on a world frozen into stillness, icier than ever, with all signs of blizzards vanished. On this perfect snow surface Agaratz’s tracks led off, out of the gulch, as though inviting him to follow. He scrambled into his outdoor furs.

The tracks followed the base of the cliff towards the painted cave. Rakrak, in her winter livery, blended with the snowy lower branches of firs, now at surface level. Progress was easy over the frost-crisp surface. It was so cold that Urrell felt his cheeks burn. Even Rakrak seemed subdued, not gambolling as usual but trotting beside him, adding her paw marks beside his footprints, like a fancy stitch along the double seam his made with Agaratz’s tracks.

When they were not more than two spear-casts from the spot in the cliff-face where Urrell remembered the entrance into the painted cave ought to be, the tracks stopped dead in a patch of snow between two vast firs. Urrell stopped too, even looking up to see if Agaratz had taken flight and settled on a bough overhead. So bemused was he in the intense cold that even this might have seemed natural. He could see no explanation for the abrupt end in the tracks. No other prints showed anywhere, human or animal. He circled the area and found nothing. Instead of following him Rakrak sat whimpering, her behaviour adding to his unease. With a growing sense of fear, Urrell set off to return as fast as his double moccassins allowed, his face raw from the cold, the icy air rasping his throat, yet sweat running under his quilted pelts, Rakrak pacing alongside.

The secret place, the acrid weeds

But this was no headlong flight of a small boy down a summery combe to meadows below. Youth and wolf arrived back at the cave as to the safety of a lair.

By the fire crouched Agaratz. He raised his eyes as Urrell and Rakrak tumbled through the flap, but seemed not to notice them both, his look elsewhere as though neither was standing before him, still panting. Then the eyes lit up, focussed, and Agaratz looked intently at Urrell’s face. He touched the lad’s nose and muttered in his own tongue, went to the entrance and came back with a handful of snow. To Urrell’s surprise he rubbed his nose and cheeks with it. Urrell felt nothing.

“Bad,” said Agaratz. “Sit not near fire. Nose get well, but hurt.”

When it warmed it did indeed. His nose and cheeks smarted so much that he did not think to ask why the tracks had suddenly ended nowhere. His nostrils cracked and the chapping of his cheeks made life miserable for days till they healed under the goose-fat plasters Agaratz employed to soothe the frostbite.

Urrell’s confinement brought out kinder aspects of Agaratz’s character. He lit lamps in a small recess, hung hides across it and they spent hours carving wood, horn and stone with animal designs. Urrell’s skills developed under Agaratz’s tuition. During those days he became aware that he had passed another unspoken stage of acceptance in Agaratz’s esteem.

With each design, each beast, Agaratz recited stories. They were new to Urrell, familiar only with the simple folktales of his own people. In Agaratz’s recitals, often made in the high tone of story-tellers, Urrell learnt of an age long past when great beasts jostled and conferred. Men were puny by comparison, tolerated by the beasts as jesters. In those tales humans often played tricks on the animals. None minded. Sometimes the animals had the upper hand. No one hunted for food as it abounded in yon times before the great cold. The lad’s imagination was nourished and enchanted by these legends summarised by Agaratz as best he could in Urrell’s language.

Indeed, Agaratz’s grasp of Urrell’s speech improved that winter. A word or turn of phrase new to him and he seized upon it, repeated it once or twice for Urrell to correct, and consigned it to his faultless memory. Sometimes Urrell half wondered if Agaratz made play to learn his language to please the growing lad, able as he seemed to follow wordlessly much that Urrell thought but did not say. Urrell, too, improved his store of words in Agaratz’s tongue but could not fluently master its structure, so different was it from anything he knew. It seemed to him of unbelievable complexity, designed to express much he could only dimly perceive, or not at all, let alone understand. He preferred to turn his attention to carving, to making hunting gear, working leather garments, to a background of stories about insects, birds, plants, beasts and their lore. He discovered inner skills of which he had been unaware. Agaratz smiled at his delight in carving mammoths and told him of the wisdom of that greatest of beasts.

During this time Agaratz dipped into their stores to vary their daily fare, devising meals with the skill and invention he displayed in all he did.

A favourite of Urrell’s were collops of bison meat, rolled round nuts and garlic before being baked in embers. “Rakrak like too,” said Agaratz.

As a treat Agaratz took combs from their honey pouches. Some honey he placed in wooden beakers with water and herbs, where it lay for days till the water bubbled and they sipped it by the fire, rolling the scented liquor round their mouths and feeling it warm their veins.

Urrell’s face healed, the cracks closed, his skin grew smooth again. He felt well; down hung a finger’s width on his upper lip and cheeks; his body muscles and hair were becoming a man’s.

“Soon you grown,” said Agaratz.

“Good, then I can hunt better with you, Agaratz, and help you more.”

Agaratz remained silent. Then he said, as if coming back from a distance: “Soon you need woman.”

The notion had not occurred to Urrell, although there were times when he thought of the youngest woman of his tribelet, she of the chaplets of berries and the small breasts beneath her summer cape. The memory did agreeable things to him; but nothing more.

“Me? But you have no woman, Agaratz.”

Again silence. That remote expression that betokened an area of Agaratz’s life not open for revelation.

“Where are women, Agaratz?”

“When hot weather, we go to
mor
, to place tribes meet. There girls.”

“Where?”

“Far, far. We take things for trade.”

“Don’t you want a wife, Agaratz?”

Deep silence. Urrell shifted uneasily. But then, as though to clear up something difficult to explain to a child, Agaratz spoke:

“When
konkorartz
, not for womens.”

He did not expand and Urrell knew best not to ask. Their silence was relieved by Rakrak whimpering for food, most unusual for her.

They ate honey – humans and wolf – that night, after nuts, herbs and meat. Urrell, whose turn it was to cook, strove to invent variants in their fare. The near smile on Agaratz’s face told Urrell his efforts had not gone unnoticed. Then he watched as Agaratz went to his stores and returned with what looked like a stick or a tube with small holes bored along it.

Agaratz squatted by the fire, the light illuminating the long face and russet sideburns, coarse reddish hair hanging down past his ears. But for the translucent intelligence of the eyes, almost yellow in the firelight, the hunched figure with the thin hairy leg and its cloven foot might have been some odd woodland mismade animal rather than a man.

Agaratz turned the tube one way and another, squinted down the hollow centre, put an end to his mouth, while Urrell watched and waited. Swaying gently Agaratz blew into the tube. A sound such as Urrell had never heard, or could ever have imagined, rose from it. Then another and another.

The lad sat enchanted. Even Rakrak pricked her ears. The flute carried its notes beyond Urrell, far into the gallery, yet entering into him in a sensation so new that he shivered. Agaratz’s fingers moved up and down the tube, stopping and unstopping the holes as he blew, swaying more and more, playing without looking, to Urrell’s surprise. Instead, the player’s eyes seemed to be fixed beyond their cave, their small ice-bound gulch in a cliff-face overlooking the vast prairies where summer flocks of bison and herds of ponies filled the horizon as far as the mountain land of mammoths and huge cave bears. Urrell’s skin fristled. He felt like soaring, hurling spears vast distances, leaping hills.

When Agaratz stopped playing the melody went on running through Urrell’s whole body. He nodded and skipped to it, possessor of something never-to-be forgotten, of a turning in his life, of a precious thing that he wanted for himself. This skill he must master. “Agaratz, teach me that.”

“One day. If you can.”

If he could? He could, and he would. Nothing would stop him, not even travelling to the land of the mammoths. But he knew there was no use in asking; Agaratz might show him the very next day or perhaps next spring.

Other things occupied his mind. “We go fish.”

“Fish? Where?”

“Nani.”

The river would be frozen over. Urrell felt loth to ask how they could fish through ice. He would wait and see.

As it was to be an expedition of several days and nights, in cold that froze to death any creature caught in it lame, lost or hungry, Agaratz displayed his skill and foresight in the preparations for the trip, one he must have made often before on his own, thought Urrell, who took in every detail, only too aware, since his frostbite, of the dangers of the great cold.

Agaratz dragged out the travois used earlier in foraging expeditions for nuts, seeds, bulbs and the like. He dismantled the bison hide from across the cave entrance and thawed it by the fire, before piling on it extra pelts, food, weapons, tools, fishing lines and bone hooks. When all was ready to his satisfaction, with Urrell’s help he broke through the snow wall to get the bundle and travois out and on to the snow-drift just below the lip of the cave. On the travois he fixed the hide with its contents, handed Urrell packets and poles, then slung a line over each of his shoulders and they set off.

“Wear all furs, Urrell. On face too.”

He draped a fox fur across his nose, fur inwards, and Urrell did likewise. Both pulled down fur caps over their ears. Rakrak trotted beside them as they issued from the gulch on to the hard snow of the open lands. In the windless air their breath froze. They moved slowly, deliberately, lest breathing in too sharply might freeze their lungs. They took frequent turns to pull the travois.

Urrell, unused to the silence of deep winter, his mouth and nose muffled, made no sound. Nor did Agaratz. They spoke in signs. Rakrak, too, conserved her strength, wolf-like, with the easy trot of her kind. They were alone in the world, three figures in the emptiness – a hunchback, a wolf and a youth – on their way to the river Nani and its waters gliding to the sea beneath thicknesses of ice and snow. Urrell stopped wondering how they would catch anything.

Far out in the open the snow depth grew shallower. Winds and blizzards had driven it towards the cliffs leaving patches where grass showed through, forage for reindeer, or snowdeer as Agaratz called them. When they passed groves and spinneys, the surface bore signs where grazing animals had sheltered and pawed through the snow for withered grass, leaves, pine-needles, anything to eat.

“See, snowdeers,” said Agaratz, half muffled.

The cold was so intense that the air scarcely carried the sound of his voice.

The Nani’s belt of trees afforded more cover for animals, now as in summer, evidence of life that surprised Urrell, accustomed to all beasts as well as humans migrating away from these wastes before the long winter. Hoof-prints, droppings, streaks of urine, told of grazers and browsers remaining behind. Spoor of big cats showed that they too remained. It was good to be wary and armed, thought Urrell. Yet Agaratz, intent on his purpose, ignored these tell-tales and plodded on. Only Rakrak showed interest, reconnoitring and sniffing such proofs of living things in a sterile world.

“Stop here,” mumbled Agaratz when they arrived at a spot among trees he plainly foreknew. “Build shelter.”

Using the downswept boughs of a fir as a roof, he and Urrell made a shelter from poles left from previous visits. Through these they pleached fir branches, laid the bison hide over and scraped snow against the sides to freeze in place and make it wind-tight. They scraped the ground bare inside, then lined it with more fir branches and twigs. It looked quite cosy to Urrell. When Agaratz had found several fire-blackened stones and made a hearth, their shelter was ready.

They ate a handful of nuts, chewed bison fat and got ready for the next task. It was past nightfall, but in the whitish gloom of winter their eyes picked out everything, helped by a shy moon in a still, clear sky.

“Take, Urrell.” He was given flint hand-axes, some rough boards and wooden scoops.

Agaratz stepped out on to the snow-covered river at a bend Urrell remembered from earlier visits, recognising the trees. There had been a deep pool where they were standing. Agaratz scraped snow away till he reached ice, a patch two handspans across. “Now work, Urrell.” Work it was, as they picked at the ice with their axes and antler points. Soon, hot inside his furs, Urrell suffered thirst. He knew better than to suck snow in such weather. Later they would melt some in quaiches by the fire, dropping hot stones in, a tiresome business but the only way to obtain water. Rakrak would have some too, though in the manner of her kind she fended for herself, seldom needing to drink.

By the middle of the night they had chipped a good way down, lying on the snow to do so.

“Tomorrow finish. Catch fishes and get water.”

Under their fir tree, its branches lit from their fire through a smoke vent in the roof, they braised meat. Snow they melted by the fire in wooden vessels that Agaratz dug out of their hiding place. They were black with smoke and age, larger than anything Urrell had ever seen. “Who made these, Agaratz?”