Authors: John Hart
“Olds, Urrell.”
Urrell must have looked uncertain. He repeated, “Made by olds. Olds men.”
“How did you get them, then, or your folk?”
“They give. Now gone.”
That was it. Urrel knew better than to ask further.
They each ate a piece of honeycomb, Rakrak sitting on her hunkers for a share, before they crawled under fir branches for the night, fully clad, drawing every spare pelt they had over themselves. It was warm enough. During the night Agaratz rose several times to replenish the fire and Urrell sensed that he expected something but by morning, when Urrell wriggled out of his lair, he noticed nothing new. All was quiet, no sound of beasts moving despite the evidence of animals they had come across on their way to the river.
Agaratz grilled meat, sending savoury odours wafting into the tree overhead, tickling the nostrils of both lad and wolf as they waited for it to be done.
“Today wolfs come,” said Agaratz. Urrell must have looked blank. He added: “Rakrak know.”
Rakrak, eating, seemed more interested in her food than the arrival of her kind.
“But what wolves, Agaratz? How do you know?”
“I know. I tell. Come for fishes.”
Muffled in their furs, they set off to their hole. Agaratz dragged a short, heavy log with him. Both got down to further chipping.
At a distance a herd of reindeer passed, their antlers forming a frieze as they raised their heads to survey these two humans out in the open scratching in the snow, then, surmising they were no threat, back down the frieze went to ground level to paw and scrape for whatever lay hidden and edible underfoot.
“Soon see snow oxes too, Urrell.”
Not sure what they might be, Urrell said nothing, too cold to talk.
They had scraped and chipped till midday when Agaratz stood up.
“Break ice.” He up-ended the log and Urrell saw its purpose: to batter the ice plug they had been chipping away. It took several blows, with all Agaratz’s might, to break through the ice and reveal the dark water running beneath.
Into it Agaratz dipped a scoop and brought up a mouthful of water. “For you,” he said, passing the vessel to Urrell with a faint grin on the ice-stubbled face. Urrell sipped the water, ice-cold, savouring the liquor, so different from melted snow. They drank thus, in turns, very slowly lest the coldness numbed their face-bones and froze their mouths. Rakrak had hers too. “Now fish, Urrell.”
Urrell watched as Agaratz unmittened his hands and showed him how to weight the lines with stones, bait the hooks with scraps of meat and skin, and drop them into the hole. There were two lines, one apiece. They crouched on the ice and waited.
But not for long. Urrell felt a tug, and with it the excitement only the fisherman knows at contact with his unseen quarry. He jerked his line and his first fish was hooked. It came up through the hole and flapped on the snow, a foot-long beautiful thing.
“Give to Rakrak.”
He did. An ancient observance, something unspoken? Henceforth he, Urrell, would know.
Rakrak took the fish, placed a paw on its head and the other on its still flicking tail and picked at it as at a bone.
The next fishes both humans ate raw, tearing at the taut skins almost before they ceased to twitch. Then they set to and in the space of two hours had caught enough char, chub, trout and other fishes unknown to Urrell, and to Agaratz only in his own tongue, to form two piles on the snow. It was easy work, the fish biting readily, to Urrell’s surprise, and he soon learnt to let the fish hook itself before tugging at the line. Despite the cold this hunting was so engrossing to Urrell that he noticed nothing until Agaratz nodded across towards the bank.
“See. Wolfs.”
Slinking out of the trees the silvery shapes of Rakrak’s pack came out on to the ice. Urrell recognised the pack leader and Rakrak’s mother, and others of her siblings despite their winter livery. Rakrak ran to meet them, rolling on her back to her father, then prancing greetings to others in a ceremony new to Urrell. This accomplished, the pack advanced and squatted round the fishermen, expectancy on their alert faces.
The big lead male came up to Agaratz and they sniffed as Urrell remembered from their meeting in the ravine.
“Urrell, give fishes to wolfs, like me.”
He took fishes and handed one to each wolf in turn as they came forward in an order of their own, and withdrew to eat their prize. It fell to Urrell to feed the mother and siblings of Rakrak. They touched noses. The she-wolf ’s eyes met his, held them, and he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, deep in her bluish depths another’s gaze. Startled, he glanced up at Agaratz. The hunchback was looking at him, part wistful, part absent.
Old Mother, Old Mother of the Mammoths.
He rued then his forgetfulness of her. Now he would remember.
When each wolf had eaten its fish – a dainty morsel rather than a meal – they raised their muzzles and joined their pack leader in a long, musical call, again a new one to Urrell, to which Agaratz and Rakrak responded in unison. Then they turned and left, disappearing the way they had come through the woods.
“Wolfs now help hunt,” said Agaratz.
As he had seen scant game, despite tracks and droppings, Urrell wondered.
“Hunt? Hunt what, Agaratz.”
“
Mammurak.
”
“Oh!” It was a moment before he realised the tease.
“No, Urrell, not
mammurak.
”
Those three nights spent by the Nani Urrell determined should stay in his memory.
The days remained dull counterparts of their nights. Through the overcast sky a faint, far-off sun glimmered, doing nothing to lessen the intense cold. Life, apart from their threesome, seemed to have fled. From the hole, which refroze overnight and had to be re-broken, they pulled a never-ending harvest. Some they baked, some they gnawed raw; most Agaratz packed in bundles till their catch outweighed what men and travois could carry. Urrell wondered how Agaratz intended to transport so much.
“Now hide fishes, Urrell.”
He beckoned to Urrell to help him carry the frozen bundles to the foot of a massive fir, one broken off halfway up and regrown where a branch had become the new lead shoot, forming a saddle. On this platform Agaratz proposed to cache their surplus fish.
With a bundle strapped across his shoulders he swarmed up the tree, using every knurr of the deeply creviced bark and every foothold on downsweeping boughs, as if from memory. He was soon down again for another parcel, prepared by Urrell. In less than an hour all surplus fish was stashed beyond the reach of passing scavengers.
“Perhaps see lion,” said Agaratz.
“Lion?”
“Old lion. Die soon.”
They had neither seen nor heard lions, and few other beasts. It was almost too cold to wonder what Agaratz was talking about. Urrell felt as if he had only half heard the words so had half forgotten them in the preparations of breaking camp, dispersing the shelter poles and hiding the hearth stones when he stopped, immediately alerted by snuffling and whimpering from nearby brush.
“See, Urrell, lion come.”
They both stopped and watched as a lion, weak and thin, limped out of the undergrowth and squatted twenty paces from the humans and the wolf. It was a lioness, her winter coat matted and shaggy, and she was starving. “You feed, Urrell. Give fishes.”
Urrell hesitated. Agaratz urged, but seeing the lad still wavering he took a fish himself and placed it before the lioness then stepped back. “See, Urrell, hungry, hungry.” The lioness, with a little pounce, seized the fish and crouched to crunch it, giving out little gurgles of contentment.
“Come, Urrell, give food.” Agaratz beckoned him over.
Much as Urrell trusted Agaratz since the meeting with Rakrak’s wolfpack, his confrontation with the bear and his judgement in so many matters, he still wavered. But Agaratz’s insistence won and he sidled over, within a hand’s touch of the animal. She, intent on her food, ignored him.
Agaratz handed him another frozen fish. “You give, Urrell.” He dropped it by the lioness and saw how thin she was under the mat of winter fur.
“She come with us. Or die. Too cold for her hunt.”
“Take the lion?”
“Yes, you see. She come.”
“But Rakrak…”
“Rakrak know.”
When the last fish was scrunched and swallowed, the old lioness rose and followed them to the campsite. Rakrak sat watching. She made no move of acceptance or resistance, the lioness acting likewise.
“How did you know the lioness was coming?”
“I know.”
“But how?”
“My people know.”
“But tell me
how,
Agaratz.”
“One day you know too.”
The cold left little energy for discussion. They muffled up, each slung pouches across his shoulders then took up a handle apiece of the travois in a gloved hand and the long trudge home began.
Beyond the trees they found their own tracks and followed them back over snow frozen hard enough to bear their weight. Apart from the criss-criss of the trailing travois poles on the snow crust all was silence. Rakrak led, the lioness brought up the rear. Their first stop would be a clump of small trees, one of the few features in the expanse and which Urrell knew had a watering-hole in better weather.
It was over two hours before either spoke when Agaratz unmuffled to ask: “Urrell, you know big forest deers?”
“Big deer?”
“Very big. Like big horse, with wide, wide horns.”
“I know fallow deer, red deer, reindeer but like a horse, no.”
“I show you.”
Urrell turned his head to scan the snow, no easy matter in cold-stiffened leatherwear, furs, headgear, muffler. He saw nothing.
“No Urrell, I
show
you.”
The tone, the emphasis, puzzled Urrell enough to make him swivel his head, in its casing of furs and neck gear, to see Agaratz’s expression. Only one cheek and one eye managed to peer round his ear muffs to see that his companion’s expression was its frequent, slightly absent self.
“I show you deers, Urrell,” he repeated, “I
show
.”
They were a few spear-casts from the grove when he said, “See, Urrell,” and pointed ahead.
In and around the trees milled a herd of huge deer-like creatures, on long ungainly legs. Most striking was the immense spread of their antlers, greater than any Urrell had ever witnessed, even among the biggest elks. There was something horsish about them. As he watched the strange animals moved into the grove and through it.
“What are they, Agaratz?”
“Big deers, from great cold, from land of
mammurak.”
Urrell pulled harder on his end of the travois, eager to draw nearer, though Agaratz made no effort to speed up. Neither Rakrak nor the lioness seemed to have noticed anything.
By the time the little group reached the trees, the travois lowered and pouches dropped, the deer had vanished. Urrell hurried through the firs and aspens eager to find traces of their passage, curious to check whether their feet were hoofed or cloven. But he found nothing. Beyond the trees the snow lay untrampled and empty to the horizon.
Agaratz was twirling the fire-stick when he came back.
“Agaratz, where have the horse-deer gone?”
No answer. “Agaratz – the deer?”
At his impatience Agaratz raised his eyes from what he was doing, with their mischievous glint Urrell knew too well.
“They far, Urrell, far, far. Land of ice,” adding as if by afterthought, “land of
mammurak.
” And half rising from his crouch over the fire-log he pointed the fire-stick north, to the land of mammoths.
Old Mother’s memory flashed before the youth’s mind, as vivid as a childhood smell recaptured, vanishing before he could seize it, ungraspable as mist between his fingers. He strove to recapture the vision. She came back, but fainter, and each time still fainter, until the woodsmoke from Agaratz’s new fire brought him back to the present. Soon the smell of thawing fish grilling amid the resinous odours of burning pine-needles would occupy his attention, while Rakrak and the lioness gnawed their fishes, still frozen hard, as they might have crunched bones. The sputter of the fire and the sounds of their eating was all they could hear in the stillness of the snows.
“Eat then rest, Urrell.”
They slept for an hour, propped against trees for fear of freezing had they lain on the snow. As Urrell dozed off his last memory was of the lioness with her head on her forepaws, snub face as close to the fire as she dared, contented at last. The sight of her carried over into Urrell’s dreams, where Old Mother appeared to him with the scarred and battered old face of the lioness, yet perfectly recognisable, and so vivid that he would remember the vision for long after. When he scrutinised the lioness on awakening he thought he descried something of Old Mother’s remembered expression when she cackled with pleasure. He would say nothing about the dream to Agaratz: it would be his own to keep, a sign.
“
S
oon reach cave, Urrell.”
Exhaustion dulled him. Ahead the line of cliffs showed, renewing Urrell’s strength for the home stretch.
Home it was. Never had he felt a homecoming like this, unlike the shifting camps of his boyhood where he belonged to no-one. They had merely been places to cadge scraps, to creep up to the fire for warmth when the men were absent, to be cuddled by childless old women and to listen to their stories.
Sight of the cave mouth as they rounded the gulch entrance drove all thoughts of the giant elks from Urrell’s mind. They were another of Agaratz’s sleights, to be understood one day. Fire, food and sleep prevailed.
Rakrak shared his mood, speeding ahead to be first into the cave. The lioness trotted behind as though familiar with this way all her life. A little coaxing from Agaratz and she jumped up and into the cave. Agaratz unknotted the bison hide from the travois and tipped the bundles of fish on to the snow.
“Later dig, Urrell.”
Together they dragged the hide up and hung it back across the mouth of the cave, then repacked the snow wall. “Now foods.”