Authors: John Hart
Mammoth Boy (16 page)
“Now you play, Urrell.”
“No pipe, Agaratz.”
“Pipe with tusk.”
And there it lay, among lengths of unwrought ivory, jostling its kind.
And there along its length was a line of mammoths that Agaratz had etched for him, so delicately, each animal no bigger than a thumbnail, yet perfect. At their head, the cow led. Urrell fondled the flute, handled its shape, blew into it gently to recapture his music but although it gave him notes, played true, made music, the flute would not surrender to him that wild dance which he knew he would only ever recapture in the mammoth cave.
T
heir winter stores were now truly low, Piura’s lean flanks tokens of scarcity, Rakrak’s quiet hunger a reproach. Even the lame fox no longer visited. Hunger had driven Urrell one day to scratch about in Agaratz’s pouches for remnants of stores while their owner was out foraging. In one he came across several handfuls of grain, dried hard as grit, which it occurred to him to kibble with a pebble on a slab of stone. While he was doing this some water spilt over the meal. He scraped it up with a bone flake into pellets the size of thrushes’ eggs which he ranged on the slab. As he had often parched and roasted nuts, he placed his doughy lumps in the embers where they hissed a little before giving off a most savoury aroma. He was engrossed in doing this when Agaratz returned. A smell of baking dough hung in the air.
Urrell’s activity gripped Agaratz’s attention. No cat watched a fledgling more keenly than Agaratz followed Urrell’s demonstration of how he had ground the grain and mixed it with water before baking the result. He pulled a lump out of the fire and tossed it from hand to hand, blowing on it till it cooled enough to be broken open, and gave half to Agaratz. They bit into the charred crust and into the moist, doughy centre with delectation.
“You make new food, Urrell. Good, good.”
There was admiration in Agaratz’s voice. Urrell felt a new pride that he had been able to show something to his all-knowing mentor. They ate all that batch and then emptied every bag and pouch down to the last dusty seed to make enough cakes so that Rakrak and Piura could join in feasting on this manna of Urrell’s devising. It would be another day he never, ever, would forget.
“Agaratz, we hunt soon? Herds must be coming?”
“Yes, we go. But careful. Hunters follow herds.”
Urrell remembered the hostile group and Agaratz’s feat when he had saved Rakrak from their spears. His wariness must stem from many such encounters over the seasons as Agaratz had struggled to survive on his own.
“Best set traps, Urrell.”
“Traps?”
“Traps. Like hunters use for bison. I make; you see.”
The hint of a grin said, ‘You may make dough-balls, but I can do things you know nothing about.’
Agaratz went out again on an errand linked in some way with these intended traps.
Soon after, Urrell went out too. Snow remained in pockets in the lee of cliffs, in dells among the trees, but everywhere else plants grew, freed from the grip of ice, while still the geese honked overhead on their own travels to lakes beyond the land of mammoths. Youth and wolf, bodies skinny from winter, scoured woods and plains for anything edible.
Urrell saw far out on the prairie a dark tide of advancing bison, the harbingers of the herds that would be following as the snow fled. No lone hunter could hope to spear one in such a dense mass of beasts. Only when groups broke off to browse in the woods might there be chances. Till then, his best hope was small game rendered unwary by interest in mating.
They entered the fir-line, Urrell listening for the clucking and crowing of big fowl displaying in leks, favourite spots where cocks strutted to attract their hens. With luck he might down one with a shot from his stone-thrower. When he found such a lek, hens camouflaged among the herbage clucked and flew off, sending up a puff of wings, alerting the two capercaillie-sized cocks they had been admiring as they jousted in their brilliant spring plumage. A fine roast lost. Later, he could return to snare one of the performers with springes that Agaratz wove with such skill from splints and horse-hair twine.
In a wide arc through the woods Urrell and his wolf trotted on, noting tracks of deer, hearing wildcat snarl, glimpsing game down glades well out of spear-cast. By a brook Urrell found cresses; Rakrak snapped at mice and froglets. Fingerling trout, gudgeon and other small fry swam abundantly in the clear water, small fare but good if they could be caught. Urrell remembered his boyhood skills and followed the brook till he came to what he wanted, a pool large enough to harbour good-sized fish yet shallow enough to empty by digging an outlet. Rakrak entered into the fun, scratching with gusto, till between them they had lowered the level of the water enough to strand fish.
Urrell beat the water with a switch to drive them into puddles where Rakrak splashed about catching as many as she could, gulping them whole, while Urrell scooped more out for himself and threw them on the strand until he had enough bigger ones to fill a pouch and tiddlers to chew raw there and then.
They were noisily engaged in this, oblivious to everything, when instinct warned man and wolf to fall silent and turn: standing on the bank overlooking the pool were two hunters, whether hostile or not Urrell was never to know for, with the certainty that precedes thought, he hissed, “Zass, Rakrak,” and the wolf was up the bank and at the men before their astonishment could turn into fleeing legs, a wolf ’s fangs at their heels.
Nothing like this had ever happened to them and they fled, not knowing that Rakrak chased them more in fun than in anger. Enough it would be for the legend of the fisherboy and his wolf to spread round campfires, and grow in the telling, for many seasons to come.
On their return to the cave Agaratz was already back, the object of his errand visible in the pile of osiers that he had been out to cut. Urrell’s fishes and cresses were welcome, but Agaratz listened with unwonted intentness to Urrell’s account of the two hunters and their discomfiture.
“Bad mens.” He did not elaborate. “Now I show how to make traps.”
Round a framework bound with thongs he wove osiers into a wickerwork box. The withies, being last year’s growth, were tough yet supple. Agaratz left a gap in the top, a sort of slot, where Urrell surmised that an animal’s hoof would snag, as the wounded bison’s hoof had been tangled when he first met Agaratz. But he still did not see how such a device could help to secure prey.
In two days they had made four between them.
“Agaratz, why not use bane on spears?”
“Not make now. Only when
perretarrec
ready.”
During a lull in their activities, Agaratz downed his carving tools and said, as though he had mulled over a decision,“Urrell, I show you
poodooec.
”
Agaratz selected several spears from his arsenal, ones Urrell had never seen him use. They were blackened with age.
With them they descended into the gulch. Against a spot on the cliff face Agaratz up-ended a half rotten log and chipped a blaze on it. “That man,” he explained.
Urrell must have looked mystified.
“Bad man. Soon come bad mans, Urrell. You need
poodooec
for their
poodooec.
”
They went back about forty paces. Agaratz chose a spear, weighed it, eyed the mark and in one smooth movement cast it straight at the blaze.
“Now you, Urrell.”
He did as bidden, chose a spear, weighed it, took his aim and with all his young hunter’s skill threw it at the log. It struck the cliff half an arm’s length from the mark, not a bad shot at that range, it seemed to Urrell.
“Not
poodooec,
Urrell. You look.”
This time Agaratz picked one with a series of deer engraved in a spiral down the shaft, so blackened and worn as to be shadowy. Urrell noticed that Agaratz took this one with his left hand. He watched as Agaratz weighed the weapon and appeared to think at it for a few instants before he lofted it and as smoothly as with the previous one, but left-handledly this time, sent it flying true to the blaze where it struck and held beside the first. Urrell could not retain an ‘ah’ of admiration.
Urrell’s next try went closer but he knew it was skill, not whatever Agaratz called
poodooec
, that had guided his arm.
“Urrell,
think
bad man,
think poodooec
, and not miss.”
He handed the next javelin to Urrell and stood behind him with his fingers on the butt, as though to help propel the missile. “Now throw.” The javelin quivered in Urrell’s grasp as, with absolute certainty, he lofted it, with Agaratz moving in unison, his arm working with a will of its own, and sent it flying with total accuracy at the target where it lodged alongside Agaratz’s two.
“See, Urrell –
poodooec.
”
They retrieved the spears and tried again. And after that again and again. Whatever his hits, Urrell knew they were luck or skill but never whatever it was that Agaratz called
poodooec
. Not once did the shaft quiver again for him nor did he sense that feeling of foregone accuracy he had had in the throw under Agaratz’s guidance.
If Agaratz felt disappointment in his disciple he did not show it whereas Urrell allowed frustration to surface, for the first time since he had known Agaratz. This certainty of aim that the crookback’s powerful shoulders appeared to transmit to the javelin, to a stone thrown by Agaratz if he chose to, lay just beyond Urrell’s reach. Once more he sensed that it had something of dreams about it, of a knowing that lay just beyond his touch.
W
ith the lengthening days, game returned by land and air, filling the sky and woods with sounds and calls. The air grew scented. Insects teemed so that each stride roused clouds of grasshoppers and flies from the grass. Worst were the swirls of gnats.
Into this world Urrell and Rakrak roamed, sometimes overnighting in simple bivouacs against a tree. However far he went Urrell never wandered beyond sight of the scarpment that was now home to him. In it somewhere strode his mammoths, forever marching into the mountain. Strive as he might he could not find their entrance. Spring seemed to have wiped out the memory of winter. Each cleft and cave he explored led nowhere. His careful mind-set of what the entrance looked like fitted nothing he found. In his searching he wandered as far as the cliff hollow where he had eaten with Agaratz that day they first met. He approached warily, as Agaratz had done, but nothing stirred in the undergrowth or among the saplings that looked more grown than he would have expected. He had to push his way through them into the hollow. Inside nothing showed signs of occupation by man or beast. The ledge where Agaratz had kept food, as though in anticipation of his coming, lay bare and it was hard to believe that here the hunchback had amused a quailing boy with animal mimickry and handstands. He remembered the climbing pole Agaratz had thrown back into the undergrowth and looked for it. Nothing remained amid the well-grown young trees. Rakrak entered into the fun, fossicking about for whatever it might be her master sought.
“Gone, Rakrak, all gone.”
Then, on a sudden resolve, he set off further along the cliffs, to the spot where he had watched the bison, the hunters and had come face to face with Agaratz.
The fir trees were much as he remembered them, boughs sweeping to the ground, each huge tree big enough to hide a tribe under its skirts. Beyond the firs, however, the glade where he had spied on the hunters was now so overgrown that he would have been hard placed to see them, and might have blundered into them. He looked for the spot where in his hunger he had gnawn the cast-off bones from the hunters’ meal. A return of his boyhood fear held him back. The glade was strangely silent, not a bird singing or even a butterfly fluttering past. He looked at Rakrak but she remained unconcerned, so he gathered his courage and moved out of the firs, as he had that time, to the spot where the bones had lain scattered. No sign of the hunters’ hearth remained nor the stone on which they had sketched the bison.
A coldness hung over the spot. Of a sudden Urrell picked up his spears and set off at a fast lope into the firs towards home cave, hastening his pace as he went, feeling pursued. Rakrak trotted by him.
… below him he saw once more the combe, the women berry-picking…
He ran and ran on the springy pine-needle floor of the forest till his breath gave out. Only when familiar sights appeared did he slow.
When youth and wolf arrived at the cave it was empty and cold, the fire out. Urrell felt the ashes – they were dead. Piura was nowhere to be seen. Neatly stacked nearby were two more wickerwork traps. It was as though Agaratz, in his sly humour, had made them to mock Urrell’s trip into the past. Piura, with the better weather, had perhaps ventured out too. Not for a long time had Urrell felt so lonely.
He looked for his flute, found it and played a little, half solace, half the nagging wish to recapture the music of that night in the mammoth cave. In it lay the key to finding the elusive place itself. His flute played true, entering into his mood, its notes floating in the cave and drifting into its depths, drawn to the black chasm where the Old Mens dwelt with their hoard of tusks. Normally he never thought of the pit. He knew it was cut off from him by the red dots and the engravings, placed there to seal its entrance from the outer world, yet the flute was hearkening back to its origins, trying to draw him with it. He swayed as he played, stomping slowly round the dead hearth. In the deepening gloom the outer mouth of the cave showed lighter against the sky. His excitement grew, he felt he was recapturing the half-remembered dream-like night when the mammoths came to him. The music drew from the cavern’s depths a breath of air as cold as off an icepatch in summer. Rakrak whimpered. The flute distinctly moved just as a figure appeared against the cave entrance and startled Urrell into silence. It was Agaratz, back from the hunt.
“Ha, Urrell, play flute. Good.”
How much he had heard, Urrell could not know. But the cold vanished. In one hand Agaratz held two wildfowl by the neck and in the other his weapons and a pouchful of something he handled with care.