Mammoth Boy (17 page)

“Eggs, Urrell.”

He had found clutches of wildfowl eggs, beautifully speckled, and caught two of the parent birds as they brooded.

“Light fire, Urrell. Time we eat.”

“Where is Piura?”

“Piura here soon.”

Agaratz asked nothing about Urrell’s adventures, leaving Urrell almost sure that in some way he knew, however much Urrell practised blanking off his mind.

“Agaratz, where did you hunt these?”

“By river. Soon we go. Much eggs and fishes.”

The prospect of a joint hunting trip calmed Urrell’s mind. He twirled the fire-stick till the tinder smouldered, glowed and lit a twist of grass. In a trice the fire was ablaze. Only then, in the glow, did he look closely at Agaratz’s traps: the bindings were twine, exactly like that given him by Old Mother with her necklace and whose retting process she had taught him and he in turn had described to Agaratz. It had been something Agaratz had seemed to value and not to know. The boy had felt proud. Now he saw that Agaratz must have known all along and this was his way of saying so.

They roasted both fowl and ate them with Rakrak. Agaratz set aside some ‘for Piura’. It was a feast. The eggs they cracked and ate raw or, if part-hatched, buried in embers and baked. They were on these when Piura crept in, exhausted from her sortie, and slumped by the fire. Agaratz fed her. She must have gone far, on her old legs.

The two men finished off with green shoots, bulbs, herbs and a remnant of honey.

“Why the traps, Agaratz?”

“Help catch bison.”

“Are we going bison-hunting alone?”

“Only for one, for pelt and meat. Rakrak wolfs want meat.”

At the sound of her name, Rakrak cocked her ears.

Urrell’s fear that Rakrak, a fully-grown she-wolf, might rejoin her pack or seek a mate resurfaced.

“Will Rakrak come?”

“Yes, she hunt bison, like wolf.”

“But she may run off with the wolves.”

“She stay. I tell her. She now Urrell’s wolf. Tomorrow go river, Urrell. I show you go on water.”

The bison hunt was for later.

Their expedition was to be a long one, to judge by Agaratz’s preparations. They were to take their travois, laden with spears, fishing lines, fire-making things, bags and pouches. He produced axes and adzes Urrell had not seen before. They were made from big flakes of the beautiful flint that Agaratz called
sakarrik.

Next day, as they followed the now familiar route across the grasslands, Urrell could see the vast herds of game moving north; and in their wake the beasts that preyed on laggards, calves and strays. Overhead circled vultures and eagles, ravens and crows.

Not far from the herds, as both of them knew, travelled bands of hunters, ahead of their women and children, as they followed the yearly tide of animals to the summer grazings. Those must be the ‘bad mens’ Agaratz was wary of.

Rakrak’s senses helped. She warned of big cats before they got close and her presence frightened off inquisitive predators more than once. Piura, bringing up the rear, must have disconcerted them even more. The long-haired lions that followed the herds cocked their heads above the grass as they passed, Agaratz amusing himself addressing them in Piura-talk, in which Piura joined, teasing them till they got up and ambled grouchily away from the man-wolf-lion circus going past.

At the river, Agaratz turned upstream. Full of meltwater the river ran dark and smooth between its banks, high into the rushes where waterfowl nested and Agaratz and Urrell had splashed to retrieve ducks brought down in their previous hunt. This time Agaratz was intent on other things.

He stopped at a small creek sheltered by birch and sallow carr. Rushes grew taller here than lower downstream. Agaratz downed pouches, and Urrell the travois. Agaratz plainly knew the spot. Hearth stones were dragged from the bushes, a fire lit and food was soon cooking. While Urrell handled this task Agaratz reconnoitred the banks and came back with duck eggs and freshwater mussels.

Placed on embers, the mussels opened. The iridescence of their mother-of-pearl insides delighted Urrell. In one he found a small pearl and showed it to Agaratz, who held it delicately, rolling it between finger and thumb and naming it in his own language, then returned it with an appreciative nod.

“You keep, Urrell. Girls like.”

He now surprised Urrell yet again. From a small wallet he took out several fish-hooks carved from the very mother-of-pearl Urrell had just been admiring in the mussel shells. With the hooks went fishing lines plaited from the long hair of horses’ tails.

“For to fish, Urrell. But first go on water.”

He showed what he meant – half afloat, half beached among the sallows, lay a thing Urrell had never seen before: a construction of poles and logs lashed together with thongs and strips of bast. It was his first view of a raft.

Agaratz set to with Urrell dragging more, drier logs from the woods around and when he had as many as he thought needful he showed Urrell how to cut last year’s dry reeds with a flint knife and bundle them. They only stopped to have time to fish for supper, using mussel for bait, and soon had as much as they cared to bake or eat raw and share with Rakrak and Piura. The cooking smells attracted a fox which came and sat with them for its share, reminding Urrell of the lame one they had befriended that winter. It seemed to know Agaratz who treated it, as he often did other animals, with humorous familiarity. He had shown the same insight when he had collected Rakrak from her pack. Like
poodooec,
this ability to empathise with the animal world was something Urrell knew he could never match.

“Tomorrow, make float. Now sleep, Urrell.”

The next few days they spent cutting and adzing logs to renew rotten parts of the raft. Using withies they bound in the new poles till the raft met Agaratz’s satisfaction. Then he showed Urrell the purpose of the bundles of reeds by lashing them round the outer edge of the craft, as floats and fenders. Once pushed and shoved into the water of the creek it floated high and true. They moored it to a tree and went off to fish for supper, as Agaratz intended to go afloat next day. Whither they were going he did not say but Urrell guessed an egg-hunt was intended.

During the night a panther or lion snuffled round the camp, attracted perhaps by Piura’s presence. They added dry sticks to the fire to make a blaze, Agaratz made noises and the beast slank off.

They cast off early, Rakrak a little hard to coax aboard but once aship finding the adventure to her taste. Only Piura would not budge. They left her on the shore, Agaratz soothing her with promises to pick up her up on the return journey, or so he explained to Urrell. He left her a pile of food, knowing a lion will hang around a supply till it is eaten before moving off.

Agaratz had cut two long poles. With one he punted the raft into the stream while Urrell tried with the other. It was some time before he got the knack and assisted Agaratz against the current. It was very slow going. Late in the day Agaratz steered the raft into an inlet among giant trees and tied up. Blackened stones attested to regular use of the spot for campfires. While Agaratz fished, Urrell and Rakrak explored the woods. They saw the bark of saplings frayed where stags rubbed their antlers and heard larger beasts crashing about in the depths of the woods. Wild strawberries were ripening. On their way back, Rakrak darted into the bracken and came out with a fawn in her jaws. She had killed it cleanly and brought it still warm to Urrell. He patted her head and they quickened their pace back, Rakrak bearing her prey.

At the camp Agaratz was already baking fish and opening mussels. He had also caught some crayfish by hand. Despite Agaratz’s pleas of a cub beseeching its mother for food, Rakrak would not yield her fawn to him, but took it to Urrell.

“See, your wolf, Urrell.”

They dined off the tenderest of venison, baked fishes, mussels, crayfish and strawberries by the mouthful.

It was the fat time of year, when food abounded, furs grew sleek, young were born and nestlings flew. Day merged into day.

“Tomorrow be at island, Urrell.”

The line of cliffs towards which they were slowly propelling their craft must have been an outlier, thought Urrell, of their home escarpment, or perhaps its continuation as it swung in a wide loop. What he could not guess was how the river got through the barrier.

Later next day this grew clearer as they worked their way round a long bend in the river and the cliffs came into sight. There was a gap parted by a solitary crag with a dark patch on it. The cliff line continued into the distance until it merged with the horizon. Only ahead, both sides of the crag, were there breaks through which the current ran.

“Egg place,” said Agaratz, nodding at the crag round which wheeled thousands of water fowl, more than Urrell had ever seen in one place, even by the sea. He saw now that the dark patch was the gape of an immense cavern.

The current, forced through narrows, ran strongly, twisting and swinging the raft, which took all Agaratz’s strength and skill to edge slowly into the lee of the crag where eddies swirled. Rakrak cowered amidships, ears flat. Their poles were finding increasing depth while the current snatched at them with a malice of its own.

“Now, Urrell, now,” and with a supreme effort both drove the raft under the lee of the rocks into a pool of still water with a little shingle beach, hidden from view even from half a spear’s cast away. Agaratz jumped ashore and pulled the raft up, Urrell and Rakrak only too happy to follow. Evidently Agaratz knew the spot and exactly what to do. Urrell’s legs trembled as he stood on the shingle. He felt queasy from the effort and tension and it was a while before he could do much, leaving the unloading of the raft to Agaratz who piled such contents as they had higher up the shingle and manhandled the raft above the water-line.

“Now go for eggs,” he said.

He knew his way up the wet, black rocks, white on top from guano. Overhead sea and waterfowl wheeled and squawked at the intruders. Nests were everywhere.

As they climbed Urrell was mightily surprised to find the birds quieten rather than grow noisier. It was as though they recognised Agaratz or he possessed some power over them or they knew he was no threat, or all three. Despite the plentifulness of eggs, the strain and hazardousness of the voyage by raft to collect them seemed to Urrell to be disproportionate. Could they be the sole purpose of the trip? He waited to learn what it might be.

His first surprise came at the manner Agaratz collected eggs on the way up. He took one egg only per nest, groping under the unresisting bird, often replacing the egg without explanation, stroking the bird’s neck and making soothing sounds. There was no pattern or choice of species: all contributed. Soon his and Urrell’s pouches were full.

They had reached the flat upper part of the crag by then.

“Now cave, Urrell.”

This would be the huge cavern he had seen gaping from afar, approached by a rough path. Large as he expected it to be, Urrell was still taken aback by its looming height.

“Many flying mouses, Urrell. Leave pouches here, with Rakrak.”

From just inside the entrance, overhead and into the cave, he saw what Agaratz meant. Bats lined the roof and walls of the cavern. Their droppings lay in drifts, in places half up the walls. Strange colourless insects scurried about in the gloom over the mounds.

“When big ice, Old Mens live here.”

Urrell looked around, half expecting to glimpse slouching shapes. He wanted to ask why they were there. What was the reason for the egg-collecting. But somehow the sheer size of the cavern, its rustle of bats and insects, silenced him in awe. His unsaid questions were part answered when Agaratz volunteered, “Then my fathers come.”

“Your people lived here, with the Old Men?”

“After Old Mens.” He rolled his hands over and over in that gesture for immemorial time past, then added, “Old Mens go with ice.”

Now Urrell was all attention. His own thinking surprised him. Something in him seemed to take over as he heard himself ask: “How could the Old Men live here, or your fathers, with the river?” He meant the stream running both sides of the cantle of cliff on which they found themselves.

“Big ice then, Urrell. No river. River under ice. Mens walk on ice.”

After an explanation this long, Agaratz fell silent and they slithered on into the cavern over mountains of bat dirt, disturbing myriads of the faintly luminous beetles which fed on it. Overhead an incessant low squeaking announced the bats. Light from the huge cavern mouth filtered in just enough for them to make their way deep inside. At the very limit of the light’s range, in near-dark, Agaratz stopped and began scraping about in the dung.

“See, Urrell.”

He saw, or rather felt. There was a harsh, dry surface; then he felt coarse bristles.

Old Mother.
Beneath the droppings lay a mummified mammoth, or part of one.

“Agaratz,
mammurak!
”

“
Mammurak
. Die when big cold. More inside.” He pointed into the vast black gulf of the interior.

“Did your people kill the mammoths, Agaratz?”

His voice, half grown man’s, quavered.

“No, no. Old Mans hunt mammoth. But mammoths come and die here when big cold. No foods.”

Then, as though that was that, Agaratz spun on his club foot and started back to the entrance.

“Go see fathers.”

Urrell tingled with excitement. The touch of a mammoth! Now what else was to be shown to him? He sensed it would be something extraordinary as he followed Agaratz back over the mounds of droppings, their droppers starting to squeak more loudly overhead in readiness for the dusk flight. At the entrance they picked up their pouches full of eggs and moved to a side entrance, one of several which Agaratz plainly knew.

“Light fire now, Urrell, eat and rest.”

To do this they had to return to the raft and their belongings for tinder and supplies. It was dark by the time they camped. There was too little fuel for much of a fire. They ate fish they had brought and sucked several eggs apiece near the cavern entrance where Urrell was soon to view one of those sights which mark a life to its end – the dusk flight of clouds of bats into the sunset as the wildfowl were returning from a day’s foraging far away, their pouches and maws heavy with fish for their brooding mates.