Authors: John Hart
When Agaratz announced: “Now time to see caves,” he did not explain but took a few things and led off towards the ice-face to a spot where the overflow from several hotter pools cut a low tunnel under the ice. Into this Agaratz stooped, paddling in the hot water, his moccassins round his neck. Urrell followed. At a word from Agaratz, the wolf and lion had remained behind, at the pool edge.
Soon the passage widened and heightened into a chamber. Urrell’s eyes accustomed themselves to the bluish gloom. “Wait, Urrell.” Agaratz had brought his fire-making bow-drill and some tinder and with difficulty managed to ignite a few pinches of the tinder in the hole of his fire-log, enough to light a resin torch. It smelt delicious. However, its light revealed nothing, just ice walls smooth as salt.
“No, Urrell, look down.” There, as Agaratz held the torch aloft, lay giant bones strewn around, on and under the ice, the results of a unimaginable catastrophe, a massacre, no two vertebrae linked, skulls tossed anywhere, a vast dismemberment. He guessed what Agaratz had meant by
mamu-mammurak,
this graveyard of mammoths.
“What happened, Agaratz, what happened?”
“Old mans hunt. Hunt much. Hunt
mammurack otelosey.
”
“
Otelosey
?”
“
Otelosey.
Till none left.” He made frenzied stabbing movements to illustrate.
Holding the light up Agaratz led Urrell among the bones, searching for something.
“Ah, look Urrell.” He held up a spearhead, a heavy chunky one, unlike anything Urrell had seen before, cruder than any he had ever handled. It had once been the tip of a short stabbing spear to finish off fallen beasts, wielded by someone with shoulders powerful enough to drive this blunt point through the hide of a mammoth’s belly. More of them lay scattered about among ribs. To Urrell’s surprise, Agaratz, his all-knowing Agaratz, examined them with the keenest interest, stroking the coarse chipping of the flint and basalt with girlish fingertips, suggesting to Urrell that by this action he was drawing from the points their story, their strength, absorbing their potency, that which he called
poodooec
. So intense was Agaratz’s attention, his shaggy mane of reddish hair hanging down his head and shoulders against the light of the torch, that Urrell knew better than to interrupt. In the total silence, the bones lay around unthreateningly. There was no hostile feeling towards either him or Agaratz. It was as though the bones had been lying there awaiting their coming.
Then, in the innermost recesses of his ear, Urrell heard his tune. It was tiny, clear, from a great remoteness.
“Urrell, look.”
In the ice wall of the cavern a frieze of mammoths, full height, was visible, frozen. The lead cow’s little eye returned his gaze. He saw even the coarse hairs of her flanks and ran, stumbling over bones, to touch them. His hand met the ice: she was gone.
“We go now, Urrell.”
They left the way they had come.
Outside Agaratz made no comment as he donned his moccassins. It was back to their routine of fishing, feeding and making a paste by pounding shrimps which Agaratz packed into pouches with salt-like rime scraped from the edge of brackish pools near the hot springs.
These occupations left Urrell ample leisure to range about the combe, exploring every crevasse and cleft in the ice faces, keen to find any more traces of ancient folk and their quarry. But he found no more mammoth remains, search as he might, only evidence of tool-making by their persecutors. These, some complete, some half made, many botched and cast aside, spoke of long residence by hunting groups in earlier times, the Great Cold in Agaratz’s words. He brought back samples of his finds to Agaratz, who merely nodded, his interest apparently sated by their visit to the mammoth ice-cavern earlier, where he had absorbed all he wished to know from the bones and weapons strewn there.
However, Urrell’s disappointment must have touched him. “Look, Urrell,” he said and took a sizable pebble from the many lying around, selected a small boulder, and in a few deft blows chipped and flaked it into a core, then taking another pebble shattered one against the other to make a crude hammer-chopper. With this he flaked the core into a spear-head indistinguishable from the ones they had found. The whole process took a matter of minutes. It was as if one of the ancient stone-knappers were directing Agaratz’s hands, transmitting to them the skill of generations.
“You do, Urrell.” He handed him the pebble-hammer. Nothing could be easier. Yet try as he might, and try he did, Urrell could not reproduce spear-heads with the authenticity that sprang so naturally from Agaratz’s hands. His spear-heads were workman-like, yes. But he knew in his inner self that whereas the spear-head flaked by Agaratz would have flown true and pierced the toughest mammoth hide, his own would have mis-flown, mis-struck and bounced off.
This apart, they did little else than fish and eat, men, wolf and lion, battening on the easy pickings, though Urrell sensed that Agaratz was distrait, often lost in thought, as though they were marking time or awaiting some signal.
One morning, the air warm from the advance of high summer, Agaratz came alive again, his old puckish self. “Now ready to go.”
“Go where, Agaratz?”
He seemed a little taken aback, as though expecting Urrell to know what he meant.
“Go to meet peoples. For mens meets womens. For, for… ceremonies.”
“Which way, Agaratz?” Urrell felt able to ask, part of the decision-making, a near full-grown man. He could see no way forward. A long trudge back down the ice-tunnel seemed the only way in or out.
“Follow sun, Urrell.” That meant ahead, against the further side of the combe and the glacier face. He helped to pack, noticing that Agaratz was taking especial care to bundle everything compactly, winding all their thongs into a single coil which he slung across one shoulder. He laid out a large pelt and tied thongs through holes to make a sling which he folded with unusual care. This and the rest done they loaded up and set off towards the ice-cliff to a spot Urrell had skirted during his explorations. A pool of hot, smelly water lay there. It stank of rotten eggs, he thought. Its outflow ran under the ice-face, where it had cut a low opening. To this Agaratz led them.
The opening was hardly more than wolf high. Encumbered as they were they would have to stoop to get in along the outflow with their faces just above the stinking water to reach a ledge inside.
U
rrell bridled, wolf and lion wavered.
“Only way, Urrell.”
Agaratz led. It took some shooing and persuasion by Urrell, bringing up the rear, to get Piura to follow Rakrak into the water and under the arch.
Once inside, while wolf and lioness shook themselves dry, Urrell looked around. Several fissures rose as chimneys in the ice, rather like the water-worn swallow-holes he was familiar with in caves. The same effect of meltwater had caused these, he thought, or an extinct geyser. “Old mens use,” Agaratz said, as though reading a half-formed question in Urrell’s mind. “Not high,” he added. “In old times, much bigger.” If he meant the pool, or the chimneys or even the ice-face, was not clear or important to Urrell: how to get up was. The sides of the biggest chimney seemed very smooth.
Agaratz unrolled a pack and selected an antler pick and a stone-bladed adze from his tool kit. He wound the coil of thongs round his shoulders and waist. “I go up, Urrell, send down thong, you tie pouches and I pull up, then Rakrak. You tie Piura in skin –” he pointed to the large pelt with eyelets round the rim “ – and when you come up we pull Piura.” Upon which he started up the chimney, chipping finger- and toe-holds with the adze, hooking the antler pick into these and other crannies, bracing his back and knees against the ice and worming his way up, the powerful shoulders hauling and the club foot seeking the least purchase. It took him quite a while. Ice flakes rained down as he chipped his slow way up. Finally, “Now, Urrell,” and the uncoiled thong ends came down to be tied to pouches and bags, hauled up into the gloom and the job repeated until all equipment and belongings were aloft. Urrell stood half in the smelly water all the while. When it was Rakrak’s turn, he tied slings under her, coaxed the creature into the water and steadied her as Agaratz, somewhere above, pulled her up hand over hand. Next Urrell baled Piura in the pelt, threaded thongs through the eye-holes so that she could not wriggle free, should she try, and shouted up to Agaratz that he was ready to come up himself.
Agaratz, anchored above, let down a line which Urrell hitched to his belt, so that by using the footholds, bracing himself as he had seen Agaratz do, plus with the hunchback’s powerful grip on the line, he reached the ledge where Agaratz crouched, their goods piled around him. The last task was to haul up Piura. She was too big for the chimney unless pulled up head and forequarters first. Once this manoeuvre was managed she helped herself up by clawing at the surface of the ice, making things far easier for her hauliers than Urrell had expected. Her rumbled purr as he rubbed her head told Urrell of her happiness at not being forsaken by her pride.
“Make light, Urrell.” In the gloom Agaratz found his fire-making implements and with that deftness Urrell felt he would never equal, had soon lit a torch, revealing a passage leading from the ledge into the ice. Waters long past must have worn it and then cascaded down the chimney they had just climbed. Without comment they loaded up, even Rakrak shouldering her pack as usual, and set off along the passage as it slowly ascended, Urrell hoped towards daylight.
They emerged well enough on to the glacier surface at a crevasse, into late daylight, and by following the crevasse eventually came to the surface of the ice-field. They were on top of the glacier. Across its ribbed surface, Agaratz leading, the others in single file, they tramped with care. Agaratz was looking for something in the featureless white in the long summer dusk. It was a depression in the snow-field, as though the ice had caved in. To this Agaratz headed. “Soon find new river, Urrell.”
They did. At the bottom of the snowy slope a funnel-like hole led to a river under the ice, a river flowing away from them, one warmed from hidden springs somewhere along its course. Soon they were once again on a ledge in total blackness, following a fast-running current.
“Rakrak lead,” said Agaratz. He tied a thong to her pack and ran it back past himself to Urrell who had himself tied a line to Piura behind him. Thus, trusting to Rakrak’s instinct, they moved on in single file. Here the air was clammy, faintly smelling of brimstone from the stream. When they stopped to eat Urrell tried the water and found it distasteful. They sucked chips of ice instead.
“How far, Agaratz?”
“Two days, Urrell.”
“What will there be?”
“Land, Urrell, like before, then, how you say,
weald
, big woods, to land of other mens, land where
mammurak
live long ago. You see.”
“Did your people live there Agaratz? Was this their homeland?
“Before great cold come, my ancients live here and where we go too. Many places.”
“How do you know the way?
“I remember.”
“Did you come with your father?”
“I remember.” He tapped his head. “I know from fathers, from old time.”
Urrell, aware of the migrations of bison, deer and horses, of waterfowl that rose in huge flights when it was time to leave, as they had always done, guessed what Agaratz meant.
Towards the end of the second day of their trudge, broken only by stops to nap and eat, the ice became thinner overhead, translucent; shortly, they issued into a jumble of broken ice and a stony plain. Across this their river headed purposefully, vapour rising from its tepid water, and as it was going their way they followed it.
The long summer days enabled them to travel twelve hours with only brief stops. Two more days and they entered scrub that yielded to birch carr and then pine forest. Urrell sniffed the resinous scent with pleasure. They cut poles to make a travois, and a small one for Rakrak.
“How much longer, Agaratz?”
“About seven days, Urrell. We see hills and then come to place.”
“Why are there so few animals in these woods, Agaratz?” They had seen only a few musk-oxen from afar, glimpsed wolves, foxes, hares. Overhead flew the usual scavengers.
It was an empty wilderness compared with their home range in the grasslands. Agaratz, in a hurry to arrive, made no attempt to hunt or forage but relied on their stores, supplemented with berries and wild fruit they found on their way. They did not even light campfires. Piura, on short rations, kept up as best she could, her ribs beginning to show.
“Urrell, long time ago in this land, many animals, in time of old mens. Animals gone.”
“Gone?”
“Like mammuts: no more.” As they reclined, Agaratz, with the facility that so amazed Urrell, drew on flat stones a succession of beasts, some familiar, many not. Several had woolly flanks; one a single horn; huge bears; tiger-like and panther-like predators with fangs of unbelievable size; strange fowl, one flightless; as well as rodents big and small; immense owls and eagles, all drawn from a phantasmagorie, a recollection, that left Urrell in wonderment.
“You saw these in cave paintings, Agaratz?”
“No, not caves.”
“Where then?”
“I not see them. They no more. Gone with old peoples.”
“But Agaratz, how can you draw them?”
He remembered the engraving of his own great bear, one like those Agaratz drew now.
“Urrell, when you have
poodooec
, you
see
too.”
“How can I have
poodooec
Agaratz?”
Agaratz fixed his gleaming eyes on Urrell’s. The lad held his gaze.
“Not yet, Urrell. Not ready yet.”
Any more questions would be fielded likewise. Any annoyance, any impatience, he felt, would go unanswered.
Four days farther on their river met outliers of a range of hills and turned aside to flow elsewhere. They left it, not without a little tug at Urrell’s heart. Agaratz, on its banks, chanted a brief farewell to the current that had been their companion and guide for days.