At the same moment, Hok rolled violently from the rock where he had lain, and whipped himself erect. The final summoning of his strength had broken those strained cords of fish skin.
A scooping grab, and he had the sword that had guided down a death of fire upon Djoma. It swung around his head like a crystallized flame.
“Hai! I am Hok—I kill!”
But he could kill only the slowest of the Fishers. For, in deadly terror, they ran before him like deer, diving into the water or scrambling aboard canoes to escape. Within seconds he stood alone on the beach, astride of the body of Djoma, panting and glaring. He now had time to realize that the rain had ceased suddenly and that the sun, his god, shone in the blue morning sky.
“Hok! Hok!” cried Oloana tremulously from where she lay bound. “Cast us free, and let us be gone.”
He hurried to her side. The edge of Widow-maker served to sever the bonds that held his wife and son. The three departed unchallenged from the beach where Djoma lay dead, and to which the Fishers dared not return.
CHAPTER VI
IT was noon when they came again to the Lair of Fire. All three were eating ravenously, for Hok had not tasted food since before the first battle with Djoma, and neither Oloana nor Ptao had been able to stomach the unfamiliar provisions of fish offered them. On their march home they had picked handfuls of berries, acorns and rose hips to stay their hunger. But Hok ceased munching as he came to the granite ridge and looked beyond to where flames rose stealthily from their pit, as though to peer at him. His face grew grave and intent, as when he thought deep thoughts.
“I do not like this place,” said Oloana. “It is too warm underfoot.”
“Wait here,” rejoined Hok briefly, and approached the Lair of Fire alone. He walked gingerly but as became a chief, carrying Widow-maker with him. His wife and son watched with curious’ eyes.
At the brink of the flame-pit, Hok took his stand. His nostrils drank the pungent, half-smothering odor of the rising gases. He began to speak:
“You asked me for Widow-maker once, and I refused. I thought then that only Widow-maker would win back Oloana and Ptao. I was wrong to think it, for Widow-maker was almost turned against us. Only my prayer and promise caused the Shining One to fight on my side, throwing fire down to destroy the chief of the Fishers and to prove that their god, the Sea-Father, is weak and of little account.”
He paused. There was a whispering noise far beneath in the glowing depths, as though the creature that breathed out the fire was agreeing with him.
“You, being of flame, are kin to the Shining One,” continued Hok formally. “I vowed to him that Widow-maker would not be used again after we were set free. I now keep that vow. You asked for it once. Here it is.”
His hand yearned to keep its grip on the good sword that had served him so famously, but he forced himself to cast it in. The bright gray blade seemed to float on the surface of the fire for a moment, as though the uprush of gas supported it. Then it was gone from view, gulped away into the abyss. Up shot a tongue of flame, seeming to make acknowledgment of the returned gift.
“It was not a gift to me—only a loan,” said Hok, and retraced his steps to where the woman and boy waited for him.
LEADING the way down the other side of the rocky rise, he paused once more under the gnarled oak tree that grew there. His big hands fastened upon a low-growing bough, and with a sudden exertion of his strength he ripped it loose. Stripping away the twigs, he tested the balance of this rough club, and nodded approval.
“It will serve to fight off any dangers that may rise on our way home,” he announced.
Ptao’s blue eyes, already bright with the dawning enthusiasm for the hunt and the war-trail, appraised the makeshift weapon. “Why did you not keep the bright thing you call Widow-maker?” he asked. “It was splendid to fight with. No axe or spear or club was ever so deadly.”
“I know it, my son,” nodded Hok, “but I had spoken a word of promise to do as I did. And words of promise, you know, must be kept.”
“True,” agreed Oloana, glad of a chance to impress a lesson in ethics upon her youngster.
The boy nodded his bright head in imitation of his father. “Yet,” he continued, “it was mighty in your hand, and it would have been mighty in mine, too, when I was grown and had become chief after you.”
Hok smiled at that, in understanding and comradeship.
“You speak wisdom, son of mine. In my hand and in yours, Widow-maker would be a good thing. Yet, after we are both gone, who knows? A man like Djoma, or worse than Djoma, might make the good thing bad. It is best that the gift of heaven go back whence it came.”
They resumed their homeward march. And so, for the time being, the dawn of the Iron Age was delayed.[9]
[1] See “Battle in the Dawn”, AMAZING STORIES, January, 1939.
[2] No formal history can trace the first use of coal, which must have been accidental as in the present example. The early great civilizations knew nothing of coal, but European barbarians before the Roman conquest seem to have used it since prehistoric times.—Ed.
[3] Meteoric iron generally has from 4 to 10 per cent of nickel, with traces of cobalt, copper, tin and carbon—an alloy that is a makeshift steel, not at all unsuitable for making weapons.—Ed.
[4] The cave-bear, Ursus spelaus, was a larger and heavier creature than his modern cousin, and was a contemporary and enemy of stone-age man. The cave-drawings of Aurignacan and Magdalenean times include many representations of the cave-bear, and at least one cave-bear skeleton shows marks of a fierce attack with stone weapons.—Ed.
[5] Remains of Ursus spelaus show that, for all the size of the animal, the phalanges bearing the claws were weak, denoting a loss of climbing ability from long dwelling in caves.—Ed.
[6] Most inland savages, unfamiliar with fish, are suspicious of it. Both the Apaches and Zulus repudiated it as poison.—Ed.
[7] The Lair of Fire was a well of natural gas, set ablaze by lightning or other cause, such a phenomenon as exists in many volcanic regions throughout the world.—Ed.
[8] Such stilt-supported communities were one of the most elaborate triumphs of prehistoric man’s inventive genius, arguing considerable industry and cooperative planning. The most interesting remains have been discovered in old lake beds of Switzerland. Probably others existed at the seashore of the Stone Age and were washed away. Venice and the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan were elaborations of the water-town idea, and the savages of New Guinea still build such towns.—Ed.
[9] ManIy Wade Wellman, creator of Hok, the Caveman, has placed in these stories what is perhaps the most accurate and basically true story of the rise of man from the primitive that has ever appeared in fiction.
Hok may never have existed, as Hok, but he did exist as the first of the true men, under whatever name he was known by. He did find the first stone axe. He did invent the first bow and arrow. He did fashion the first sword. This story is the story, in imaginative form, of how he may have fabricated the first metal weapon of this kind. Indeed, the way he must have made it. And he did live the sort of life Mr. Wellman has pictured here.
Author Wellman has presented here, in sugar-coated form, a true picture of the beginnings of man, and while he wrote to entertain you, perhaps his motive was also to teach—because knowledge is progress. Hok progressed that way.—Ed.
ONLY Hok could have done it—only Hok the Mighty, strongest and wisest and bravest of the Flint Folk whose chief he was. For Gragru the mammoth was in those days the noblest of all beasts hunted by man—to bring one down was an enterprise for the combined hunter-strength of a tribe. Save for Hok, no man would even think of killing Gragru single-handed.
But Hok had so thought. And for Hok, to think was to do. When winter’s heaviest snow had choked the meadows and woods that Hok’s people had won by battle from the half-beastly Gnorrls,[1] he put his plan into action.
Not that food was scarce. A late flight of geese had dropped floundering
on the frozen river before the village of mud huts, and Hok’s sturdy young son Ptao had led the other children to seize them. Hok’s brother Zhik had traced a herd of elk to their stamped-out clearing in a willow thicket, and was planning a raid thither. But Hok’s big blond head teemed with great thoughts, his blue eyes seemed to gaze on far distances of the spirit. Already he thought of such game as trivial.
On a cloudy gray day, not too cold, he spoke from his cave-door in the bluff above the huts. “I go on a lone hunt,” he told the tribe. “It will be several days, perhaps, before I return. In my absence, Zhik is your chief.” Then he gave his handsome wife Oloana a rib-buckling hug, and told young Ptao to grow in his absence. He departed along the river trail, heading south for mammoth country.
His big, tall body was dressed in fur from throat to toe. His long shanks wore tight-wound wolfskin leggings, fur inside. His moccasins, of twofold bison leather, had tops reaching almost to his knees, and were plentifully tallowed against wet. His body was wrapped in the pelt of a cave-lion, arms fitting inside the neatly skinned forelegs, mane muffling his neck and chest. Fox-fur gloves protected his hands. All openings and laps were drawn snug by leather laces. Only his great head, with golden clouds of hair and beard, was defiantly bare to winter.
Leaving the village, Hok paused to strap his feet into rough snowshoes.[2] The Flint Folk had developed such things by watching how nature made broad the feet of hare, ptarmigan and lynx to glide on top of the snow. Hok’s weapons were a big bow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a big keen axe of blue flint. At his side hung a sizeable deerskin pouch, full of hunter’s gear and provisions.
Away he tramped, his blue eyes scanning the horizon. Far off was a black bison, snow-scamped, with wolves closing in. Nearer, gaunt ravens sawed over a frost-killed deer. Winter was the hungry season—eat or be eaten was its byword. Hok’s people would eat plentifully of Gragru’s carcass . . . Hok journeyed west and south, to where he had once noted a grove of pine and juniper.
It was all of a morning and part of the afternoon before Hok reached the grove. He smiled over nearby mammoth tracks, large enough for him to curl up in. The prey had been there. It would return. He began preparations.
He set up headquarters in the center of the grove, scooping out a den in the snow and laying branches above it for roof. His bow and arrows he hung to a big pine trunk, away from damp. Then, axe in hand, he sought out a springy red cedar, felled it and trimmed away the branches. Dragging it to his camp, Hok laboriously hewed and whittled it into a great bow-stave, twice as long as himself and thicker at the midpoint than his brawny calf, with the two ends properly tapered.
BENDING the bow was a task for even Hok. From his bag he took a great coil of rawhide rope, several strands thick. With a length of this he lashed the bow horizontally to the big pine. To each end he fastened a second line, making this fast to a tree behind. After that, he toiled to bend one arm, then the other, using all his braced strength and weight and shortening each lashing. The stout cedar bent little by little into a considerable curve.
Next Hok affixed his bowstring of rawhide, first soaking it in slush. When it was as tight as he could make it, he lighted a row of fires near it. As the string dried and shrank in the heat, the bow bent still more.
Meanwhile, Hok was cutting an arrow to fit that bow, a pine sapling thrice the length of his leg. From his pouch he produced a flint point longer than his foot, flaked to a narrow, sharp apex. This he lashed into the split tip, and with his axe chopped a notch in the opposite butt. The finished arrow he laid across his big bow.
“My weapon is ready to draw for killing,” he said with satisfaction, and put himself to new toil. A lashing of rope held the arrow notched on the string, and Hok carried the end of this new lashing backward, around a stump directly to the rear. With braced feet, swelling muscles, panting chest, he heaved and slaved and outdid himself until the bow was drawn to the fullest and his pull-rope hitched firmly to the anchorage. He stepped back and proudly surveyed the finished work. “Good!” he approved himself.
He had made and drawn a bow for such a giant as his old mother had spoken of, long ago in his childhood. The big pine to which the bow was bound stood for the archer’s rigid gripping hand. The back-stretched rope from the arrow’s notch was the drawing hand. All that was needed would be a target in front of it.
And Hok arranged for that.
He cut young, green juniper boughs and made to heaps, three strides apart, so that the arrow pointed midway between them. Then he hacked away branches and bushes that might interfere with the shaft’s flight. It was evening by now. He built up his fire behind the drawn bow, toasted a bit of meat from his pouch, and finally slept.
At dawn he woke. Snow was falling. Hok rose and gazed along the little lane in front of the arrow.
There came the prey he hoped for.
Gragru the mammoth, tremendous beyond imagination, marched with heavy dignity to the enticing breakfast Hok had set him. A hillock of red-black hair, more than twice Hok’s height at the shoulder,[3] he sprouted great spiral tusks of creamy ivory, each a weight for several men. His head, a hairy boulder, had a high cranium and small, wise eyes. His long, clever trunk sniffed at one stack of juniper, and began to convey it to his mouth.[4]
Hok drew his keen dagger of reindeer horn. The mammoth gobbled on, finished the first stack, then swung across to the second.
Hok squinted a last time along the arrow. It aimed at the exact point he had hoped—the hair-thatched flank of the beast. Hok set his knife to the draw-rope—sliced the strands—
Honng! With a whoop of freed strength, the bow hurled its shaft. A heavy thud rang back, and Gragru trumpeted in startled pain.
“You are my meat!” yelled Hok.
Gragru wheeled and charged the voice. Hok caught his bow and arrows from their hanging place, gathered the snowshoes under his arm, and danced nimbly aside. “I shot you!” he cried again. “I, Hok!”
Blundering through the brush, Gragru looked right and left for his enemy; but Hok had sagely trotted around behind him. A savage exploration of the thicket, to no avail—then Gragru sought the open again. His blood streamed from wounds on either side where the pine-shaft transfixed him, but he still stood steady on his great tree-stump feet.
Hok came to the fringe of the junipers. “You shall not escape!” he yelled at the mammoth. “Hok will eat you!”
THIS time Gragru did not charge.
He knew that death had smitten through hair and hide and bone, to the center of his lungs. No time left for combat or revenge—time only for one thing, the thing that every mammoth must do in his last hour . . .
He turned and struggled away southward through the snow.
Hok watched. He remembered the stories of his fathers.
“Gragru seeks the dying place of the mammoth, the tomb of his people, that no man has ever seen or found.[5] I shall follow him to that place—learn the secret and mystery of where the mammoth goes to die!”
Quickly he bound on his snow-shoes, gained the top of the drifts, and forged away after Gragru, now a diminishing brown blotch in the middle distance.
CHAPTER II
Where Gragru Died
EVEN the elephant, degenerate modern nephew of Gragru’s race, can outrun a good horse on a sprint or a day’s march; and the beast Hok now followed was among the largest and most enduring of his kind. Despite the wound, the shaft in his body, and the deep snow, Gragru ploughed ahead faster than Hok’s best pace.
The tall chieftain, however, had a plain trail to follow—a deep rut in the snow, with splotches and spatters of blood. “Gragru shall not escape,” he promised himself, and mended his stride. The rising wind, bearing more snowflakes, blew at his wide shoulders and helped him along. Ahead was a ravine, its central watercourse many men’s height deep under old snows. Gragru sagely churned along one slope, into country more than a day’s journey from Hok’s village. Hok had hunted there only a few times.
They travelled t
hus, hunter and hunted, all morning and all afternoon. Evening came, and Hok did not pause for a campfire, but gnawed a strip of dried meat as he marched. His longest pause was to melt snow between his ungloved hands for drink. Then on into the dusk. The clouds broke a little, and the light of a half-moon showed him the trail of Gragru.
With the coming of night he heard the howl of winter-famished wolves behind. They were hunting him, of course.[6] The safety of a tree, or at least a rock-face to defend his back, was the dictate of discretion; but Hok very seldom was discreet. He paused only long enough to cut a straight shoot of ash, rather longer than himself. Then, resuming his journey, he whittled it to a point with his deerhorn knife. This improvised stabbing spear he carried in his right hand, point backward.
The howling chorus of the wolves came nearer, stronger. It rose to a fiendish din as they sighted Hok. He judged that there were five or six, lean and savage. Without slacking his pace, he kept a watch from the tail of his eye. As they drew close to his heels, several gray forms slackened pace cautiously. Not so the leader—he dashed full upon Hok and sprang.
Hok had waited for that. Back darted his reversed spear. The tough ash pike met the wolf’s breast in midair, the very force of the leap helped to impale the brute. There rose one wild scream of agony, and Hok let go of the weapon, tramping along. Behind rose a greedy hubbub—as he had foreseen, the other wolves had stopped and were devouring their fallen leader.
“The bravest often die like that,” philosophized Hok, lengthening his stride to make up for lost time.
The long ravine came to a head in a frozen lake. Across this, to the south, brush-clad hills. Gragru’s wallowing trail showed how hard he found those hills to climb, and Hok made up some of the distance he had lost on the levels. As the moon sank before morning, Hok caught up. Gragru had paused to rest, a great hunched hillock in a shaggy pelt. Hok yelled in triumph and Gragru, galvanizing into motion, slogged away southward as before.
The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 23
