ANOTHER day—second of pursuit, third of absence from home. Even Hok’s magnificently trained legs must begin to suffer from so much snowshoeing; even Gragru’s teeming reservoir of strength must run lower from pain and labor. Given a chance to idle and nurse himself, he could let the air clot and congeal the wounds, but the shaft still stuck through him, working and shifting to begin fresh bleedings. The trail now led through impeding thickets, and after a brief spurt by Gragru, Hok had a new advantage, that of using the mammoth’s lane through the heavy drift-choked growth. By afternoon more snow fell, almost a blizzard. Lest he lose the trail entirely, Hok tramped in Gragru’s very tracks instead of on the firmer drifts beside.
“He weakens,” Hok told himself, eyeing new blood blotches. “At this point he rested on his knees. Yonder he fell on his side. Brave beast, to get up again! Will he reach the dying place?”
Full of admiration for Gragru, Hok half-wished the animal would triumph, but he did not slow down. Hok was weary, but warm from his exertions and far from faltering.
Night again. During the darkness Hok again kept up a dogged march. Up ahead somewhere, Gragru was forced to make a halt of it. His wound was doing its grim best to heal. Once or twice the mammoth’s trunk reached back and investigated that lodged shaft. But there was too much wisdom in that high crag of a skull to permit tugging out of the painful thing—that would mean bleeding to death on the spot. Once again, as the deepest dark heralded the dawn, Hok drew nigh to his massive quarry. Once again Gragru stirred to motion, breaking trail for the third day of the chase.
The mighty stumpy feet were shaking and stumbling by now. Gragru fell again and again. He rose with difficulty after each fall, groaning and puffing but stubborn. A fresh hunter might have caught up—but Hok, however much he would not admit it, was himself close to the end of endurance. His deep chest panted like a bullfrog’s. He breathed through his mouth, and the moisture made icicles in his golden beard. Frost tried to bite his face, and he rubbed it away with snow. Only his conscious wisdom kept him from tossing aside his Turs as too much weight. By noon he made his first rest-stop. Knowing better than to sit down and grow stiff, he leaned his back to a boulder and gulped air into his laboring lungs. After he had paused thus, and eaten a mouthful of meat, he was no more than able to resume the pursuit, at a stubborn walk.
“Gragru,” he addressed the fugitive up ahead, “you are strong and brave. Any man but Hok would say you had conquered. But I have not given up.”
THE afternoon’s journey led over a great flat plain, rimmed afar by white wrapped mountains and bearing no trees or watercourses that showed above the snow. Almost on its far side was a gentle slope to a ridge, with a peculiar length of shadow behind. Hok saw Gragru ahead of him. The mammoth could barely crawl through the drifts, sagging and trembling with weakness. Hok drew on his own last reserves of strength, stirred his aching feet to swifter snowshoeing. He actually gained.
Narrower grew the distance between them. Hok drew the axe from his belt, balanced it in his gloved right hand. Coming close, he told himself, he would hack the tendon of Gragru’s hind leg, bring him down to stay. After that, get close enough to wrench out the piercing shaft, so that a final loss of blood would finish the beast. Then—but Hok could wish only for camp, a fire, sleep.
He toiled close. Closer. Gragru was only fifty paces ahead, tottering to that ridge of the slope. At its top he made a slow, clumsy half-turn. His head quivered between his big tussocked shoulders, his ears and trunk hung limply. His eyes, red and pained, fixed upon Hok’s like the eyes of a warrior who sees death upon him. Hok lifted his axe in salute.
“Gragru, I am honored by this adventure,” he wheezed. “Eating your heart will give me strength and wit and courage beyond all I have known. You will live again in me. Now, to make an end.”
He kicked off the snowshoes, so as to run more swiftly at Gragru’s sagging hindquarters. But, before he moved, Gragru acted on his own part. He stretched his trunk backward to the shaft in his wound.
Hok relaxed, smiling. “What, you would die of your own will? So be it! I yield you the honor of killing Gragru!”
The mammoth’s trunk surged with all the strength it had left. Fastening on the head of the lance, it drew, dragged, pulled the shaft clear through and away. A flip of the trunk, and the red-caked weapon flew out of sight beyond the ridge. Then, blood fountaining forth on both sides, Gragru dragged himself after the shaft. He seemed to collapse beyond the ridge.
“He is mine,” muttered Hok into the icicles on his beard, and lifted his axe. He ran in pursuit. So swift was he that he did not see what was on the other side of the ridge until too late.
There was no other side, really. Ground shelved straight down from that highest snow-clad point, into a vast, deep valley. There was a drop of eight or ten paces, then the beginning of a steep muddy slope. Hok felt a beating-up of damp warmth, like the rush of air from a cave heated with many fires. He saw thick, distant greenery below him, with a blue mist over it as of rain-clouds seen from a mountain top. All this in one moment.
Then his moccasins slid from under him on the brink, and he fell hard.
Striking the top of the slope all sprawling, he rolled over and then slid like an otter on a riverbank. Perhaps something struck his head. Perhaps he only closed his eyes as he slid.
In any case, Hok dropped into sleep as into warm water. He never even felt himself strike a solid obstruction and halt his downward slide.
CHAPTER III
The Jungle Beneath the Snow
HOK stretched, yawned, opened his eyes. “Where have I fallen?” he inquired of the world, and looked about to answer his own question.
He had plumped into a great bushy thicket of evergreen scrub, and had lain there as comfortably as in a hammock. By chance or instinct, he still clutched his big flint axe. Above him was the steep slope, and above that the perpendicular cliff with a crowning of snow. But all about him was a springlike warmth, with no snow at all—only dampness.
Hok wriggled out of his branchy bed, examining himself. His tumble had covered his garments with muck. “Pah!” he condemned the mess, and used his gloves to wipe his face, hair and weapons. A look at the sky told him it was morning—he had slept away his fourth night from home.
Then he gazed downward. The valley seemed to throb and steam. He made out rich leafage and tall tree-summits far below. One or two bright birds flitted in the mists. Hok grimaced.
“Summer must sleep through the cold, like a cave-bear,” he decided. “I will go down, and look for Gragru’s body.”
There were shoots and shrubs and hummocks for him to catch with hands and feet, or he would have gone sliding again. The deeper he journeyed, the warmer it became. Now and then he hacked a big slash on a larger tree, to keep his upward trail again. Those trees, he observed, were often summer trees, lusher and greener than any he had ever seen.
“Is this the Ancient Land of safe and easy life?”[7] he mused.
He threw off leggings and gloves and the muddy lionskin cloak, tying these into a bundle to carry. Further descent into even more tropical temperature, and he hung the superfluous garments in a forked branch of a ferny thicket. “I will get them when I return,” he decided, and went on down, clad only in clout and moccasins. Bow, quiver and pouch he slung from his shoulders. The deerhorn dagger rode in his leather girdle. His big axe he kept ready in his right hand, for what might challenge him.
The first challenger came, not up from the valley, but down from the misty air. Hok saw gray-green pinions, four times wider than his own arm-spread, and borne between them something like an evil dream of a stork. The wings rustled as they flapped—he saw, as they settled upon him, that they were unfeathered membranes like a bat’s—and two scaly rear talons slashed at him.[8]
“Khaa!” cried Hok, revolted, and set himself for defense. He parried the rush with his axe. The side, not the edge, of the flint struck that monster’s chest, blocking it off. Down darted the long l
ean neck, and the sharp-toothed beak fastened in Hok’s hair. A moment later the clutching lizardy feet closed on the axe-haft. Hok found himself carried shakily aloft.
There was a struggle for the axe. The thing could barely sustain Hok’s weight clear of the ground, and it tried to kill, not capture. A long tail belabored him like a club, hideous handlike claws on the wing-elbows scratched and scrabbled at his chest and throat. Hok, dangling in midair, found himself able to voice a savage laugh.
“A hai!” You think to eat Hok, you nightmare? Others have found him a tough morsel!” Quitting hold of the axe with one hand, he whipped the dagger from his belt. Thrusting upward, he pierced the scaly throat to the bone.
THE jaws let go his hair, and emitted a startled screech. Snaky-smelling blood drenched Hok, and the two fell. The wings, though out of control, partially broke the tumble, and Hok had the wit and strength to turn his enemy under and fall upon it. They struck the slope some paces lower than where the fight began. Hok pinned the still struggling nightmare with his foot, and cleft it almost in two with his axe. Then he stepped clear, nose wrinkled in disgust.
“Khaa!” he snorted again, mopping away the ill-scented gore with handfuls of fern. “I’d have doubly died if that bird-snake had eaten me. Are there others?”
His question was answered on the instant. Dry flappings, shrill screams—Hok sheltered in a thicket, and watched a dozen more birdsnakes swoop down to rend and devour their slain brother. It was a sight to turn the stomach of a Gnorrl. Hok slipped away down slope.
Now he came to a gentler incline and larger trees. He journeyed on without mishap for the rest of the morning. Hungry, he ate several strange fruits from vine or tree at which he saw birds pecking. Once, too, a strange thing like a tiny tailed man[9] scolded him in a harsh high voice and flung down a big husk-fibered nut. Hok dodged the missile, split it and enjoyed both the white flesh and the milky juice.
“Thanks, little brother!” he cried up at the impish nut-thrower.
When noon was past, Hok had come to where he could spy the floor of the valley.
With difficulty he spied it, for it was dusky dark. From it rose fumes, mist-clouds, earthy odors. It was a swamp, from which sprouted upward the tallest and biggest trees Hok had ever seen. They grew thickly, interlaced with the root-ends and butts of vines and creepers, hummocked around with dank clumps of fungi, rimmed with filthy pools. Swarms of biting insects rose, and Hok retreated, cursing.
“I see nothing of Gragru down there,” he said. “I’ll go sidewise.”
Nicking a tree to mark the turnoff, he travelled directly along the slope. Nor had he far to go before he saw Gragru.
Here was the place where mammoths were entombed. Above, extending up the valley’s slope, Was a tunnel through trees and thickets, kept open by so many falling, rolling masses of dead or dying mammoth-meat. At the bottom of the chute rose a stinking stack of remains. Hok could not have counted them—there must be thousands of desiccated and rotted carcasses, the bones gray and the curling tusks white. On top lay the freshest of these, Gragru his quarry. And beside it was one that had beaten Hok to the kill.
“First bird-snakes,” grumbled Hok. “Now elephant-pigs.”
For the thing was bigger than an elephant and grosser than a hog. Its monstrous bulk, clad in scant-bristled hide of slate gray, stooped above the carcass. Its shallow, broad-snouted skull bent down, and powerful fangs tore the hairy hide from Gragru’s flesh, exposing the tender meat. That head lifted as Hok came into view, a head larger than that of a hippopotamus. Two small hooded eyes, cold and pale as a lizard’s, stared. The mouth sucked and chewed bloody shreds, and Hok saw down-protruding tusks, sharp as daggers. Upon the undeveloped brow, the swell of the muzzle, and the tip of the snout were hornlike knobs—three pairs of them.[10]
FIXING Hok with that lizardlike stare, the big brute set its elephantine forefeet upon Gragru’s bulk and hitched itself nearer. Its bloody, fang-fringed jaws seemed to grin in anticipation of different meat.
“Thing,” Hok addressed the monster, “you came unbidden to eat my prey. You yourself shall be my meat, to replace that which I killed.”
He lifted his bow, which was ready strung, and reached over his shoulder for an arrow. Just then the elephant-pig moved toward him.
For all its unwieldy bulk, it came at antelope speed, that great toothed maw open to seize and rend. Hok swiftly drew his long arrow to the head and sent it full at the long protruding tongue. The monster stopped dead, emitting a shrill gargling squeal, and lifted one horn-toed foot to paw at the wound. Hok retired into a bushy thicket, setting another arrow to string.
That thicket would have shielded him from the charge of a buffalo or lion; but the bulk of the present enemy was to buffalo or lion as a fox to rabbits. It charged among the brush, breaking off stout stems like reeds. Hok, lighter, had difficulty getting aside from its first blind rush. He gained the open, and so did the elephant-pig. It spied, wheeled to charge again.
He discharged a second arrow, full at one of those dead eyes. The six-knobbed head twitched at that moment, and the shaft skewered a nostril instead. Again a horrid yell of angry pain. Hok sprang away from under its very feet as it tried to run him down, found himself heading into the swampy bottom. There was a great cylindrical mass among the trees, a trunk which even this hideous monster could not tear down. Hok ran to it, seeking to climb the rough lappings of bark.
“You cannot climb quickly enough,” said a voice from within the tree. “Come inside, where I can look at you.”
CHAPTER IV
The Man inside the Tree
IT IS often like that, even with a hunter as wise and sharp-eyed as Hok. Not until the voice spoke to him, in the language of men,[11] was he aware that near him in the great trunk was a gaping hole, big enough for him to slide through, and full of blackness.
The tree itself was not a tree. For trees are straight upward shoots of vegetable growth—this seemed a high-built, dose-packed spiral, as if someone had coiled a rope, or a worm had made a great casting. Between two woody curves, one upon the other, showed the hole.
“Make haste,” bade the voice inside. Hok saw that the elephant-pig, after a momentary questing to spy and smell him out, was ponderously wheeling to charge. He waited for no third invitation, but dived into the space, head first. A struggle and a kick, and he was inside, among comforting dimness that bespoke solid protection all around, A moment later the huge beast struck outside, with a force that shook every fiber of the strange stout growth within which Hok had taken refuge.
“He cannot break through to us,” assured the voice, very near. “This vine is stronger even than Rmanth, the slayer.”
Hok made out a dark shape, slender and quiet. “Vine?” he echoed. “But this is a tree, a dead hollow tree.”
“The tree that once stood here is not only dead, but gone,” he was quietly informed. “If there were light, you would see.”
Momentary silence, while Hok pondered this statement. Outside the elephant-pig, which seemed to be named Rmanth, sniffed at the orifice like a jackal at a rat-burrow.
“You don’t sound like a mocker,” was Hok’s final judgment aloud. “And it is true that this is a strange growth around us. As for light, why not build a fire?”
“Fire?” repeated the other uncertainly. “What is that?”
Hok could not but chuckle. “You do not know? Fire lights and warms you.”
“For warmth, it is never cold here. And for light—I do not like too much.”
“There is need of light in this darkness,” decided Hok weightily. “If you truly do not know fire, I can show better than I can tell.”
He groped with his hands on the floor of the cavern into which he had come. It seemed earthy, with much rubbish.
He found some bits of punky wood, then larger pieces, and cleared a hearth-space. From his pouch he brought needful things—a flat chip of pine, one edge notched; a straight, pointed stick of hard wood; a tuft of dry moss
.
“Thus,” lectured Hok, “is fire made.”
Working in the dark, he twirled the stick between his palms. Its point, in the notch of the chip, rubbed and heated. Within moments Hok smelled scorching, then smoke. A faint glow peeped through the gloom. Lifting away the chip, Hok held his moss-tinder to the little coal of glowing wood-meal. The rising blaze he fed with splinters, then larger pieces. The fire rose. “There!” cried Hok, and had time and illumination to look up.
HIS first glance showed him the refuge—a circular cavity, twice a man’s height in diameter, and walled snugly with those close-packed woody spirals. High above the space extended, with what looked like a gleaming white star at some distant apex. The floor was of well-trampled loam and mold, littered with ancient wood chips. His second glance showed him his companion.
Here was a body slimmer and shorter than the average man of the Flint People. The shoulders sloped, the muscles were stringy rather than swelling, there were no hips or calves. Around the slender waist was a clout rudely woven of plant’fiber, its girdle supporting a queerly made little axe and what seemed to be a knife. The feet, outthrust toward Hok, looked like hands—the great toe was set well back, and plainly could take independent grasp. On the chest—quite deep in proportion to the slimness—and on the outer arms and legs grew long, sparse hair of red-brown color. Hok could not see the face, for the man crouched and buried his head in his long arms.
“Don’t,” came his muffled plea. “Don’t . . .”
“It will not hurt,” Hok replied, puzzled.
“I cannot look, it burns my eyes. Once the forest was eaten by such stuff, that struck down from heaven—”
“Lightning,” guessed Hok. “Oh, yes, fire can be terrible when big. But we keep it small, feeding it only sparingly. Then it is good. See, I do hot fear. I promise it will not hurt you.”
The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 24
