by neetha Napew
With no additional prodding from the old woman, the people of Cheanah responded with enthusiasm. They were people of the great bear and raven totems, and by now the mammoth was probably dead anyway, half-consumed by predators; but the spirits wanted them to have its bones and its tusks and what remained of its meat. The forces of Creation had decreed it through the talking bones of Zhoonali.
Yet, as Cheanah led his men and youths from camp, followed by the women with their butchering tools, Yanehva lagged behind.
“What is it?” asked Ank, who fell back to walk beside him.
“I don’t like it. It was the great mammoth spirit of Man of the West who led our people to this valley. To eat of its flesh seems a sacrilege.”
Ank frowned. “If our grandmother says it is all right and our father agrees, it must be so! The talking bones have spoken!” He paused. “Do you think Torka still lives?”
“That is unimportant. Whether Torka is dead or alive, it was still his totem that led us to this good land.”
“He did have a pretty daughter,” recalled little Ank dreamily. “Summer Moon, I mean.” He ducked away, flame faced with embarrassment, as his brother cuffed him affectionately.
“Thinking of girls already, are you?”
“Girls grow up!” Ank snapped. “And so do boys. What girls worth thinking about do we have in this camp? Not one. You and Mano must share the women of others, and it will be years before the baby girls of Ekoh and Ram and the others are old enough to be taken from their fathers’ fire circles. But if Summer Moon were still in this camp, she would be a woman soon, my woman maybe.”
“She is not in this camp, nor will she ever be again. The daughter of Torka is unreachable! Thanks to our father, we will never see her or any of Torka’s people again.”
The beast ling had stood alone at the edge of the cave, his little face thrust into the wind, and bawled like a mired camel as Mother and Sister completed their descent of the mountain. Fear made him shiver against an inner cold. Mother is tired. Mother is sick. Mother should not have left the cave today!
By the time he took his first step down from the cave, he was able to justify his wanton disobedience. If he could keep Mother in sight, she would not disappear. If danger threatened her in the world below, he would be there to help her; even a little help would be better than no help at all. And if he was very, very careful, Mother would never know that he had ever left the cave.
He moved slowly. The wind was with him. Unless it reversed itself, they would catch no smell of him. To his relief, Mother was not looking back.
Unaware that he was following, Mother and Sister were well ahead, pushing their way deep into the high, frost britt led auburn grasses of the steppe. Their movement formed a pathway that was easy for him to follow. He went on, deeper and deeper into the sea of grass, following confidently in their wake. His unprotected arms and legs itched and prickled against the grasses. And the wind was growing cold. He was shivering almost as fiercely as he was itching. If only he had fur!
He paused, momentarily distracted as shadows dulled the light of the hole in the sky. Long, translucent streamers of clouds struck a chord of warning; he knew their kind almost always appeared before storms .. . before big storms.
He continued to follow Mother and Sister’s trail through the grassland. After a while, he could tell by the height of the breaks that Mother was carrying Sister. She must have grown tired. He understood why—never had he been so very far from the nest. His feet were raw and bleeding by the time Mother entered the marsh country. He was far behind her now, a small figure wincing and tight stepping against pain as he marveled at how Mother could forge ahead without stopping.
Unable to go on, the beast ling paused to rest. The reeds were all around him, a wall separating him from Mother. They itched more than the grasses. Scratching himself irritably, he sat down. In a moment, his elks king was soaked and his buttocks puckered against the icy sludge of muddy ooze underlying the reeds. The coolness of the marsh was welcome on his feet.
Then, suddenly, Mother screamed. The beast ling was on his feet in an instant, his pain gone and his weariness a thing of the past. His heart was leaping in his chest. Carrion-eating birds were shrieking and winging from out of the reeds a good distance ahead of him. He cowered lest the larger hawks, eagles, or teratorns catch sight of him and decide to carry him away. The beast ling realized that Mother was screaming to drive other carrion eaters from the carcass that she was about to claim for herself. Pride in Mother’s power swelled in his chest.
His confidence disappeared when he heard the sloppy footfalls and pantings of a big animal moving just ahead of him. Instants later the reverberant growls of a lion had his heart beating so furiously that it seemed to lodge in his throat and he could barely catch his breath. The wind brought him the warm, wet, meat-eating stink of the lion.
The stejich confused him, for it was a mixture of several highly individual body scents. He then heard the footfall of at least twelve paws. The beast ling eyes went round. There were several lions in the marsh, and they were moving toward Mother! She had driven them away, but now they were returning, walking slowly, deliberately, to close a circle from which they could attack.
The beast ling felt sick with dread. Without hesitation, he shoved his way forward through the reeds, with all the speed that his small body would allow. He ran screaming at the top of his lungs, and the lions were so startled by his sudden appearance that they looked at him in amazement as he broke through their circle and raced ahead of them without looking back.
The wanawut looked up from her feast. Her man cub was racing toward her out of the reeds. She felt pride and gladness to see him, as well as righteous indignation at his disobedience. Beside her, her female cub looked up, eyed the man cub dully, and continued to eat from the shoulder of the dead mammoth.
Then the wanawut spotted the lions emerging from the surrounding wall of reeds. There were two large, shaggy females and three powerful albeit only half-grown adolescents. Standing now, the wanawut raised her arms and screamed at them, threatening them away with a show of teeth and claws and man stone. The wanawut scooped up her female cub by the scruff of her neck as the lions moved forward toward the beast ling He was pounding toward her, his eyes bulging in terror, mouth agape, his step beginning to falter. The pursuing lions would be on him, and his life would be finished.
With a screech of rage, the wanawut leaped off the mammoth carcass, and as she came down hard into the shallow ooze of the marsh, pain burned in her leg and injured arm. She had no time for it. She snarled in frustration as she ran toward her cub, because she knew that her strength was not all that it should be.
The lions were closing on the beast ling as a white, one-eyed, black-maned male joined them from the reeds. Memories flared within her. She knew this lion.
He stopped dead. She could see recognition in his ruined face. He shook his head and roared at her, displaying his killing teeth. But she kept on running, knowing that although he would not attack her, he would take her cub if he could. He roared again. Ahead of him, the females and adolescents turned back and stopped. Their tails twitched as they awaited a signal from him.
The wanawut did not wait for him to give it. The distance between her and her man cub was almost nonexistent now. With her man stone between her teeth and her female cub still dangling by the scruff of her neck, she reached out to him with her free hand. She had him now. He clung to her fur with the tenacity of a biting fly as she wheeled and ran. The gash on her arm had opened; she could feel it oozing from beneath the scab. The old injury on her thigh was threatening to cramp. She screamed against the betrayal of her body, but it was no use. Her leg gave out, and she fell, sprawled forward, her cubs sheltered beneath her. The white lion was on her in an instant, like lightning striking from an unseen cloud. He was the weight of all the world crushing the life right out of her as he slapped at her with his huge paws, trying to turn her over so that he could get at her throat a
nd belly. She felt him rip her shoulder as, gripping her man stone, she stabbed up and back with all her might. The lion roared in pain and arced straight up.
Still clutching her man stone, the wanawut scooped up her cubs in one arm. She fought to rise and run. Sounds that she had not heard in many moons came to her: Man sounds they were, hidden within the faraway grasses. She was running again, her cubs clinging to her. The female was burrowing between her breasts. The male was reaching over her shoulder as she ran, stuffing his little hands into the wounds that the lion’s raking claws had inflicted upon her back. She knew that the beast ling was trying to stanch the flow of hot blood, but lest he lose his balance she pulled him down into the protective press of her massive arm. She dared not let him fall! She dared not slow her pace! She had to keep on running, not only from the lions, but from the beasts whose voices she had heard.
They were coming with their flying sticks out of the southern grasslands. Soon they would be within the marsh. They would see her and hunt her, as their kind always hunted her kind ... to the death. She could smell them now, coming ever closer.
The lions must have smelled them, too, for they were running at her side, no longer interested in hunting. To her relief they outdistanced her and kept on running until they disappeared into the grasses. She dared not slow her pace. Heading across the steppe toward the distant, stony hills, she followed them deep into the grassland.
The hole in the sky had vanished over the tangled, snow-covered horizon when, at last, straining against pain and exhaustion, she moved upward across the mist shrouded highlands. If there was a moon, she could not see’ it through the clouds. She finally reached her cave, and with the cubs safe in the curl of her arm, she crawled into her nest to sleep in safety through the long autumn night.
In silence, the beast ling stole from her embrace and stood above her in the cold dark. The smell of congealing blood was thick in the air. Mother was no longer bleeding. Her newest injury was not keeping her from sleep, nor was worry over Mother preventing Sister from smiling in her dreams.
The beast ling turned away from them. Shivering against the cold, he went to sit at the edge of the cave. His stomach growled. Mother and Sister had eaten the flesh of the mired mammoth, but he had not. It did not matter; he had no appetite. He was deeply troubled. Once again she had returned to the cave with wounds upon her body .. . once again he was beset by the realization that someday she would leave the cave to hunt and would not return.
He sat very still, listening to the wind. Moonlight shone through apertures between the rive ring clouds. He could see the world below almost as clearly as though it were day.
At the edge of the grassland, three beasts that walked on two legs stood together. The beast ling held his breath. Never before had these strange-looking, upright beasts come so close to the mountain. The cub cocked his head as he observed them. Their torsos were as straight as the sticks that they carried ... as straight as his own in those unguarded moments when Mother did not make him assume a correct bent-forward posture. And their arms were not long enough to allow them to lean comfortably on their knuckles. The beast ling frown deepened. His arms were not long enough for that, either! The arms of the beasts were down, and their fingertips reached to midthigh . like his own.
Their fur, he thought, was very strange. Not one of them possessed the same pelt. From this distance, it seemed that one of them had the body fur of a bear, the leg fur of a yak, and the shaggy arms of a bison. Another seemed to have the body fur of wolf, dog, and caribou, with long strips of horsehide running down its back. Two of them had big, puffy heads furred all around with what looked like fox or wolverine tails; if they had eyes, mouths, noses, or ears, the cub could not see them. But he could discern that the largest had a smaller head than the other two, and its face was bald .. . and the fur on its head was long and as black as the night, and as straight and smooth as a shaft of new grass.
He caught his breath. His hands flew to his head, and his fingers closed on two thick, tangled hanks of hair and pulled them forward. His own head fur was like the head fur of the beast that walked the world below. How could this be?
He stared down through the strands of his hair. The beasts were in a tight circle. The wind had changed, so he could hear them now, sounding to one another.
His hands left his hair and went to his throat. The beasts were sounding! They were not mewing or growling, screeching or huffing. Each sound had a shape, and within each shape was an inference of meaning that eluded him but was somehow calming to his spirit.
He closed his eyes, listening: One beast would sound, another would answer, and somehow a message was passed from one to the other. He could sense it; he could feel it. In an attempt at emulation, he inhaled deeply, pushed the air up and out of his chest, and held it captive within his mouth. He moved it over his tongue, shaped it, turned it, then slowly allowed it to escape as sounds.
“Ahh .. . kah .. . wah .. . mah ...” Because the sounds made no sense to him, he did not know why it both pleased and saddened him to hear them.
“Mah .. . nah .. . rah .. . vak ...” He intoned that utterance, then followed it with the one that Mother sometimes howled to a midnight moon: “Wah .. . nah .. . wah. Wah .. . nah .. . wut ...” He opened his eyes. In the world below, the beasts turned and walked back into the grassland. The cub watched them.
At the back of the cave, Mother sighed in her sleep. The beast ling needed no syllabic soundings to tell him that there was pain in the sound.
He rose and would have turned his back upon the night had a single flash of white not caught his eye. It was moving in the scrub growth near the river at the edge of the floodplain. He strained to focus his vision. He saw it clearly now. A white lion. The lion that had attacked Mother and hurt her.
He stood at the edge of the cave, glaring hatefully down at the world. As long as Mother remained weak and slow, that world would be the province of lions and wolves. It would not be safe for her or for Sister or for him.
A soft rain began to fall. The beast ling turned and went into the cave. He stood over the nest, looking down at Mother and Sister. How deeply they slept within the safe, sheltering walls of the mountain.
Far away, beyond the clouds and rain, a lion roared. The beast ling tensed, listening, knowing that Mother had recognized and feared that lion as much as it had feared her. Was the white lion responsible for the scar upon her leg as well as for the wounds in her back? Had Mother ruined its face and taken its eye? He hoped so.
Slowly, being careful not to wake Mother or Sister, he climbed into the nest and cuddled close to them. Sister briefly opened her eyes. She smiled and slung a long, gray-furred arm around him, then made smacking, contented little sounds as she settled back into her dreams.
The beastling lay very still. He was warm now. Beyond the cave, rain turned to snow. The white lion roared once more, then was still. The beastling slept and dreamed. He saw himself fully grown, the man stone in his hand as he went down from the cave alone, to kill the white lion so that Mother would have no cause to fear it ever again.
The sun disappeared over the western ranges, and winter settled over the land. Now was the time of the long dark, when day was only a memory and night went on forever.
Storms blew across the world. The sky was rarely clear, but when it was, the wonderful snow-covered valley and its surrounding hills and mountains sparkled beneath the light of the moon and stars, and the air was so cold that ice crystals hung suspended just above the earth in long rivers of subfreezing mist, which, if breathed too deeply, could fatally sear the lungs of man and beast alike.
Deep within the burrows and dens, the heartbeats of hibernating animals slowed as insulating layers of fat, feathers, and fur kept the cold away. Within lakes and rivers, fish sought deep water or died. And within wind-sheltered canyons, birds and predators hid from the storms as herd animals clustered, drawing warmth from one another’s closeness.
Within Torka’s capacious, r
ichly stocked cave, weather baffles of hide kept the winter at bay, and as an additional guard against the loss of precious heat, the people raised a great hut in which life went on much as it would have done had they still been encamped upon the open steppe. In the light of a low-burning fire and tallow lamps, the laughter of children dispelled the shadows of the endless night.
Karana brooded in the winter dark. With the great dog Aar at his side, he walked the winter world whenever the weather permitted. Beneath the star-strewn skin of the night, he sought communion with the spirits on behalf of his people and implored the forces of Creation to make a female child within the belly of his woman—he knew in his heart that if it was a male, he must kill it for the good of the band lest through its flesh the bones and blood of Navahk take life again.
But how would Karana kill it? On what pretext? And when the time came, could he bring himself to do it? Would Torka allow him to murder the infant?
No matter. It would and must be done! And when it was accomplished, Karana knew with heart-sinking clarity that he would never be able to look into the eyes of his beloved Mahnie again. But the death of an infant and the death of his life with Mahnie were the prices he must pay, for he knew now that he had been unthinking and uncaring when he had chosen to be a man with her.
“You worry too much.”
Torka’s comment startled him. He had been sitting alone on a snow-blasted boulder, with a thick stand of willow scrub at his back. Aar had been gone for a while, leg lifting and sniffing out the land, tail up and whoofing low as though in conversation with himself. Karana swiveled and actually gasped in surprise when he saw Torka standing over him.
“And you should remember to watch your back!” Torka admonished evenly, bending into a crouch beside the magic man and resting his spears across his folded limbs.
