by neetha Napew
By the first frost, game had already begun to become noticeably scarce in the once meat-rich hunting grounds. When winter came, the people were fat and ready to settle into camp. They feasted throughout the time of the long dark, confident that the great migratory herds of caribou, bison, and elk would return with the sun.
But this year the winter was colder and longer than any in memory. Food grew scarce. Babies wailed as their mothers’ milk began to wane. The people grew thin and fearful as predators prowled close to the encampment. Wolves, wild dogs, and the wanawut howled against hunger in the endless, snow-driven dark.
“Do you think that the great mammoth spirit is punishing this band for having eaten of its flesh?” asked Honee. She was immediately sorry that she had asked the question, for Mano reached out and, across the meager fire of Cheanah’s pit hut, smacked her across the side of the head so hard that her ears rang.
“That was long ago! Long ago!” he shouted. “And mammoth was totem to Torka and his band, not to us!”
Holding her head, Honee cowered in fear of another strike. She was grateful and surprised when Ank, instead of Zhoonali, spoke up in her behalf.
“It was your idea that we carve up the mammoth, Mano! Not the band’s! Not even our father’s. If the great mammoth spirits are angry, it is all your fault!”
Honee peered through her fingers in time to see Mano snarl and go for the boy, but Cheanah grabbed his eldest son by his long, greasy, un plaited hair and pulled him down hard. “Grown men do not beat boys or batter their sisters unnecessarily, Mano.”
Honee looked across the flames to the men’s side of the fire pit. Mano’s features were twisted and engorged with anger and frustration. Mano frightened her. She wished that there were more women in the camp so that Mano could take one for himself and start his own family instead of sheltering with their father while sharing the women of the other men of the band.
“There is too much tension in the light of this fire .. . in this camp ... in this people. It is not good, not good at all.”
Honee looked up as her grandmother rose. Zhoonali was dwarfed by the high, shadowed tangle of antlers and mammoth bones that formed the arching roof of Cheanah’s pit hut. In the flickering light of the central fire, the old woman looked so frail that Honee’s heartbeat quickened in fear for her grandmother’s life—until Zhoonali stood erect.
“Hear me! Spirits of the wind and storm, take pity on this people!
Give to the land the gift of your warmth that is life!”
Zhoonali’s prayer was answered. The gift of the sun was given, and the caribou came into the Land of Endless Meat from out of the eastern ranges. The blood of the men was up for hunting, so they did not notice that the herd was smaller than usual.
Cheanah led the way into an area of low hills, ahead of the caribou, where he positioned his fellow hunters on either side of the frozen river. Beneath the ice, the water was shallow; there would be little danger besides the cold if a man broke through. The broken ice would slow the caribou’s movement, and the frozen embankments would cause a panicked animal to slip and fall. Those that did manage an escape would be vulnerable to the spears of those hunters positioned on the high ground of the surrounding hills. The hunters patiently awaited the coming of the caribou to the river crossing. Then they ran. They howled. They yipped like frenzied wild dogs leaping to the kill.
“Enough!” cried Yanehva. “We have killed enough!”
Close at Yanehva’s side, Mano laughed out loud. “Never can one kill enough!” He left Yanehva behind, spears in check. As Mano plunged forward through the shallows, young Ank raced after him, water and ice sludge spraying all around. Mano’s heart was pounding. His loins were hot; his penis was as hard and erect as his spears. The kill always affected him this way.
He was aware of Ank calling out to him, but he did not wait. Ank was young; he would soon learn that calling a man back from a kill was as futile as asking a man to hold back after an ejaculation had begun! The thought moved his mouth into a twisted smile as he waded deep into the fray.
The river was a boiling mass of men and caribou. Half of it fought for life; the other half fought to take life. Many caribou broke through the ice to become mired up to their chests in the shallows. Calves were drowning and cows were down, unable to rise, as Mano and his companions slogged their way through the bloodied, ice-thickened water, sloshing and stabbing and slashing.
Although buffeted by fear-maddened animals, Mano managed to hold his position. An antler raked his side; the pain was pleasure to him. He threw back his head and howled as he drove a spear deep into the side of a frantic, screaming cow. The animal ran a few steps, ran afoul of a downed calf, and fell forward, with Mano still stabbing. When her head came up out of the water, a section of some other caribou’s intestine hung from her antlers.
He drove his spear deep again and again. “Die!” commanded Mano.
“Die!”
The cow’s tongue lolled, and the water was suddenly fouled with her final release.
Beside him, young Ank was stabbing at the same animal. Mano knocked the youth down. Ank fell sideways just as another cow leaped over him.
“Kill your own! This one is mine! And it is already dead!” Ank would sink or swim. Mano did not really care.
It was Yanehva who lunged through the morass of dead or dying caribou to save the boy. Mano cast a glance their way, then returned to the massacring until the strength was gone from his arms and he could find neither the energy nor the resolve to lift another spear.
By then the few surviving animals of the herd were gone across the snow-covered hills. If the exhausted hunters were puzzled—in the past the herd was so large that it took many days to cross the land—they gave no thought to their puzzlement. They caught their breath and began to drag carcass after carcass onto the frozen embankment.
“You would have let the boy drown!” Yanehva accused Mano as the three brothers sat dripping beside Cheanah.
“You are too much the worrisome woman, Yanehva,” Cheanah criticized.
“Ank was unconscious when I pulled him up!”
“Now, Brother, don’t make so much of nothing!” Mano countered lightly.
The women and children arrived at the butchering site, but no butchering was done. They feasted instead. They ate until they could eat no more, and still more than half the number of slain animals had not been touched.
“We will never be able to eat them all,” observed Ekoh with a thoughtful frown.
“We will eat the best parts!” Old Teean smacked his lips and sucked bits of raw tissue through his few remaining teeth.
“And store the rest.” Ekoh nodded at the prospect.
“This woman will not skin all these caribou!” Kimm frowned darkly at Bill’s man.
“We will take only the best skins and bring only the best meat back to camp!” proclaimed Cheanah, popping another eyeball into his mouth.
The people belched and dozed and cut wind, and then awoke to relieve themselves and to eat and rest again. When animals were heard howling and roaring in the distances of the night, they howled and roared back, and the hunters raised their spears and shook them at the sky.
“Listen,” said Ank with trepidation. “Wolves and dogs have smelled our kill. Lions, too.”
“Lions ...” Cheanah tasted the word as if it were meat.
“And the wanawut,” added Teean. “Did you hear it?”
Mano backhanded juices from his mouth. “Let them howl! I do not fear them. Mano’s spears are sharper than their teeth!” Cheanah looked at his son out of weary, sleep-bleary eyes. “You boast too much. The life spirits of the animals you mock may take offense.”
Mano forced up a belch and expelled it in Cheanah’s direction.
The night was growing deep and cold. The women raised a fire. It was not a time for talk. The people slept on the bloodied earth, beneath the star-strewn, moonless sky. Only the hunter Ekoh lay awake with his woman, Bili, in the fold
of his arm. She was pregnant again. By Cheanah—again! Ekoh’s mouth turned down into a scowl of loathing and frustration.
The wanawut hunted with her young in the fading night. As always, her two cubs were well ahead of her—the female trailing the much smaller but bolder and fleeter beast ling She sighed and limped after them. When they found the game, she would help to kill it. A tremor of doubt passed through her. Her back continued to ache, and her shoulders felt hot and stiff. The thigh muscles of her lion-mauled limb had long since atrophied, shortening her leg and impairing her effectiveness as a predator. It was this that had forced her to remain in the hunting territory of man, where she and her young came to feed-and to depend upon the leftovers of the beasts.
She paused again, sniffing the wind as the fingers of her right hand curled around her man stone. Even with the aid of her dagger she knew she was no longer physically able to contest with other large carnivores for meat; she must be the first to reach a killing site or abandon all hope of a meal. Never could she risk a confrontation with the beasts and their throwing sticks. So it was that when she had led the cubs down from the cave, she turned away from the killing site and followed the surviving caribou. Some of the fleeing animals were injured; she had caught the scent of their fear and blood upon the wind. They would be easy to kill.
She went on again, certain that before the sun was up she and her cubs would eat well for the first time in longer than she could remember. With a sigh, the wanawut quickened her steps. She was growing old and slow, but her cubs had need of her still.
Mano awoke with the dawn and lay on his back in his bloodied stalking cloak. It was frozen as stiff with caked blood as the oiled exterior layering of his thigh-high boots. When he sat up, he could hear the cracking of the thin layer of ice that sheened his outer garments. He was warm within his thick, multilayered clothing, but his breath formed a cloud before his face and crystallized upon his stubby eyebrows and the sparse strands of brittle hair that he had neglected to pluck from his upper lip. It was not considered attractive for a man to have hair upon his face, but there were no women worth impressing since Cheanah had stopped allowing him to use Dili.
Mano was glad that Bili was pregnant again; now neither Ekoh nor Cheanah could use her. He had heard Cheanah mutter regretfully to himself about the loss of Torka’s women. It was one of the few things that Mano had in common with his father. Mano could hear Ram and Kivan moving on their women. The sound stirred him. He looked around. Yes. The hunters had all moved to lie beside their women. Only Kimm, the children, and the old ones slept alone. He rose, rubbing his gloved hands together. Stepping across the sleeping and mating forms of his people, he lamented his options. His father’s second woman was the best he could hope for at the moment because Cheanah was joined with Xhan. He gave Kimm a sharp kick in her broad backside.
With a startled yelp, she rolled over and looked up, groaning when she saw who it was. Then she rolled onto her side again, pulling her sleeping skin over her head.
He kicked her again, hard, bent, and pulled away her carelessly groomed sleeping skin.
“Go away,” she protested, but even as she spoke, she was arching her hips and reaching under her tunic to loosen her trousers.
“Roll over. On your belly,” he commanded.
She complied.
Impatiently, he knelt and straddled her. Despite the long, hungry winter, Kimm was still plump. In the softly textured light of dawn, the two mounds of her buttocks shone up at him like twin moons cratered with fat. It was not a pretty sight, but it was the accepting end of a woman, and he came down on it eagerly, forcing penetration, ramming deep, pumping hard and fast, releasing quickly, and then moving slowly for a while until the last of his need was gone. Kimm was asleep before he was finished.
Disgusted, he withdrew and sat back, vexed to find that his sister Honee had been sleeping close to Kimm’s back. The girl’s small, closely set eyes were staring at him hatefully from beneath the soft, wind-rippled furs of her badger-skin hood. “Except for hunting, is that all that you men know how to do?” He snarled at her. “Be quiet, you ugly thing, or do you want me to give you some of what I have just given to your mother?”
“What makes you think I want you? Pound, pound. Quick, quick. That is what the women say of Mano.”
The girl knew when to move in a hurry. She was up and away and settled safely in the dawn shadow of Zhoonali’s sleeping form before Mano could make a grab for her.
He sat staring after her, despising her and wanting to hurt her, until he heard lions roar nearby.
Cheanah rose from where he lay with Xhan. Mano watched as the headman stood still, listening. The great cats sounded the deep, resonant growls of discontent as they prowled ever closer to the butchering site.
Mano went to Cheanah. “I would like to kill something this morning. Lions would do.”
From somewhere in the darkness across the river, the wanawut howled in the hills above the frozen marsh country. The roar of a lion answered. They knew it was a big lion from the way its roar seemed to echo within its chest before it was released as a sound to rival thunder.
“Perhaps a white lion ...” Speculation, not fear, colored Cheanah’s voice, but there was hesitancy in it.
It did not pass Mano unheard. “Yes,” he replied, eyeing his father. The speculation in his own voice had nothing to do with lions. “Perhaps it is time for Cheanah to take his white lion .. . if he can.”
It was quiet in the twisting gully between the hills. The exhausted caribou milled restlessly, fetlock deep in a thick, rolling ground fog. They had heard the roaring of the lion, and it kept them alert, moving, heads up, ears and tails twitching.
The beast ling crouched low. He listened for another roar to reverberate through the hills. None came. Nor was there a scent of lion. Sister was across the gully from him; he could just see the top of her head above the curve of the hill. Mother had moved to the canyon’s head.
Now, for the first time, the caribou caught her scent. The heads of several cows went up. A yuk-yuk-yuk came from their throats. Clouds of vapor condensed above their muzzles as they began to circle.
The beast ling looked on expectantly as Mother showed herself and raised her arms wide. She shook her fists and her man stone at the sky. She shrieked. The sound was a terrible thing to hear, but her visage was even more terrifying. The beast ling heart swelled with pride. Every movement hurt her, yet still she hunted for her cubs. How brave she was! How he loved her!
Today, with Sister to help him, he would try to make her see that she need not hunt at all. Her cubs were not fully grown, but thanks to her teaching they could provide for her as well as for themselves.
She shrieked again, and as he had been taught to do, the beast ling shrieked back at her. Sister did the same, then followed the beast ling lead as he stood tall upon the hilltop, waving his arms and pounding at the sky with his fists. He gave his best imitation of the behavior and scream of a wanawut and then, howling and yipping at the top of his lungs, he raced downhill toward the startled caribou.
The herd scattered and ran. Mother stood directly ahead of them as the two screaming cubs advanced from the hills on either side. The panicked caribou turned back toward the neck of the little canyon. In the narrow gully, the turn was impossible for all but a few animals. Frenzied cows overran each other, and calves were hopelessly trampled, their bodies disappearing into the ground fog. Mother and Sister leaped upon them and began to feed.
The beast ling however, stood his ground, attracted to a fine, fleet-footed cow that raced ahead of the others. He stood poised on the hillside, ready to jump down as the cow ran under him. And then, with a shriek of delight, he was in the air. He was yipping and howling as he landed on her back. He grabbed her antlers and, straddling her, held on for his life.
As her panicked eyes bulged round and her nostrils flared and snorted in fright, she leaped and bucked and twisted, trying desperately to be free of him. With the wind in his hair
and the saliva of the frenzied animal blowing back like warm snow against his face, he rode the fear-maddened caribou as she galloped out of the gully and back onto the open steppe. She ran on and on, full out, with her heart pounding against her heaving ribs and her body as hot and wet as blood against his inner thighs. His head was filled with the thundering sound of the caribou’s hooves.
Then, with no warning, she fell over, dead. The beast ling shocked, fell with her. The caribou was on her side, on top of him .. . and on top of the caribou was something big, growling and snarling ferociously as it grappled at the body of the dead cow with massive paws.
Blood ran into the beast ling eyes, but not before he glimpsed the color of those paws. Pale fur grew like soiled, blood-splotched grass around the enormous pads and claws of the white lion.
“Look! There in the mists ahead of us! There is the lion you seek!”
Mano and Cheanah had been brought to pause by the sight of a large caribou racing out of the hills ahead of them. The animal seemed to have something on its back, but distance made it impossible to say what it was. Nevertheless, when the caribou suddenly collapsed onto its side, neither Mano nor Cheanah failed to see the blur of white that suddenly leaped up out of the fog to fall upon it.
“The white lion ...” Cheanah seemed to grow taller as he exhaled the words with the fire of pure intent. Then, without another word, he moved forward with a long, sure stride.
Mano, running beside him, was soon breathless. “The wind is in our favor, and the lion will not see us until we are within striking distance. No need to hurry.”
Cheanah scowled as he ran. “I’ve waited too long to make this kill.”
But as he and Mano closed on their prey, another form materialized out of the mists. Waist-deep in ground fog, it was big and gray. The way it ran upright on its hind legs was grotesquely human as it pounded, screaming, toward the lion and caribou.
“By the forces of Creation, what is that?” Mano’s face revealed fear, revulsion, and horrified fascination as he stopped beside his father and stared ahead.
