Mammoth Boy

by John Hart

  “Mammuraperritxac, Urrell. Eat. Good.”

  It did not taste bad, just a little acrid, and tough. These words were the nearest to an explanation Agaratz had ever come, perhaps because no words existed to say what he wanted, or none that Urrell knew.

  Urrell chewed and swallowed the woody fragments.They roughened his throat.

  This done, Agaratz produced bundles of dried herbs, roots and seeds. These too were chewed small and swallowed. Although Agaratz ate his share, Urrell surmised that he did so more to encourage him, Urrell, than from any need of his own.

  After a short pause, he said: “Now blow, Urrell.”

  Urrell, on his mammoth-tusk flute, blew as bidden. He started a melody of his own, waveringly, till Agaratz joined in, picked up the line of music and expanded it, leading Urrell on in ever greater confidence as he started to move in time to his own playing round Agaratz and Rakrak, round the torch and its pool of light. He noticed the resinous smell of the torch as never before, sniffing with delight. Crevices, knurrs, flaking patches on the half-lit cave walls leapt out; every hair on Rakrak’s coat grew discernible; pouch and garments revealed creases made by the identity of their user and wearer. He felt he could touch his music in his head.

  Slowly this clarity blurred. No longer were Agaratz and Rakrak so present.

  His mind drifted to the shelter under the overhang, huddled women; Blueface; the brook; rubbish where he scavenged; Old Mother looking up, her eyes blinking through smoke, gone before he could speak; his trip over the moors; hawks; the bison with the trapped hoof. When he came to the present he felt giddy, ill, retching as he jigged round, unable to play and following only Agaratz’s music.

  New visions started up – dim distances, lakes and forests, herds of bison and horses stretching to the horizon, groups of aurochs, musk-oxen, a giant bear, followed by beasts he had never seen, with shaggy fur, stripes, scales, strange horns and snouts, giant fangs. They slank into his vision and back out into oblivion. None of this frightened him. He felt – intensely – that this was leading somewhere.

  By now exhaustion was taking over. His gyrations dwindled until he sank to the floor, accompanied by Rakrak’s whimpers of concern. He could not see her clearly, unable to focus his eyes, but felt her fur and warmth, fondled her ears and was soothed.

  This was the prelude to another phase. He felt better but weak. Lights in his head shifted and shone with the phosphorescent gleam of rotten wood, the elf-light he had sometimes found in the forest. It seemed to get into his mind’s eye. He was rising shakily, bidden on by Agaratz’s incessant playing, when he saw them – there, in front of his eyes, in single file, at a slow loping stride of their own, came the mammoths. They were perfectly clear on the cave wall, alive. He stopped dead in his excitement.

  “Mammurakan, mammurakan, Agaratz, mammurakan!” He could only croak the words, his voice hoarsened by the fungus and roots chewed, retching, slipping into Agaratz’s language as the only one fit for such an event.

  Agaratz’s response was to continue playing while he rummaged in his pouch with one hand. He drew out pieces of charcoal.

  “Draw, Urrell, draw mammurakan.”

  Impelled by Agaratz, who for once showed urgency, Urrell guessed exactly what to do. The music from Agaratz grew wilder, longing, mournful as Urrell drew the outlines of the mammoths with long, sure strokes, seizing their movements, using excrescences to emphasise here a shoulder, there a domed head, instinct with an artistry he could never have explained. He drew at speed. The column strode by on the stone for him. Its lead animal, an old cow, watched him with her small, reddened eye. As he caught her oblique glance, for the time of a glimpse it turned golden, like Agaratz’s, then back to ill-tempered ochre – he might have imagined it but he knew he had not. He drew till the frieze extended across the lit surface of the wall to the edge where darkness began and the beasts filed away into the mountain. His frenzy of drawing only stopped when Agaratz’s piping ceased.

  He subsided to the floor.

  “Now I paint, Urrell.”

  Holding a lump of greasy blacking, and balancing on his club shank with the delicacy of a bird, Agaratz underscored Urrell’s outlines, picked out features, touched in the shaggy flanks, hinted at the sweep of tusks, till the mammoths stood out in the torchlight.

  With reddle he doodled a deer and a pony, beneath the frieze, neither larger than a man’s hand, both ones Urrell recognised – animals from long ago, before he had met Agaratz.

  “Agaratz, how do you know that deer, that horse?”

  But already Agaratz was gathering up their things to leave.

  Old Mother, were you that lead cow?

  CHAPTER 21

  When Urrell revived he was deep in the pine-needle and bracken litter of home cave, huddled with Rakrak. Instantly wakeful he expected the torchlight, the mammoth frieze he had drawn, but as instantly knew he was mistaken. Wrapped in a pelt, he lay with Rakrak’s forepaws solicitously on him, as though she had been waiting for him to come round. A strong smell of body sweat issued from the fur wrapping when he stood up, teetering on the springy litter. He felt thin, feeble, and could not understand why he was in such a state at all.

  He parted the hangings of the alcove. Agaratz was at his usual place, by the fire, carving by the light of a torch, with Piura curled on some old furs as near the embers as she could without singeing herself. The air of the main cave felt chill after the sweaty wrap in the alcove.

  “Ho, Urrell. Good. You much sick. Now better.”

  It was a longish speech for Agaratz, yet did not reveal why he had been ill, how he had got out of the mammoth cave or back home. He knew then, and he knew firmly, that the mammoth cave had not been an illusion, one of Agaratz’s tricks: it was graven in his mind. Nothing Agaratz did was going to fool him this time. With a determination that surprised him, he decided there and then to put the matter out of his mind, away from Agaratz’s reach, so that later, when he was better, he would return alone and find the cave, squirm back in and rediscover his frieze, his very own frieze. Agaratz would not foil him this time.

  “Eat, Urrell.”

  He shuffled to the fire, still in his pelt wrap, his legs trembly, body shivery, but his mind unwontedly clear and bright.

  Hot venison lay on the slab. Agaratz had hunted while he lay comatose.

  He wondered how long he had lain thus. Instead of asking he bit into a hunk of meat and with it chewed a whole head of garlic. There were onions and scallion bulbs laid out too as though expecting his arrival. The concert of flavours held his full attention. Some nuts and seeds, autumn’s last offerings, were also set out. He munched on, deliberately, methodically, making up for lost time to fill out the hollows in his body. No thoughts of mammoths, caves, fungus-food or wild dances entered his mind, or if any did they were dismissed as fast as they came.

  No, this time Agaratz would not learn of his resolve to retrace his steps.

  On a frame he saw his leggings, jerkin, skins and even moccassins hanging where Agaratz must have put them when he had fallen ill. They were the same old worn and greasy things, creased with use. However, he realised there was something amiss with them; not a trace of the mud he had wriggled through in that funnel to the rock chamber remained…

  While Urrell devoured his food, half out of his pelt by the fire, Agaratz left the cave. When the bison hide was lifted, Urrell could see the snow was half gone – during his sickness winter had moved into the short spring of the north. How long must he have lain senseless since that foray to the mammoth cave?

  Agaratz returned with a pouchful of mushy snow.

  “Urrell, now need clean. You stand.”

  He stood, two handspans taller than Agaratz, a lanky youth turning into a man.

  Agaratz nodded, approvingly. Then with handfuls of snow and tufts of fern and dried grass he scoured Urrell’s flinching body from top to bottom. There was no let up. With a woman’s skill he scrubbed away a winter’s grease and dander, enlivening Urrel
l’s blood till he glowed.

  “Now dress, Urrell.”

  Instead of his old leathers Agaratz handed him a new set of garments, cut and sewn while he had been unconscious – a tunic, kirtle, leggings, cap, moccassins – all assembled and adorned here and there with quills and tassles, as for a special occasion. He donned his outfit, its soft inner leather pleasurable on his newly scoured skin, a suit of clothes made to mark a turning point in his life in the unspoken scheme of things by which Agaratz lived.

  Within days Urrell’s strength returned. They went on brief outings, mainly to gather green stuff, shoots of herbs, the first bulbils of the allium plants that throve in pockets of earth where the snow first melted away. Overhead, skeins of geese honked on their way to elsewhere. Soon herds of bison, horses, flocks of deer and wild sheep would pour back over the plains for the summer grazing, calving and plenty. Their main occupation was carving. Agaratz seemed in haste to make as many necklets, pierced disks, antler points as time allowed. He decorated shoulder blades, femurs, antlers, horns with scenes and designs from a world unknown to Urrell: lion and deer entwined, bison running with aurochs, strange flightless fowl sometimes, bears and tigers, and creatures that Urrell had never heard tell of, even in the fearful tales recited by tribelets in those winter quarters by the sleety sea. When asked, Agaratz gave them names that meant nothing to Urrell. They might have been drawn from a bestiary of another time, known only to his mentor.

  One evening, when Agaratz took his pipe and played, Urrell looked about for his mammoth flute, inwardly surprised for not having given it a moment’s thought all these days since his illness, as though it had been a figment of the mind, or part of a mammoth dream. He began to look for it along the ledges, under piles of objects heaped against cave walls, like a dreamer pursuing something forever just out of reach, a finger’s length ahead of his clawing grasp, beyond the tip of recollection. While he was searching thus, in mounting exasperation and panic, he distinctly heard Agaratz play the notes of the mammoth dance. He glanced at Agaratz, to be met with that teasing sidelong look, the yellow eye mischievously mocking, akin to the glance of the lead cow in the frieze he had drawn. Then the notes were gone and Agaratz was looking at him.

  “Now you play, Urrell.”

  “No pipe, Agaratz.”

  “Pipe with tusk.”

  And there it lay, among lengths of unwrought ivory, jostling its kind.

  And there along its length was a line of mammoths that Agaratz had etched for him, so delicately, each animal no bigger than a thumbnail, yet perfect. At their head, the cow led. Urrell fondled the flute, handled its shape, blew into it gently to recapture his music but although it gave him notes, played true, made music, the flute would not surrender to him that wild dance which he knew he would only ever recapture in the mammoth cave.

  CHAPTER 22

  Their winter stores were now truly low, Piura’s lean flanks tokens of scarcity, Rakrak’s quiet hunger a reproach. Even the lame fox no longer visited. Hunger had driven Urrell one day to scratch about in Agaratz’s pouches for remnants of stores while their owner was out foraging. In one he came across several handfuls of grain, dried hard as grit, which it occurred to him to kibble with a pebble on a slab of stone. While he was doing this some water spilt over the meal. He scraped it up with a bone flake into pellets the size of thrushes’ eggs which he ranged on the slab. As he had often parched and roasted nuts, he placed his doughy lumps in the embers where they hissed a little before giving off a most savoury aroma. He was engrossed in doing this when Agaratz returned. A smell of baking dough hung in the air.

  Urrell’s activity gripped Agaratz’s attention. No cat watched a fledgling more keenly than Agaratz followed Urrell’s demonstration of how he had ground the grain and mixed it with water before baking the result. He pulled a lump out of the fire and tossed it from hand to hand, blowing on it till it cooled enough to be broken open, and gave half to Agaratz. They bit into the charred crust and into the moist, doughy centre with delectation.

  “You make new food, Urrell. Good, good.”

  There was admiration in Agaratz’s voice. Urrell felt a new pride that he had been able to show something to his all-knowing mentor. They ate all that batch and then emptied every bag and pouch down to the last dusty seed to make enough cakes so that Rakrak and Piura could join in feasting on this manna of Urrell’s devising. It would be another day he never, ever, would forget.

  “Agaratz, we hunt soon? Herds must be coming?”

  “Yes, we go. But careful. Hunters follow herds.”

  Urrell remembered the hostile group and Agaratz’s feat when he had saved Rakrak from their spears. His wariness must stem from many such encounters over the seasons as Agaratz had struggled to survive on his own.

  “Best set traps, Urrell.”

  “Traps?”

  “Traps. Like hunters use for bison. I make; you see.”

  The hint of a grin said, ‘You may make dough-balls, but I can do things you know nothing about.’

  Agaratz went out again on an errand linked in some way with these intended traps.

  Soon after, Urrell went out too. Snow remained in pockets in the lee of cliffs, in dells among the trees, but everywhere else plants grew, freed from the grip of ice, while still the geese honked overhead on their own travels to lakes beyond the land of mammoths. Youth and wolf, bodies skinny from winter, scoured woods and plains for anything edible.

  Urrell saw far out on the prairie a dark tide of advancing bison, the harbingers of the herds that would be following as the snow fled. No lone hunter could hope to spear one in such a dense mass of beasts. Only when groups broke off to browse in the woods might there be chances. Till then, his best hope was small game rendered unwary by interest in mating.

  They entered the fir-line, Urrell listening for the clucking and crowing of big fowl displaying in leks, favourite spots where cocks strutted to attract their hens. With luck he might down one with a shot from his stone-thrower. When he found such a lek, hens camouflaged among the herbage clucked and flew off, sending up a puff of wings, alerting the two capercaillie-sized cocks they had been admiring as they jousted in their brilliant spring plumage. A fine roast lost. Later, he could return to snare one of the performers with springes that Agaratz wove with such skill from splints and horse-hair twine.

  In a wide arc through the woods Urrell and his wolf trotted on, noting tracks of deer, hearing wildcat snarl, glimpsing game down glades well out of spear-cast. By a brook Urrell found cresses; Rakrak snapped at mice and froglets. Fingerling trout, gudgeon and other small fry swam abundantly in the clear water, small fare but good if they could be caught. Urrell remembered his boyhood skills and followed the brook till he came to what he wanted, a pool large enough to harbour good-sized fish yet shallow enough to empty by digging an outlet. Rakrak entered into the fun, scratching with gusto, till between them they had lowered the level of the water enough to strand fish.

  Urrell beat the water with a switch to drive them into puddles where Rakrak splashed about catching as many as she could, gulping them whole, while Urrell scooped more out for himself and threw them on the strand until he had enough bigger ones to fill a pouch and tiddlers to chew raw there and then.

  They were noisily engaged in this, oblivious to everything, when instinct warned man and wolf to fall silent and turn: standing on the bank overlooking the pool were two hunters, whether hostile or not Urrell was never to know for, with the certainty that precedes thought, he hissed, “Zass, Rakrak,” and the wolf was up the bank and at the men before their astonishment could turn into fleeing legs, a wolf ’s fangs at their heels.

  Nothing like this had ever happened to them and they fled, not knowing that Rakrak chased them more in fun than in anger. Enough it would be for the legend of the fisherboy and his wolf to spread round campfires, and grow in the telling, for many seasons to come.

  On their return to the cave Agaratz was already back, the object of his errand visible in t
he pile of osiers that he had been out to cut. Urrell’s fishes and cresses were welcome, but Agaratz listened with unwonted intentness to Urrell’s account of the two hunters and their discomfiture.

  “Bad mens.” He did not elaborate. “Now I show how to make traps.”

  Round a framework bound with thongs he wove osiers into a wickerwork box. The withies, being last year’s growth, were tough yet supple. Agaratz left a gap in the top, a sort of slot, where Urrell surmised that an animal’s hoof would snag, as the wounded bison’s hoof had been tangled when he first met Agaratz. But he still did not see how such a device could help to secure prey.

  In two days they had made four between them.

  “Agaratz, why not use bane on spears?”

  “Not make now. Only when perretarrec ready.”

  During a lull in their activities, Agaratz downed his carving tools and said, as though he had mulled over a decision,“Urrell, I show you poodooec.”

  Agaratz selected several spears from his arsenal, ones Urrell had never seen him use. They were blackened with age.

  With them they descended into the gulch. Against a spot on the cliff face Agaratz up-ended a half rotten log and chipped a blaze on it. “That man,” he explained.

  Urrell must have looked mystified.

  “Bad man. Soon come bad mans, Urrell. You need poodooec for their poodooec.”

  They went back about forty paces. Agaratz chose a spear, weighed it, eyed the mark and in one smooth movement cast it straight at the blaze.

  “Now you, Urrell.”

  He did as bidden, chose a spear, weighed it, took his aim and with all his young hunter’s skill threw it at the log. It struck the cliff half an arm’s length from the mark, not a bad shot at that range, it seemed to Urrell.

  “Not poodooec, Urrell. You look.”

  This time Agaratz picked one with a series of deer engraved in a spiral down the shaft, so blackened and worn as to be shadowy. Urrell noticed that Agaratz took this one with his left hand. He watched as Agaratz weighed the weapon and appeared to think at it for a few instants before he lofted it and as smoothly as with the previous one, but left-handledly this time, sent it flying true to the blaze where it struck and held beside the first. Urrell could not retain an ‘ah’ of admiration.