by John Hart
Agaratz rose and gyrated round Urrell and the two animals, humming like a swarm of midges, his visage intent, repeating the slow stomp a dozen times and ending it by placing a hand on the head of each in turn. His humming ceased. The gnats went on swirling but henceforth kept a spear’s length away from them all.
“How do you do poodooec, Agaratz? How do you know?”
“From long times. My people know. You know too.”
But how, how? This latest spell was at one with the accuracy of Agaratz’s javelin cast; with that stirring of the flute in Urrell’s hand when he had captured, or been captured by, the music from another plane; with the mammoth cow in the cave as her herd lumbered past his drawing hand, mocking yet knowing, teasing him to draw and understand. If this trip was a stage to that understanding, to his own poodooec, as the herds of bison they skirted knew their poodooec and returned without fail to their very own grazing each year untaught, he, Urrell, would travel to the very heart of the icefields to find his.
Food was easy. Agaratz, for all his skill as a hunter, seldom slew if other food abounded as it abounded now: roots, berries, grubs, clutches of eggs, hives of honey… Urrell observed how Agaratz took only one comb from a hive, a few eggs from a clutch, muttering words that Urrell memorised without understanding and mimicked when he found a nest, to Agaratz’s approval.
“What do the words mean, Agaratz?”
“Mean poodooec.”
“Which language, Agaratz, your people’s?
“Alls languages.” Then he added, “Like speak Old Mens and Olders Mens. My father teach.”
“Teach me, Agaratz.”
Several days out, far into the sea of grass scattered with island copses, Agaratz pointed. “We go to see bison meeting.”
Herds had been streaming slowly by along the horizon, under circling crows and vultures. Bands of horses came closer, sometimes towards the two humans to stare. Wolves they saw too but though Rakrak stood alert she showed no desire to join them. Piura’s kind they saw in prides from time to to time, a woollier variety of lion. From the remains of their kills Piura and Rakrak had meat.
Agaratz changed course and turned towards the herds and the far-off mountains. They left their travois to be able to trot more easily through the high grass, kicking up showers of insects at each footfall, flushing partridges and great bustards that ran away before them, Rakrak in pursuit, more in high spirits than in hope of a capture. At the end of a long day, the land became undulating, the first swell of the distant mountains. They had been moving parallel to an immense herd of bison grazing their way north. Urrell had never seen so many. The ground trembled with the drumming of their hooves. When Agaratz and Urrell slept for the short summer night the vibration of the ground had not ceased at dawn.
“Soon there, Urrell.”
By mid-morning they were. Over the rim of a low bluff they saw before them a vast hollow in which milled thousands of bison, the air thick with dust. Animals were frisking, tails erect, males and females alike, rolling in the dust sprinkled with their own urine, bulls jousting and mounting cows.
“See, Urrell, here bisons find womens. Many more places.” He pointed towards hazes of dust in the distance where other encounters were happening. Agaratz’s eyes gleamed. “Poodooec for bisons,” he said.
“Agaratz, where do the mammoths go for this?”
“Far, far. When old time.”
“Old time?”
“When old mens. When all cold, big cold.”
He rose and began the mammoth dance Urrell remembered so well from their first meeting. As the mimic dance became the mammoth, cold fell round Urrell, a cold so intense he stood still, eyes seeing beyond Agaratz and the gambolling bison in their dusty heat haze.
Agaratz stopped. The spell broke. Urrell watched beads of sweat on the backs of his hands melt. Drops on his downy upper lip thawed. He had clenched his hands in the sudden cold. As he unstiffened them, a little pool of mushy snow lay in each palm and slithered on to the grass at his feet. When he looked up, Agaratz had already turned his back on him to watch the bison.
“Now go,” said Agaratz.
They returned to pick up their travois, following the trail of grasses bent by their footfalls on the outward journey, a track as easy to read as spoor in snow. Rakrak chased grasshoppers; Piura brought up the rear.
CHAPTER 27
For days Agaratz led, Urrell second and Piura third, Rakrak scouting and sometimes slinking off to explore a movement that caught her eye. Not another human marred the world. They skirted huge herds of bison and droves of horses. Caribou-like deer appeared and stared at their little group. Wolves and woolly lions grew commoner as the tree-line of the distant mountains sent out spinneys and even small woods into the grasslands, harbingers of a vast green army. None of this concerned Agaratz. After each detour round herds he resumed his line of advance aslant the mountain range.
Berries, fungus abounded. Raspberries, bilberries and other fruitlets throve in endless quantities, often showing where bears had brashed and combed their branches in orgies of feeding. If they met bears, Agaratz would exchange grunts with them and part amicably. For the brief summer nights they stopped and ate wherever they were, sometimes lighting a fire to braise fungus or cook the small rodents that teemed everywhere, lemming-like, and when roasted whole were passable fare. Rakrak and Piura ate theirs raw, on the hoof, snapping them up as they went.
By now the vast mountains were drawing nearer, if obliquely, looming larger, their peaks and valleys, crags and ghylls, huge screes growing clearer. On the lower slopes, forest clad everything. Higher up, those streaks of whiteness that had so intrigued Urrell he now saw was ice snaking down from the snowy peaks into the valleys till it reached the tree-line, where it ended.
From following the range at an angle, at a point that to Urrell looked like any other, Agaratz changed course and made straight for the mountains. He knew Agaratz’s sureness of direction better than to wonder why. It took them two more days of travel, now in driving rain and sleet, taking turns at pulling their sodden travois, to reach the first foothills where Urrell saw that Agaratz had aimed for a gap between two outriders of the range which formed a glen that one would have needed to know existed in order to find it. A river ran along the middle, smooth and dark and fast. When Urrell drank from its water it was ice-cold. Firs grew down to both banks.
Behind them spread the sunny grasslands, their innumerable herds, the circling swirls of prey and carrion fowl overhead, showers of insects at every footfall, drifts of berries, whereas ahead stretched, it appeared to Urrell, endless tree-bound gloom and the spongy pine-needle floor of the forest. Into this quiet, cool world Agaratz strode, leaving Urrell to drag the travois over roots and mossy boulders. To their left ran the river, never far, sometimes glimpsed, then coming into full view where the glen narrowed to little more than a clough and they travelled almost along its bank, the forest silence unbroken by any ripples from its rapid current. That night they bivouacked beneath a fir that towered above in search of whatever light there was high above the gulch at the bottom of which centuries earlier its seed had first rooted.
“Big tree,” said Agaratz, tapping a massive ridge of bark. “Old mens tree.”
As he did not elaborate, Urrell busied himself with trying to light a fire while Agaratz circled the tree, climbing over the buttresses of its roots, examining the fissures and crevices of its bole, Rakrak tagging behind him.
“Why old men’s tree, Agaratz?”
“When small tree, Old Mens here.”
“Then mammoths were here too!” Old Men and mammoths went together in Urrell’s vision of things.
CHAPTER 28
“Old mens slay mammoth, Urrell. Then big cold time end and mammoths go.”
“Go where? And the old men?”
“They follow mammoth.” He waved a hand vaguely in the direction they were going, upstream into the mountains. Agaratz’s manner was listless, which heightened Urrell’s att
ention, aware as he was of every flicker in Agaratz’s moods and movements.
Agaratz circled the tree. Its needles were of a sort new to Urrell. It appeared to be a singleton, a survivor from a previous age. It might have known the mammoths as they streamed past on their last journey. Urrell’s mind awoke to all this as he followed Agaratz round the vast bole.
“Agaratz, when did you come this way?”
“I not come.”
“But you know the way. You know this tree.”
“I know, yes.”
“How, but how?”
“From old fathers. From old mens before. They know.” Then turning his yellow eyes on Urrell’s own he concluded: “Now Urrell know.”
He took Urrell by the hand and laid it on the bark, cracked so deeply that a man’s hand might scarcely fathom its fissures. Deep in some were objects that Urrell first thought were stones caught up as the tree had grown, but then recognised these to be offerings embedded in the trunk, from long ago.
Agaratz started a chant full of harsh glottals, rasped consonants alternating with crooned vowels, none of it intelligible to Urrell; nor were the sounds like any of the other tongues that Agaratz sometimes used. While the chant went on a chill rose, as from the river, summer fell away and Urrell shivered. He would not swoon this time: he would let the poodooec work whilst he kept his wits about him. He clung to the reassuring roughness of the bark as the cold intensified. Under his summer tunic and leggings his body juddered and his teeth clattered. The huge tree rose overhead as all around the landscape of the clough changed. Gone were the fir trees. Only stunted taiga grew dotted with thickets of dwarf birches and willow. In the unbearable cold, Urrell strove to keep alert, clinging for dear life to the tree trunk, his eyes blurring so that his vision, impaired, hardly took in the movement of three figures as they appeared at the bottom of the clough, coming his way. They were three squat men, swaddled in furs, carrying short spears, their gait shambling but steady, almost a slow trot. He heard in the distance, beyond the men, a massive trumpeting and as he went under from the cold his last thought was mammoths.
“You better, Urrell?” Agaratz was crouched by a fire chafing Urrell’s hands and face. All he said was, “You sit by fire. I make warm.”
Agaratz stoked armfuls of brash and twigs on the fire till it blazed, lighting the criss-cross of enormous boughs over their heads. Burning twigs from the ancient tree gave off a fragrance that confirmed it was of a kind Urrell had never before encountered, and yet he felt he knew it. He sniffed hard. The harder he tried the remoter became the recollection of its scent.
“Look in fire, Urrell.” He looked and saw flames running through a scene of brush and stunted firs, followed by human figures waving spears and torches, urging the fire on. Beyond the men he saw what appeared to be the purpose of all this – for, trunks raised, a herd of mammoths lumbered ahead of the flames and their tormentors. Just as suddenly the scene vanished and Urrell jerked out of his bemusement to catch Agaratz’s sly girn, and the impish light in his eyes.
Neither spoke. Urrell felt himself overcome by a huge weariness. He lay down and slept by the fire, on needles dropped over centuries by the giant overhead, Rakrak to one side of him, old Piura to the other.
The air grew chillier as they approached the ice. Outlying patches of snow lay in hollows and the heights above the tree-line were often white. Yet in the river valley it was warm by day, and in the stretches of mountain-meadow between the firs flowers of all kinds bespeckled the grasses. Most were new to Urrell. If he stopped to examine a bloom, a bulb or a fungus Agaratz gave it a name and commented on it as:
- good to eat, Urrell
- that one, medecine for bones
- that leaf, you eat if belly hurts
- That wort – he pointed carefully in such cases – that wort kill even bison.
Once shown a plant, Urrell would never forget it. Life teemed in these grassy gaps in the forest. The grass rippled with movements of rodents which Rakrak and Piura pounced on as they went.
To amuse Urrell, Agaratz mimicked the calls of birds, getting them to flutter over his head, even settle on his shoulders. Urrell also tried, imitating the calls as truly as Agaratz and yet, for lack of some quality of sound, he only roused the curiosity of fowl but not their trust. They drew near but not near enough. It peeved him not to match Agaratz’s powers.
“When shall we reach the great ice, Agaratz?”
Their river valley and its green-black current seemed to go on for ever, a world of its own, where wild creatures unsure of humans did little to avoid them. Bears, often fishing, they avoided. Rakrak’s presence was enough to deter the curiosity of panther-like cats and leopards, and to startle away deer. Once they nearly bumped into an auroch, alone in the woods, but he was as surprised as they. Neither Urrell nor Agaratz unsheathed a weapon all day, as berries and fruit abounded and the nests of waterfowl were easy to find. Some evenings they fished in the fast stream. Their two companions fended for themselves from the endless provision of small animals they caught. At night they camped under a fir, dry even after heavy rain, lit a fire to light the tracery of branches above, liernes of an arboreal vault, and slept in peace.
In this way they had travelled unconcerned for about a dozen days, in short stages, when the valley began to narrow. In a mist of rain and drizzle, round a turn, they came to the ice. It blocked their way. No fragments, no moraine littered the glacier’s approaches: it was a total surprise, to Urrell at least…
CHAPTER 29
What next? Urrell, from behind, could not see Agaratz’s face to discern his reaction to the wall of ice. Without a change of speed, pouches swinging, spears at the trail, Agaratz carried on ahead, impenetrable though the ice looked to Urrell. Nor did there seem to be a way up the sides of the valley and over the ice.
They were near enough to the wall for Urrell to feel its coldness before he noticed that the river, issuing from under the ice, had carved a tunnel somewhat larger than its flow needed, as though it had been bigger in the past. It was to this that Agaratz strode.
“Leave travois here, Urrell. Take things.”
They loaded themselves with bags, skins, food, weapons and their stock of ornaments and their pipes. They had food enough for men, wolf and lioness for several days. Beyond that Agaratz would know. “Rakrak carry some,” he said and called the wolf.
With thongs he tied a load on her back, whispered in her ears, and all were ready to move on, Piura, unburdened, padding last. “Too old for load,” said Agaratz.
The river had worn the ice smooth and left a gravelly bank the width of a javelin along its edge. This they entered, lit dully at first from outside but soon utterly dark.
“Rakrak go first. You hold this, Urrell,” and he handed him the end of a thong tied at the other to his own belt. He hitched another to Rakrak’s pack as a leash and spoke to the wolf, who pricked up her ears and set forth leading the tiny caravan into the blackness.
Old Mother. Urrell’s boyish fears welled up, but soon evaporated. It felt warm under the ice, almost snug, in the total dark. Only the footfalls of their moccassined feet on the gravel, and the occasional purl of the river water, broke the silence. He had full faith in Rakrak and Agaratz ahead; behind him he could touch Piura’s ears as she followed close, a rumbled purr in response to caresses. Soon he was sweating under his burdens.
The air, unless he was imagining things, seemed not so much milder to Urrell as denser. Far from being completely still, as in caverns, he thought he felt movement in it.
Perhaps the current drew air along as it ran. The sensation increased the farther they went till Urrell felt sure something unusual lay ahead. When they stopped for a rest and snack Urrell voiced his curiosity.
“You see, Urrell, soon see.”
Soon was relative. They stopped twice more before the darkness began faintly to lighten. Rakrak pulled at her leash and the pace of the file hastened. The light increased from translucence in the ice, thinning
as they advanced into warmer air at a stumbling, eager gait, till they burst into a wide ice-free area, a bowl with ice-walls all around.
Their river, now more a big stream, ran across it, wisps of mist rising from its surface.
“You touch, Urrell, touch water.”
He did. The water was luke-warm, and the mist was vapour condensing like a man’s breath on a frosty morning. Urrell’s astonishment so amused Agaratz that he went into one of his rare chuckles. Sitting on a boulder, he was shrugging off his packs and pouches as he shook with mirth at Urrell’s reaction. Urrell, a trifle abashed and puzzled, loosened his as well, then unburdened Rakrak. She, to add to his surprise, ran about, frolicking, tail erect, in a joyful release under the effect of this strange place, so he joined in and they scampered about over the gravel and among the boulders till tired out.
“Now we eat, Urrell.” Agaratz drew out strips of dried bison meat, the jerky kept in the bottom of bags as iron rations, or to celebrate. All four gnawed their way through this bark-hard food, sucking the nourishment that no berries, no roots or shoots could provide for exhausted bodies.
This done they unrolled pelts on the ground between two boulders and slept pell-mell the sleep of the weary for a full twelve hours.
It was dark when Urrell woke. Agaratz was sitting on a boulder, outlined against the ice-wall beyond. Rakrak poked her head from under a pelt and crept out. She licked Urrell’s nose, a new familiarity. Piura, last as ever, rose and stretched.
“Urrell, we eat and go on. Follow river.”
They chewed dried berries, nuts and a few strips of jerky.
“Soon plenty foods, Urrell.”
Skins rolled up, bags slung they set off, the wolf leading. The gloom had a clarity of its own, setting off boulders and stones against the paler bed of shingle and pebbles that lined the combe floor. They followed the waterway, as before. On either side towered the cliffs of ice, in places closing in, even arching overhead. In this silent world the only sound came when the current swirled round an obstruction.
