Mammoth Boy

by John Hart

  “Growing warmer, Urrell.” They dipped their fingers in the stream, the water now quite warm. “Soon be there.”

  By first light – less dawn than decrease in dark – the ice-walls had widened and they entered a shallow basin-like expanse, dotted with pools and lakelets. Vapour rose from several.

  “You watch, Urrell.” They had stopped to look. Urrell did as bidden, expectantly, but observed nothing unusual except for steam. Soon, however, he was to be rewarded: a pool bubbled, plopped and fell still again. He glanced at Agaratz to see what manner of trick this might be, accompanied by its tell-tale grin, but Agaratz was watching the pool as steadfastly as he had been, so he resumed his own scrutiny.

  Agaratz plainly knew something was afoot. Urrell’s expectancy turned to unease. Tales of water-beasts told round the fires in the cold nights by the sea which had made him shiver with fear in his boyhood tugged at his mind now. Even Rakrak and Piura were attentive.

  He was therefore taut with alertness when the bubbling renewed itself and whatever lay beneath the water, angered, impatient, tore itself free and hurtled into the air, hung cliff-high in the pale light, and as suddenly collapsed in a froth of foam and seething water before Urrell’s astonished eyes, and vanished below. Urrell glanced at Agaratz. The golden eyes were gleaming with excitement. That instant Urrell knew, and knew with perfect insight, that Agaratz had never viewed this thing, in life or vision, and had not known quite what to expect. His all-seeing companion, who had known the route hither, unerringly following a memory from another time, nevertheless crouched in awe before this wonder.

  Urrell’s love of his mentor was nowise diminished, but grew. Master and pupil had shared an event neither understood.

  As though continuing a previous conversation Agaratz spoke:

  “Old mens come here long, long time past. Here mammurak come. Place have much…” He searched for a word to convey what he meant, for which perhaps no language had a word, certainly not Urrell’s. “Is like caves; great poodooec. Like when you see mammuts, Urrell.”

  Meaning half-dawned between them. The silence of this eery, empty spot, its pools, the ice-walls hemming it in, weighed on Urrell.

  Old Mother, was this your land of the mammoths?

  Agaratz said: “Catch food.”

  Nothing catchable met Urrell’s eye but he followed Agaratz to a big boulder, of sarsen-stone size, in the lee of which Agaratz set down his bags to camp. Urrell did likewise. Piura, thirsty, was sniffing at a pool but loth to lap.

  Agaratz selected salmon spears and a leister and led Urrell to their nearest pool where Piura was now suspiciously sipping the surface.

  “See, Urrell.” The pool was ice-water clear, each pebble of the shingle bottom visible. “Touch, Urrell.” The water was agreeably warm. As he touched it he jumped back – the water had moved and a swarm of creatures twitched and swam away.

  “Good to eat, good to eat!”

  Good or not, Agaratz was not in pursuit of these. Instead he made for a larger pool which acted as headwater of the stream they had followed all the way. Here Agaratz showed Urrell large grey fish swimming against the current. With ease he forked one, then another with the leister, tossed them on the bank and brained them with a stone, reciting the words, in his own tongue, he used whenever he slew a living thing from need. The surviving fishes ignored him.

  “Poodooec, Agaratz?”

  “No. Fish not see. Look.” He showed Urrell the rudimentary eyes of his catches and it was evident they were blind.

  “Live like in cave, Urrell, under ice. Eat those things when they leave pool.” He wiggled his forefinger in and out to imitate a shrimp swimming. They were the creatures, translucent in the water, that Urrell had disturbed. The shrimps teemed in the warmer pools, whereas the fishes, explained Agaratz, preferred cold water so they swam upstream to the outflow to catch unwary crustaceans.

  Urrell stared round their stony surrounds for any sign of fuel with which to cook their catch. He caught Agaratz’s eye and its mischievous twinkle. “Follow, Urrell.” He went to the pool where they had witnessed the geyser. He was unconcerned, so Urrell followed with Rakrak. There Agaratz ran a thong through the gills of the fishes and dropped them into the water.

  “Urrell, water cook fishes.”

  It was true. The water in the pool was seething hot, quite still on the surface and bottomless, shimmering below as if constantly welling up yet never overflowing. They had been there a while parboiling their fishes when the bubbling began in the centre. Urrell started up and backed off, with Rakrak, eyes fixed on the phenomenon, while Agaratz went on crouching, his stiff club leg a little askew, holding the thong.

  “Not danger, Urrell – not yet.”

  Only when the bubbles subsided, as though gathering strength from the deep, did Agaratz pull up his fishes and join Urrell, a full spear’s cast away. If Agaratz felt this was safe, Urrell decided he would too. They had a good view of whatever was to happen. As they waited they gnawed their half-boiled fishes, one apiece. Rakrak was eating the heads and remnants by the time the pool bubbled again, built itself up and whooshed a column of water and steam into the air, held it aloft the time of Urrell’s pent up breath, and let it crash back, foam a while and lie still once more. It was the replica of the first blow they had witnessed.

  “Like this all the time, Urrell, since…” he rolled his hands over and over, “since olds, olds. Ancients come here, for mammurak. Before ice.” As if to remind Urrell, he took a few steps of his mammoth dance.

  “Did your people come here, Agaratz?”

  The wistful expression, the one he had seen at the burial island, was answer enough. It was always so when he asked Agaratz about his origins, his forefathers and his singular existence. Perhaps these were things that could not be uttered, as men’s things might not be witnessed or spoken of by women; nor, as he knew from boyhood eavesdroppings, might men see such women’s things as where and when they gave birth, or the ceremonies with which they accompanied their moon-bleed.

  Suddenly, as if to compensate for his evasiveness, Agaratz volunteered: “Soon see mammurak, mamu-mammurak, Urrell.”

  “Mamu, Agaratz?

  “Mamu. Like deads, Urrell, but not deads.”

  “Is that poodooec?”

  “No, not poodooec. Is like dead but not dead – is mamu-orrak.”

  There must be no other way of saying that. He would have to wait and see what it was.

  Now it was time to catch more fish, for Piura, for Rakrak, for themselves, for a fish feast by the seething waters of the magic pool.

  CHAPTER 30

  The pools, Urrel discovered, varied in temperature, from scalding hot where the geyser leapt at intervals, something to which Urrell grew accustomed but never indifferent, through to near seething, hot, warm, luke-warm and cold. As the air near the pools never fell below freezing, despite the ice of the glacier, they went about their fishing, resting and exploring at ease. They bathed in the warmer water, Urrell naked, Agaratz with the breechclout he never removed and Urrell never thought to ask why. Rakrak and Piura, loth at first, entered into the spirit of the fun and disported themselves in their own ways.

  Here Agaratz taught Urrell how to dive deep and find shellfish, crabs and crayfish under rocks in the bottoms of some of the pools. He had been right – there was food galore for all.

  This way they spent days. “Get strong, Urrell. Eat much.” Meanwhile they explored every part of this enclosed place, hemmed in by high ice walls, its bottom strewn with stones and boulders. The only other living things, above water level, to share the place with them were flocks of waterfowl that came and went, feeding on whatever it was they caught in the pools. Their calls and honking from beyond the ice announced their arrival, the only sounds in the silence. They were nearly tame and some answered Agaratz’s mimick calls so well that they came and ate from his hands.

  When Agaratz announced: “Now time to see caves,” he did not explain but took a few things and led
off towards the ice-face to a spot where the overflow from several hotter pools cut a low tunnel under the ice. Into this Agaratz stooped, paddling in the hot water, his moccassins round his neck. Urrell followed. At a word from Agaratz, the wolf and lion had remained behind, at the pool edge.

  Soon the passage widened and heightened into a chamber. Urrell’s eyes accustomed themselves to the bluish gloom. “Wait, Urrell.” Agaratz had brought his fire-making bow-drill and some tinder and with difficulty managed to ignite a few pinches of the tinder in the hole of his fire-log, enough to light a resin torch. It smelt delicious. However, its light revealed nothing, just ice walls smooth as salt.

  “No, Urrell, look down.” There, as Agaratz held the torch aloft, lay giant bones strewn around, on and under the ice, the results of a unimaginable catastrophe, a massacre, no two vertebrae linked, skulls tossed anywhere, a vast dismemberment. He guessed what Agaratz had meant by mamu-mammurak, this graveyard of mammoths.

  “What happened, Agaratz, what happened?”

  “Old mans hunt. Hunt much. Hunt mammurack otelosey.”

  “Otelosey?”

  “Otelosey. Till none left.” He made frenzied stabbing movements to illustrate.

  Holding the light up Agaratz led Urrell among the bones, searching for something.

  “Ah, look Urrell.” He held up a spearhead, a heavy chunky one, unlike anything Urrell had seen before, cruder than any he had ever handled. It had once been the tip of a short stabbing spear to finish off fallen beasts, wielded by someone with shoulders powerful enough to drive this blunt point through the hide of a mammoth’s belly. More of them lay scattered about among ribs. To Urrell’s surprise, Agaratz, his all-knowing Agaratz, examined them with the keenest interest, stroking the coarse chipping of the flint and basalt with girlish fingertips, suggesting to Urrell that by this action he was drawing from the points their story, their strength, absorbing their potency, that which he called poodooec. So intense was Agaratz’s attention, his shaggy mane of reddish hair hanging down his head and shoulders against the light of the torch, that Urrell knew better than to interrupt. In the total silence, the bones lay around unthreateningly. There was no hostile feeling towards either him or Agaratz. It was as though the bones had been lying there awaiting their coming.

  Then, in the innermost recesses of his ear, Urrell heard his tune. It was tiny, clear, from a great remoteness.

  “Urrell, look.”

  In the ice wall of the cavern a frieze of mammoths, full height, was visible, frozen. The lead cow’s little eye returned his gaze. He saw even the coarse hairs of her flanks and ran, stumbling over bones, to touch them. His hand met the ice: she was gone.

  “We go now, Urrell.”

  They left the way they had come.

  Outside Agaratz made no comment as he donned his moccassins. It was back to their routine of fishing, feeding and making a paste by pounding shrimps which Agaratz packed into pouches with salt-like rime scraped from the edge of brackish pools near the hot springs.

  These occupations left Urrell ample leisure to range about the combe, exploring every crevasse and cleft in the ice faces, keen to find any more traces of ancient folk and their quarry. But he found no more mammoth remains, search as he might, only evidence of tool-making by their persecutors. These, some complete, some half made, many botched and cast aside, spoke of long residence by hunting groups in earlier times, the Great Cold in Agaratz’s words. He brought back samples of his finds to Agaratz, who merely nodded, his interest apparently sated by their visit to the mammoth ice-cavern earlier, where he had absorbed all he wished to know from the bones and weapons strewn there.

  However, Urrell’s disappointment must have touched him. “Look, Urrell,” he said and took a sizable pebble from the many lying around, selected a small boulder, and in a few deft blows chipped and flaked it into a core, then taking another pebble shattered one against the other to make a crude hammer-chopper. With this he flaked the core into a spear-head indistinguishable from the ones they had found. The whole process took a matter of minutes. It was as if one of the ancient stone-knappers were directing Agaratz’s hands, transmitting to them the skill of generations.

  “You do, Urrell.” He handed him the pebble-hammer. Nothing could be easier. Yet try as he might, and try he did, Urrell could not reproduce spear-heads with the authenticity that sprang so naturally from Agaratz’s hands. His spear-heads were workman-like, yes. But he knew in his inner self that whereas the spear-head flaked by Agaratz would have flown true and pierced the toughest mammoth hide, his own would have mis-flown, mis-struck and bounced off.

  This apart, they did little else than fish and eat, men, wolf and lion, battening on the easy pickings, though Urrell sensed that Agaratz was distrait, often lost in thought, as though they were marking time or awaiting some signal.

  One morning, the air warm from the advance of high summer, Agaratz came alive again, his old puckish self. “Now ready to go.”

  “Go where, Agaratz?”

  He seemed a little taken aback, as though expecting Urrell to know what he meant.

  “Go to meet peoples. For mens meets womens. For, for… ceremonies.”

  “Which way, Agaratz?” Urrell felt able to ask, part of the decision-making, a near full-grown man. He could see no way forward. A long trudge back down the ice-tunnel seemed the only way in or out.

  “Follow sun, Urrell.” That meant ahead, against the further side of the combe and the glacier face. He helped to pack, noticing that Agaratz was taking especial care to bundle everything compactly, winding all their thongs into a single coil which he slung across one shoulder. He laid out a large pelt and tied thongs through holes to make a sling which he folded with unusual care. This and the rest done they loaded up and set off towards the ice-cliff to a spot Urrell had skirted during his explorations. A pool of hot, smelly water lay there. It stank of rotten eggs, he thought. Its outflow ran under the ice-face, where it had cut a low opening. To this Agaratz led them.

  The opening was hardly more than wolf high. Encumbered as they were they would have to stoop to get in along the outflow with their faces just above the stinking water to reach a ledge inside.

  CHAPTER 31

  Urrell bridled, wolf and lion wavered.

  “Only way, Urrell.”

  Agaratz led. It took some shooing and persuasion by Urrell, bringing up the rear, to get Piura to follow Rakrak into the water and under the arch.

  Once inside, while wolf and lioness shook themselves dry, Urrell looked around. Several fissures rose as chimneys in the ice, rather like the water-worn swallow-holes he was familiar with in caves. The same effect of meltwater had caused these, he thought, or an extinct geyser. “Old mens use,” Agaratz said, as though reading a half-formed question in Urrell’s mind. “Not high,” he added. “In old times, much bigger.” If he meant the pool, or the chimneys or even the ice-face, was not clear or important to Urrell: how to get up was. The sides of the biggest chimney seemed very smooth.

  Agaratz unrolled a pack and selected an antler pick and a stone-bladed adze from his tool kit. He wound the coil of thongs round his shoulders and waist. “I go up, Urrell, send down thong, you tie pouches and I pull up, then Rakrak. You tie Piura in skin –” he pointed to the large pelt with eyelets round the rim “ – and when you come up we pull Piura.” Upon which he started up the chimney, chipping finger- and toe-holds with the adze, hooking the antler pick into these and other crannies, bracing his back and knees against the ice and worming his way up, the powerful shoulders hauling and the club foot seeking the least purchase. It took him quite a while. Ice flakes rained down as he chipped his slow way up. Finally, “Now, Urrell,” and the uncoiled thong ends came down to be tied to pouches and bags, hauled up into the gloom and the job repeated until all equipment and belongings were aloft. Urrell stood half in the smelly water all the while. When it was Rakrak’s turn, he tied slings under her, coaxed the creature into the water and steadied her as Agaratz, somewhere ab
ove, pulled her up hand over hand. Next Urrell baled Piura in the pelt, threaded thongs through the eye-holes so that she could not wriggle free, should she try, and shouted up to Agaratz that he was ready to come up himself.

  Agaratz, anchored above, let down a line which Urrell hitched to his belt, so that by using the footholds, bracing himself as he had seen Agaratz do, plus with the hunchback’s powerful grip on the line, he reached the ledge where Agaratz crouched, their goods piled around him. The last task was to haul up Piura. She was too big for the chimney unless pulled up head and forequarters first. Once this manoeuvre was managed she helped herself up by clawing at the surface of the ice, making things far easier for her hauliers than Urrell had expected. Her rumbled purr as he rubbed her head told Urrell of her happiness at not being forsaken by her pride.

  “Make light, Urrell.” In the gloom Agaratz found his fire-making implements and with that deftness Urrell felt he would never equal, had soon lit a torch, revealing a passage leading from the ledge into the ice. Waters long past must have worn it and then cascaded down the chimney they had just climbed. Without comment they loaded up, even Rakrak shouldering her pack as usual, and set off along the passage as it slowly ascended, Urrell hoped towards daylight.

  They emerged well enough on to the glacier surface at a crevasse, into late daylight, and by following the crevasse eventually came to the surface of the ice-field. They were on top of the glacier. Across its ribbed surface, Agaratz leading, the others in single file, they tramped with care. Agaratz was looking for something in the featureless white in the long summer dusk. It was a depression in the snow-field, as though the ice had caved in. To this Agaratz headed. “Soon find new river, Urrell.”

  They did. At the bottom of the snowy slope a funnel-like hole led to a river under the ice, a river flowing away from them, one warmed from hidden springs somewhere along its course. Soon they were once again on a ledge in total blackness, following a fast-running current.