The Hunter Returns

by David Drake

  “Bull’s tribe hunted horses and camels,” Flash replied when Wolf kept silent. “Their luck wasn’t bad. Hold your tongue, old woman!”

  “They should have shared with us,” Boartooth grumbled. He had gone off by himself for a time after Bull’s tribe drove them away. When Boartooth returned, he had flaked another chert point to replace the one which shattered at such an unfortunate time. Perhaps the young man hoped that the rest of the tribe would forget what had happened if his spear looked complete again.

  “We have fire,” said the Chief Hunter wearily. “Tomorrow we will hunt again, and perhaps the bison spirit will send his children to us. For now, we will eat the food the women have found for us.”

  A child began to cry. “That is no food,” said one of the hunters bitterly. “It is dust in our mouths, and it cramps my belly.”

  Because the women had followed the hunt today, they had not been able to glean as much in the way of roots and berries as they usually would. Besides, the season was too early for the best of the vegetable food; and such crops were never viewed as more than incidentals of diet in a tribe of wandering hunters like Wolf’s.

  The tribe needed meat. All of them knew that.

  “They should have let us share the meat,” Wolf said at last. “It was our meat too. But tomorrow we will hunt game of our own.”

  Kar stirred up the fire, thinking as he watched the sparks swirl skyward. For an instant he thought he saw the curving tusks of a mammoth in the orange firelight, then the shaggy cape of a bison. Did the spirits of game animals live in the flames, warming the exterior of men as their meat warmed those who ate it?

  The talk among the folk of the tribe was merely a pointless wrangle now. Different people, women as well as the hunters, kept saying the same things: that they were hungry, that they needed food, that Bull’s tribe should have shared the large kill with the hunters who drove the game into the spears which brought it down.

  Magnolia, a nursing mother whose milk had dried up, was particularly shrill. Her loud complaints could not help her infant, though. She held the child to her flaccid breast, but it no longer had the strength to cry. If Magnolia’s child was not already dead, it would die soon, and others of the tribe’s youngest children would follow it in a few days.

  Unless the hunters brought in meat.

  “It’s because of our spears that we didn’t bring down any game in today’s hunt!” said Heron angrily. “When the herd ran, we all should have thrown our spears. We would have brought down at least one animal. Anyway, we would have wounded one badly enough that it could not run.”

  “You didn’t throw your spear, Heron,” said Boartooth, who didn’t see where the other hunter’s words were leading. “I wounded a horse so that it died. Bull stole from me the meat that I had killed!”

  “The men who had good spears,” Heron snarled in reply, “the spears that Hawk or his father made for us, those hunters did not throw their spears. We were afraid we would lose our good spears and have to use trash that Boartooth made!”

  “My spears are good spears!” Boartooth shouted, as though raising his voice would change the facts that everyone in the tribe, even the women, knew.

  “Your spears are not good, Boartooth,” said Wolf. The Chief Hunter stood up. He held his club. Wolf had been silent during most of the complaints. He knew that because he was the Chief Hunter, the failure to bring in meat was his fault even if no one in the tribe could see anything that he was doing wrong.

  Although Wolf kept tight control of his temper, being blamed by everyone—and blaming himself—made him very angry. Kar saw the anger start to come out now, in response to Boartooth’s noisy posturing. Kar understood, but he knew also that what the Chief Hunter was doing was very dangerous. While the tribe was having such a difficult time, they needed more than ever to stick together instead of fighting among themselves.

  “Your spears do not fly straight, Boartooth,” Wolf shouted. “You barely scratched that stallion—and drove the whole herd off, so that none of us have meat. You do not perform the spear-making rites correctly, so your points shatter and bring bad luck on all of us!”

  Wolf’s club twitched with the strength of the Chief Hunter’s grip. All the other hunters were on their feet. They held weapons also. Women snatched their younger children to them. They edged back to keep out of the way of possible violence.

  Boartooth realized how serious the situation was. He didn’t step away—there were men on every side of him—but his eyes flicked in all directions, looking for a way out of the trouble his arrogant tongue had gotten him into.

  The campfire popped loudly. Water which had collected in a knot burst the wood in a puff of steam. Everybody glanced toward the flames. Boartooth slid between two of the hunters and stood among the women at the edge of the firelight.

  After a further moment of tension, everyone relaxed. Even Wolf looked relieved. He was a good leader. He knew that it was his job to keep fights within the tribe from occurring, not to start them himself.

  Kar stared at the images which formed within his fire. He fed in an additional piece of wood.

  “We need better spears,” said Flash. He spoke simply and without anger. The hunter held one of the spears Boartooth had made. His fingers ran slowly up the rough, slightly twisted, shaft to the point. The chert was not balanced so that the two sides met along the axis like the halves of a leaf at the stem.

  They could all see that the spear would not fly straight if Flash threw it. Worse, there was a chance that the point would break apart if it struck a bone when a hunter ran close to his prey. Even a camel could be dangerous if it lashed out with its blunt-toed feet, driven by the pain of a flesh wound.

  Boartooth glowered, but he said nothing.

  “Bull’s tribe has good spears,” suggested Heron. “Maybe their spear-maker would make weapons for us.”

  “We have nothing to trade,” Flash protested. “Besides, they drove us away. If we return, they will attack us to keep our bad luck from harming them too.”

  “We must pray forgiveness from the spirit of the bison,” said Elm. “It doesn’t matter what spears we have unless the spirit decides to forgive us for hunting other creatures instead of his children.”

  Kar stirred the fire. It seemed as though the old, pointless arguments were about to resume. Nothing had changed except that they were all hungrier by the amount of time—he checked the fire—it took to burn a log to ashes.

  Usually the fire was necessary to keep predators at bay, but tonight the tribe was not bothered by the usual snaps and snarling of animals which lurked in the darkness. The beasts knew that there was nothing to eat here except the humans themselves . . . and the humans were too thin with hunger to make a good meal.

  Kar had always thought of the fire as also keeping off the spirit of the dark, a shadowy thing that was separate from all the dangerous animals that hunted within the shelter of the night. As he watched the fire, Kar remembered the previous night when the tribe had been driven away from the bogged mammoth. Many terrifying things had happened—but the spirit of the dark had not attacked them when they fled their camp.

  The tigers were tigers. The wolves were wolves. They were dangerous, but they were not usually as dangerous as they had been that night when the smell of the butchered mammoth had inflamed their hunger throughout the day.

  Hunger cramped the Chief Fire-Maker’s belly and twisted his mind into unfamiliar patterns. Smoke filled his nostrils and formed new shapes of imagination.

  Perhaps the spirit of the night did not really exist. Or perhaps there was a spirit of the night, but a tribe was safe from it so long as the Chief Fire-Maker had built a campfire. Men might not have to stay where the fire was to be safe from the spirit.

  Kar’s fire popped. His eyes flashed open on a wonderful thought.

  “We won’t have any luck hunting until we have better spears,” Flash said for at least the third time. He rubbed his empty stomach.

  “Wolf!
” the Chief Fire-Maker shouted in delight at his idea. He jumped to his feet. “We will have spears, many spears! We will take the spears from Bull’s tribe!”

  Wolf looked at Kar in puzzlement. They all knew that sometimes men lost their minds from being out in the sun too long . . . or even from hunger. “They will not give us spears,” the Chief Hunter said, speaking simply as if he were talking to a child. “They will attack us if we even go to them to ask.”

  “We will not ask,” said Kar. “We will take. They should have shared the meat with us, so it is right that we take from them spears to win our own meat.”

  “Did you fall on your head, old man?” Boartooth demanded. “There are too many of them for us to attack. They would kill us all.”

  Much as the other hunters had come to dislike Boartooth, there was a general chorus of nods and waughs of approval for what the would-be spear-maker had said.

  “If we went by day,” Kar explained, “they would kill us. Instead we will go now, at night, and surprise them.”

  Wolf frowned as he tried to understand the idea that the Chief Fire-Maker was proposing. “We will not surprise them, Kar,” he said at last. “They will see our torches.”

  “We will not take torches!” the old man said. “This fire here will protect us from the spirit of the night, even when we are far away from it. I have seen this when I watched the flames. Remember when we fled from the mammoth? The fire that I had built earlier still kept the spirit of the night away.”

  “After the fire went out, it didn’t protect us from tigers,” said Heron sourly. He rubbed his left arm, still swollen from the claw marks he had received that night. “Or from wolves.”

  “The wolves and tigers came because the mammoth was there,” said the Chief Fire-Maker with a confidence he really felt so long as he was talking. “If we could have carried the meat away, the scavengers would have fought over the remains and left us alone.”

  “There wasn’t time!” said Wolf. He was reacting to what he saw as a complaint about his judgment. “Besides, there was too much meat to carry.”

  “But Bull’s tribe will carry the meat away, to their camp,” Kar explained. “The wolves and tigers will be at the kill site. They will not bother us when we go to Bull’s camp.”

  Flash shook his head slowly. “But there are many hunters in Bull’s tribe,” he said. “And they have many spears. They will drive us away.”

  “No,” said Wolf. The Chief Hunter had finally understood Kar’s wonderful idea. “They will be asleep. They have eaten as much meat as they can hold. We will run in and grab their spears, then run away. They will not chase us in the darkness.”

  “And besides,” said Boartooth, “we will have their spears! Then we will kill much game!”

  Kar looked at the young braggart grimly. If the attempt was successful, Boartooth would probably begin saying that the idea was his.

  But if the attempt was successful, the only important thing would be that the tribe could hunt properly again. It didn’t matter who got credit for that.

  Clouds covered what remained of the moon. Kar carried his fire-gourd as well as a club. The hunters would have no need of fire tonight, but the Chief Fire-Maker would have felt unprotected without the slight weight of the gourd jouncing on the end of the thong tied around his waist.

  An animal barked in the darkness. A hunter gasped in fear. Kar chuckled. “It is nothing,” he said. “Only a fox. Its voice is greater than its jaws.”

  Kar guided the hunters. There was no tradition governing a night-time expedition to rob another tribe. Such a thing had never happened in the memory of Kar, Kar’s father, or Kar’s grandfather. That is, so far as the tribe was concerned, such a thing had never happened in the memory of Man.

  Hunters never left the circle of fire at night, but sometimes the fire-makers had to go out to get more fuel. Because the Chief Fire-Maker was not quite as nervous as the rest of the men about moving through the night, and because the plan had been his to begin with, he wound up in the lead.

  There had not been a vote or a formal assignment. The other men had looked at Kar expectantly. Kar had grunted and taken the first step beyond the fire. The hunters followed him willingly enough.

  “How much farther is it, Kar?” Wolf whispered to the Chief Fire-Maker.

  “I can smell their fire,” Kar replied. “Soon we will see its light. They are not far.” Wolf mumbled his approval.

  Kar was much less afraid than he should have been. When he left the campfire to drag in more wood to burn, he always carried a torch and shouted loudly to frighten away lurking predators. Now he was tramping through total darkness, as quietly as he could and without an open flame for protection. But because the hunters were so much more frightened than he was, and because they trusted him—with no good reason, Kar knew—he felt a surprising confidence in himself.

  What the tribe was doing was new, a thing without traditions. Not exactly against tradition, but still a thing that their fathers would never have considered doing. The only reason Wolf and the hunters had accepted the idea—the only reason the idea had occurred to Kar!—was hunger. Hunger was forcing them to do new things.

  Kar thought of Hawk, whom they had cast out of the tribe. Hawk had done wrong. Hawk had violated tradition. But—

  But the tribe’s bad luck at hunting went back moons before Hawk began to use his spear shafts in ways that his father had never done. Elm said that the tribe’s luck would not change until their medicine placated the spirit of the bison. Perhaps she was right. Elm was an old woman and very wise.

  But Kar was old too, and he had seen, year by year, the herds of bison grow smaller and more wary of men. Wolf and his men performed the hunting rites just as their fathers had done when Kar was a youth. It was hard to see what tradition they had violated to make the spirit of the bison angry.

  It might be that the spirit of the bison required a new rite . . . and if the spirit did, perhaps that rite required the Chief Spear-Maker to join in the hunting, or even to use the spirit of the wood in new ways. After all, Kar was Chief Fire-Maker, and he was leading hunters in an action for which the tribe had no tradition.

  “We should not have driven Hawk away,” Kar muttered under his breath.

  “What?” said the Chief Hunter.

  “Nothing,” said Kar. Then he added, “There is Bull’s fire. Now you must creep close. I have led you here, but this next is no business for an old man who is Chief Fire-Maker.”

  Wolf grunted approval and gathered his men to give them final directions. Kar stared at the fire glittering in the night, ten spear-casts away. No one was moving in Bull’s camp. The luscious odor of cooked meat spiced the air.

  Kar knew that he and Wolf were creating new traditions because hunger forced them to. Hawk had done new things because he wanted to, because his mind worked in new ways. If the spirits which ruled the tribe’s hunting success had decided to demand new rites, then the tribe would have been much better off if Hawk were still a part of it.

  The hunters slipped toward the strangers’ camp with skills polished in stalking skittish game on the grasslands. Bull’s folk were encamped in the open. The fire-maker or one of his assistants nodded by the fire, barely awake. There should have been a hunter on watch also, but he must have laid his head down.

  Kar remembered how the folk of Wolf’s tribe had been unable to stay awake when they gorged on mammoth after so many days of hunger. Bull’s tribe was not in anything like as much danger from animals. The site of the kill, where the tribe left the bones, hides, and offal of the game, was a snarling mass of predators who could be heard far into the distance. As Kar had expected, though, the beasts ignored the fire-protected human encampment since there was plenty of equally satisfactory food lying in the open.

  Kar could not see any movement silhouetted against the campfire, but Wolf and his men were invisible. The fire had been allowed to sink low, into a mass of coals. It was not because the tribe was short of fuel. There w
ere plenty of branches piled near the blaze. The watchman was sleepy, and he wasn’t adding wood as frequently as he ought to.

  The hunters must be very close to the area cleared for the other tribe’s camp. Any moment now—

  The watchman got up and stirred the fire with another branch. The coals blazed high in a swirl of sparks, doubling the feeble light which the campfire provided a moment before. The sudden flare winked from the eyes of one of the encircling hunters. The watchman shouted in terror and flung his branch, now blazing, into the night.

  Wolf, Heron, and Boartooth jumped to their feet and ran toward the fire. Several of Wolf’s other men stood up, but they did not follow their chief. Bull’s watchman leaped over the campfire to get away.

  The hunter who should have been awake with the fire-tender had gone to sleep with his spear in his hands. He woke up as quickly and decisively as a cat. Kar saw firelight wink on the stranger’s spearhead of glass-sharp flint as he twisted and plunged his weapon into Heron’s belly.

  Heron cried out in pain. He dropped his own spear and gripped with both hands the shaft of the weapon whose point now projected from his back. The stranger grabbed another spear. Wolf jumped at him. The guard fled instead of trying to battle the Chief Hunter.

  The Chief Spear-Maker of Bull’s tribe kept his extra spears, at least a dozen of them, in a sheaf bound together with cords woven from the inner bark of trees. Boartooth grabbed the bundle. Longshank caught the opposite end before Boartooth could flee with his treasure.

  The two men tugged against one another. Boartooth thrust awkwardly with his spear. Longshank used the bundled spearshafts as protection, ducking down behind them. He had a club which he swung at Boartooth’s knees, but his reach wasn’t long enough for the weapon to strike.

  The other tribe was fully aroused now. Most of Wolf’s men had stopped on the edge of the firelight. They were shouting, but they seemed afraid to venture in to help Wolf and the two hunters who had followed him.