Alaska (6 page)

The bull had no chance to defend himself; this first strike was mortal, but in his death agony he did release one powerful bellow that echoed across the steppe. Matriarch heard it, and although she knew the young bull to be of an age when he should be leaving the family, he was still under her care, and without hesitating, she galloped as fast as her awkward

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hair-covered body would permit, speeding directly toward the sabertooth, who was crouching over its dead prey.

When she spotted it she knew instinctively that it was the most dangerous enemy on this steppe, and she knew it had the power to kill her, but her fury was so great that any thought of caution was submerged. One of the young mammoths for whom she was responsible had been attacked, and she knew but one response: to destroy the attacker if possible, and if not, to give her life in an attempt. So with a trumpeting cry of rage she rushed in her clumsy way at the sabertooth, who easily evaded her.

But to its surprise she wheeled about with such frenzied determination that it had to leave the corpse on which it was about to feed, and as it did so it found itself backed against the trunk of a sturdy larch. Matriarch, seeing the cat in this position, threw her entire weight forward, endeavoring to pin it with her tusks or otherwise impede it.

Now the broken right tusk, big and blunt, proved an asset rather than a liability, for with it she did not merely puncture the sabertooth, she crushed it against the tree, and as she felt her heavy tusk dig into its rib cage, she bore ahead, unmindful of what the fierce cat might do to her.

The stump had injured the sabertooth, but despite its broken left ribs it retained control and darted away lest she strike again. But before the cat could muster its resources for a counterattack, she used her unbroken left tusk to batter it into the dust at the foot of the tree. Then, with a speed it could not anticipate or avoid, she raised her immense foot and stomped upon its chest.

Again and again, trumpeting the while, she beat down upon the mighty cat, collapsing its other ribs and even breaking off one of the long, splendid saber-teeth. Seeing blood spurting from one of its wounds, she became wild with fury, her shrieks increasing when she saw the inert body of her grandson, the young bull, lying in the grass.

Continuing in her mad stomping, she crushed the sabertooth, and when her rage was assuaged she remained, whimpering, between the two dead bodies.

As in the case of her own destiny, she was not completely aware of what death was, but the entire elephant clan and its derivatives were perplexed by death, especially when it struck down a fellow creature with whom the mourner had been associated.

The young bull was dead, of that there could be no doubt, and in some vague way she realized that his wonderful potential was lost. He would not come courting in the summers ahead; he would fight no aging bulls to establish his authority; and he would sire no successors with the aid of 34

Matriarch's daughters and granddaughters. A chain was broken, and for more than a day she stood guard over his body, as if she hoped to bring it back to life. But at the close of the second day she left the bodies, unaware that in all that time she had not once looked at the sabertooth. It was her grandson who mattered, and he was dead.

Because his death occurred in late summer, with decomposition setting in immediately and with ravens and predators attacking the corpse, it was not fated that his body be frozen in mud for the edification of scientists scores of thousands of years later, but there was another death that occurred during the last days of autumn which had quite different consequences.

The old bull that had broken Matriarch's tusk, and had been a prime factor in the death of the young bull, strode away from the affair looking as if he had the strength to survive for many mating seasons to come. But the demands of this one had been heavy. He had run with more cows than usual and had been called upon to defend them against four or five lusty younger bulls who felt that their time to assume control had come. For an entire summer he had lusted and fought and eaten little, and now in late autumn his vital resources began to flag.

It began with dizziness as he climbed a bank leading up from the great river. He had made such treks repeatedly, but this time he faltered and almost fell against the muddy bank that impeded his progress. Then he lost the first of his remaining four teeth, and he was aware that two of the others were weakening. Even more serious was his indifference to the approaching winter, for normally he would have begun to eat extravagantly in order to build his reserves of fat against the cold days when snow fell. To ignore this imperative call of 'Feed thyself, for blizzards are at hand!' was to endanger his life, but that is what he did.

On the day of the first snowfall, a whipping wind blowing in from Asia and icicles of snow falling parallel to the earth, Matriarch and her five family members saw the old bull far in the distance, at what would later be known as the Birch Tree Site, his head lowered, his massive tusks resting on the ground, but they ignored him. Nor were they concerned about his safety; that was his problem and they knew he had many options from which to choose.

But when they saw him again, some days later, not moving toward a refuge or to a feeding ground, just standing there immobile, Matriarch, always the caring mother, started to move toward him to see if he was able to fend for himself. However, when he saw her intruding upon his satisfactory 35

loneliness, he withdrew to protect it, not hurriedly, as he might have done in the old days, but laboriously, making sounds of protest at her presence. She did not force herself upon him, for she knew that old bulls like him preferred to be left alone, and she last saw him heading back toward the river.

Two days later, when thick snow was falling and Matriarch started edging her family toward the alder thickets in which they customarily took shelter during the long winters, her youngest granddaughter, an inquisitive animal, was off

by herself exploring the banks of the river when she saw that the same bull who had spent much of the summer with them had fallen into a muddy crevice and was thrashing about, unable to extricate himself. Trumpeting a call for help, she alerted the others, and before long Matriarch, her daughters and her grandchildren were streaming toward the site of the accident.

When they arrived, the position of the old bull was so hopeless, mired as he was in sticky mud, that Matriarch and her assistants were powerless to aid him. And as both the snow and the cold increased, they had to watch helplessly as the tired mammoth struggled vainly, trumpeting for aid and succumbing finally to the irresistible pull of the mud and the freezing cold. Before nightfall he was tightly frozen into his muddy grave, only the top of his bulbous head showing, and by morning that too was buried under snow. There he would remain, miraculously upright for the next twenty-eight thousand years, the spiritual guardian of the Birch Tree Site.

MATRIARCH, OBEDIENT TO IMPULSES THAT HAD ALWAYS animated the mammoth breed, remained by his grave for two days, but then, still puzzled by the fact of death, she forgot him completely, rejoined her family, and led them to one of the best spots in central Alaska for passing a long winter. It was an enclave at the western end of the valley which was fed by two streams, a small one that froze quickly and a much larger one that carried free water most of the winter. Here, protected from even the worst winds, she and her daughters and grandchildren remained motionless much of the time, conserving body warmth and slowing digestion of such food as they could find.

Now once more her broken tusk proved useful, for its rough, blunt end was effective in ripping the bark from birch trees whose leaves had long vanished, and it was also helpful in brushing away snow to reveal the grasses and herbs hiding below. She was not aware that she was trapped in a vast ice castle, for she had no desire to move either eastward into

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what would one day be Canada or southward to California. Her icy prison was enormous in size and she felt in no way penned in, but when the frozen ground began to thaw and the willows sent forth tentative shoots, she did become aware how she could not have explained that some great change had overtaken the refuge areas which she had for so many years dominated. Perhaps it was her acute sense of smell, or sounds never heard before, but regardless of how the message reached her, she knew that life on the Mammoth Steppe had been altered, and not for the better.

Her awareness intensified when she lost one of her remaining teeth, and then one evening as she wandered westward with her family, she came upon a sight that confused her weak eyes. On the banks of the river she had been following stood a structure like none she had ever seen before. It was like a bird's nest on the ground, but hugely bigger. From it came animals who walked on only two legs; they were like water birds that prowled the shore, but much larger, and now one of them, seeing the mammoths, began to make noises. Others poured from the immense nest, and she could see that her presence was causing great excitement, for they made unfamiliar sounds.

Then some of the creatures, much smaller than herself or even the youngest of her grandchildren, began running toward her, and the speed with which they moved alerted her to the fact that she and her herd were about to face some kind of new danger.

Instinctively she began to edge away, then to move rapidly, and finally to trumpet wildly as she started running.

But very quickly she found that she was not free to move as she wished, for no matter where she tried to go with her charges, one of the creatures appeared in the shadows to prevent her from escaping. And when day dawned, confusion intensified, for wherever Matriarch sought to take her family, these beings kept pace, persistently, like wolves tracking a wounded caribou. They would not stop, and when that first night fell they added to the terror by causing a fire to spring from the tundra, and this created panic among the mammoths, for they expected the dried grass of the previous summer to burst into uncontrollable flame, but this did not happen. Matriarch, looking at her children in perplexity, was not able to form the idea: They have fire but it is not fire, but she felt the bewilderment that such an idea would have evoked.

On the next day the strange new things continued to pursue Matriarch and her mammoths, and when the animals were exhausted, the newcomers finally isolated Matriarch's 37

youngest granddaughter. Once the young animal was cut off, the pursuers closed in upon her, carrying in their front legs, the ones they did not use for walking, branches of trees with stones attached, and with these they began to beat the encircled mammoth and stab at her and torment her until she bellowed for help.

Matriarch, who had outrun her children, heard the cry and doubled back, but when she tried to aid her granddaughter, some of these creatures detached themselves from the larger group and beat her about the head with their branches until she had to withdraw. But now the cries of her granddaughter became so pitiful that Matriarch trembled with rage, and with a mighty bellow, dashed right through the attackers, and without stopping, lumbered to where the threatened mammoth was striving to defend herself. With a great roar, Matriarch flung herself upon the creatures, lashing at them with her broken tusk and driving them back.

Triumphant, she was about to lead her frightened granddaughter to safety when one of the strange beings shouted the sound 'Varnak!' and another, a little taller than the others and heavier, leaped toward the threatened mammoth, allowed himself to fall beneath her dangerous feet, and with an upward stab of whatever he was carrying, drove a sharp weapon deep into her bowels.

Matriarch saw that her granddaughter was not fatally wounded, but as the mammoths thundered off, seeking respite from their tormentors, it was obvious that the young one was not going to be able to keep up. So the herd slowed, and Matriarch assisted her granddaughter, and in this way the huge beasts made their escape.

But to their dismay, the little figures on two legs kept pace, coming closer and closer, and on the third day, at an unguarded moment when Matriarch was directing the others to safety, the creatures surrounded the wounded granddaughter. Intending to crush these intruders once and for all, Matriarch started back to defend her grandchild, but as she strove to reach the attackers and punish them with her broken tusk, as she had done with the sabertooth, one of them, armed only with a long piece of wood and a short one with fire at one end, stepped boldly out from among the trees and drove her back. The long piece of wood she could resist even though it had sharp stones on the end, but the fire, thrust right into her face, she could not. Try as she might, she could not avoid that burning ember. Impotently she had to stand back, smoke and fire in her eyes, as her granddaughter was slain.

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With loud shouts, much like the triumphant howling of wolves when they finally brought down their wounded prey, the creatures danced and leaped about the fallen mammoth and began to cut her up.

From a distance that night, Matriarch and her remaining children saw once again the fire that mysteriously flamed without engulfing the steppe, and in this confusing, tragic way the mammoths who had for so long been safe within their ice castle encountered man.

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Ill

PEOPLE OF THE NORTH

ome twenty-nine thousand years B.P.E. Before the Present Era, which means before the reference year A.D.

1950, when carbon dating became established as a reliable system for dating prehistoric events in that eastern projection of Asia which would later be known as Siberia, famine was rampant, and it struck nowhere with more ferocity than in a mud hut that faced the sunrise. There, in one big room excavated a few feet below the level of the surrounding earth, a family of five faced the coming winter with only a small store of food and little hope of finding more.

Their house provided no comfort except a slight protection from the howling winds of winter, which blew almost constantly through the half of the structure which rose above ground and was formed of loosely woven branches plastered with mud. This hovel was no more than a cave-hut, but it did provide one essential: in the middle of the floor there was a place for fire, and here half-wet logs gave off the smoke which lent flavor to what they ate and endless irritation to their eyes.

The five people huddling in this miserable abode as autumn ended were headed by a resolute man named Varnak, one of the ablest hunters in the village of Nurik, who had as wife the woman Tevuk, twenty-four years old and the mother of two sons who would soon be able to join their father in his chase for animals whose meat would feed the family. But this

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year animals had grown so scarce that in some cave-huts the younger people were beginning to whisper 'Perhaps there will be food only for the young ones, and it will be time for the old ones to go '

Varnak and Tevuk would hear none of this, for although they had a very old woman to care for, she was so precious to them that they would starve themselves rather than deprive her She was known as the Ancient One, Varnak's mother, and he was determined to help her live out her life because she was the wisest person in the village, the only one who could remind the young of their heroic heritage 'Others say ”Let the old ones die,”' he whispered to his wife one night, 'but I have no mind to do so '

'Nor I,' Tevuk replied, and since she had no mother or aunts of her own, she knew that what her husband was saying applied only to his own mother, but she was prepared to stand by this resolute old woman for as long as life remained This would be difficult, for the Ancient One was not easy to placate and the burden of tending her would fall almost solely on Tevuk, but the bond of debt between the two women was great and indissoluble

When Varnak had been a young man, searching about for a wife, he fastened his attention upon a young woman of rare attractiveness, one who was courted by various men, but his mother, a woman who had lost her husband early in a hunting accident while chasing the woolly mammoth, saw clearly that her son would come to harm if he tied himself to that woman, and she launched a campaign to make him appreciate how much better his life would be if he allied himself with Tevuk, a somewhat older woman of common sense and unusual capacity for work Varnak, captivated by the younger, had resisted his mother's counsel and was about to take the seductive one, when the Ancient One barred the exit from their hut and would not allow her son to leave for three days until she was assured that some other man had captured the enchantress 'She weaves a spell, Varnak I saw her gathering moss and searching for antlers to pulverize I'm protecting you from her '

He was disconsolate at losing the wonderful one,, and it was some time before he was prepared to listen to his mother, but when his anger subsided he was able to look at Tevuk with clear eyes and he saw that his mother was right Tevuk was going to be as helpful when an old woman of forty as she was now 'She's the kind who grows stronger with the seasons, Varnak Like me ' And Varnak had discovered this to be true

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Now, in this difficult time when there was almost no food in the cave-hut, Varnak became doubly appreciative of his two good women, for his wife searched the land for the merest scrap for their two sons, while his mother gathered not only her grandsons but also the other children of the village to take their minds off hunger by telling them of the heroic traditions of their tribe: 'In the long ago our people lived in the south where there were many trees and animals of all kinds to eat. Do you know what south means?'

'No.' And in freezing darkness as winter clamped down she told them: 'It's warm, my grandmother told me. And it has no endless winter.'

'Why did those people come to this land?'

This was a problem which had always perplexed the Ancient One, and she dealt with it according to her vague understandings: 'There are strong people and weak. My son Varnak is very strong, you know that. And so is Toorak, the man who killed the great bison. But when our people lived in the south, they were not strong, and others drove us out of those good lands. And when we moved north to lands not so good, they drove us out of there, too. One summer we came here, and it was beautiful, and everyone danced, my grandmother said. But then what happened?'

She asked this of a girl eleven seasons old, who said: 'Then winter came,' and the old one said: 'Yes, winter came.'

She was surprisingly correct in her summary of the clan's history, and of mankind's.

Human life had originated in hot, steaming climates where it was easy to survive, but as soon as sufficient people were assembled to make competition for living space inevitable say after a million years the abler groups started to edge northward toward the more temperate zone, and in this more equable climate they began to invent those agencies of control, such as seasonal agriculture and the husbandry of animals, which would make superior forms of civilization possible.

And then once more, in the time of the Ancient One's great-great-great-grandmother, or even further back, competition for favorable sites recurred, but now it was the less able who were forced to move on, leaving the most fit to hold on to the temperate zones. This meant that in the Northern Hemisphere the subarctic areas began to be filled with people who had been evicted from the more congenial climates. Always the pressure came from the warmer lands to the south, and always it ended with people along the edges being forced to live on cold and arid lands which could barely support them.

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But there was another interpretation of this movement to the north, and the Ancient One related it proudly to her children: 'There were brave men and women who loved cold lands and the hunt for mammoths and caribou. They liked the endless days of summer and were not afraid of winter nights like this.' Looking at each of her listeners, she tried to instill in them a pride in their ancestors: 'My son is a brave man like that and so is Toorak, who killed the bison, and so must you be when you grow up and go out to fight the mammoths.'

The old woman was right about many of the men who came north. They thrilled to their contests with whale and walrus. They were eager to do battle with the white polar bear and the woolly mammoth. They fought the seal for his fur so that they might survive the arctic winters, and they mastered the secrets of ice and snow and sudden blizzards. They devised ways of combating the ferocious mosquitoes that attacked in sun-darkening hordes each spring, and they taught their sons how to track animals for fur and food so that life could continue after they were dead. 'These are the true people of the north,' the old woman said, and she might have added that a hardier breed never existed on this earth.

'I want you to be like them,' she concluded, and one of the girls began to whimper: 'I'm hungry,' and the Ancient One took from the sealskin tunic she wore in winter a piece of dried seal blubber and apportioned it among the children, retaining none for herself.

One day at the turning of the seasons, when there was practically no daylight in the village, the old woman almost lost courage, for one of the children who had gathered in the dark hut to hear her tales asked: 'Why don't we go back to the south, where there's food?' and in honesty she had to reply: 'The old people often asked that question, and sometimes they pretended to themselves and said: ”Yes, next year we will go back,” but they never meant it. We cannot go back. You cannot go back. You are now people of the north.'

She never considered her life in the north a penalty, nor would she allow her son or her grandchildren to think of it in that way, but as the hellish days of winter closed down when days lengthened but cold increased and ice grew thicker she would wait till the children were asleep, and then whisper to her hungry son and his wife: 'Another winter like this and we will all die,' for even now they existed by chewing sealskin, which provided them little energy.

'Where will we go?' her son asked, and she said: 'My father spent four days chasing a mammoth once. It led him east across the barren lands, and over there he saw fields of green.'

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'Why not go south?' Tevuk asked, and the old woman told her daughter-in-law: 'The south never had a place for us. I'm finished with the south.'

So in those tantalizing days of early spring when winter refused to stop tormenting these people at the western end of the land bridge, the fine hunter Varnak, seeing his family slowly dying of hunger, began asking about the land to the east, and he came upon a very old man who told him: 'One morning when I was young and with nothing better to do, I wandered eastward, and when night came with the sun still high in the heavens, for it was summer, I felt no need to return home, so on and on I went for two more days, and on the third day I saw something which excited me.'

'What?' Varnak asked, and the old man said, eyes aglimmer as if the incident had occurred three days ago: 'The body of a dead mammoth.' He allowed Varnak time to fathom the significance of this revelation, and when nothing was said, he explained: 'If a mammoth saw reason to cross that bleak land, men would have a reason too,'

to which Varnak said: 'Yes, but you said the mammoth died,' and the man laughed: 'True, but there was a reason for him to try. And you have just as good a reason.

For if you remain here, you will starve.'

'If I go, will you go with me?' and the man said: 'I am too old. But you ...”And that day Varnak informed the four members of his family: 'When summer comes we shall go where the sun rises.'

The route he would take had been available for the past two thousand years, and although some had used the bridge, they had not found it inviting. Across its six-hundred-mile width north to south harsh winds blew so constantly that no trees or even low shrubs had been able to establish themselves, while grasses and mosses were so sparse that big animals could not find forage. In winter the cold was so forbidding that even hares and rats stayed underground, and few men ventured upon the bridge, even in summer. Settled life upon it was unthinkable.

But it was by no means unpassable, since from west to east, the direction in which Varnak's people would be traveling if they attempted the crossing, the distance would be no more than sixty miles. Varnak, of course, did not know this; it could have been eight hundred miles, but all that he had heard of attempts to cross it led him to believe that it was shorter. 'We'll leave when day and night are even,' he informed his mother, and she approved of the plan so heartily that she spread the news throughout the village.

When it was known that Varnak was going to try to find food to the east, there was excited discussion in the cave-huts 44

and several of the men concluded that they would be wise to accompany him. So as spring progressed, four or five families began to weigh seriously the possibility of emigrating, and in the end three came to Varnak with the firm promise: 'We'll go too.'

On that day in March which Varnak had selected, the one when day and night were equal in all parts of the earth Varnak, Tevuk, their two sons and the Ancient One prepares to set forth, accompanied by three other hunters, their wives and their eight children.

When the nineteen gathered at the eastern edge of their village, they were formidable in appearance, since the men wore such massive pieces of fur clothing that they looked like hulking animals. They carried long pikes as if going to war and their rumpled black hair drooped low above their eyes Their skin was a dark yellow and their eyes a sparkling black so that when they stared this way and that, as they often did they seemed as predacious as eagles.

The five women had different styles of dress, featuring decorated skins with seashells along the hems, but their face: were surprisingly alike. Each was heavily tattooed with vertical blue stripes, some covering the chin, others running the length of the face beside the ears, which were pierced fo rings carved from white ivory. When they moved, even the old woman, they did so with determined steps, and as the four sleds on which each family's goods would be carried were brought into position, it was these women who grasped the reins and prepared to do the hauling.

The ten children were like a collection of colorful flowers for the clothes they wore were varied in design and color Some wore short tunics with stripes of white and blue, others long robes and heavy boots, but all wore in their hair some ornament, some flashing bit of shell or ivory.

Any item of clothing was precious, for men had risked their lives to harvest the hides and women had toiled tanning them and preparing sinews for sewing. A pair of men's trousers stitched so carefully that they kept out cold and water would be expected to last most of an adult lifetime, and only a few men on this peninsula would ever own two such garments.

Most important, however, were the boots, some of which reached to the knee; each group of families had to have some woman skilled in making boots from heavy hides, or the many members of that group would freeze their feet when they hunted on ice.

And this was another reason why Varnak wanted to keep his mother alive: she was the ablest maker of boots the village had known in two generations, for although 45

her fingers were no longer nimble, they were strong and could still pull reindeer sinews through the thickest seal hide The men of this expedition were not tall Varnak, the biggest, stood only five feet six, with the others noticeably shorter None of the women was much over five feet, and the Ancient One was sharply under that mark The children were small, the three babies tiny except for their big round heads, but when dressed in heavy clothing the young ones were balls of fur with insatiable appetites On small sleds with runners of antler and bone, the travelers dragged behind them the pitiful supply of artifacts their people had collected during ten thousand years of life in the arctic ultraprecious bone needles, skins not yet sewn into clothing, shallow bowls carved from heavy wood or bone, longhand led cooking spoons of ivory, no furniture of any kind, but sleeping pads for everyone and fur blankets for each family