Mammoth Boy (19 page)

Then, having made this announcement, he seemed less than anxious to set out, letting days slip by, as though expecting a propitious moment, much to Urrell’s impatience. One morning that looked like any other, he said: “Tomorrow go.”

They spent that day and much of the night repairing and assembling bags and pouches, straps and spears, binding all with thongs to the travois. Their choicest flint heads, ornaments of ivory, needles, fish hooks, a roarer and flutes were packed, whereas few provisions were needed, for the world lay under summer’s plenty. They would forage and hunt as they went. They slept well, rose early, ate and set off, Rakrak scouting, Piura bringing up the rear. The sounds, sights and scents of their gulch as they left it for the open plains tugged at Urrell with a sentiment that a period in his life was over and another beginning. His strength, his hair, his body were now nearly a man’s, his spear-cast as far and as accurate as it would ever be.

They travelled in leisurely stages across the plain, aslant the range of mountains that Urrell had first seen at the end of his boyhood trek across the moorlands on his way, had he known, to Agaratz. To him this new journey was a continuation – he had but to follow, as a tree grows, a body develops, a herd moves.

When the sun was hottest, they rested, lolling in the grasses, amid the flowers of summer and the innumerable insects of the grasslands. Clouds of gnats swirled about, filling eyes and nostrils, biting bare skin, Urrell’s at least. Agaratz was untroubled. They tormented even Rakrak’s muzzle, Piura’s ears and her old eyes. She pawed and rubbed her head in despair.

Agaratz grinned. “You not
poodooec
, Urrell.”

“
Poodooec
?”

“For gnats.”

“How can you be
poodooec
for
gnats
, Agaratz!”

“You see.”

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

F
or 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

“
O
ld 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 attention, 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.