The SealEaters, 20,000 BC Read online

  “I’m willing to stay until the full moon. More than that and we take the chance of too cold a winter. We are supposed to explore this area. I don’t need to remind you that our winter clothing is cached back at the mouth of the river we followed. That winter clothing must last us for our return trip home, so we’re not going back to take it. We’ll have to go further south than our cache to be warm for the coldest part of the year. Either that or we must make winter clothing. I don’t want to do that.”

  “I understand, Father.” Wen was already looking for a cave or shelter.

  “Let’s go back up the hill. I may have spotted something earlier as we were leaving to come down here,” Mongwire said, taking charge.

  They climbed back up the hill. Mongwire found the dark area behind some bush. It was a small cave, ideal for a half moon’s time. He and Wen gathered their things and put them in the cave. Wen climbed the tree and lowered the deer carcass they’d tied over a limb. Mongwire cut off pieces of meat from a back leg, and Wen raised the deer and re-tied the cordage around the tree. Mongwire was glad they had food from the day before. Instead of having to hunt this evening, they prepared a new hearth by the cave and set up the y-shaped holders for the tree branch they’d run through the meat for roasting it. Wen looked up at the bird above that was singing in the tree. Another bird answered not far away. He looked for a nest but couldn’t see one.

  Wen liked the land. It drew him with amazement and wonder, causing his thinking place to become more active than it had ever been. He felt alive as he had never felt. Until this point in his life, he’d lived in a small area walled in by mountains and hills on three sides and the sea on the other. He’d never met people from other places. In their land he knew they had just gone through a time of terrible sickness. According to their elders, the stories of their ancestors had been lost when the tellers died. The terrible sickness had eaten away many people in many places on the earth. In addition to the loss of land from the ice sheets that continued to move south, there were fights over who would live where after the terrible sickness. What the sickness didn’t kill, wars did. Sometimes when people lost a war, the victors set fire to the huts of all the people. They thought it would purify the place for the victors to live there free of the terrible sickness. Some of those who made war called the terrible sickness the white death, because people became so pale when they had it. It was not a good place or time, Wen thought. In this place there was more land than he knew existed in the whole world, and it was covered with a wonderful forest of tall healthy evergreens mostly. Clearly people lived here, for they followed a path, too wide for a typical animal path. It was a wonderful location for SealEaters.

  Stars began to appear. The hunks of meat they’d cut off and speared on the stick were well roasted. They took their pieces off the roasting rod and laid them on the greens Wen had gathered. Wen laid the roasting rod across the y-shaped holders. He speared his pieces of meat one at a time with a shorter stick he’d cut off from a dead branch from which he’d removed the outside bark. He had cut the end of his meat spear on a slant. Juice ran from the meat down the meat spear to his hand. Mongwire ate with his hands, while juice ran down his arms dripping to the ground from his elbows. Juice from their mouths would dribble to their chins. The meat was hot and very good, Mongwire thought. A whippoorwill cut the silence. Then, another. Wen wondered whether he heard more than just one. He could not determine well enough the source of the sound. He found the sound restful in some ways and at the same time it was a little bit unsettling. He mused over entertaining conflicting feelings about a single thing.

  Mongwire was an explorer at his core. He wanted to be gone from this place, but he also wanted his son to grow. The moon rose. It was at the thinnest crescent, exactly as he thought. The moon was something to which Mongwire paid much attention. He had to wait for thirteen days. He decided to do as Wen suggested. He’d take the time to learn the way of the animals in this place. That could improve the hunting, he decided. He needed something to occupy him during this enforced rest. Oh, the things he did for this son! he thought.

  At the spring Wen washed off the sticks they’d used to spear the meat to cook it over the hearth. Mongwire often teased him for doing that, but Wen didn’t want pieces of old meat sticking to what he was about to eat. The women at the Cove were very careful about that. The spring was conveniently close by. Father and son entered the cave and laid down on their sleeping places, covering themselves with hairless skins. They went black immediately.

  In the morning Mongwire arose first. He folded his cover and stretched. His thick graying beard was littered with particles of leaves and dirt, so he ran his fingers through it wondering where the debris came from, shaking it a bit. Wen opened his eyes. He raised himself up waiting until his father left the small cave before he stood up. He folded his sleeping skins and left the cave. Wen went to the tree to lower the deer carcass. Mongwire came immediately and cut off a hunk.

  “That what you want?” he asked.

  “That’s a good portion,” Wen replied.

  Mongwire cut a piece for himself. He took the pieces to the cave entryway while Wen quickly tied the deer out of reach of bears and other animals. He snatched some greens and quickly placed them on the ground for Mongwire to put the meat on. Mongwire had become accustomed to the wait. He never bothered with things like that. A little dirt didn’t hurt anyone, he always told Wen, but he realized it made a big difference to Wen, so he waited patiently for the food that he knew would be coming. Mongwire laid the meat on the greens and wiped his hands on his tunic.

  The banked fire still had embers. Mongwire started the fire, and they cooked the meat over a blaze, hoping it would cook faster, which of course it did.

  Mongwire and Wen set out, leaving their backpacks in the cave. They carried pouches of jerky knowing they’d return. Mongwire and Wen also put some of the morning’s meat in their pouches, because it was decidedly better tasting.

  They neared the bottom of the mountain and Mongwire was about to depart to study animal life until he spotted the most extraordinary looking animals he’d ever seen in the valley to the east, moving towards them. They were musk oxen. These animals had horns that appeared parted. From great lobes the horns wound down in a tapering curve pointing slightly forward at the end of the curve. Because they were shedding, they had brown shaggy coats that were ratty looking where strips of tangled lighter colored hair fell like thick cordage or in sheets like skin from their sides and back. They had faces a little like an aurochs. As they moved closer, Mongwire observed they had hooves that split in two parts. A few of them had black hooves that curled like his fingernails and toenails when they grew too long. Mongwire’s nails curled under; the animal he observed had hooves that curled upwards. The animals were quiet, only slightly murmuring or exhaling with a noise.

  Wen noticed movement to the far west. A single animal, fox or wolf, he wondered which, was heading towards the musk oxen. Wen exhaled and Mongwire looked at him. With his eyes, Wen showed him what he’d seen. Mongwire watched as the wolf approached. It tried to reach the smallest in the herd, but the whole group of musk oxen began to circle and wound themselves around the curled hoofed animals and the young one, creating a circle from which their heads with formidable horns appeared on the outside. The wolf just remained, head lowered, waiting. Some of the male musk oxen left the group and began to gallop towards the single wolf. They chased the wolf a good way from their tight musk oxen circle of protection, still surrounding the seemingly old and definitely very young.

  They followed the wolf until Mongwire and Wen could no longer see it. Then, they returned and the circle disbanded and grazing continued. Mongwire and Wen were amazed. Never had they seen such behavior. Mongwire thought momentarily that they’d have missed this display, if he and Wen had begun to travel south that morning. It had been well worth the wait.

  It was after high sun when the musk oxen began to travel east. When they had followed the musk oxe
n a long distance, Mongwire left the forest soon followed by Wen. Mongwire wanted to examine the leavings of the musk oxen. He also wanted to see the shape of their prints in the soil. Those two clues were fundamental to hunters. They examined the signs and Wen gathered hunks of the fur that the animals had left behind. He was amazed at the softness of it. Wen gathered a lot of it, shoving it into his tunic above the belt until it gave him a very strange appearance and would take no more.

  “Why are you bringing that?” Mongwire asked.

  “I thought it might be good to line our boots this winter.” Having stuffed his tunic from neck to waist, he hung the long lengths of the musk oxen shed around his neck.

  They headed back to the cave. Mongwire and Wen both were very satisfied with the event of the day. For some reason, Wen was extremely hungry. He pulled a piece of jerky from the pouch. That was all that was left, since he had consumed the fresh meat earlier while watching the musk oxen.

  Mongwire checked the area when he returned to the cave. It was something he always did. Nothing had bothered the carcass. There was no sign, human or animal. He relaxed and began to make a fire in the hearth.

  An extremely loud grinding noise ripped through the quiet. It was accompanied by high pitched shrieks intermittently, then more grinding and more shrieks.

  “That must be the ice sheet,” Wen voiced his thoughts needlessly. The sounds could only have come from one source. The sounds lasted to the slow count of fifteen.

  “That could be annoying,” Mongwire said.

  “Yes, Father, but now we know it happens. Do you wonder what else happens?”

  Mongwire found it unsettling. His desire was to leave the place immediately, but he could see Wen’s point of learning something. They had seen new and different animal behavior and heard an ice sheet make a lot of noise.

  “I don’t really wonder what else happens. We know the ice breaks off, and it makes noise. It’s ice. On land it cannot turn over as it does in sea water. What else could there be to know?”

  “I don’t know. I do know it can melt, because it’s ice. A lot of it melting at one time could create quite a lake.”

  “I suppose,” Mongwire replied losing interest. He was not comfortable speculating in this manner.

  Wen moved over to the area where the fewest trees were. The area was flooded with sun. He pulled his tunic over his head and lay down on it. His chest absorbed the sun’s warmth. It felt wonderful.

  Wen thought of the noise he’d just heard. He wondered whether ice had a spirit or whether the sounds were just a part of the environment—and ice was not really alive. He’d been carefully taught that all things were alive and filled with spirit, but he could not find a sense of life when he picked up a dead stick or a rock. If a stick had a spirit, did the spirit leave when the stick separated from the living tree as a human spirit did when the human died, or was it just cast off, spiritless, while the whole spirit stayed with the tree? Did a part of him have spirit when it died or did the spirit remain with him until his whole person died? He thought that loss of a fingernail did not reduce by some tiny amount the totality of his spirit. The separated fingernail, he was convinced was spiritless. Nor did a separated fingernail take part of him to the land of the dead. Some rocks had a feel of life to them, as if some force of life flowed through them, but as for a small rock, he compared that to a dead twig. He’d heard similar sounds in the ice on the water, well, not the grinding sounds, but certainly the high pitched ones. Was it just a sound that occurred in the natural world of ice? It was hard to question against what one had been taught, he thought.

  He remembered the voyage past the ice. What an amazing chance to learn. He did not like the storms at sea. That frightened him terribly. He wanted to live. He wanted to learn everything there was to learn about this land they were going to explore. He’d never felt so alive. The fierce winds and the pelting with rain, hail, water, or ice during the crossing was not pleasant. Comparing his experience with others, he was dumbfounded that the gods could make water from the tops of waves feel like rocks when the wind threw it at you. What he expected to remain forever in his memory was the huge storm where they saw some of the enormous chunks of ice literally turn over and over in the water. The largest part of the ice chunk was so deep in the water it seemed impossible to believe that they could overturn. He had seen it happen more than once with his own eyes. Fact was established. He didn’t really want to see that ever again. It made him aware how small and fragile he was.

  Wen thought of Camun, daughter of Amoroz and Fluga. He and she had played together since they were young. He preferred her company to Sted, Whug and Gemu’s son, who tried to emulate Reg, thinking that would make him powerful like Reg. Among the others in the age group, Megg, Camun, Egorgo, Pligo, Tob, Vaima, Pupe, and himself, nobody much wanted to be around Sted. Wen pitied him, but not enough to want to offer friendship. A person like that, he reasoned, would not return friendship, any more than Reg would.

  Camun’s beauty lay more inside than outside. She was a girl that one would see but not see, he reasoned. Until she blew into her flute. Camun played haunting music on her flute. It could raise the hairs on the back of his neck. It could cause him to see wonders in the ordinary things about him. It caused him to see and feel and almost smell or taste things in unique ways he’d never dreamed. When they talked, he’d found she was able to keep up with his thoughts and he could keep up with hers, which were reasoned in much the same way, except for the intuitive part of her reasoning, which left him breathless. She could reach conclusions quicker and, he wondered whether he shouldn’t credit her as having more accuracy than he did. He wished he had that intuitive sense. But more than all that, Camun made him feel special on a personal level. It drew him to her as to no other.

  He and Megg had talked about which girl they’d like as a wife. Megg was devoted to Egorgo who seemed to feel the same about Megg. Egorgo was stunningly beautiful everyone agreed. She had brown hair, not really remarkable, bright blue eyes that showed deeply into her spirit, dark long lashes, and eyebrows the color and shape of crow wings. Her lips were soft looking, very full, and startlingly, naturally red. Her body was beginning to take the shape of a woman’s and promised to be curvy. She was just beginning to use her body to learn the effects it might have on the men and older boys. Megg looked the other way, not really grasping the importance of what she was doing. He thought she returned the devotion he felt. She let him believe that. Reg paid little attention to her. Had he known of Megg’s interest in his daughter, he would have quashed that, but all who knew or suspected were careful not to let him become aware. Wen had loved Camun since they were young children. He could see no one but her as wife. Thoughts of her warmed him as the sun warmed him. He turned over on his tunic to let the sun warm his back. There in the sun he dreamed of her, almost hearing the tunes she played.

  Mongwire had gone inside the cave to lie down on his sleeping place. He felt odd, as if something was wrong. He had a slight feeling of nausea. Perhaps, he thought, if I lie down for a while this odd feeling will pass. He lay there rubbing his left arm with his right hand.

  Some time passed, and the sun moved off Wen’s back and he felt a little chill. He picked up his tunic and put it back on. He was slightly surprised not to see his father anywhere. He stooped down and put his head into the small cave.

  Mongwire looked at him. He was sweating.

  “Father?” Wen asked, “Are you sick?”

  “I just felt a little tired,” Mongwire replied in the manner of SealEater men, minimizing anything physically aberrant.

  “You don’t look like you feel well,” Wen persisted.

  “Why don’t you fix the meat? By the time I eat, I should be fine.”

  Quickly Wen went out and found that he needed to re-start the fire from a spark. He took the fire starter and quickly had a small fire going. He climbed up the tree, untied the deer carcass, scrambled down and tied the carcass lower. He went to the area where he
harvested greens and picked a handful. They were smaller than the others had been. He noted that he’d need to find another location for the greens. He went to the spring and ran water over the greens to wash the dirt off. He laid them on the rocks he’d prepared beside the hearth. Then, Wen took the straight cooking rod and headed toward the deer. He cut off hunks the normal size for them and threaded them on the cooking stick. He laid the cooking stick in the holders and went to tie up the deer. He climbed the tree and tied it up high.

  He looked in on his father when he returned. He had turned so his back was to the entryway. Wen tightened the corners of his mouth in consternation and returned to cooking the deer meat.

  He heard Mongwire moan and went into the cave.

  “Father, what is it?” he asked deeply concerned.

  “I just need some help to stand up,” Mongwire admitted.

  Wen helped him rise to his feet to go out to the place where they sat to eat. Wen became more concerned as time passed. Ironically, Mongwire began to feel a little better. He was hungry.

  When the meat had cooked, Wen took the meat for his father and placed it on his greens. Wen was becoming a bit more optimistic. His father began to eat.

  Wen used his meat spear and began to eat also. He finished up quickly and went to the spring to wash the sticks. When he returned, he found his father clearly in extreme pain. Wen helped his father back into the cave where he lay back on the soft skin.

  “It just has to wear off,” Mongwire offered as an explanation to Wen. He actually had no concept of what was wrong, only that something rather serious was happening. He did not consider himself old enough for the problem to be extremely serious. He’d had no injury. It bothered him that he was having trouble breathing. He hadn’t just exerted a great amount of energy.

  Wen was deeply troubled. He tried to remain patient and trust that his father knew what was wrong, but it didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen, and his father seemed too vague to give Wen confidence that he understood his condition.