Mammoth Boy by John Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

later.
    Urrell wondered why Agaratz never cooked anything away from the home cave, however far afield they roamed. One day he asked: “Why not cook meat here?”
    Agaratz was silent. The pause was so long it seemed he would not answer. Then he said, quietly, “Bad. Hunters see smoke.”
    Since the bison hunters on the day he had met Agaratz, Urrell had seen no sign of humans in all their hunting trips across the savannah, or to the river. Only herds of horses and bison, far off, fattening for the migration south as winter would arrive, the time when Urrell knew his home group would migrate in parallel with the herds to the plains by the salt water to seek shellfish, crabs and flightless birds that drifted on the sea currents in vast flocks and sometimes came too near inshore in pursuit of shoals of fry, becoming stranded when the sea withdrew. Those were cold and often hungry times. Even the sea froze in places. Hunters died in the snowy wastes as they pursued game into the frozen woods where bison and horses sheltered, browsing on brushwood and bark, made alert by packs of wolves and all the members of the cat family, that preyed upon them. Some years when the cold became very great, the deer with the wide antlers were driven to the coast in search of grasses and lichens under the snow. His group lived out these months in caves beside the sea, as generations before them had, the mounds of cast-off shells from the food the women gathered at low tide proof of how long they had been coming. When hunting had been good and the fire blazed hot, old men told of monsters and huge beasts from those far-off times, creatures long since vanished. Yet deep in caves Urrell knew there were paintings of great power where these monsters lived on, secrets only a few initiates might visit.
    When and whither would Agaratz migrate – along the river, perhaps?
    “Agaratz, when the cold comes, where do you go?”
    “Stay.”
    “Stay – in the cold?”
    “Yes, stay in cold.”
    Urrell had heard tales of hunters dying on their own, unable to hunt enough to stay alive. Surviving the cold by the sea was hard, when the wolves, lions and panthers from the forest were famished and ate anything they caught.
    “How… how can you live – in the cold, Agaratz?”
    “I live. You see.”
    “I see?”
    “You see. You see with me.”
    Urrell, so far as he had thought at all, knew his future lay with Agaratz, but had not thought of it like this. It was a reversal of all his experience to date.
    “But, Agaratz, how can you hunt alone in the great cold?” His voice must have trembled at the prospect of starvation, of freezing to death, for Agaratz was firm yet consoling when he answered:
    “You see. I hunt. You hunt.” There was no hint of the bullying or bragging of one of his home group’s hunters: Agaratz stated what he had done. Experience spoke; Urrell’s qualms subsided.

CHAPTER 8
    “ Y ou like to see wolves, Urrell?”
    Wolves. They heard wolves most nights howling afar, responding to one another, or ‘singing’ as Agaratz called it. Nothing in Urrell’s life had led him to want to meet them. Wolves, he knew, unless ravenous, seldom attacked humans so long as one did not encroach on their territory. They warned, and one turned away.
    “We go see.”
    That evening Agaratz roasted two wildfowl and placed them on a shelf, out of reach of rats.
    “Tomorrow we go see wolves,” he said, “take food.” Urrell wondered what he meant. Some sort of bait? Agaratz explained: “Long way. Need food.”
    That night Urrell, sleeping in his burrow of branches, leaves and ferns, dreamt of wolves, of Agaratz as a wolf, of himself in a wolf ’s lair eating roast duck. When he awoke, the dreams had been so real he tried to describe them to Agaratz.
    All he got was a nod and a grin.
    “Take stone-thrower, pouch, spear-thrower, three spears,” said Agaratz, selecting three weapons from his store of antiquities, or ‘father’ as he called