Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online Page B

Hwll’s surprise, Tep did not return to his own camp down river. The truth was that the little hunter was tired of living as an outcast, and glad to find someone who knew nothing of his bad reputation. So the day after Hwll selected his hill, Tep came to him.
    “It is better that I stay here and hunt with you,” he said; and although Hwll did not trust him, he had to acknowledge the sense of this arrangement.
    Two miles away, where the two western rivers met, Tep and his family set up their curious, ramshackle shelters by the river bank.
    In this way, the two families came to occupy Sarum, hunting the high ground and the valleys where game was abundant. Never again did Hwll have to face starvation as he had in the tundra, and although his journey south had been cut off, he had found his warm lands.
     
    So began a new community of hunters at the place where the rivers met. They were not entirely alone, however. Seven miles to the east two other families had a similar camp on a wooded slope above a stream; and beside a marsh ten miles to the west along the river where Tep had built his huts, a friendly group of three families had settled in marsh huts, raised above the water on long poles for protection. To the north, however, as far as Hwll could discover, the plateau was empty.
    In Britain at that time, this was still a dense population, for the entire island probably contained less than five thousand souls.
    Sarum proved to be a place of many wonders. The two families could find enough food in the nearby valleys all year round without needing to move their camps. There were abundant roe deer; there were wild horse, elk, and sometimes bison and reindeer on the cooler plateau above. Once or twice, a brown bear with its clumsy gait even appeared; and while there were wolves in the forests too, they usually avoided the humans if they could. On the river there were swans, and at the harbour storks, pelicans and herons, though the last were not good to eat; there were many birds, including the tasty grey partridge and delicate lapwing. There were beavers, foxes, badgers; and sometimes all the families in the area came together to hunt the dangerous wild boar, with his villainous flashing tusks and his delicious meat. On the slopes Akun could find juniper, blackthorn and hawthorn berries; in the rivers Tep caught trout, salmon, pike, perch, grayling and eels. The hunters had a varied diet.
    Many animals however were as yet missing from the scene: there were of course no house mice, although field mice could be found in the woods. There were no rats; there were no sheep, no domestic pigs or cattle, no pheasant and, though hares existed, there were no rabbits, nor would there be until the Normans introduced them six and a half thousand years later.
    There was timber of many kinds: oak, ash, elder, pine; there was clay; and embedded in the chalk everywhere were deposits of flint useful for making arrowheads. In one place in particular, on the high ground a few miles to the east of the valley, there was a hollow in the ground which led to a small, natural open flint mine; and when he and Tep dug down a few feet, they found wonderful stone that they could easily quarry.
    He and Akun did not entirely abandon the way of life they had known in the open tundra. Neither of them cared for the stuffy hut in which Tep lived all the year round. In winter they cut a large square hole well into the hillside and faced its entrance with brushwood and reeds, to keep in the heat; but when spring came, they erected their tent on the warm slopes overlooking the valley, and raised the flaps so that the breeze could ventilate their home with the sweet smell of spring leaves and summer grasses.
    The winters were still long and hard, and the east wind could whip up a blizzard on the high ground quite as terrible as any they had known in the north; but when spring came, it was a warm, tumultuous affair unlike the meagre season they had known before: the