The Hunter Returns Read online

  The flint-edged point snicked into the beast’s neck and came out its back. The cat reared straight up, clawing at the spear shaft, then fell on its side. For a moment its paw twitched feebly, then it was still.

  As Hawk walked slowly up to his fallen quarry, he understood why it had rushed at him in such an insane fashion. In the recent past, the cat had foolishly tackled a porcupine, and had become half-crazed from the pain of the quills. There were so many of the needle-sharp barbs in its cheeks and face that the tawny gray fur was almost hidden beneath them. The cat had evidently tried to bite the porcupine, and had succeeded only in filling its mouth and tongue with quills. Hawk looked at the little spears with respect.

  He knew the porcupines, some of which were almost as big as dire wolves. They were stupid things that knew only how to gnaw bark, and to eat grass and roots. But of all the creatures in this savage land, porcupines were the only ones equipped to survive without fighting. Any beast that attacked those bristling arrays of small spears did so to its own sorrow and frequently its own death.

  Hawk pulled his spear out of the wild cat and shouldered the carcass. It was meat, and therefore to be saved. But it had also given him an idea. A human could not carry and handle more than two or three full-sized spears, but what if, like the porcupine, he were armed with many small ones?

  When Hawk returned, Willow was turning the bird over the fire on a long spit. The puppies crowded over to frolic about him, and he pushed them aside, his nostrils twitching from the savory smell of the cooking fowl.

  Hawk tore hungrily at his portion, and looked appreciatively at the girl. Meat prepared this way was delicious, much better than that which was just hung over the fire on a green stick. Usually the outside of that was burned and the inside raw. The bird was cooked to a flaky turn all through. Hawk wiped his hands on his fur girdle, threw the bones to the puppies, and let them scramble for them. His stomach filled with hot food, Hawk sighed happily.

  “I never had such food before,” he said. “It is good.”

  Her own portion finished, Willow sat cross-legged beside the fire, weaving a basket from limber willow shoots she had gathered. Hawk watched her idly. The art of basket-making had long been known to the women of his tribe. When they gathered a store of food, they used woven baskets in which to keep it. But the baskets were never kept for very long. On a long march nobody wanted to carry extra or unnecessary weight. Only on those rare occasions when the tribe stayed somewhere for an extended period did baskets appear.

  Hawk looked up quickly, distracted by a rustling sound. But it was only the skin of the bird they had eaten. Pending some possible future use, Willow had hung it on a limb and he had heard the feathers rustling. Returning to his problem of more weapons, Hawk went to the dead cat, pulled a quill from its cheek, and looked at it.

  Although he had tried many times, he had never been able to make any practical use of the little barbs. The quills served their original owners well enough, but they were too thin and flexible even to think of tipping a hand spear with them. But he might make a small spear and see how it worked.

  Hawk emptied his pouch of flint spear heads and studied them intently. All had been fashioned for heavy spears. Attached to a shaft smaller than that for which they had been designed, they would make it unwieldy and top-heavy. Nor could they be reshaped without spoiling them. He put all the spear heads back into his pouch.

  Unmindful of the gray puppy that tagged at his heels, he rose and walked to an outcropping of stone on the side of the hill. He pried among the tumbled pieces of flint that had broken off, examining every piece with painstaking thoroughness, rejecting most of them. He was not concerned with size, but rather with flaws, conformation, and the way any given piece might be expected to flake. Finally, after an hour’s search, he returned to the fire with half a dozen rough pieces of flint.

  Now it was necessary to haul more wood for the night’s fire. Grudgingly, reluctant to leave his task, he rose and went into the forest. While he made trip after trip, Willow sat quietly, shaping her basket. When it was finished, she lined the bottom with grass, then put in a large quantity of seeds she had gathered. As Hawk brought in his last load of wood, she began cooking more meat.

  Holding a long piece of flint in his right hand, Hawk pried a flake from one of the pieces he had selected. Carefully, making no sudden moves that might injure the small head, he pried another flake off. Ordinarily it took only a few minutes to make a good spear head, but these, being smaller, must be made with great care. The spear-maker continued to shape the head he had planned, using pressure to remove one tiny flake at a time.

  When he was finished he looked critically at the point in his hand. It was very good, better than most of the spear heads in his pouch, but he thought he could make a still better one. By the fire’s light he crouched down again and went to work. Willow had been sleeping for hours when he finally thrust the last half-finished head into his pouch.

  With morning he resumed his task, so absorbed in it that he forgot all else, except to eat what Willow gave him. Finally he balanced half a dozen flint heads in his hand. Again and again he inspected them minutely, looking at each for flaws. He could find none. He went into the forest and returned with an armful of hardwood shoots.

  He knew what he had in mind, but he was somewhat at a loss as to how to accomplish it. The darts must be lighter and shorter than spears, but they must be long enough so that he could rest them in the throwing-stick and still balance them. With a sharp piece of flint he scraped a stick until it was perfectly smooth. Working with painstaking precision he smoothed off all the uneven edges, so that the stick balanced perfectly. He made another, and another.

  It was noon of the following day before he had finished his task. He had half a dozen darts, better fashioned and balanced than any hand spears he had ever made. All six of them did not weigh as much as two spears, nor would they be any harder to carry. With mounting excitement he fitted one into his throwing-stick, getting the feel of it in countless practice casts before he finally threw.

  A grunt of disappointment escaped him. Lacking the weight of a spear, the dart wobbled in flight and fell three feet to one side of the tuft of grass at which he had aimed. Nor could he get as much distance with the lighter weapon. He tried again and again, and failed each time to strike the tuft of grass. Hawk sat before the fire, chin in his hands. There must be some way to make the darts fly straight, but what was it? A shadow fell across him and he looked up.

  Willow stood beside him, offering him baked cakes on a flat piece of stone. Hawk glared at her.

  “Where is the meat?”

  “There is no more. You have not been hunting.”

  Without answering Hawk reached out to grasp the dun-colored puppy by the scruff of its neck.

  He lifted it with one hand, and reached for his club. This was why he had brought the puppies; now let them serve as food. He raised his club.

  Willow moved so swiftly that she was in and out before the heavy club could descend. She snatched the puppy from his hands, and stepped backward. Hawk stared, too startled to move. A woman had defied him! As he got to his feet with a growl of rage, she swung away from him, shielding the puppy.

  “Do not kill it! We have food!”

  Hawk took a threatening forward step. Willow stood her ground for a moment, then turned and ran. The gray puppy raced at her heels. Furious, Hawk ran after them, club in hand.

  Willow ran across the clearing to the border of the woods. At the base of a huge, lichen-encrusted boulder, she stumbled and went to one knee. Quickly she rose, turning to face the enraged Hawk. Her eyes widened in fear, but not of the man. She was staring over his shoulder.

  Turning, Hawk saw the hunting saber-tooth between them and the safety of their fire.

  HORSES AND CAMELS

  Wolf chewed determinedly at the root and berry mush which was all the tribe had to eat this morning. He tried to pretend that he didn’t notice the bitter taste. Except
for the bitterness, the coarse porridge had no flavor at all.

  Elm swore that she had appeased the spirits of the plant by scraping the roots, putting them in a wicker basket, and soaking them for two days in a running stream. Finally she boiled the mass to a gelatinous solid by pouring it into a pit in the ground and dropping in stones heated by the fire.

  Wolf was confident that Elm knew what she was doing and that she had performed the rites correctly. The plant spirits would not grip the Chief Hunter’s belly with cramps and nausea, perhaps even with death, as could happen if the medicine woman made a mistake.

  But the porridge tasted terrible, simply terrible. Wolf thought that for flavor and texture—each mouthful felt as if it were made of the skin that formed on tar after it oozed from the ground—he would rather chew the willow splits from which Elm had woven the soaking baskets.

  Elm walked over and stood in front of Wolf. “Well, Chief Hunter,” the old woman said. “How do you like your breakfast?”

  Wolf dipped the index and middle fingers of his right hand into the porridge pit again and lifted another load of the glop to his mouth. “Thank you for making the food, Elm,” he said formally. There were a few dried blueberries in the porridge, but they did nothing to flavor the horrible stuff.

  “We have nothing else to eat,” Elm continued, as if it were news to the Chief Hunter. She spoke in a loud voice so that the whole tribe could hear her. “In the old days we ate bison, but it is many days since we have had any kind of meat to cook.”

  “We will have meat again soon,” Wolf said, trying to keep his temper. Under other circumstances, he would have knocked the old woman down to silence her. The Chief Hunter knew that now Elm was only saying what all the members of the tribe were thinking. If he struck her . . . well, Wolf was Chief Hunter, but there were many in the tribe. They might all turn against him at once.

  He wondered if the medicine woman had deliberately made the porridge taste worse than it needed to. Probably not. Elm was eating the horrible stuff herself, after all.

  “When will we have meat again, Chief Hunter?” the old woman demanded with her hands on her hips.

  “A moon-phase ago we had mammoth,” muttered one of the hunters. “I don’t want to go through that again.”

  Wolf licked the porridge off his fingers. He grimaced at the taste despite his attempt to keep his face calm. He knew he had to change the subject quickly or he was going to lose his position as Chief Hunter. The tribe might even cast him out, as they had done to Hawk.

  Deep in his heart, Wolf wondered if perhaps he really was the cause of the tribe’s misfortune. He performed the hunting rites with particular care each night, drawing in the ground the shape of the animal they would hunt and setting an actual part of the beast—a horn, a swatch of hide, a hoof—in the outline.

  When he had created the outline, Wolf led all the hunters in bowing to the spirit of the animal and promising honor to the spirit if it would lend the strength of its children to the tribe. Then the men danced and thrust their spears into the dusty drawing, chanting praise of the spirit of the beast while the women watched in respectful silence.

  Wolf performed the hunting rites just as his father and other hunters of the former generation had taught him. He followed tradition perfectly—but the spirits did not bring game to the tribe. Was there some rite that he had forgotten? Had Wolf somehow, during an earlier hunt, offended the spirits so that they would not permit the tribe to have success in hunting so long as Wolf was the Chief Hunter?

  Wolf thought of exile, of being thrust out of the circle of the tribe to starve alone or be devoured with no one to chant his name on the nights of remembrance when the moon was dark. He shuddered and said loudly, “Boartooth! Do all the hunters have spears now?”

  Boartooth got to his feet quickly. He knew as well as Wolf did that the Chief Hunter was trying to focus the tribe’s anger on somebody else. The young man held the shaft to which he had just bound one of his own chert spearblades.

  “Heron, this is yours,” he said loudly, holding out the spear. The shaft had an obvious crook in it. “Now all the hunters in the tribe have spears.”

  Heron reached out from the reflex of a man to take something that is handed to him. When he had time to look at the spear, he jumped back quickly.

  “What is this?” Heron demanded angrily. “You have not tested the spear by bird flight! I will not accept it.”

  “I performed the rites in the forest yesterday when I was alone,” Boartooth said in a haughty voice. “The birds flew straight.”

  “I will not accept this spear!” Heron repeated. “Look at it! The shaft hasn’t been smoothed down like it should be. It isn’t even straight! I want a proper spear, not this.”

  “Hawk’s shafts were smooth, but his spears would not strike hard,” Boartooth said. “I do not make my spears the way Hawk made his.” His tone had changed. He was wheedling with Heron now, instead of trying to shout down the other hunter.

  “I won’t take it!” Heron shouted angrily.

  “Heron is a woman,” sneered Boartooth. “He doesn’t think he needs a spear.”

  Heron grabbed for the spear-maker’s throat with both hands. Boartooth tried to fend him off with the crossed spearshaft. All the hunters jumped to their feet, shouting.

  Wolf saw that he’d let matters go as far as they safely could. He stepped between the angry men, placed one hand on the chest of each, and pushed them apart. “Enough!” he shouted.

  Boartooth gestured as though he were threatening Heron with the chert-bladed spear. The Chief Hunter slapped the weapon from Boartooth’s hands. Wolf was really angry now. “Enough!” he repeated, glaring at the younger man.

  All the men in the tribe had a club or a spear in their hands now. They relaxed when they saw that Wolf was fully in control of the situation.

  “I will not take that spear,” Heron said in a sullen voice.

  Wolf grunted noncommittally. He looked at the spear-maker. “Boartooth,” he said. “Do you still say this—” he pointed to the chert-bladed weapon which lay on the ground beside them “—is a good spear?”

  “It is a good spear, Chief Hunter,” Boartooth muttered. He would not meet Wolf’s eyes. “I performed the rites in the forest yesterday, just as I said.”

  “Very well,” said Wolf. “You will give Heron your own spear, Boartooth—the spear that Hawk made when he was with the tribe. You will keep the spear you just made yourself.”

  Boartooth looked up. “Yes,” he sneered. “I will have the better spear. Heron will beg me to make him a spear soon, and I will not.”

  “Enough,” the Chief Hunter repeated grimly. “It is time we were hunting. Now that we all have spears, we will bring in meat again.”

  He breathed a prayer to the spirits of the hunt that he was correct.

  Wolf crawled to the knoll where Flash, a hunter with a patch of white hair growing from a birthmark in his scalp, waited for him. The Chief Hunter moved so silently that even the little gray birds hopping and chirping from one tall grass stem to another were unaware of his presence until he was directly beneath them.

  The knoll was rocky and grew a crop of stunted beech trees. Flash lay on his belly. He braced his left hand on a tree trunk to raise his head enough to look out over the valley beyond. Even he was startled when Wolf appeared beside him.

  “What do you think, Wolf?” he whispered. “Camel hump’s the best eating there is, some say. And even horse isn’t too bad for a hungry man.”

  The Chief Hunter looked at what his scout had found. He said nothing for a long minute.

  In the rolling valley beyond was a mixed herd of camels and horses, about a hundred animals all together. The horses had keen directional hearing, but the long-necked camels could see farther across the plain when they raised their heads. The combined herd was therefore safer than either horses or camels would have been separately.

  The grass was about waist high. Although the beasts traveled together,
they did not eat grass at the same stage of growth. The horses cropped the fresh shoots growing close to the ground, while the camels took mouthfuls of the coarser dry blades which their huge stomachs and cud-chewing broke down over a long period.

  “We could drive them,” Flash muttered. “The grass is plenty dry enough.”

  Wolf squinted to the south. He couldn’t see the other end of the valley. “It won’t do us any good to drive them,” he said, “because there’s nothing to drive them against. The herd can run for the next moon-phase without coming to a drop-off or even a marsh.”

  “Camel hump sure is good meat,” Flash said wistfully. His stomach rumbled unhappily on its latest meal of bitter porridge.

  Wolf tested the wind with the tufts of fine hair on the peaks of his ears. There was a slight, fitful breeze here on the knoll. It was scarcely noticeable. Further down the valley, the air would be almost perfectly still. It was just possible . . .

  “We will not drive the herd,” the Chief Hunter said decisively. “We will stalk them. Only the adult hunters will join the hunt. The boys are not experienced enough yet, and they might startle the animals before it is time.”

  “Can we do this, Wolf?” Flash asked, frowning. He was used to driving herds by the use of fire. He had expected that somehow the Chief Hunter would show him a way to kill meat under the present circumstances by using traditional methods.

  “We will be very close to the herd before they notice us,” Wolf said. He knew that in grass of this height, he could get within twenty feet of even a skittish horse. He had ho hope that the other men of his tribe could do almost as well. “We will approach from all sides—there is no wind to carry our scent.”

  There was almost no wind to carry the hunters’ scent.

  “When the herd finally runs in panic, we will be all around them,” the Chief Hunter concluded. “We will spear at least one of the animals. Perhaps we will spear many and eat until it spoils.”