Mammoth Boy Read Online Free PDF

resting place on the way to the tribal camp of his people? It looked more permanent than the camp they had stopped at earlier yet he could not fathom why there were no hints of anyone else using the place. Why there were no signs of hunting parties coming and going? He would wait to ask.
    “You want eat, Urrell?”
    Agaratz was ferreting among things in a recess as he spoke.
    Urrell recognised another fire-log, tinder and a hardened fire-stick. The stick twirled with a deftness that entranced the boy, the tinder soon smouldered, was blown alight and twigs added to start a fire in a hearth Urrell now discerned against a wall. He glimpsed the sly grin on the long face lit by the first flames.
    “You make fire next time, Urrell.”
    In his home clan, an old woman kept the fire alight, her role to carry the fire-log with its embers on the long trek to the upland hunting grounds in spring and back down in the autumn when the snows drove the clan to the lowlands and the sea shore. Woe betide the fire-keeper who let the embers die. Re-kindling was not easy. Urrell knew it was done, but never had any of his tribe conjured up fire so magically, so effortlessly, as Agaratz had before his dazzled eyes.
    He was to be shown how. His breast swelled with pride. “Tomorrow I make fire, Agaratz?”
    “Yes, now I cook.” Agaratz pulled out bundles of bone-dry twigs from a pile and built up an almost smokeless fire against the wall. Urrell’s people used a hearth away from the wall, always the same.
    In the firelight Urrell made out side entrances and recesses, as well as piles and bundles around their sides. Yet more bundles hung from pegs and from frames made of boughs. There was a permanence about the arrangements. Agaratz must live here much of the time. But where were his kin?
    Urrell saw too, from the blackened wall, that this was the regular hearth – though not in the propitious mid-rear of the shelter. Another puzzle. Old Mother would have known the answer, keeper of the flame in the true spot the spirits knew.
    Tomorrow he would learn to make fire; Urrell the fire-maker-to-be.
    Agaratz was fanning the blaze with a leafy branch, dispersing the little smoke the fire made. He was crouched in profile, lit by the flames, the club foot, almost cloven, was turned towards Urrell, with its hairy shin.
    “You eat perretxiko? ”
    “Perretxiko?”
    “Like… like mushroom.”
    Urrell knew some funguses could be eaten, some not. At certain times, the women gathered them when they went berrying, if game was scarce or the men’s hunting had failed. It was not men’s fare; hunters spurned funguses unless driven by extreme hunger. He had learnt from the women which kinds to nibble by following them when he was small and ousted from the camp with stones and cuffs, the lot of orphaned boys everywhere.
    “You eat fungus?” Urrell’s voice must have conveyed boyish disbelief.
    “I eat. They mamu food.”
    “ Mamu?”
    “Give strength. Give…” he sought a word in Urrell’s language… “give power.”
    Urrell knew hunters sought hunting powers, held secret rituals that women and boys must not witness, on pain of spearing. Some foods, some signs, weakened power, deflected weapons from their mark. No hunter touched fish, from the water world, because of this. Some foods women might eat, but not men; some men alone might eat. That lore he knew.
    “If it is power food, am I allowed to eat it?”
    “You eat. I let you.”
    The finality of this empowering statement comforted Urrell.
    An idea occurred to the boy. “Agaratz, may you eat fishes?”
    “Fishes, yes.”
    “For my people fish is… like spirit food. Hunters never eat fishes.”
    Somehow he felt he had impressed his protector. The golden eyes rested on him, with a stare devoid of the sly grin, empty of malice or of friendliness, looking beyond him. Urrell crouched still, caught in the stare, a small creature paralysed by a greater. Had he crossed an unseen line, transgressed,