wrestling was popular, as was reindeer riding, climbing, and swimming.
Among them were a few who grew up with a deep inner distance from the others, and they spent most of their time alone, fashioning drums and flutes from wood and hides, giving the others music. Some made strange shapes out of clay and gave the others images to ponder. Some appeared periodically to tell long stories in hypnotically rhythmic language, speaking of things no one had ever experienced but which sounded mysteriously familiar.
When the spirit moved the guide, he or she would begin to dance, and then a feast would take place, the people making a fire and brewing tea from a grass that grew on the far side of the mountain that overshadowed their land, a drink with magic powers of intoxication. Sometimes the celebration would last for days, until the entire population had been so perfectly unified in a vortex of energy by the sacred dance and the sheer power of their massive gathering, that the field they moved in became the scene of a single orgiastic organism, pulsing in ponderous and quickening tempo.
Generally, however, they spent their time contemplating the wonder of creation.
The guide possessed one idiosyncrasy as a mark of office; he or she ate nothing but sperm. In fact, to the degree that the people had a formal culture at all, it centered around providing the guide with enough to eat. Since sperm is a perfect food, the guide needed nothing else. And since the people lived a rarified existence, eating only the purest foods, drinking only the most vital water, breathing only the sharpest air, and since they were exposed to nothing but peaceful manifestations of the life energy, they were as sensitive as flowers in their capacity to take nourishment directly from the sun. It is not surprising that the guide's daily intake was relatively small, usually amounting to no more than the combined volume of seventeen ejaculations.
Over the span of history, of course, different guides developed individual feeding habits. The conventional method was for male guides to use the cunts of young maidens as cups, having the day's male volunteers mount the female volunteers and make love lustily until orgasm, at which point the guide would put his mouth to a succession of still hot trembling vaginas and suck the sticky deposit from the freshly fucked lips. Most of the female guides took their sperm straight, lying languidly on a couch while the day's complement masturbated over her and at the moment of climax putting the spurting cocks into her waiting mouth. There were what the people called "interesting" guides, men who sucked the sperm directly from cocks, and women who preferred using cunts as a vehicle.
Occasionally there would be a guide who developed more esoteric tastes and might request a daily dollop of yak sperm. One guide took a fancy to tiger sperm, and since the people were so gentle they could approach the fiercest beasts and coax the vital fluid from them, the wish was able to be granted. That particular guide was legendary for his sexual prowess, for after half a cup of tiger sperm he was able to fuck twenty women to satiation without stopping once. Another guide, a woman, ate only hummingbird sperm, and before she died had become totally transparent.
It never occurred to anyone at any time that things should be different. They were the only people in the history of the species who did not let the acquisition of language rob them of their primal simplicity, and so they attained true human dignity. Possessing wisdom, they had little use for knowledge; living in a state of tranquil bliss, they had no inclination to intensity of purpose. They watched the universe in its constant infinite turnings and workings, understanding that they were blessed just to be alive and know the wonder of it all. In touch with the primordial realities of the cosmos, they were beyond the superficialities of civilization.
It is conjectured that they were the