Her awareness intensified when she lost one of her remaining teeth, and then one evening as she wandered westward with her family, she came upon a sight that confused her weak eyes. On the banks of the river she had been following stood a structure like none she had ever seen before. It was like a bird's nest on the ground, but hugely bigger. From it came animals who walked on only two legs; they were like water birds that prowled the shore, but much larger, and now one of them, seeing the mammoths, began to make noises. Others poured from the immense nest, and she could see that her presence was causing great excitement, for they made unfamiliar sounds.
Then some of the creatures, much smaller than herself or even the youngest of her grandchildren, began running toward her, and the speed with which they moved alerted her to the fact that she and her herd were about to face some kind of new danger.
Instinctively she began to edge away, then to move rapidly, and finally to trumpet wildly as she started running.
But very quickly she found that she was not free to move as she wished, for no matter where she tried to go with her charges, one of the creatures appeared in the shadows to prevent her from escaping. And when day dawned, confusion intensified, for wherever Matriarch sought to take her family, these beings kept pace, persistently, like wolves tracking a wounded caribou. They would not stop, and when that first night fell they added to the terror by causing a fire to spring from the tundra, and this created panic among the mammoths, for they expected the dried grass of the previous summer to burst into uncontrollable flame, but this did not happen. Matriarch, looking at her children in perplexity, was not able to form the idea: They have fire but it is not fire, but she felt the bewilderment that such an idea would have evoked.
On the next day the strange new things continued to pursue Matriarch and her mammoths, and when the animals were exhausted, the newcomers finally isolated Matriarch's youngest granddaughter. Once the young animal was cut off, the pursuers closed in upon her, carrying in their front legs, the ones they did not use for walking, branches of trees with stones attached, and with these they began to beat the encircled mammoth and stab at her and torment her until she bellowed for help.
Matriarch, who had outrun her children, heard the cry and doubled back, but when she tried to aid her granddaughter, some of these creatures detached themselves from the larger group and beat her about the head with their branches until she had to withdraw. But now the cries of her granddaughter became so pitiful that Matriarch trembled with rage, and with a mighty bellow, dashed right through the attackers, and without stopping, lumbered to where the threatened mammoth was striving to defend herself. With a great roar, Matriarch flung herself upon the creatures, lashing at them with her broken tusk and driving them back.
Triumphant, she was about to lead her frightened granddaughter to safety when one of the strange beings shouted the sound 'Varnak!' and another, a little taller than the others and heavier, leaped toward the threatened mammoth, allowed himself to fall beneath her dangerous feet, and with an upward stab of whatever he was carrying, drove a sharp weapon deep into her bowels.
Matriarch saw that her granddaughter was not fatally wounded, but as the mammoths thundered off, seeking respite from their tormentors, it was obvious that the young one was not going to be able to keep up. So the herd slowed, and Matriarch assisted her granddaughter, and in this way the huge beasts made their escape.
But to their dismay, the little figures on two legs kept pace, coming closer and closer, and on the third day, at an unguarded moment when Matriarch was directing the others to safety, the creatures surrounded the wounded granddaughter. Intending to crush these intruders once and for all, Matriarch started back to defend her grandchild, but as she strove to reach the attackers and punish them with her broken tusk, as she had done with the saber-tooth, one of them, armed only with a long piece of wood and a short one with fire at one end, stepped boldly out from among the trees and drove her back. The long piece of wood she could resist even though it had sharp stones on the end, but the fire, thrust right into her face, she could not. Try as she might, she could not avoid that burning ember. Impotently she had to stand back, smoke and fire in her eyes, as her granddaughter was slain.
With loud shouts, much like the triumphant howling of wolves when they finally brought down their wounded prey, the creatures danced and leaped about the fallen mammoth and began to cut her up.
From a distance that night, Matriarch and her remaining children saw once again the fire that mysteriously flamed without engulfing the steppe, and in this confusing, tragic way the mammoths who had for so long been safe within their ice castle encountered man.
III - PEOPLE OF THE NORTH
Some twenty-nine thousand years B.P.E. Before the Present Era, which means before the reference year A.D. 1950, when carbon dating became established as a reliable system for dating prehistoric events in that eastern projection of Asia which would later be known as Siberia, famine was rampant, and it struck nowhere with more ferocity than in a mud hut that faced the sunrise. There, in one big room excavated a few feet below the level of the surrounding earth, a family of five faced the coming winter with only a small store of food and little hope of finding more.
Their house provided no comfort except a slight protection from the howling winds of winter, which blew almost constantly through the half of the structure which rose above ground and was formed of loosely woven branches plastered with mud. This hovel was no more than a cave-hut, but it did provide one essential: in the middle of the floor there was a place for fire, and here half-wet logs gave off the smoke which lent flavor to what they ate and endless irritation to their eyes.
The five people huddling in this miserable abode as autumn ended were headed by a resolute man named Varnak, one of the ablest hunters in the village of Nurik, who had as wife the woman Tevuk, twenty-four years old and the mother of two sons who would soon be able to join their father in his chase for animals whose meat would feed the family. But this year animals had grown so scarce that in some cave-huts the younger people were beginning to whisper 'Perhaps there will be food only for the young ones, and it will be time for the old ones to go.'
Varnak and Tevuk would hear none of this, for although they had a very old woman to care for, she was so precious to them that they would starve themselves rather than deprive her She was known as the Ancient One, Varnak's mother, and he was determined to help her live out her life because she was the wisest person in the village, the only one who could remind the young of their heroic heritage 'Others say "Let the old ones die,"' he whispered to his wife one night, 'but I have no mind to do so '
'Nor I,' Tevuk replied, and since she had no mother or aunts of her own, she knew that what her husband was saying applied only to his own mother, but she was prepared to stand by this resolute old woman for as long as life remained This would be difficult, for the Ancient One was not easy to placate and the burden of tending her would fall almost solely on Tevuk, but the bond of debt between the two women was great and indissoluble When Varnak had been a young man, searching about for a wife, he fastened his attention upon a young woman of rare attractiveness, one who was courted by various men, but his mother, a woman who had lost her husband early in a hunting accident while chasing the woolly mammoth, saw clearly that her son would come to harm if he tied himself to that woman, and she launched a campaign to make him appreciate how much better his life would be if he allied himself with Tevuk, a somewhat older woman of common sense and unusual capacity for work Varnak, captivated by the younger, had resisted his mother's counsel and was about to take the seductive one, when the Ancient One barred the exit from their hut and would not allow her son to leave for three days until she was assured that some other man had captured the enchantress 'She weaves a spell, Varnak I saw her gathering moss and searching for antlers to pulverize I'm protecting you from her '
He was disconsolate at losing the wonderful one,, and it was some time before he was prepared to listen t
o his mother, but when his anger subsided he was able to look at Tevuk with clear eyes and he saw that his mother was right Tevuk was going to be as helpful when an old woman of forty as she was now 'She's the kind who grows stronger with the seasons, Varnak Like me ' And Varnak had discovered this to be true Now, in this difficult time when there was almost no food in the cave-hut, Varnak became doubly appreciative of his two good women, for his wife searched the land for the merest scrap for their two sons, while his mother gathered not only her grandsons but also the other children of the village to take their minds off hunger by telling them of the heroic traditions of their tribe: 'In the long ago our people lived in the south where there were many trees and animals of all kinds to eat. Do you know what south means?'
'No.' And in freezing darkness as winter clamped down she told them: 'It's warm, my grandmother told me. And it has no endless winter.'
'Why did those people come to this land?'
This was a problem which had always perplexed the Ancient One, and she dealt with it according to her vague understandings: 'There are strong people and weak. My son Varnak is very strong, you know that. And so is Toorak, the man who killed the great bison. But when our people lived in the south, they were not strong, and others drove us out of those good lands. And when we moved north to lands not so good, they drove us out of there, too. One summer we came here, and it was beautiful, and everyone danced, my grandmother said. But then what happened?'
She asked this of a girl eleven seasons old, who said: 'Then winter came,' and the old one said: 'Yes, winter came.'
She was surprisingly correct in her summary of the clan's history, and of mankind's.
Human life had originated in hot, steaming climates where it was easy to survive, but as soon as sufficient people were assembled to make competition for living space inevitable say after a million years the abler groups started to edge northward toward the more temperate zone, and in this more equable climate they began to invent those agencies of control, such as seasonal agriculture and the husbandry of animals, which would make superior forms of civilization possible.
And then once more, in the time of the Ancient One's great-great-great-grandmother, or even further back, competition for favorable sites recurred, but now it was the less able who were forced to move on, leaving the most fit to hold on to the temperate zones. This meant that in the Northern Hemisphere the subarctic areas began to be filled with people who had been evicted from the more congenial climates. Always the pressure came from the warmer lands to the south, and always it ended with people along the edges being forced to live on cold and arid lands which could barely support them.
But there was another interpretation of this movement to the north, and the Ancient One related it proudly to her children: 'There were brave men and women who loved cold lands and the hunt for mammoths and caribou. They liked the endless days of summer and were not afraid of winter nights like this.' Looking at each of her listeners, she tried to instill in them a pride in their ancestors: 'My son is a brave man like that and so is Toorak, who killed the bison, and so must you be when you grow up and go out to fight the mammoths.'
The old woman was right about many of the men who came north. They thrilled to their contests with whale and walrus. They were eager to do battle with the white polar bear and the woolly mammoth. They fought the seal for his fur so that they might survive the arctic winters, and they mastered the secrets of ice and snow and sudden blizzards. They devised ways of combating the ferocious mosquitoes that attacked in sun-darkening hordes each spring, and they taught their sons how to track animals for fur and food so that life could continue after they were dead. 'These are the true people of the north,' the old woman said, and she might have added that a hardier breed never existed on this earth.
'I want you to be like them,' she concluded, and one of the girls began to whimper:
'I'm hungry,' and the Ancient One took from the sealskin tunic she wore in winter a piece of dried seal blubber and apportioned it among the children, retaining none for herself.
One day at the turning of the seasons, when there was practically no daylight in the village, the old woman almost lost courage, for one of the children who had gathered in the dark hut to hear her tales asked: 'Why don't we go back to the south, where there's food?' and in honesty she had to reply: 'The old people often asked that question, and sometimes they pretended to themselves and said: "Yes, next year we will go back," but they never meant it. We cannot go back. You cannot go back. You are now people of the north.'
She never considered her life in the north a penalty, nor would she allow her son or her grandchildren to think of it in that way, but as the hellish days of winter closed down when days lengthened but cold increased and ice grew thicker she would wait till the children were asleep, and then whisper to her hungry son and his wife:
'Another winter like this and we will all die,' for even now they existed by chewing sealskin, which provided them little energy.
'Where will we go?' her son asked, and she said: 'My father spent four days chasing a mammoth once. It led him east across the barren lands, and over there he saw fields of green.'
'Why not go south?' Tevuk asked, and the old woman told her daughter-in-law: 'The south never had a place for us. I'm finished with the south.'
So in those tantalizing days of early spring when winter refused to stop tormenting these people at the western end of the land bridge, the fine hunter Varnak, seeing his family slowly dying of hunger, began asking about the land to the east, and he came upon a very old man who told him: 'One morning when I was young and with nothing better to do, I wandered eastward, and when night came with the sun still high in the heavens, for it was summer, I felt no need to return home, so on and on I went for two more days, and on the third day I saw something which excited me.'
'What?' Varnak asked, and the old man said, eyes a glimmer as if the incident had occurred three days ago: 'The body of a dead mammoth.' He allowed Varnak time to fathom the significance of this revelation, and when nothing was said, he explained:
'If a mammoth saw reason to cross that bleak land, men would have a reason too,' to which Varnak said: 'Yes, but you said the mammoth died,' and the man laughed:
'True, but there was a reason for him to try. And you have just as good a reason.
For if you remain here, you will starve.'
'If I go, will you go with me?' and the man said: 'I am too old. But you ..."And that day Varnak informed the four members of his family: 'When summer comes we shall go where the sun rises.'
The route he would take had been available for the past two thousand years, and although some had used the bridge, they had not found it inviting. Across its six-hundred-mile width north to south harsh winds blew so constantly that no trees or even low shrubs had been able to establish themselves, while grasses and mosses were so sparse that big animals could not find forage. In winter the cold was so forbidding that even hares and rats stayed underground, and few men ventured upon the bridge, even in summer. Settled life upon it was unthinkable.
But it was by no means unpassable, since from west to east, the direction in which Varnak's people would be traveling if they attempted the crossing, the distance would be no more than sixty miles. Varnak, of course, did not know this; it could have been eight hundred miles, but all that he had heard of attempts to cross it led him to believe that it was shorter. 'We'll leave when day and night are even,' he informed his mother, and she approved of the plan so heartily that she spread the news throughout the village.
When it was known that Varnak was going to try to find food to the east, there was excited discussion in the cave-huts and several of the men concluded that they would be wise to accompany him. So as spring progressed, four or five families began to weigh seriously the possibility of emigrating, and in the end three came to Varnak with the firm promise: 'We'll go too.'
On that day in March which Varnak had selected, the one when day and night were equal in al
l parts of the earth Varnak, Tevuk, their two sons and the Ancient One prepares to set forth, accompanied by three other hunters, their wives and their eight children.
When the nineteen gathered at the eastern edge of their village, they were formidable in appearance, since the men wore such massive pieces of fur clothing that they looked like hulking animals. They carried long pikes as if going to war and their rumpled black hair drooped low above their eyes Their skin was a dark yellow and their eyes a sparkling black so that when they stared this way and that, as they often did they seemed as predacious as eagles.
The five women had different styles of dress, featuring decorated skins with seashells along the hems, but their faces were surprisingly alike. Each was heavily tattooed with vertical blue stripes, some covering the chin, others running the length of the face beside the ears, which were pierced for rings carved from white ivory. When they moved, even the old woman, they did so with determined steps, and as the four sleds on which each family's goods would be carried were brought into position, it was these women who grasped the reins and prepared to do the hauling.
The ten children were like a collection of colorful flowers for the clothes they wore were varied in design and color Some wore short tunics with stripes of white and blue, others long robes and heavy boots, but all wore in their hair some ornament, some flashing bit of shell or ivory.
Any item of clothing was precious, for men had risked their lives to harvest the hides and women had toiled tanning them and preparing sinews for sewing. A pair of men's trousers stitched so carefully that they kept out cold and water would be expected to last most of an adult lifetime, and only a few men on this peninsula would ever own two such garments.