Winter came, and the wolves howled closer and closer in the darkness, while Tribesmen and Half People alike kept the Wolf Guard over the lambing pens. Spring came, and Drustic ploughed the family corn plots with the two red plough oxen, followed by a wheeling, crying cloud of gulls, the shadows of wings mingling with the shadows of the drifting clouds along the shoulder of the downs. Seed-time came, and with all the other children of the Outland farms and the village away down the valley, Drem was busy all day long at the bird scaring. And so almost a year went by.
On an evening about the time of sheep shearing, Drem went down the valley towards the village and the house-place of Talore the Hunter, with a message from his mother for Wenna about a sitting of mallard eggs. He had been to Talore’s house-place more than once since that summer dawn in the forest. Talore had three sons, all grown men, even the youngest of them who had gained his scarlet last Beltane, but they were kind to Drem in an off-hand way, tossing him a word in passing as though tossing a scrap of meat to a well-intentioned puppy. Fat Wenna, the wife of the eldest son, who looked after the household, was kind to him too, when she was not too taken up with the stew or the wet girl-child squalling in the rushes. And there was always the hope that Talore would be there.
He was hoping that now, as he came dropping down from the Chalk at a steady wolf trot, with his throw-spear over his shoulder. It was a wild day, the wind driving a racing tumble of cloud low across the downs, and the stray gleams of sunshine scudding before the rain; and the long tongue of the woods that thrust up from the valley was roaring like a forge fire as he came down through the head of it with the rain in his face. Rain trailed across the crest of the Hill of Gathering, above the village, blurring the outline of the round grave-mound of the long forgotten warrior who slept there with his copper sword beside him; and the cluster of turf-roofed huts and house-places about the Chieftain’s steading seemed to huddle under the bluff hill shoulder with the head-down dejection of ponies sheltering under a bank. But ever after in Drem’s memory that was to be a shining day—one of the cluster of shining days that a man may hold in the hollow of one hand when he is old and looks back.
The steading of Talore the Hunter had fewer out-sheds than most, for though he and his sons farmed a little, their wealth was not in herds or corn-land but in dressed skins, and their own skill and cunning on the hunting trail, with spear and bow and dead-fall trap. Æsk, the eldest son, was squatting by the doorway now, cleaning a raw beaver skin with a bronze scraper, while a couple of great hounds beside him snapped up the scrapings; and when Drem had stopped to give him the day’s greeting, he said with a jerk of his head behind him, ‘Something fine to see in there.’
‘Is it the puppies—Fand’s puppies?’ Instantly Drem was alight with eagerness.
‘Maybe. Go in and look.’
More than two moons ago, when winter was quickening into spring, Talore had taken Fand, the wisest and most beautiful of his hounds, and rubbed her brindled hide with certain herbs to take away the Man smell, and tied her to an alder tree by the forest pool where the wolves came to drink. The hunters and shepherds did that sometimes, for a hound bitch mated with a wolf had fine cubs, and brought strong new blood into the dog pack. And in the morning there had been the pad marks of a he-wolf all about her, and the wolf smell on her hide, and they had known that presently there would be strong puppies born to Fand the Beautiful.
Drem swooped through the low doorway into a warm, smoky gloom laced with firelight, pitched his throw-spear in the direction of the place where it was the custom to stack weapons on entering a house, and not even noticing Wenna setting curd cakes to dry by the fire, made for the place against the wall, fenced off with hurdles and piled with russet fern, from which came small unmistakable squeaks and rustlings. Talore had shifted back one of the hurdles, and was squatting on one knee in the opening, giving little bits of meat to Fand, who half lay, half sat, her eyes luminous in the gloom, surrounded by small things that Drem could not really see in the crowding shadows, save as a wriggling and a squirming among the dried bracken fronds.
Talore turned on his knee and looked up at the boy with a swift, dark flash of shared pleasure that made nothing of the difference in years and status between them. ‘I heard your voice. See now, the cubs are come.’
Drem, who had checked his headlong arrival, squatted down beside the hunter, his own eyes very bright under his wild, rain-wet flame of hair.
Fand dropped her muzzle and sniffed at one of the tiny rat-like creatures against her flank, with a kind of proud bewilderment. She had had many litters in her time, but just at first she always seemed a little puzzled by the puppies.
‘Ah, my beautiful, that was bravely done!’ Talore said, with a leaping gentleness in his voice, as he gave her the last piece of meat, and turned his hand to caress the warm hollow under her chin.
There were five of the whelps, Drem could see now; blind, helpless, squirming, yet already thrusting among each other for first place against their mother’s flank and the chief share of the warm milk that meant life.
Talore slipped his hand under one of the puppies, and scooped it up. Fand licked his wrist as he did so, but when Drem tried to pick up one of the tiny creatures she rumbled warningly in her throat, the rumble rising to a sing-song snarl; and he drew his hand back empty, saying, ‘But you know me, I am Drem. Do you think that I would harm your cubs?’
Talore smiled, and the dog teeth showed white at the corners of his mouth. ‘In a little, ah, before their eyes open, she will let you take them even from under her. Now her temper is shaken and unsure; it is no more than that.’ He returned the puppy, and took up another, whose coat was brindled black and amber. ‘Aye, they are fine cubs. But this one, it is in my heart, will be the finest of the litter.’ And while Fand watched with only a faint warning growl, he set the puppy on Drem’s knee.
With strange things happening inside him, Drem slipped his hand under its small chest and sat it up, its fore paws dangling over his wrist. It was as rat-like as its brothers, its still damp hide soft as a mouse’s skin, its stomach pinkish and almost naked, palpitating with very new life against his palm. And on its breast and throat there shone already a blaze like a small silver flame. The creature whimpered, its soft muzzle thrusting and fumbling against Drem’s hand, seeking for the warm milk that it had lost. And Drem, looking down at it, saw it with the eyes of love, so that his whole heart went out to it, his whole soul caught up in longing. It was not just because it was a puppy, he had held many puppies before now, in his world that lived by its hounds and herd dogs; and of them all, it was to this one that his heart cried out, ‘Brother, we are for each other, you and I!’ This one, with the white flame on its breast.
Ah, but what was the use? If it had been a weakling, the outcast of the litter, maybe Talore would have given it to him instead of drowning it; but it would be the finest of them all, Talore had said so, and he could see the truth of that for himself. And there were always hunters throughout the Clan who would pay any price that Talore liked to ask for one of Fand’s puppies, for Fand’s puppies always had her wisdom and her beauty.
Now the puppy was nuzzling harder and more urgently under his hand. Talore said, ‘He is hungry. It is time that he goes back to his mother,’ and picked him up and set him again among his brothers, laughing as he thrust his way back to his mother’s flank.
‘Come,’ said Talore, rising. ‘Better that we leave her to herself now.’
So Drem got up, with one last, longing look at the tiny rat-like thing squirming among its litter brothers, and presently, quite forgetting to give Wenna the message about the sitting of mallard eggs, went his way, out into the gusty greyness of the evening, leaving his small fierce heart behind him.
In the days that followed, he seized on every excuse to go down to the village, until at last the time was almost come for the cubs to leave their mother. By that time Fand was growing tired of her family and had returned to her usual place at Talore
’s heels; and the low hurdles of their pen were the only thing that kept them from exploring all over the house-place at all times of the day and night and probably ending by being trodden on by Wenna or killed in a fit of exasperation by one of the other hunting dogs.
On a summer evening, a grey evening as the other had been, but full of the soft, regretful stillness of mizzle rain instead of the wet turmoil of wind, Drem, who for several days had not been able to escape from the work on the farm, met Talore on his way home from visiting his traps, and came trotting back among the hounds at his heels. And now, the hurdle shifted back, he was squatting on his heels in the fern, with the cubs all about him. The rain dripped from the eaves, and the flames fluttered under the pot in which Wenna was seething deer meat in milk; the wet girl-child chirrupped and bubbled to herself on a deer-skin beside the hearth, and the pupples squealed and whickered together. Fand pushed past Drem and snuffed among her cubs, thrusting them this way and that with her broad muzzle; but she no longer lay down among them, for her time for feeding them was gone, and she was tired of being nipped and crawled over.
They were twice the size that they had been when first he saw them; they had become woolly and venturesome and had long since ceased to look like rats. He looked up at Talore, who had come across the hut to join him, after hanging up his kill. ‘Does Fand not feed them any more?’
‘Nay, the time for that is over; they eat meal stirabout and meat now.’
Something seemed to twist in Drem’s stomach, and he put out his hand to the cub with the white throat, and bowled it on to its back, feeling the nip of its little sharp teeth in his thumb. ‘Ah—ee! Fierce wolf-dog! You would bite, would you?’ He rolled it from side to side while it squirmed with delight; and still playing with the puppy, so that he need not look up, he asked in a carefully levelled voice, ‘Then—their new masters will be taking them soon?’
‘Any day now,’ said Talore.
Drem swallowed. ‘You will—have chosen who they go to?’
‘Surely. The little red one I keep myself, and the mealy grey. This one, Belu from above the ford will trade me a length of cloth for—poor Wenna cannot clothe four men with her weaving—and this one goes to Gwythno of the Singing Spear.’
That left only the cub with the silver blaze, now muzzling into the hollow of Drem’s neck, for without quite knowing that he did so, he had caught it up and was holding it against his breast.
‘And that one—’ said Talore, and let the end of the sentence fall, watching the small, braced, tell-tale figure crouched among the fern, with the puppy held fiercely, protectively, against his breast.
Drem looked up, and met Talore’s dark, narrowed gaze upon him, and waited, with a sudden intensity of waiting that hurt him somewhere beneath his breast-bone. He heard the drip of the summer rain from the eaves, and Wenna crooning to the girl-child as she turned barley cakes among the hot ash. The puppy whimpered protestingly at being held so close, its little body warmly alive against his, its breath like the breath of all puppies, smelling of garlic. Soon its warmth and liveness would be under someone else’s hand, it would learn to come to someone else’s call, and hunt with a master who was not Drem . . . And still the rain fell, drip-drip-drip from the eaves, very loud.
‘Do you want him so badly, then?’ Talore said.
Drem lifted bright, grave eyes to his face and nodded. He could not speak.
‘Then it is in my mind that I will sell him to you,’ Talore said, ‘at a price.’
It seemed to Drem that the rain was louder than ever. ‘Drip-drip-drip’ marking off the silence with little dark arrow-heads of sound. Price? What price could he give for the cub? He was not Belu to have fine cloth to trade. His eyes searched Talore’s face, looking for the meaning behind it.
‘What is the price?’ he asked at last, and his voice sounded husky in his own ears.
Talore smiled. ‘I grow weary of mutton and of deer meat. The price is a bird for the pot—but it must be brought down with the throw-spear.’
Drem frowned at him a moment in bewilderment, knowing that Talore could bring down wild fowl for himself at any time he chose, and had, besides, three sons to hunt for him. And then he understood. It was proof of his own skill with the throw-spear that was really the price of the cub.
Well, it was a year since he had first set himself to master the throw-spear; he had some skill, he knew. Suddenly he grinned, flinging up his head like a pony, in a way that always showed when he was ready for battle; and the dripping of the rain under the eaves went back to its proper place. ‘I will pay the price,’ he said, ‘I will pay it tomorrow, Talore.’
Drem did not say anything in the home house-place about what he was going to do; he could not speak of it to anyone until it was done. He slept fitfully that night, waking often, until the first faint paling of the sky where the roof turf was rolled back warned him that it was time to be on his way. Then he pushed back the deer-skin covering and got silently to his feet, feeling to make sure that his knife was safely in his belt. There were a few bad moments while he felt for his own spear among the others in the rack, and got it out, but he managed it without the blade clattering against its neighbours, and with a sigh of relief turned to the entrance. Old Kea raised her head beside the fire to watch him, but made no outcry, for the hounds were well used to night-time comings and goings; and since it was summer time there was no stirring and stamping of ponies in the fore porch to betray his passing that way.
Yesterday’s rain had gone over, and there was a new-washed cleanness in the air, a smell of wet, refreshed earth. The curlews were already calling over the High Chalk, but at this time of year they called almost all through the short nights; and there would be plenty of time to reach his chosen hunting ground before dawn.
He had left the last of the corn plots behind him, and was turning down to the little brook that had its spring in a deep hollow under the grazing ground, when his ear picked up the pad of running feet behind him—very small, swift feet on the downland turf—and he had scarcely time to swing round before a flying shadow came down the slope and Blai was beside him, panting with the speed she had made.
Drem was angry. ‘What do you come after me for?’ he demanded. ‘Go home, Blai.’
‘I saw you go,’ Blai said in the little clear voice that had somehow the note of a bird call in it and never seemed to belong to the same person as her narrow, shut-up face, ‘and I thought maybe—if it was a hunting, you would need food for the day.’
Food; yes, he had not thought about food. Well, it was for the Women’s side to think of such things. ‘What have you got?’ he demanded.
‘Only a barley cake. That was all I could steal without waking them. But it is a big one.’
‘It will serve,’ said Drem handsomely, and tucking his throw-spear under his arm, took the hard, crusty bannock that she thrust into his hand. ‘Go home now, Blai, and do not you be telling anyone that I have gone hunting.’
‘I will not, then.’ Blai hesitated on one foot, half going, half staying. ‘Drem—let you take me too!’
Drem said with harsh reason, ‘You! What use would you be?’
‘I would do anything—I would be your hound—’
But Drem was already turning away. ‘Na, I do not need a hound today. And’—suddenly he could not hold it back—‘soon I may have a hound of my own to hunt with me!’
Behind him as he went, he heard her cry out in a little defiant voice, ‘One day—one day my father will come back for me—’ But she was crying it out to herself, not really to Drem.
Drem crossed the brook—it was so narrow still that it did not even need a stepping stone—and went on to his day’s hunting, leaving her standing there.
A faint bar of amber light was broadening in the east as he came down through the oak and hazel and whitethorn scrub of the lower slopes, eating the bannock as he went so as to have it out of the way, and headed for the marshes. A great, slow, full-bodied river, winding south from th
e forest uplands far inland, found a pass in the hills just there, and went winding and looping out to join the Great Water. Many streams rising in the lower flanks of the Chalk ran down into it, and in several places across it beavers had built their dams—generation after generation of beavers that had been there, Drem supposed, as long as the river had been there, and would stay while the river stayed. And the choked river had flowed out over its banks, spreading far and wide; and so came the Marsh. Sometimes after the winter rains the water spread far up into the forest, making a lake that was a day’s trail, two days’ trail, from end to end, and all the pass through the Chalk was a winding arm of water out of which the alders and sallows raised their arms to the sky. But in the summer it was mostly land of a sort, sour and sodden and very green: reed beds and alder brakes, and dense covers of thorn and sallow, and thickly matted fleeces of yellow iris, all laced with winding, silver riverways and spreading, shallow lakes alive with the wild fowl that came inland at the breeding season and did not go back to the coast until autumn came again.
No one lived in the Marshes that lay inland of the Chalk, for at night mists rose from them and evil spirits prowled abroad in the mists to give men the sickness that filled their bones with shivering fire; and even at high noon in summer time there was always a dank smell of things wet and rotting, for the cleansing wash of the tides that came up and went down again twice in every day over the sea marshes could not reach so far through the Chalk. But the hunters went there after the wild fowl and the beaver.
So Drem headed for the Marsh now, and in a clump of sallows on the edge of one of the many spreading sheets of water, settled himself to wait.
He was shivering with mingled cold and excitement and a breathless sense of the importance of that day’s hunting. Away eastward the bar of amber light was brightening to gold, and the gold was catching echoes from the water that lay everywhere, and all around him was a stirring as the Marsh woke into life. Light and colour were coming back into the world; and suddenly something dark, almost like a rat, darted from among the pale roots of the rushes close to Drem, hesitated, half doubled back, and then scuttled across to the next clump. When the water-rail moved, other things would soon be stirring. Very soon now, Drem thought, any moment now, and drew his knee farther under him. His hand cramped on the spear shaft, and he opened it, feeling it wet and sticky with the long tightness of his grip; and went over feverishly in his mind everything he had ever been told, everything he had ever found out for himself about the throw-spear; and licked his lower lip, and waited again.