Read Mammoth Boy for Free Online

approaching. A “ho” from Agaratz announced that he had come up silently and was warning him of his presence. “Ho,” answered Urrell, caught unawares.
    Agaratz had been foraging, as a skin held by the four corners to make a carrier revealed when he laid it down for Urrell to inspect. It held several kinds of funguses, several rodents and some raspberries wrapped in big leaves. He watched Urrell’s reactions, with a communicative gleam in those yellow eyes that Urrell had never known in anyone, not even in Fire-crone’s when she took pleasure in explaining things to him, or talked of her girlhood land.
    “Good, now eat,” said Agaratz.
    They went back up the pole and Agaratz revived the fire. As before, he made a rude oven of hot stones to bake the rodents while others served to braise the heads of funguses. Urrell watched all this, between acting as fuel-fetcher from the woodmow, noting every move which, once seen would be recalled perfectly, like spoor. From Agaratz’s manner he knew there would be more to learn: he squatted happily, as happy as those rare times when he and Fire-crone had been alone in camp and she had rambled on about her youth, shown him binding skills, described strange beasts and told him stories of olden times in that mixture of her girlhood tongue and his camp’s which he had grown to understand better than anyone else.
    The marmoset-like creatures proved good eating, creatures that his clan eschewed, nobody knew why. If Agaratz ate them, Urrell felt safe to do so too. His camp’s taboos held no power here. He memorised each fungus Agaratz gathered and ate, and learnt their names, known only in Agaratz’s language.
    When they had finished eating, he saw how Agaratz gathered the bones and leftovers to burn in the fire, something no-one would have bothered to do in his home group, where leavings lay where they fell, to be trampled into the shelter floor.

CHAPTER 6
    H e had no notion of what to expect next. Only that it would be good, new knowing, like Old Mother’s knowing when they were alone in camp, by her fire.
    “You know how to make… spear-caster?”
    “For throwing spears? I have seen some, in my tribe.”
    “Come.”
    Agaratz went to one of the recesses at the back of the gallery, lighting his way with a burning stick from the fire. Inside, laid out on a skin, were spear-thrower heads. Some looked yellow with age. Each was carved in the shape of an animal – bison, deer, horse – so as to wed purpose and shape in one thrust of the shaft straight to its mark. Urrell’s eyes widened.
    “Oh.”
    “You like?”
    “Oh, I like them, yes. Did you make them, Agaratz?”
    “No. These olds.” His eyes lost their lustre for a moment. “These, keep. I make you one.”
    They went back by the fire. Nothing stirred outside in the sunlit gulch. From the bundle that he had been carrying when Urrell first met him, Agaratz drew out a collection of flint and bone tools – scrapers, chisels, burins, drills, blades – which he laid out in rows on a bit of leather before Urrell’s intent gaze. Then he went to one of the piles of objects ranged round the sides of the cave and selected a piece of hard, dark wood, of the kind that Urrell knew was found in bogs. It was crooked, like an elbow.
    “You watch, Urrell.”
    Gripping the wood upright between his good and his cloven foot, Agaratz began to shave and pare the wood with a two-handed scraper. Urrell squatted to watch. When the scraper bluntened Agaratz stopped to sharpen it, not as the boy thought he would, by tapping the blade edge with a flint. Instead Agaratz chose a burin from his array and, with small, rapid pressures on the flint edge, prised slivers of stone off. His speed and deftness dazzled Urrell. Soon the scraper was keen again and Agaratz resumed work for a while.
    “Now stop.”
    He stowed his tools back in their bundle, tied the thongs that Urrell had noticed on that first meeting, when the bison hunters had sped off