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hills that shaped the river’s course. But even when the sun of early spring had burned off the mist, a fog of another kind still lingered in the valley and remained throughout the day, thickening as the sun sank each evening and the fires were heaped higher to keep the night chill at bay. This more stubborn mist was marked by a scent that kept the game away and forced the hunters to start each day with a long trek to reach the places where the reindeer herds might be found. The animals had always known that smoke meant fire and fire meant danger in the forest. Now they were also learning that the smell of smoke signaled the presence of man, and that this valley was wreathed constantly with his presence.
    The trees near the river had gone, cut down laboriously with flint tools to feed the fires. The river took strange courses, where stones had been heaped along the shallower stretches to make fords where man could cross. There was the smoke, and above all, there was the noise of man. He was the least silent of all living things. His young chattered and laughed and screamed in their play. His womenfolk called out constantly to their children and to one another, and chanted strange rhythmic dirges as they came down to the riverbank three times each day for water, and then slogged back up the slopes with their burdens. The men themselves roared in their triumph as they came back to the valley carrying the butchered reindeer, slung by their own sinews to poles borne on the hunters’ shoulders. And behind it all was the constant toc-toc-toc, like the sound of a vast flock of woodpeckers, as men chipped and chipped away at the flint stones to make their tools. Noise and smoke and the destruction of trees and the constant, hanging scent of their fires in the valley they had despoiled. That was the essence of man.
    Gazing down the river, watching the smoke from more fires than he could count spiral and linger down the valley as far as he could see, the Keeper of the Bulls knew that there was more to his people than the sounds and signs of their presence. More than speech, more than communication, more than the skill at working in groups that kept the meat coming to the caves, there was the work that was worship. It glared and pranced and brooded on the walls of the cave behind him. The Keeper of the Bulls looked down at his hands, spread out the fingers, looking at the red and yellow clays that filled his nails and stained his skin. He lifted a hand to his mouth. He could smell the colors. Idly, he sucked, wondering for the hundredth time whether he could taste any difference between them. He fancied that he could, when he took the soft moss to paint the blackness of the bulls, smelling their power, tasting their darkness. He felt the familiar tug of the beasts’ presence, and took a deep breath to begin the chant that would prepare him for a new day of work, the song that he made to the bulls.
    As he sang, he knelt before the small fire glowing at his feet. To his left hand lay the feather, the most perfect and precise of his painting tools. To his right hand lay the moss, the most crude of them. Beyond the fire lay the small piece of dung from the holiest of animals. He had rolled it himself, mixed it, moist and warm and fresh, with the colors that he would use. Blowing on the fire as he chanted, he waited for the precise words to place at the fire’s heart first the feather, then the moss. He smelled the acrid burning of the feather, waited for the billow of smoke from the damp moss, and then he reverently placed one red and one yellow ball of dung into the flames. He stood, stretching his arms wide, ending the chant as the sun burned through the mists and sent glints of sparkling yellow fire along the river. Closing his eyes and bowing his head, he thought of the great haunches that he would paint this day, of their power and their solidity, feeling in his head the swelling shapes that he would use to portray their force.