He was a good provider, known amongst the other hunters as a skilful tracker, and for many years the little group had lived and hunted undisturbed in a region approximately fifty miles east to west and forty north to south. They followed game, they fished, and it was the moon goddess who watched over all hunters that they trusted to protect their precarious way of life. In summer they lived in tents; in winter they built semi-subterranean houses, cutting them into the side of a hill and facing them with brushwood: crude shelters, but well designed to conserve precious body heat. He had taken Akun as his woman ten years before and in that time he had fathered five children, two of whom had survived: a boy of five and a girl of eight.
And now he was preparing to embark on an immense trek to an unknown place! Akun shook her head in despair.
The reasons for Hwll’s extraordinary plan were simple. For three years now, the hunting had been poor, and that last winter the little group had nearly ceased to exist. In vain he had searched in the snow, day after day, for the tell-tale tracks that might lead him to food. Day after day he had come back disappointed, having found only the trail of a single arctic fox, or the minute scuffling patterns of the lemmings which then inhabited the region. The little band had subsisted on a store of nuts and roots that they had gathered in the preceding months, and even that store had been nearly exhausted. He had watched the women and children grow wasted, and almost despaired. Nor had the weather given them any respite, for it had been bitterly cold, with continuous icy winds from the north. Then at last, he saw a party of reindeer, and the hunters, calling on their last reserves of strength, had managed to separate one from the group and kill it. This single lucky find had saved them from starvation: the flesh of the animal gave them meat and its precious blood gave them the salt which they would otherwise have lacked. Despite this kill, the end of the winter saw one of the women and three of the children dead.
Spring came and, in place of the snow, revealed a cold, marshy wasteland where small flowers and ragged grasses grew. Usually this change of season meant that they would encounter the bison, who cropped over the new shoots on the high ground during the early months of summer. But this year the hunters had found no bison. They met only wild horse, whose meat was tough and which was hard to catch.
“If the bison do not come, then the hunting here is over,” Hwll said to himself, and throughout the early summer as the pale sun coaxed the vegetation into flower, and the ground became firmer underfoot, they had travelled in a wide circle, twenty miles in radius, in search of game; but still there was almost nothing. The group was half starving and he was sure they would not survive another winter.
It was then that Hwll made his decision.
“I am travelling south,” he told the others, “to the warm lands. If we leave now, we can reach them before the snows.” He said this to encourage them, because in fact he did not know how long the journey would take. “I am going to cross the great forest of the east,” he said, “and go south to where the lands are rich and men live in caves. Who will come with me?”
It was a brave statement and it was based on the ancient store of oral tradition which was all he knew. The geography that had been handed down to Hwll through scores of generations by word of mouth was fairly simple. Far to the north, it was said – he did not know how far – the land grew colder and even more inhospitable until finally one reached a great wall of ice, as high as five men, that cut across the landscape from east to west. The ice wall had no beginning and no end. Beyond it lay the ice plateau, a shimmering white land that extended northwards for ever: for the land of ice had no end. Far to the west lay a sea, and that, too, had no end. To the south lay tundra, and thick forests, until one reached a sea too wide to cross. On three sides, therefore, the way was cut off. But to the south east there was a more inviting prospect. First one walked south many days until a great ridge of high ground arose, and down this it was possible to travel easily for several more days. Then from this ridge, turning east, one could cross other, lesser ridges, until a gently shelving plain led to a huge forest through which there were tracks that could safely be followed. By crossing the eastern forest it was possible to by-pass the southern sea; at the end of the forest began a great steppe, and when he reached that, he must turn south again and travel for many days until he reached those fabled warm lands where the people lived in caves.
“There it is much warmer,” he had been told, “and the hunting is good.”
Vague as it was, all this information was correct. For Hwll was standing in what would one day be called the north of England. Far to the north, the ice wall of the last glacial age, some thirty feet deep, had been retreating steadily and was still melting; only centuries before it had covered the place where their camp was now. To the west lay the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of the island of Ireland, about which he did not know, the water continued until it reached the coast of North America, and would not be crossed for nearly nine thousand years. To the south lay the midlands and the broad lowlands of southern England, and further still the large estuary of the river Rhine had, with other rivers, been slowly carving out the small sea now called the English Channel for several thousand years. To the south east however, lay the great land bridge that joined the peninsula of Britain to the continent of Eurasia. Here, a vast plain stretched unbroken, forest interspersed with steppe, from eastern Britain for two and a half thousand miles to the snow-capped Ural Mountains of central Russia.
Across this land mass the hunters of the northern hemisphere had wandered for tens of thousands of years: moving south when successive Ice Ages came, and north once more each time the ice receded. Because of these migrations, Hwll’s ancestors could have been traced to many lands: to the Russian steppe, to the Baltic, to Iberia and the Mediterranean. It was the distant memory of these travels that had been handed down to him and which formed the basis of his world view now. Two centuries before, his ancestors had roamed through the huge eastern forest onto the British peninsula and had followed the game north to the area in which he now found himself. In his ambitious journey to the warm lands of the Mediterranean basin, fifteen hundred miles to the south, he would therefore be retracing their steps. Had he realised how far it was he might never have started; but he did not. All he knew was that the warmer lands existed and that it was time to go in search of them.
The plan was daring. It would also have been sound – had it not been for one fatal flaw of which he could not possibly have been aware, and which would bring it crashing down in ruins.
But when, later that day Hwll asked: “Who will come with me?” there was silence from the rest of the band. They had hunted there for generations and they had always somehow survived. Who knew if the warm lands really existed, or what kind of hostile people might live there if they did? Try as he might, Hwll could not persuade anyone to join him; and it was only several days later, after many furious arguments, that Akun came, sullenly and under protest.
There was a warm sun in the sky on the morning that they left the other four families, who stood watching them sadly until they were out of sight, certain that, whatever privations they themselves faced, Hwll and his family must surely die. For five days they walked south; the going was easy because the ground was firm and dry; in all directions, the brown tundra stretched to the horizon. They had taken with them a small quantity of dried meat, some berries, and a tent which Hwll and Akun carried between them. They travelled at a slow pace to conserve the strength of the two children, but nonetheless, they covered a solid ten miles a day, and Hwll was satisifed. Bleak as it was, the landscape was criss-crossed with little streams, and usually he was able to catch a fish to feed his family. On the third day he even killed a hare, using his slender bow and arrow with its long flint head; and always he kept an eye on the sky where the movement of the occasional eagle or kite might indicate food on the ground below. They spoke little; even the children were silent, sensing that they would need all their resources to survive the
journey.
The boy was a sturdy little fellow with large, thoughtful eyes. He did not walk very fast, but he had a look of concentrated determination on his face. Hwll hoped it would be enough to carry him through. The girl, Vata, was a stringy, wiry creature, like a young deer, he thought. She looked the more delicate, but he suspected she was the tougher of the two.
On the fifth day they reached their first objective: the ridge.
It rose magnificently above the tundra – a huge natural causeway several hundred feet high, running for two hundred miles down the east side of Britain before it curved westwards across country for two hundred miles more, and finally turned south again to end its journey in the sea. A little before it reached the sea, this limestone, Jurassic ridge would skirt in the centre of southern Britain, a huge plateau of chalk, from which other long ridges spread out across the land like the tentacles of some giant octopus. Throughout prehistoric times, and even afterwards, these ridges were the great arterial roads along which men travelled – the natural and gigantic highways made for men by the land itself.
The views from the ridge were magnificent and even Akun smiled with wonder as she joined Hwll to look at them. They could see for fifty miles. As they began to make their way along it, they found that there were patches of wood and scrub so that they did not need to descend from the ridge to seek shelter at night. But as the days passed and the little family wandered on alone, it was sometimes difficult not to lose heart. Hwll, however, was set in his purpose. Grim-faced, silent, and determined, he led them down the ridge, and all the time in his mind’s eye, he tried to picture the southern lands where the weather was warm and the hunting was good. At such times he would look back at his two children and at Akun, to remind himself that it was for them that he had undertaken this astonishing migration.
Akun: there was a prize! A glow of warmth suffused his body when he looked at her. She had been twelve when they met, one of another group of wanderers who had entered the area where his people hunted. Such meetings were rare and were treated as a cause for celebration – and above all for the exchange of mates: for these simple hunters knew from the experience of centuries that they must keep their own bloodstock strong by seeking other hunters with whom to breed. He was a skilful young tracker without a woman; she was a good-looking girl just past puberty. There was no need even to discuss the matter; the two parties hunted together and, for a small payment of flint arrowheads, she was given to him by her father.
She was twenty-two now, entering middle life, but better looking than most of the tough, weatherbeaten women of her age. Her colouring was lighter than his. She had a rich brown mane of hair, though it was now greased with animal fat and matted from recent rains; her eyes were an unusual hazel colour and her mouth, pursed though it often was against the cold winds, was wide and sensual. She had most of her teeth, and her face had not yet developed the deep wrinkles that one day would make it resemble the cracked clay bed of an empty stream in a time of drought.
It was her body, though, that made the determined face of the hunter break into a tender smile. Smoother than the squat, hirsute bodies of the other women he knew, her skin had a rich, lustrous quality that set the blood racing in his veins. He would still catch his breath with wonder when he thought of the magnificent, swelling curves of her breasts and the rounded, powerful body in the full flower of its womanhood.
There was, in the tundra summer, a glorious, all too short period of less than a month when it was warm; and at this magical time, he and Akun would go down to one of the many streams that ran through the landscape and bathe together in the cold, sparkling waters. Afterwards she would stretch out her magnificent body in the warm sun and then, in an access of joy at the sight of her, and at the continuing strength of his own manhood, Hwll would throw himself upon her. She would laugh, a low, rich laugh that seemed to come from the earth itself, and languidly raise that wide, tantalising, sensuous mouth to his.
She was indeed a wonder! She knew with an infallible instinct where to find the best berries and nuts; she was deft in making nets for fishing. Perhaps, he hoped, they might still have another son: but not in the tundra, he vowed: they would reach the warm lands first.
It was twenty days after they had first set out, that Hwll and his family descended from the ridge and began to walk towards the east. The land now was flat and there was more vegetation. Woods were growing beside the streams; long reeds and grasses waved in the breeze. Hwll noticed these changes with pleasure; but the light wind came from the east and it was still cold.
He had been right about the children. Vata was very thin; her face was pinched and her head hunched forward; but she had kept on doggedly. The boy was starting to worry him. For three days he had been walking with his thumb in his mouth – a bad sign. Twice, the day before, he had stopped, refusing to go on. Both Hwll and Akun knew what they must do: if they gave in once, the boy would break the necessary rhythm of their journey. He must not be allowed to think that they would wait. And so they left him standing there, watching his parents moving slowly away from him until they receded into the distance. It was Vata who finally turned back and dragged him along, and when he caught up at last there were huge tears in his eyes. For the rest of that day he refused even to look at his parents. He did not fall behind again, though.
That night they camped in the shelter of the woods, and Hwll caught two fish in a stream. Akun sat opposite him, a small fire burning between them; the two children huddled close to her.
“How far is it to the forest?” she now asked. During the twenty days that they had travelled, she had said nothing about the journey which she had so opposed. She had spent her energy keeping the children alive and he was grateful for the silence between them, even though he knew that it was also a form of protest. Perhaps her question now meant that she was ready to show her anger, he thought, but her face was expressionless. He was too tired to concern himself anyway.
“Six days journey, I think,” he said, and fell asleep.
Five days passed. They came to another ridge and crossed it. There were many streams to get over; some of the land was marshy and the going was more difficult. But he was fascinated by the gradual change in the landscape. Bleak as the plain was, it contained far more vegetation than there had been in the tundra to the north; and though it was still very empty, game was not so sparse. The children barely noticed the change, for now even the boy was too dazed to protest: his thumb was no longer in his mouth; he and Vata moved like automatons, staring straight ahead of themselves as though in a dream while Akun strode beside them at her stately walk. But they kept a steady pace and he did not let them cover more than ten to twelve miles a day, conserving the last reserves of their strength.
“Soon you will see the great forest,” he promised them. And each day, to encourage them, he repeated what his father had told him. “It has many kinds of different trees, and plenty of game, and strange birds and animals that you have never seen before. It is a wonderful place.” They would listen to him, then stare blankly, straight ahead, and he prayed to the goddess of the moon, who watched over all hunters, that this information was correct.
On the sixth day disaster struck, and when it did so, it came in a form unlike anything the hunter had ever dreamed of.
He woke at dawn, to a clear, chilly day. Akun and the children, wrapped in furs and huddled together beside a clump of bushes, were still sleeping. He stood up, sniffing the air and staring towards the east where a watery sun was rising. At once his instincts told him that something was wrong.
But what? At first he thought it was something in the air, which had a curious, clinging quality. Then he thought the trouble was something else and his brow contracted to a frown. Finally he heard it.
It was the faintest of sounds: so faint that it would never have been picked up by any man other than a skilled tracker like himself, who could discern a single buffalo three miles away by putting his ear to the ground. What he heard now, and w
hat in his sleep had troubled him all night, was a barely perceptible murmur, a rumbling in the earth, somewhere to the east. He put his ear to the ground and remained still for a while. There was no mistaking it: some of the time it was little more than a hiss; but it was accompanied by other grating and cracking sounds, as though large objects were striking against each other. He frowned again. Whatever it was, this sound was not made by any animal: not even a herd of bison or wild horse could generate such a trembling of the earth. Hwll shook his head in puzzlement.
He stood up. “The air,” he muttered. There was, undeniably, something strange about the air as well. Then he realised what it was. The faint breeze smelt of salt.
But why should the air smell of salt, when he was close to the great forest? And what was the curious noise ahead?
He woke Akun.
“Something is wrong,” he told her. “I must go and see. Wait for me here.”
All morning he travelled east at a trot. By late morning he had covered fifteen miles, and the sounds ahead were growing loud. More than once he heard a resounding crack, and the murmur had turned into an ominous rumble. But it was when he came to a patch of rising ground and had reached the top that he froze in horror.
Ahead of him, where the forest should have been, was water.
It was not a stream, not a river, but water without end: a sea! And the sea was on the move, as ice floes stretching out as far as he could see, drifted past, going south. He could hardly believe his eyes.
Along the shoreline, small ice floes buffeted the vegetation, and tiny waves beat on the ground. This was the hissing sound he had heard. Further out, the tops of great trees were still visible here and there, sticking out of the water; and occasionally a small iceberg would crack and splinter the wood as it rubbed against them. So that had been the strange cracking sound that had puzzled him!