John Norman (20 page)

As the men were eating, and the meat had been thrown to the pregnant females and the children, the other females would creep nearer, for the men, if they wished, to feed them. They might not steal meat or take it for themselves, for they were women. The only exceptions to this were Old Woman and Nurse, who took meat when they wished, neither challenged. Old Woman was simply Old Woman; and Nurse was important for the small children, the infants. Sometimes a mother did not have milk. In some human groups, the Bear People, for instance, nursing mothers were extended the same meat rights as pregnant females, but this was not so in Spear’s group. In Spear’s group such women obtained their meat like other women, by begging and by being pleasing to hunters. Spear had discovered that a woman who needs meat to make milk in her body for her baby will kick well. After the hunters were finished, of course, anyone, woman or child, might fall on the remains of the repast, to pick what bones might be left, to poke about in the ashes for bits of gristle or to lick grease from the charred wood of the fire. After these were finished, Ugly Girl would, the others not stopping her, creep to the fire, scratching and smelling for what might be left. It was not always the case, of course, that a woman would beg for meat, or lift her body to the men to be fed. Such women, though rare, often wandered away from the groups. Usually they died; if they did not die they did not have children. Women who wished the touch of hunters, who accepted being owned by them, who willingly, eagerly, lifted their bodies for meat, would be those women who would survive, whose children would be born, whose young would take in time their place, in turn, as hunters and the women of hunters.

Tree now circled the camp, not losing the scent. It was not difficult to follow.

He carried his pouch, his rope, his spear.

For four days Brenda Hamilton had wandered in a generally southward direction, in the morning keeping the sun on her left and, in the evening, on her right.

At the end of the second day she had come to the end of the rolling grassland in which she had first found herself. She had dug roots and found wild strawberries, and had drunk at small pools of rain water. Once she had come to a larger watering hole, near which were the prints of numerous animals. The water had been muddy there, and she bad not drunk. She had gone around the hole and continued on her journey. She saw only one herd of animals, a herd of some twenty horses. They were the size of large ponies, and had an unusual mane, stiff and erect, like a brush. They were tawny in color, and kept well away from her, even when she attempted to approach them more closely. She did not know, but they had been hunted. They knew the smell of men. If she had gone further to the north she would have found more animals, herds of bison and smaller groups of aurochs. In the mud at the watering hole she had found no prints of paws, except those of tiny animals, rodents and insectivores, with one exception, those of a pair of apparently large animals, feline, it seemed, who had come to the water to drink together. The great majority of the prints at the watering hole were those of small, hoofed animals, doubtless mostly those of horses, of the sort of which she had seen one herd. There were other prints, too, hoofed, which, being smaller, she conjectured were those of various, lesser ungulates. The larger paw prints had frightened her. She had not lingered at the watering hole. They were the prints, though she would not learn this until later, of one of the most beautiful, and dangerous, animals of the Pleistocene, the giant cheetah.

In the late afternoon of the second day she bad come to what seemed to be an endless, linear stand of deciduous trees, oak, elm and ash, and yew and maple, and others she did not recognize, stretching northeast by southwest. Entering the trees she discovered a long, swift stream, quite cold, flowing southwestward. She drank at this and, finding a wide place, using a pole to thrust ahead of her to test her footing, she forded it, and then, on the southern bank, followed it southwestward. Within an hour the grasslands, at first visible through the trees on her left, bad disappeared, to be replaced with darkly green, forested country. By nightfall she could no longer, either, through the trees, see the grasslands on her right.

She had left the fields.

She had come to the forests.

The forests, with their darkness, and their sounds, frightened her.

She tried to make a fire by rubbing sticks together, and striking rocks, and failed.

It was cold at night.

She slept fitfully. Once she awakened and screamed. Not more than twenty paces from her, in the moonlight, she saw the dark forms of more than a dozen doglike creatures, curious, watching her. When she screamed, they moved away, scurrying, but then continued to watch. She wept and screamed and threw rocks and sticks at them. Two snarled, but then the pack turned, and, as one, faded into the trees.

Weeping, Hamilton climbed a tree, and clung to the branches.

They had been wolves.

Man is not, and has never been the natural prey of wolves, a quadruped that strikes for four-footed game. Her erect posture might have saved her. Or her smell, which was not the game smell of wolves. The wolf, in its pack, like the hunting dog, is a tireless tracker and bunter, and a successful pack killer, and ruthless, and savage, but it is not, and has never been a predator on man. Had it been so the dog, derivative from wolf stock, doubtless would never have been domesticated. And, too, perhaps, man would not have survived. Wolves, however, are curious animals, a trait indicative of animal intelligence. Human camps were often objects of curiosity to them, and it was not uncommon for them to scout them, and prowl them. Wolf eyes beyond the firelight, almond and gleaming, were not unusual. Humans did not, however, fear wolves, for the wolf did not hunt them.

It was sometimes otherwise with the cave lion, if the animal were old or crippled, or with leopards.

Hamilton, who did not know the hunting habits of wolves, was terrified.

She determined to leave, if possible, the forest, but she did not wish to return to the grassland. The prints of the large felines she had seen by the watering hole still frightened her. She reasoned that if she continued to follow the stream she might remain indefinitely within the forest, for it might, even to the sea, margin the waterway, broadening, too, as other streams fed into it, or it, itself, became a tributary to some larger flow of water, perhaps a great forest-encompassed river. Too, she wished to move generally southward, rather than southwestward. The terrain and vegetation about her reminded her strongly of that of the temperate zones, and this made her afraid of what winter might be like. The season of year in which she found herself in this fresh, frightening world seemed surely to be late spring or early summer. The grass in the fields had reached generally halfway up her calves. The trees were not budding, but openly and richly leaved, and still a rich green. The season was not dry as she would have expected in late summer. She went south, rather than north, correctly ascertaining by the stars, their familiarity to her, their difference from the African night, that she was in the Earth’s northern hemisphere. Had the night sky been that of the southern hemisphere, she would have trekked north. She began to go south immediately, for she had no idea how long it might take to reach a climate which might remain mild throughout the year. She lacked clothing; she lacked shelter; she lacked, as far as she knew, the skills even to make a fire; she did not believe she would survive in the winter; there would be little to eat, if anything; and there would be the cold. She trekked south.

Her main motivation to follow the streams and rivers was to keep close to drinkable water, though she would, when possible, drink from rock pools, filled with rain water, rather than from the streams, which were often dark with mud, washing silt down to the sea, draining basins perhaps hundreds of miles wide. Small, clear forest streams, emanating from springs, much pleased her. River water frightened her. Still she must, at times, drink. It would take weeks, she knew, to die by starvation; but she could thirst to death in less than four days.

Still she had made her decision to depart from the stream, which was moving southwestward.

She feared the forest; she did not know the habits of wolves; she did not wish to be led by the streams too far west, for she wished to move more directly south. There were two other reasons, too, why she elected to move more directly south, though she scarcely dared to consider them explicitly. The first was that she suspected that men might exist in this time, in these countries, and follow the rivers, or make their habitations near them. The last thing she wanted, perhaps paradoxically, for she was inutterably lonely, was to encounter men. She did not even know if they would be human. Her imagination was terrified. She wondered if they might appear subhuman primates, with great jaws and long arms, or, if they seemed human, if they might have, in effect, the minds of apes. At best, she knew, they would be ruthless, and savage. She did not wish to fall in with such. With uneasiness she recalled Gunther’s speculations as to whether or not they might sacrifice virgins. He had speculated that they, being hunters, would not. Herjellsen had said that they were sending a woman, because a man would be killed. But, might they not kill a woman, too, especially if she were not a member of their group, if she were an utter stranger? At best they might keep her as an oddity, or, more likely, as a pet or, if they found her body of interest, as a slave. She would, at all costs, avoid men. Brenda Hamilton smiled to herself. She was beautiful, sophisticated, and highly intelligent. She had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. She had no intention of becoming the slave girl of savages. The second other reason for moving more directly south than could be achieved by following the stream was that she feared reaching the sea. The sea on one side would be a wall. She knew she might be hunted, or pursued, from the forest, and, across the beach, driven against that wall. Against the sea she could be trapped. Gunther had told her that in fenced game preserves lions had learned to drive antelope against the wire fences, trapping them for the kill. She had no wish to be in a position where she might be so trapped. She feared to be hunted, by whatever might hunt her, whether it might be animal or human, or near human. She did not want the sea closing off one hundred and eighty degrees of an escape route. Also, of course, she feared that, at the edge of the sea, there might be men, either in their habitations or using the relative openness of the beaches for trekking.

Accordingly, Brenda Hamilton left the stream. If she did not find fresh water after one day, it was her intention to return to the stream, and again follow it.

On the third day of her trek, however, the first day of leaving the stream, she discovered, to her pleasure, that her southward journey transected various small brooks, and that rock outcroppings, in which water could be found, were relatively plentiful. Less to her pleasure, she did not discover the trees thinning, or giving way, as she had hoped, to either grassland or savannah country; sometimes she walked on a carpet of leaves, between tall trees, whose canopied branches all but obliterated the light of the sun; sometimes, in the heat, naked, feet and ankles scratched, her body struck by branches, she forced her way, foot by foot, through what seemed to be an inclosing, almost impenetrable thicket of trees, brush and fallen timber. Once she came to a broad, scarred, half-blackened belt of stumps; it took her more than half an hour to traverse it; it was now scattered with patches of green, and tiny shoots of trees, bright, in the grayish earth, where rain had mixed with ashes and soil; the cause of the fire, she conjectured, would have been lightning; it would have taken place, presumably, in the last dry season, late in the preceding summer or early in the succeeding fall. She thought that she was entering ever more deeply into the forest, and to some extent she was, but, when the evening of the third day fell, she was startled to discover a stream that was flowing not from her left to right but from her right to left, and, to her dismay, she found the evening sun on her left, rather than her right. Her path, described, would have resembled a large hook; she had not circled, but she had, in the thickets, during the time of high sun, turned gradually back on her path; it was difficult in the forests, for one who could not read the forest, and Brenda Hamilton could not, to keep a straight direction; the common strategem of marking out distant landmarks and trekking to them was not available to her; and her stride, even if it had not been for the forest, was not even; few humans, not trained in the military, can maintain an even stride; over a period of hours, and miles, the unevenness tends to bring about, unless compensated for, say, by noting directions or landmark trekking, a gradually curved path, not the desired linear progression. Accordingly, on the third day, Brenda Hamilton, though moving generally southward, had gone far less far to the south than she would have hoped. She had, on the third day, in twelve hours of trekking, reckoning in time, moved only some three or four hours, or some eight or ten miles, further to the south. She did not, of course, know that she had done even this well. She knew only that she had discovered herself, toward the evening of the third day, moving northward, rather than southward, that she bad been moving in the direction exactly opposite to that in which she had intended to move. This discovery terrified and shattered her, for, to the best of her understanding, she had been, continually throughout the day, moving as she wished, southward. Suddenly she no longer had confidence in her ability to find her way as she wished. What had seemed simple to her no longer did so. She now knew she might, stumbling and pressing through thickets, when the sun was high, lost among the branches and leaves, unknowingly, unwittingly, lose her direction. If the touch of the winter extended, from her latitude, some hundreds of miles to the south, and she could make only a few miles a day in her trek, it was not unlikely that she would be trapped in the forest. She imagined herself caught in the first snows, naked, perhaps still unable to make a fire, without food. She wept with misery. For the first time since her first hours in the grassy field, she felt utterly helpless, utterly alone. She realized now that it was not impossible that she, alone, unable to help herself, might die in the forest. That evening she found a handful of nuts to eat, which she picked from the ground. She broke them with rocks, and ate their meat. She lay on her belly, on the gravel, beside a small stream, and drank. She crawled into some brush, and pulled it about her. She lay on her side, and moaned. She now knew, clearly, that she lay at the mercy of her ignorance and the elements. And, too, she feared beasts, wolves, or unknown beasts, such as might have made the large paw prints at the watering hole, which might hunt her, and bring her down with their teeth, as easily as a doe. Toward morning, after much weeping, she fell asleep. She had decided, however, that she must continue to attempt to travel directly south. If she stopped and followed a stream generally southwestward, it might take hundreds of extra miles to reach a warmer latitude, even assuming the sea itself, or an arm of the sea, did not, when reached, itself present an obstacle to that advance, and the winter might overtake her. She must try to move, she reasoned, difficult though it might be, directly to the south. She did not know how many days there might be until the onset of winter; more importantly, she did not know how far she would have to travel to reach a mild climate, nor how much of this distance she might be able to cover in a given day. On this day, the third day of her trek, she knew only she had discovered herself, in the evening, moving in the wrong direction; she did not know if she had covered even a mile of her projected journey in the past twelve hours of trekking.