The Intimate Bond (3 page)

 

CHAPTER 1

Partnership

Pech Merle Cave, southwestern France, Late Ice Age, 24,600 years ago. Fat lamps flicker in the darkness. Dark shadows ebb and flow across the rugged cave wall, deep below the bright realm aboveground. The hunters huddle against the dank rock, gaze upward at the two black spotted horses opposite them. The beasts face in opposite directions. The natural shape of the rock emphasizes the head of the right-hand animal as the soft, irregularly pulsating light gives an impression of movement. A shaman chants softly as he invokes the power of the horses that reside behind the wall. He thrusts with an ocher-tipped stick and imprints red dots on the two beasts, symbolic wounds from an imaginary hunt. The chanting rises to a crescendo. At least three people, perhaps both men and women, step forward, plant their hands on the rock by the horses, and blow black soot onto the wall. The supernatural power of the animals courses through their hands to validate their hunts. The hand imprints are still there after nearly twenty-five thousand years.
¹

This was a common practice, and occurs at other Ice Age sites. At Gargas Cave, in the Pyrenees, generations of visitors—men, women, and children, even infants—left their hand impressions on the walls, some close to cracks filled with bone slivers. More than two hundred hand impressions survive in one chamber alone. Red iron oxide or black manganese powder outlined the participants' hands, giving the impression that their hands had melted into the rock, into the supernatural realm.

Pech Merle lies in a landscape of deep valleys and floodplains, where herds of wild horses grazed at the height of the last Ice Age. For generations, the hunters have lived alongside their harems and the stallions, walking close to the beasts in open sight, without a care on either side.
They know many of the beasts by sight, may even have given some of them names. At every season, young men lurk quietly in the shadows, watching the animals as they feed or scrape with their hooves for dried grass under winter snow. They've watched their changing appearances in winter and summer, observed the movements of the local herds, seen matings and battles between competing stallions. Observing animals has taught the hunters much about poisonous plants and nature's pharmacopeia. They know the horses as well as their fellow band members, and they always treat the animals with respect, on account of their spiritual power. It is almost as if they were in love with their prey. And when they stalk them and move in for a kill, they butcher the dead animal with care and treat it with deference as a partner in the hunt.

Figure 1.1
  The horses of Pech Merle. Centre de Préhistoire du Pech Merle, Cabrerets, France.

A speculative interpretation, to be sure, but judging from anthropological sources, it's almost certainly speculation with more than a grain of truth. There's not a hunting society on earth that does not treat its prey with respect. The Australian Aborigines have bewilderingly
elaborate oral traditions surrounding animals of all kinds, real and mythic, which form an integral part of “the Dreaming,” their cosmic vision of the landscape and human existence. The Cree hunters of Canada's northern forest believe that everyone has a spirit, as does everything in the world, be it an animal, a plant, rocks, even tents and their doorways.
²
In addition to these individual spirits, some more important than others, some categories of beings, especially animals, also have spiritual identities, which are said to be master of them—say, caribou or moose. The same applies to humans. Some individuals have special powers, such as that of elders, who have acquired a lifetime of experience with animals and their environment. They sometimes have powers of divination, knowledge and spiritual power that lead to success in the hunt. There can be little doubt that the symbolism behind the Ice Age paintings in French and Spanish caves reflects a powerful link between people and the animals they hunted. And such ties were not ones of domination. (It's worth noting that the word
animal
has roots in the Latin word
anima
, or “soul.”)

Balance, Involvement, and Respect

The routine of Late Ice Age life, year in, year out, revolved around not mass killings, but individual hunts. Taking a solitary deer, trapping arctic ptarmigan, snaring hares, or stalking a wild horse—all were part and parcel of a life lived close to a remarkable, and often formidable, bestiary. The hunters dwelled among animals, saw them every day of their lives, and were on terms of easy familiarity with them. They lived alongside their prey in a form of close intimacy that it is hard for us to understand. These creatures were not mere animals to be slaughtered with a repeater rifle or a crossbow. Rather, they were living individuals with their own habits and distinctive characteristics, often in small herds that were nearby for months on end. But how does this compare with our modern-day attitudes toward wild animals? Western society's view of nature was expressed in the Book of Genesis more than four thousand years ago: “And God said unto them, ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the
sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”
³

Genesis leaves us in no doubt that we humans are in control of the earth and the animals that dwell upon it. Nature is something different. Humankind stands outside the realm of the environment, its beasts and plants, and controls their destiny. This is a fundamental assumption of modern conservation, with its talk of pristine wilderness where human access is carefully restricted. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold memorably remarks, it's “like putting a ‘do not touch' notice in front of a museum exhibit: we can observe, but only from a distance.”
⁴
We foster a profound sense of detachment from the wilderness, a “do not interfere” syndrome, which is totally incompatible with the traditional, hunting way of life known to us both from cave paintings and from studies of surviving hunting peoples such as the Australians. Such societies' dealings with animals were dynamic, intimate, and respectful.

We know from studies of surviving hunters and gatherers in many parts of the world over the past century or more that the natural environment is not something passive that has food there for the taking. It's alive, saturated with a wide diversity of powers. If people are to survive, they have to maintain associations with these powers, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral—just as they have to sustain ties with other humans. This means that they have to treat the landscape, and its animals and plants, with consideration. What's involved is something very different. Successful hunting depends on the personal ties that the hunter builds with animal powers, carefully constructed through previous hunts. The meat obtained from a kill is a return on a long-term investment in following the proper procedures for hunting the prey. Many hunting societies, both from ancient and modern times, appear to have practiced a conscious form of conservation by managing their resources.

For traditional hunters, the same powers that animate the environment are those that are responsible for the extinction or survival of
humans
. As another anthropologist, Richard Nelson, wrote of the Koyukon hunters of Alaska, “the proper role of humankind is to serve a dominant nature.”
⁵
The well-being of humanity depends on acts of propitiation
and respect. So the Koyukon yield to the forces of their environment: they never confront it. We may talk of two separate worlds, those of humans and nature, but the reality for the Koyukon and other hunters was that there was one world, of which humans formed a very small part.

Dancing with Eland

Anthropological research in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, in tropical Africa and Australia, chronicles a closely maintained balance between hunters and the powers in all kinds of natural environment, and with prey. Everywhere, hunters engaged in a deep and meaningful involvement of their entire beings with animals. A successful hunt that ended in a kill was thought of as proof of friendly relations between the hunter and his quarry, which willingly allowed itself to be killed. A kill was not an act of violent subjugation, but a successful attempt to draw the creature into a familiar realm of social being, part of a process of coexistence and mutual interchange. We can be certain that such close links developed tens of thousands of years ago as part of human strategies for survival.

The San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa lived in landscapes teeming with animals of all sizes—great antelope herds, migrating wildebeest, zebra, and many smaller prey. Then there were the predators such as lions, leopards, hyenas, and other formidable beasts like the buffalo, the elephant, and the rhinoceros. Every creature, however large or small, was an integral part of the San world. Each had a place in the cosmic and supernatural order; each had its own distinctive identity and personality in the vibrant living and supernatural worlds of which the hunters were a part. The San were members of this tapestry of animal life and took their part in it, enjoying a close familiarity with the creatures they hunted and ate. They treated all beasts, large and small, with consideration, even if some of them had reputations as killers or tricksters. One trod carefully in the predator-rich landscapes of the past, where one survived by careful observation, the carefully hoarded knowledge and experience passed by word of mouth from one generation to the next, and by meticulous communication with the supernatural forces of the world around one.

To the San, one of the most important prey was the eland, the largest and fattest of all antelope. San artists painted hundreds of eland on rock shelter walls, often with human figures cavorting around them, mainly in the Drakensberg Mountains in eastern South Africa.
⁶
Until recently, San in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana still danced next to the carcass of a freshly killed eland. As they activated their potency, the medicine men (shamans) trembled, then sweated and bled from their noses. A dying eland trembles, sweating profusely, with melted fat gushing like blood from its wide-open mouth. Perhaps the San compared the human trance with the trauma of an eland in its death throes. In a San Bull Dance, miming and sounds make the beast appear real before the eyes of the participants. As the shaman dances, he hallucinates and “sees” the eland standing beyond the glow of the fire.

In time, the dancers become one with the eland, and the transfiguration is complete: They have become the eland. Thus, the animal and the human become interchangeable. San artists mixed fresh eland blood with ocher, making their paintings storehouses of potency long after their composition. In some rock shelters, imprints of human hands covered with paint cover the walls. By placing their hands on the rock or the painting, people acquired the potency of the eland, which flowed into their bodies. It was as if the great antelope dwelled behind the rock, at least in spirit, sharing its potency with its hunters in a form of spiritual closeness. The same may have been true of Ice Age hunters thousands of years earlier. The close pairing of hunter and hunted, of people and animals, transcends millennia.

Not only the San, but all subsistence hunters who depended on game, found themselves enmeshed in close dealings with animals. So the hunter had to behave toward his prey in much the same way as he would toward people. He was cautious, for he could never predict exactly how the prey would act. For this reason, detailed knowledge of an animal, its habits and diet, appearance and behavior, was of fundamental importance. Hunters spent large amounts of time observing animals, getting to know them in the same way as one gets to know a friend and his or her moods and idiosyncrasies. One worked to control one's associations with one's prey over a long period, using one's own experience and that
of others—as well as a huge body of myth, lore, and storytelling that defined animals and their personalities.

Animals and humans inhabited the same world, engaging with one another not only in body or mind, but as whole beings. Humans and animals were equals, not in roles of dominance and subjugation—which was what happened when people began domesticating animals of all kinds. The realm that divided the social world of humans and the rest of nature was permeable and easily crossed. To write a narrative history of animal-human relations among hunters is to write a history of human concern with animals, the notion that we attend to them, are with them; something very different from the disengaged way in which we have made sharp distinctions between animals and society, nature and humans. What we need to examine today is the quality of our relations with animals, something that hunters of the past understood (and, indeed, surviving hunters of the present understand) very clearly.

Tales from Distant Time

The communication between hunters and animals goes back into deep time. Countless stories from the remote past, unimaginable numbers of years ago, passed, and still pass, from one generation of hunters and foragers to the next. In northern lands, much of the storytelling unfolded during the long hours of winter darkness, as people lay in their warm beds. The Koyukon tell stories of “Distant Time” that begin before the present order of existence came into being. This was a time when animals were human, had human forms, and lived in a human society, speaking human language. At some point in Distant Time, some people died and were transformed into the animals and plants that inhabit the landscape today. Richard Nelson calls this a “dreamlike metamorphosis” that left some human qualities and personality traits in local animals. In Koyukon society, just as in innumerable other traditional societies around the world, such stories, often of great length, are the equivalent of the creation story in Genesis. The tales explain the origins of the sun, moon, and constellations; account for prominent landmarks; and often feature a central figure, the Raven.