OWONGO AND THE FACTS OF LIFE

Here I revisit a stone-age ancestor of mine... and the miracle of life.

It was a dotted, colourful, ancient meadow, swept now and then by gentle breezes and occasionally by full-blown winds and the naked man paused half-way across.

Owongo loved it. As a child he’d played there with the lad from the cave opposite, had chased him like only boys can, tumbled in the grasses and mosses that clung to soil and part-exposed rocks alike and generally had the very best of times. But now he was a man and he had something on his mind.

Although he lived in the long-ago of time (from our perspective), Owongo was a thoughtful individual with a keen brain that was only limited by the sum total of human knowledge at that point, which wasn’t very much. Millennia would have to pass before the human race gained any real knowledge, and when it did there would come the blurring distortion of superstition and impossible gods.

But for the moment Owongo was truly wrapped in the world around him. Owongo was happy.

“Much fun as boy,” he thought in the strange and hesitant language of his people, which was the only language he knew. He paused and sighed and sat on a tumbled weather-worn outcrop of sandstone and gazed around him. It had been like this back then. Oh, he knew that every blade of grass, every leaf, every flower with its shining petals were different. Old ones had long perished, and these were new, and he knew it and loved the knowledge.

He daren’t stay long because Mirumda was at home and needed him. She had grown fat of late and he guessed why: they were to have an addition to their small family and she was going to produce it. He’d seen it in other couples, and in a way it frightened him. As yet he hadn’t associated the games they liked to play with each other most nights after dark, and the excitement that throbbed through him as they played, with this sudden and wonderful growth in Mirumda’s body but he did know what was imminent. And he knew that when her turn came it would be him that would be the midwife " not that the word nor the reality behind it existed yet. She would need help and it would be down to him to provide it.

“All new life is,” he mused, “everywhere I look … new life, new hearts beating, new living is, new blades of green, green grass...”

It was a wonderful world, and the meadow reminded him just how wonderful it was. A blade of grass, a yellow-blooming flower, a trail of moss … all were microcosms of his little family in the home cave and all filled his heart with a strange warmth that one day people would call emotion.

He stood up and strode off.

Like all of his people, the small tribe stretched over the valley floor living in the homes they found waiting for them, caves wrought by ancient streams and rivers, carved out of the solid earth over countless millennia and maybe even on odd occasions inhabited by other creatures than men. But men were dominant. Men knew the secrets of fire! Men could ward off dangers that might approach in the night. Men could keep their women safe.

He clambered over the wide ridges and haphazardly scattered boulders that lay across his way home and then, suddenly, stood at the entrance to his cave and looked around him.

“Mirumda! Me home!” he called, and he heard her call back to him.

“Owongo, man mine, me hurting...”

Her voice was weak and filled with pain, and he rushed to where the sound came from.

She was lying on the palliasse he had made for them, skins stuffed with dry leaves and hay and a comfort at night, a cushion between their fragile flesh and the rock of the earth itself. Her face was strained and pale and he could feel her pain as he stared at her desperate eyes.

Then, suddenly, they both knew what to do. It was like a new instinct, something neither of them had ever done before but knew what to do, as if by magic.

“Owongo help,” he muttered, and he knelt by her.

In a tumult of weeping and shouting and almost thrashing as the pain of childbirth shot through her, and then during the periods of calm as he comforted her and held her close to him, and as the little head of a new Owongo began to emerge from Mirumda he saw, like in a flash of inspiration, how it had come to be there. He had before his eyes an image of the meadow that he loved and the way it was constantly being reborn, and his inspiration was born from that. Suddenly he recalled their games and the shooting fire of joy.

“It was me, Mirumda-love...” he muttered, almost apologetically. “It was the games we played … the night-time frolics as we played...”

At that moment she was in no mood to listen as the baby fought its way into the world and towards Owongo’s eager hands. She cried out, and he soothed her, and took their son into his hands and like an instinct gently placed the child to its mother’s beasts, then gently clamped and severed the umbilical cord, chewing through it. No man or woman had taught him as he delivered the placenta and looked towards his woman.

“Next time we play our games we’ll know,” he murmured. “A game has consequences. A game is … a serious affair.”

Holding her new child with unbelievable gentility Mirumda looked towards her man, proudly. She understood.

“A very, very serious affair...” she sighed.

© Peter Rogerson 20.08.16

Author's Note

It must be 20 years since I first breathed life into Owongo, a prehistoric hunter who walked through the pages of the first volume of "The Jewels of Ooombis" (available on Lulu.com), and since then many short tales like this one have graced various web-sites in which that ancient ancestor of mine contributed greatly to the advancement of human knwledge.