CHAPTER THIRTEEN - AFTER THE HUNT

Back to the natives and the prize of a hunt

“Me bring meat!” boasted Umbaga, crowing his victory so that others living nearby might hear. After all, the meat he’d brought back would be more than enough for his small family of three, and others would be welcome to share it before nature or something to do with nature turned it sour and poisonous.

That was the way of he and his neighbours - in the future it might have been called a village or a tribe but to the people living in the there and then it was a discrete and often widely separated bunch of almost neighbours. Families often came and went, drifted in when times seemed good and went away when the harsh winter threatened to bite too hard. Now it was summer, and they were all settled.

A small group soon gathered around Umbaga. He had the crippling weight of a mature stag on his back and he struggled to toss it onto the ground outside his cave, doing his damnedest to make the action seem like it involved no effort at all when in actual fact it almost crippled him. But a man had to seem like a man and not a wimp. Strength was the language of life in those days.

“Juju take meat!” he exclaimed, and she ran up to him and hugged him. The expression on her face and the look in her dark eyes was one that might have been interpreted as love, and it certainly reflected the gratitude she felt when she saw his prize. Then she took a stone blade, cunningly crafted by Umbaga from flint, and skilfully made a careful and deep cut on the skin of the stag, intending there and then to remove it for later use. All of the animal would be used, even many of the bones.

“Need meat,” muttered one of Umbaga’s friends. This was Carpa, a skilled hunter himself, but one who had been going through tough times since a tussle with Old Man Tiger weeks earlier had left him lame. It had been a dreadful occasion, and had it not been for his woman, who had cared for him with consummate skill and gone out on the forage herself because he couldn’t, the man may well have died. But Bibi had been more than a wife, she had been an untrained but caring nurse and he had slowly recovered from the worst of his injuries. As time had passed he had started hunting again, but he was far from the man he had been and others in the neighbourhood subsidised the meagre rations he returned with. They felt they had to: Carpa had a family and every son or daughter of the people would prove an important ingredient of the future., and should be protected if it was at all possible They all knew that.

“Carpa take meat,” invited Juju, nodding at Umbaga, who smiled back at her despite the weariness he felt. It had been a long march back home with the stag on his back, from the other side of the pissing stump.

He still didn’t like going close to the Clearing beyond that stump. His memories of the nightmares that had visited him after eating mushrooms from that diseased place and his feeling that it would be wise to avoid more contact with the two strange people and their shiny machine (though he had no concept of any kind of machine) saw to that. But the hunt was more important than his fears (unless Old Man Tiger was involved, and not even that dread beast could be everywhere at the same time,) and he often found himself pissing on that stump before veering away from the Clearing.

And that’s what he had done today. He had emptied a full bladder on the rancid aromatic stump and veered away from the Clearing, going a mile or two further from home before coming upon his stag. It had been limping on three legs and presented him with no real opposition as he had plunged a crude spear behind its shoulders where he knew it would bring instant death to the creature.

Now he was back home he needed rest, and Juju knew it, so she attended to some of the butchery. It was the normal way of things and it wasn’t long before she had strips of meat ready for sun-drying.

They often ate raw meat, but preferred it cured, and the sun did that during the long summer days during which it beamed down with barely a break for rain.

“Need fire,” murmured Umbaga.

Fire was best when it came to making meat more pleasing to the palate, but it was a mighty mystery to Umbaga. He had used fire, taking living flame from the wild when there had been a lightning strike or sporadic outbreak of flame in dry tinder, had ignited a dried branch and carried it home (carefully lest the fire spread) but had no idea how to create it. One day the knowledge would be commonplace, but that day lay well into the future.

He had managed to keep a fire burning more than once in the past, feeding it with dried wood, but the fire had always originated elsewhere. If only he could work out a way to make it in the first place….

“No fire,” murmured Juju, and she lay strips of raw meat on a sloping rock outside the home cave. A large bird hovered overhead, greedy eyes on the meat, but that was as close as it got because that bird had been swiped by Umbaga before and it knew there were easier ways of getting a meal, though it may well try if the humans down below moved far enough away from potential prey.

“Good meat,” said Carpa, gratefully. It was his way of saying a heartfelt thanks, for he knew that without the continued help of his friends and neighbours he and his family would go hungry for a great deal of the time. He also knew that he would repay them when he returned to full fitness, for others would come to grief in the forest and need help and some future day it would be him offering that help. It was a dangerous time to be alive, and if it wasn’t Old Man Tiger ready to leap, it was one of his many cousins.

“Carpa eat,” acknowledged Umbaga, and he smiled.

“Carpa kiddies eat,” invited Juju, warmly.

The biggest problem with fresh meat was it didn’t stay fresh for long. Even sun-dried strips started tasting foul soon enough, especially after they had started turning green or been attacked by a tribe of maggots. So Juju was only too happy seeing the Carpa kiddies filling their stomachs on meat that was still fresh.

“Foes about!” shrieked a female voice suddenly.

It was Bibi on her way to fetch her tribe of children, and she had spotted danger on its way to what was becoming a major feast as by then others had joined in and started consuming Umbaga’s prize.

Umbaga leapt to his feet and rushed to her side, all feelings of exhaustion melting away at the alert.

“What it?” he asked, and she pointed a wavering finger at a figure almost running towards them.

It was the woman from the strange silver vessel, and she was smeared with blood and her clothes showed claw marks where something sharp had tried to bite through to the skin and flesh beneath.

She was on the point of collapse, and Umbaga raced up to her and grabbed her with both arms before she fell and carefully, almost sensitively, led her into his cave.

“Juju mend woman!” he commanded, but they were words he didn’t need to use because Juju was already there, with a bowl of home-made salve and a look of deep concern on her face.

“Old Man Tiger,” she breathed, as if it was a curse.

© Peter Rogerson 28.10.16