4. THE ORANGE MAN

Owongo gets an unpleasant shock when he goes hunting...

The night grew thicker with lust and poppy-smoke, and towards its ending, when they could barely stand on their four feet, Mirumda and Owongo staggered back to their own little cave with its comforts and promise of a good night’s sleep … a good night, or what was left of it, that was. The hour was late, though they had no way of measuring the lateness.

Their cave was set back from most of the others. Some of them had been formed long ages earlier when changes to the structure and flow of the wide river had moved tributaries from one place to another, and the caves were left in dryness by the miracle of terrestrial metamorphosis. Others had always been fissures in the crumbling sandstone that formed the high cliff in which they had been formed and yet more had merely been cracks widened and excavated bythe skills of men needful of a roof over their heads.

The one thing you could say of them was that they were all caves and as comfortable or uncomfortable as their owners chose to make them. And those owners were themselves merely temporary residents, little more, indeed, than tenants scraping the humblest of homes from the lamdlord of history. Before them had been brown bears or wolves or other creatures of the wild needful of shelter, all in residence and all eventually leaving, and after them, for long ages, would be families of men until someone had the clever idea of erecting a shelter out of what he could find around him.

Owongo and Mirumda had a fairly small cave, but what it lacked in size it made up for in comfort �" some might almost suggest luxury. For Owongo had already become a skilled hunter and Mirumda made all manner of furnishings from the bones and skin of his prey.

Owongo flung himself onto their bed and grinned at Mirumda.

“Good night is,” he said, briefly.

She nodded. “Mirumda sorry about Beth-with,” she replied, referring to the insults her own mother had tried to subdue Owongo with. Back then, as in many later times, men and women were occasionally mindful of what they saw as their place in the order of creation, and Beth-with wanted her daughter to join with a youth from her own side of the broad river where the stone-age almost nobility dwelt. Instead she had chosen Owongo, and that choice was, in itself, a cause for maternal disappointment.

“Owongo not care,” he replied, “who the orange man?”

“He with the flaxen hair?” asked Mirumda, and she giggled. “He born with no colour in skin or hair, white like a coverlet of snow from head to toe, so paints himself and get it all wrong,” she said. “Down by the joining of two rivers is where he finds mud and slime of the colour he likes, and he dyes his skin and hair with it. The hair turns fair under the sun, but his skin stays orange, like a juicy fruit in summer! He is Fart-fart, and no man likes him, for he has great wealth from his ancestors, and uses it to buy and then misuse his women.”

That had been a long explanation for anyone in those verbally limited times, even for the intelligent Mirumda, to make, and Owongo looked at her in admiration.

“Mirumda clever,” he said, seriously.

“Mirumda Owongo’s!” giggled the primitive woman, and she took her equally primitive man by both hands and pulled him towards her. “And Owongo show Mirumda what he can do,” she added, her breath hot on him as she mischievously slid one hand under his fur-skin and stroked his skin where the touch made him shriek his pleasure to the approaching dawn.

But there had been fermented drinks and poppy-smoke in mighty abundance that night, and all Owongo could manage when he tried to concentrate was a sloppy grin followed by a succession of raucous snores. Mirumda smiled at him, and unknown by him, kissed him once again on his young lips.

By next morning, long after the sun had risen over the distant mountains, both were awake and both were feeling fragile.

“Owongo head hurts,” he told her, “and Owongo go hunting!”

“With sore head?” asked Mirumda, trying to discourage him. But she knew her man and his attitude to duty and knew that, come gales or storms, fair weather or foul, he would still make his lonely way into the scrubby forest that lay beyond the bend in the river, and using skill and judgement he would track his meat until he found where it was grazing, and then he would hurl his home-made spear with accuracy and power, and fell it.

And if he ever missed he kept quiet about it. Although not one to boast, he was also not one to confess failure too readily.

“Me not want food now,” he muttered to Mirumda, and she nodded her head. She knew a hangover when she saw one, and this was a hangover. It was easy enough to identify, for she had one also. But she also knew that later that day they would both be hungry, so Owongo had to go to it and bring meat home with him.

It must have been almost noon, though with winter coming on the sun never actually reached to be high over their heads, when Owongo slipped out and started his lonely trail to where he hoped there would be good hunting. Others may have gone before him and surely even more would follow, but all the menfolk had their own favourite routes, and anyway, were mindful of their friends and neighbours and where they hunted. The world was a big enough place for all.

Owongo had been out for an hour or so and was nearing where he found most good fortune and plump meat with the spear when there was a crashing noise ahead through the undergrowth, and a man whom he recognised, a good neighbour with a pretty woman and kidlings at home, came rushing towards him.

“Owongo!” he shouted, “it battle-time is!”

There had been no battle-time in Owongo’s lifetime, and he didn’t fancy the idea of fighting other men when there was good meat to be had in plenty. After all, men don’t make good meat.

“What is?” he asked.

“Fart-fart!” gasped the other, Binflo, a strong man, older and tougher than Owongo and not eeasily given to hysteria or fear.

“Orange man?” asked Owongo. “He with the wild hair and wilder eyes?”

“The same. He ordered wild men build barrier. He says the forest-land and hunting is all his, and no other may come on pain of death!”

“Fart-fart say that?” gasped Owongo. “The forest land belongs to all men, not just one!”

Binflo nodded vigorously. “Binflo see for himself. The wild men savage with painted skins and huge muscles, and they kill us if need be! Fart-fart has taken all the hunting lands and says we can hunt there only if we pay a price!”

“What price?” asked Owongo, who wasn’t at all sure what price meant.

“Three parts out of four of what we kill he wants, and we keep one part,” almost wept Binflo, “As if he didn’t have lands and wealth enough already! No, we must go back to River bank where good men live, and make our plans.

“For now, Owongo, is battle-time!”

TO BE CONTINUED…

©Peter Rogerson 13.04.17