14. BLADDERS AND MILK

I always said thats tone-age men were clever. They could even play football.

It took Owongo a single night to realise that babies are always one of two things: they are either sleeping a gurgling and being pretty as pictures or they are hollering and yawping fit to waken the dead, and being ugly. Yes. He shivered when the thought went into his head. The little tiny scrap of meat (also called Owongo, which, he thought showed a remarkable lack of originality on Mirumda’s part, for it was she who had named it) could indeed look ugly when it yawped.

All this led to Mirumda having to wearily climb out of her pile of skins and push first one and then the other breast into the baby’s face. Then the baby, and to Owongo this was miraculous, latched onto the n*****s and sucked for all it was worth. He was so impressed by the process that he thought he even might try it himself if the child ever grew big enough to drink properly and chew bones like a man.

And the very next day he knew that an invention was called for. He treasured his sleep, and so, he knew, did Mirumda, and if she went without it she was irritable all the next day, and an irritable Mirumda was something he couldn’t bear. And anyway, even if she did develop tolerance for it he knew that he was also capable of degrees of irritability if he went without enough shut-eye, and that had a downright powerful effect on Mirumda’s patience.

Owongo, both him and others who bore his name in the same way as his tiny son did, had a skill when it came to inventing stuff. It wasn’t as if he was so sophisticated that he could see financial gain from a gap in the market but he could see reward in the form of a good night’s sleep.

“What’s wrong with the brat?” he asked Mirumda when it woke him with a particularly loud squawk.

“He’s no brat, he’s Owongo Junior!” squawked an enraged and weary Mirumda who took any criticism of her infant as criticism of herself.

“Then why is Owongo Junior squawking?” demanded Owongo, with a layer of sympathy almost (but not quite) detectable in his intonation.

“Why, he’s hungry,” Mirumda told him, “he needs feeding.”

“He needs meat?” asked Owongo, wondering if he was asking the right question but asking it anyway because he wasn’t quite sure what the right question might be.

“No, silly, Owongo Junior need mother’s milk,” said Mirumda with an edge to her voice that warned Owongo that she wouldn’t tolerate stupidity from him even if he didn’t know what stupidity was.

“Where mother’s milk?” The question was such a simple one and so deserving of a straight-forward explanation, but Mirumda wasn’t in the mood to be straight-forward. The last thing she wanted to do right now (and they were still in bed on their far from comfortable palliasse with the dawn of a new day exploding outside with a ray of sunlight that fought its way into their cave past and through the distant woodlands, that made it flicker) was feed the baby. She’d done it several times during the night and her n*****s were threatening to become sore and anyway her eyes wanted to shut.

“In my teat of course!” she snapped, “not in Owongo’s where it might help Mirumda when she’d tired but in mine! Mirumda must take the scrap that is Owongo Junior and force it onto her swollen breasts without weeping from the pain and urge the creature to suck gently rather than viciously, which is how it sucked in the night. And all Owongo can do is stand there looking gormless and ask stupid questions.”

Several other questions sprung into Owongo’s mind but he wasn’t sure whether they might be categorised as stupid by his lovely Mirumda, so he kept them to himself.

“Owongo make invention,” he murmured, and, even though the morning was very early he picked up his spear and made his way into the forest, his mind deep in thought. He passed Mirumda’s Mouthing stone, and that set off a weird chain of thoughts in his head, so he paused and scratched an irritation on its crown.

When Mirumda like Owongo, he thought, when she touch Owongo’s mouth with her own and when she lick Owongo’s tongue with her nice clean tongue…

There might be something hovering somewhere on the edge of that mental image, but the memory of it rebounded to his groin, and he groaned. Memories did that sort of thing if the memories were of precious moments and Mirumda.

Owongo make a mouth for baby to suck on, he thought, and Owongo fill it with milk. Owongo get milk from she-deer, and make a mouth for it, and give it to Owongo Junior!

The idea was far-fetched, but had a shape that he rather liked because it promised to solve a problem, and there was nothing Owongo liked better than solving problems.

But where would he find a mouth, or failing finding one, how would he make one?

One thing slithered into place in Owongo’s head after another. The one thing was an image of the guts and goo left over after he had slaughtered and butchered a wild boar only the previous day. You could do that to wild boar, if you slaughtered them: cut the meat off and leave the rubbish behind so that other creatures in the forest might feed off it. In that way a savage tiger might be less enthusiastic about hunting Owongo if the tiger had a full belly of Owongo’s left-overs. That, to Owongo, was win-win.

It didn’t take him long to find the remains of the wild boar. It had been a small creature, no more than a piggy chidling itself, poor little mite. Once Owongo had cut away the meat there wasn’t much left.

But there was the bladder.

Owongo didn’t know it was the bladder or even what a bladder did inside the beasts he massacred for food. But he did know it could be inflated and kicked around for fun because he’d done it himself. Don’t let them tell you that soccer is a relatively modern invention because it isn’t. It pre-dated Owongo, even. It even pre-dated Owongo’s grandfather, which was ages ago, and a hog or boar’s bladder was what they used.

The game was fun and it exactly reflected the genius of stone-age man.

It took Owongo next to no time to retrieve the fortunately still intact bladder from yesterday’s diminutive kill, and all he had to do was work on it, tie off a few of the bits and bobs that dangled from it until he had a container that could be kicked around without bursting. But this one wasn’t going to be used as a football. It was going to be Owongo Junior’s baby bottle and it was going to be suspended where Mirumda’s pride and joy could find it in the night, and the two of them, he and Mirumda, were going to get a good night’s sleep.

It was much more difficult getting some milk because the nervous does objected about parting with it even when Owongo spoke in his most cuddly voice to them. But after a great deal of battling he caught one and discovered that one thing it didn’t like was its n*****s being pulled and pushed. In fact, it made the kind of noise you might expect it to make if it was in the act of being slaughtered, which it almost was. But if nothing else, Owongo knew about persevering.

It was well past noon when Owongo arrived back at his cave and proudly showed his bladder filled with milk to an exasperated and weary Mirumda. It was leaking a bit, but only a bit and he said, quite seriously, that their problems were all over and that they could sleep at night because he, Owongo, was mighty clever.

Mirumda, though, didn’t quite see it that way.

She screamed so loud that Sappo the Wise Woman heard and came to see what was amiss. When Owongo, very seriously, explained about his marvellous invention her face rippled into a really telling smile.

“You poor soul,” she said quietly to Mirumda, and shook her head.

But none of that meant anything to Owongo because he, and he alone, had invented the baby’s bottle. And miracle of miracles, that night they used it because Owongo Junior was very demanding, and believe it or believe it not, the darned thing worked!

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 23.04.17