1. Meat is Not The Only Food

STEPPING BACK IN TIME Part 1

“Owongo! Owongo! Where are you?” shrieked the small prehistoric boy’s mother from the cave entrance where they lived their brutish comfortable lives.

Owongo looked up, and smirked. He wasn’t really afraid of his mother because he knew that deep inside her sagging bosom she loved him. But he did fear some of the things she might do, and he wasn’t ready to go in yet because being in the cave was boring, like watching mother, the woman his dad and all the other grown ups called Mingey as she went about her tasks, was boring. Or if his dad was home and not out hunting, the giant of a man who everyone called Faceache, as he tried to do something creative with a rotten fur from a deer he killed a good turning of the moon ago without filling the cave with its noxious stink, was equally boring when it didn’t make his stomach heave.

But he was too slow. He’d barely looked about him for somewhere secret to hide when the harridan he called mother caught him and grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking him up until he was dangling in front of her face, his head screaming its pain as a bunch of hair was being pulled by its roots.

“I called, Owongo!” she spat at him, “Me, your mother and you come or I lather you!”

Owongo wasn’t sure what lather meant. In fact, there were quite a few words he had failed to grasp any meaning of in his five years of life because they were sounds that came along and quite often never repeated themselves because language was in the act of being invented, though he didn’t look at it like that. But it sounded unpleasant. It seemed to sound, to his five year old ears, like the very enunciation of pain, and he had learned quite a bit about that in hs five years.

So, “Ouch!” he screamed before the pain came, hoping to deter it’s final arrival.

“Mother called Owongo!” hissed that good woman into his face. “Mother want Owongo. Owongo Mother’s germ of a son and mother wants to cuddle him and feed his stomach with goodness!”

It wasn’t nice being called a germ. But he put up with it in order to survive as a living child for as long as it took to find out what he was going to be fed with.

He was fed quite often. Sometimes more than once in a day, and mostly it was something he’d learned to suffer. Father was out hunting, and when he returned it was usually with something he was obliged to eat, or if not actually eat, spit out when neither parent was looking. He had become quite adept at that, and had a mental map of the few places where last moon’s toxic meals were fermenting.

Mother lowered him by his hair until his feet were on the ground and it crossed his mind that if he did or said something that appealed to her the lathering she had mentioned might not occur. And in addition, if he was extra lucky the stuff she was going to oblige him to put into his mouth might not be repulsive. It might not even be wriggling, which he hated. Swallowing stuff that wriggled was the most unpleasant experience in his young life.

“Father returned from hunt,” she said as she forced him back to the cave. Then she smiled. “Father brought goodness,” she said, and there was a gleam in her eyes.

He rather thought that he knew that gleam. It was what happened on her face when she was going to use him in an experiment.

“Father brought fruit!” she cackled, and she pushed him in the back so hard that he shot into the cave and banged painfully into a protruding ledge of hard stone.

“Father got treat for Owongo!” smiled the man. He was widely known as Faceache because that’s what his face normally did: it ached as a result of an accident half a dozen years earlier when he had been thrown against a rather sturdy tree with a trunk that might easily have been granite, by a creature with absurdly long horns.

Those horns had hurt, but the collision with the tree trunk had smashed his jawbone, which had proceeded to heal all wrong. Ever since then it had both ached and looked to others as if it ached really painfully. So he was known as Faceache to one and all living in the valley bottom.

His neighbour was known as Willyscab, which spoke for itself and was, if anything, even more painful that Faceache’s shattered jaw. And as the clime that the tribe rejoiced in living with was always balmy and never wintery, the fact that they all, every man and every woman, every child and every babe, went around naked, made it hard to conceal such disfigurements as life heaped upon them.

In fact, to Owongo there was only one certainty and that was that his own name was merely temporary and would be adjusted when one of the accidents that flesh is heir to disfigured that flesh and turned it into a talking point.

Such times as they were obliged to live in rendered life into an often painful affair.

“What fruit?” asked Owongo when he saw the orange clump of dripping juices in the man’s powerful hands.

“This tasty!” grinned the man, excitedly making his jaw click unpleasantly. “Old Willyscab showed me! He know a thing or two, does Willyscab! Here, Owongo stupid child, eat!”

And he pushed a handful of mush into Owongo’s mouth.

Owongo had to swallow. He had no choice, so swallow he did, and that fruit was delicious. It was sweet. He’d never met sweet before. Most food was either bland or nasty. This was not just sweet, it was over-sweet.

“See, Owongo-child!” roared the man, and he pushed a second handful into his woman’s mouth, and Mingey gagged. She would have brought it all back, but its descent into her stomach was assisted by a couple of hornets who, trapped in the treacly pulp, exercised their powerful stings as they slowly perished in the woman’s toxic gastric juices.

Faceache grinned with huge pride.

“See: Mother like fruit!” he exclaimed, and banged Owongo on the back until he had to fight to prevent the delicious sweet fruit from returning to the light of day.

That was how Owongo learned that meat was not the only food.

It was a lesson he would never forget.

© Peter Rogerson 10.02.22