7. The Loincloth Launch Pad.

STEPPING BACK IN TIME Part 7

Back in Owongo’s time and place there seemed to be one golden rule about privacy and modesty, and that was if you wear any kind of garment make sure it’s clean. Therefore women mostly, but occasionally men who were womanless, spent a great amount of time bashing whatever it was they wore with stones that lined the banks of the meandering stream as it coursed along the valley.

The alternative was so enjoy the summer sun au naturel, a state in which even manly loin cloths were put aside until the cooler weather returned at the close of the year, not that any expertise at predicting the seasons had been gleaned by a population that suffered embarrassingly brief life-spells.

And the truth was that many lives were short. Fifty was hardly ever reached, forty was an impossible dream to most and thirty was looked upon as positively geriatric. Not that anyone counted the years because there was a great deal too much other stuff to occupy their minds, like why is rain wet and how do I light fires when I want them?

And that last conundrum was on eight year old Owongo’s mind as he set out to glean whatever he could from the wild because his mum Mingey had suggested spending a day or two in the forests collecting edibles was a good idea when the alternative was starvation. In a few years time, she said, he would be able to go hunting like the men did, but until then he was too small to offer much of a threat to most of the walking meat he might encounter in the depths of the woodland and far from home.

“And you wear second best loin cloth,” she added, “many dangers for boys who cast protection aside.”

He knew there were. Bitter experience had taught him just what thorns and spikes and sharp teeth could do to a boy’s secret parts and he didn’t want the sort of mutilation that their neighbour Willyscab had experienced years earlier. So he dressed himself modestly in that single garment and set out.

I have deduced all of the above from a couple of marks scratched on his cave wall and I doubt I have made much in the way of a mistake. The line that represented his loincloth was particularly easy to understand when I put my head on one side and squinted.

So it was that Owongo set out, dragging a home made sled behind him. It was a simple device, rough wood that he pulled along with two rounded spikes scraping on the earth behind him. It was far from easy fo rhim, though ,you will have noted that another year has passed and he is now eight years old. Or he might have been nine or even ten. Nobody calculated such things in his day. But of one thing I am quite certain: he had long since ceased to be five!

He sauntered along paths that had been made by creatures of the wild. Some of them were difficult and narrow, winding along, seeming to be going nowhere, whilst others were broad and tempted him to even break into a boyish trot. The weather was hotter than balmy, though, and trotting soon became a thing of the past as his own perspiration found its way into his eyes and half-blinded him.

There was one place he had been advised my his mother and just about everyone who had any sense not to venture anywhere near. Well down the river, leading away from the distant mountains, lived a small group of ruffians who had toxic hearts and who would find Owongo a tasty addition to their diet should they leap upon him and drag a sharp flint across his throat, stilling his young heart.

So it was with some surprise when he spied two of them well away from the forbidden homestead of the thugs. But they were distinctive, being of mixed breed, a great deal of Cro Magnon with more than enough Neanderthal to give them brutish bad looks and far from fragrant breath. Now, I know that just about everyone in our modern age has supposedly inherited a tiny bit of Neanderthal DNA, but these men had a great deal more than a tiny bit.

Fortunately for Owongo, he saw them before they saw him or his story might have come to an abrupt ending there and then. But he was capable of caution, which was a good thing.

The sight of them might have spurred him to drag his sled swiftly in the direction of home, but for one thing.

They had a prisoner, and that prisoner was easy for him to identify because she had dwelt in his head day and night since the winter celebrations. It was Mirumda, and if he knew anything it was that he worshipped her. She was a goddess and he was a mere mortal.

One of the thugs was laughing at her whilst the other was pulling her hair and pinching her flesh wherever it was pinchable.

“Get off!” she howled in an almost ladylike way, “or I bite you!” and to prove that she was capable of being as good as her word she lashed out at one of the men with her lovely white teeth.

“You make tough meat!” snapped the bitten thug, and he struck her across her face.

That was too much for Owongo. It stole from his any sense of caution. But it didn’t actually make him stupid. It alerted his brain to the fact that he was Owongo the Mighty and he could do anything he liked, especially if it included using his brains and rescuing the love of his life from the jaws of possible death.

He looked around him and saw that there was quite a scattering of last year’s horse chestnuts on the ground, some brown and glistening under the sun whilst other were still in their green protective shells.

He picked one up, and looked at it. It was hard and he knew precisely what it could be: it could be a missile, and if carefully aimed and launched with sufficient power it could do damage to two thugs even if they were bigger and stronger than him.

“Hold on, Mirumda!” he shouted, and the two men looked round to see where his voice came from, but he was careful to keep well hidden behind the tree that had provided him with his missiles.

“Owongo?” whimpered the girl.

But he had not time to waste in simple conversation. He picked up a dozen or so horse chestnuts and then removed his second best loincloth, which as we have established, will have been clean even though it did merge beautifully into the forest being generally the same colour as trees. Using it as a sling he aimed the missiles at the two men, and his accuracy was remarkable because one of the bullies was hit straight in one eye, vausing him to yelp and let go of Mirumda’s arm, whilst the other was struck on the chest by two or three of them.

“What!” howled the half blinded man.

“Mirumda!” shouted Owongo, “run!”

And she did. Pulling herself free she ran towards Owongo’s voice, to where she thought he must be hiding.

It must have been obvious that what the two bullies lacked in brain power they made up for in physical strength, and after the briefest of pauses during which they worked out what was happening, they set out in pursuit of their escaped prey.

They might have caught her, but for a second wave of missiles that shot towards them from what they perceived as nowhere, and this time the nuts hit all the harder as a consequence of having nowhere near as far to travel as they had during the first assault.

“Come, Mirumda,” hissed Owongo, “sit on sled!”

She was clever, was that girl, establishing the simple fact that the female of the species can be quick to think and quicker to react. Within a split second the two youngsters would have been seen racing through the ancient forest had there been anyone to look, the boy pulling a rickety sled and the girl hanging on for all she was worth.

But they were alone, so nobody saw. The two bullies had decided that, far from being a child, Owongo was an avenging angel from their own version of the heavens, and they’d best scarper as quickly as they could.

Which is what they did.

© Peter Rogerson 17.02.22

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