The last journey before winter was for collecting honey. Each family went separately, so it would be just Ikaseraz and me. I could see which of us would be climbing the trees. We had to wait until the hunters came back though because some families would need the men on the honey collecting trip.
The day they got back all the camp was out to meet them. Even from a distance we could all see it had been a success, there were many large animals on poles and they mostly had smaller ones on their backs as well. They were walking slowly with their burdens but at last they arrived in camp to great applause. All the wives had counted when they were far away, and as many were returning as had set out, which was the thing uppermost in their minds. When the reunited families had hugged and chattered, the dividing up began. The hunting stories would have to wait.
Ikaseraz and the Elders counted all animals out, then gave to each family according to the number of people in it. Our pile was nearly the smallest, most families were bigger than ours. Even Mother and Father’s share was quite small compared with families that had several big children and old people as well, though they had a boar which is always a favourite. Ikaseraz told me later that pregnant or milking women got more too. The Chief Elder asked if there were any complaints about the division, but it was a formality, everyone could see it was fair.
Ikaseraz and I managed to get our share, a reindeer and a red deer doe, back to our shelter but we hoped someone would help us to get the butchered meat up onto the tundra. There was a lot of work to do before that. We spent all day skinning the two animals, then scraping the skins and setting them out to stretch. The intestines were the next priority. That was such a messy and smelly job we had to do it outside, luckily the weather was fine. Even so we had to keep going in and warming our hands at the fire. We had saved as much of their blood as we could, for paints of course, but it made a good general binder, and with some meat, bulbs and roots could be baked in one of the stomachs into a fine meat pudding.
When we had emptied the intestines and got them soaking in a bowl of water, I asked Ikaseraz if I could have the doe’s intestines.
"Yes, you can. But what will you do with them?"
"I want to make a musical instrument that would sound like the south wind, to make it blow for us."
"Kizkur, I’m glad I chose you, what an idea. How will it work?"
" I was thinking about it in the cave. The flutes sound good, but I think they are too harsh for this. If I cut the intestines into very thin strips and dry them as you would for sewing-thread, then cut them into various different lengths, held taut they would give different notes if plucked with your fingers. I thought an antler, where a tine branches off, could be drilled then the short and long threads put through the holes and held with dowels or pins. Do you see what I mean? The threads could be be made more or less taut, to change the note, by pulling out the pin and winding more thread onto it."
"It will take some practice, I should think, to get it right. We’ve got two antlers here. You can start with them. And you think it will sound like the south wind?"
"Yes. I’d hoped to play it at our weather ceremony."
"That sounds right. The doe’s intestines and the reindeer’s antlers are yours."
The hooves and ligaments were put aside for making glue, the eyes and tongues for sausages, that left us to deflesh the bones. Between them they gave us a good pile of meat, Ikaseraz was well satisfied. We would roast the bones for a while to make them easier to split for the marrow.
That was as much work as we could do that day and we both went over to see Mother and Father. They had finished before us so we all sat and had a hot drink.
"What’s that?" I asked pointing, although I could see what it was. Oskol ran to it and picked up his wolf cub as if I might take it. Father smiled at him and said
"We didn’t want to kill the she-wolf but she attacked and was killed when we defended ourselves. The wolf-spirit will forgive the accident I hope, Enchanter?"
"It is the intention that the spirits look at. You are safe."
"We saw the milk coming from her then and knew there must be cubs. But we could only find one, and here she is. If we can raise her she and Oskol will make a good hunting team when he has been initiated."
"I wish you success."
"I hope so, Oskol has taken to it very strongly already. It can eat meat, although we brought as much of the mother wolf’s milk as we could get."
"She, not it." said Oskol.
"What is she called, Oskol?" I asked.
"Wolf" he said.
"Oh."
"Hello Wolf" we all said to welcome her into the group.
Ikaseraz asked Father what they had done with the mother wolf’s body, but Father cast his eyes quickly at Oskol and said nothing. The next day Ikaseraz told me that, when Oskol was nowhere near, Father told him that they had skinned her and kept the pelt, but decided nobody would be pleased with wolf’s meat from the division and cut up the body on the spot hoping any remaining cubs might find it.
The discussion turned to how we would organise getting the meat into cold storage the next day. It was decided that the three adults would carry both our households meat up to the frostline between them. They would need to make more than one trip up, so it would just have to be done slowly. Both families had a cold pit already dug up there so that saved work, they would just have to cover the stores, after the last was in, with rocks that were too big for any scavengers to move. They thought I was too small to carry anything of significant weight so my job was to look after my brother and sister. All the elecampane, and anything even slightly druglike was to be put away.
The three of them intended to start early so, when we were back at our shelter, I collected up the things I would need for the next day before going to bed. The south wind instrument was my priority now in order to have it made by the time Ikaseraz wanted to hold the weather ceremony. There was no hurry for the purple dye, but after the success of the paint I did want to discover how to make it right.
They set off heavily laden at first light. Oskol was too busy with Wolf to care if I were there or not, so when Eraminpe was comfortably gurgling to herself, I could begin work on my instrument. The doe intestine had dried well overnight and I began by cutting that into thin strips. The lengths would be determined by the space that there was for them in the antler frame. I had brought both antlers because I could easily get one wrong. With the gut threads laid across between the main stem of the antler and the tine I could get some idea of what it would look like, but it was hard to make them stay parallel to each other and with space between them to get a finger in to pluck the thread.
My burin cut the antler without too much effort and, when I had one hole made, it made placing the rest easier because I could tie one of the threads through the hole and round the tine. Where the other end of the thread should go on the main branch was clear then, so I drilled its hole and tied it in. I plucked it to see what sort of note it gave, but it was too loose and just went "clunk". Tightening the knots at both ends worked though and I had my first note. It was high-pitched because I had started near to where the tine branched off and that was the shortest thread. Though I couldn’t tune it until my other threads were in I decided to make the dowels for the holes as I went along. Bone is so much easier to work than antler that I had brought quite a lot of spare bones with me. Even in bone getting a good tight fit wasn’t easy, but two were eventually finished despite interruptions from Oskol who wanted to take Wolf out to play. He wasn’t allowed out of the shelter. Luckily Eraminpe was asleep by this time so I could tell him to be quiet and not wake her.
My idea had been that the dowel would hold the thread tight in the hole then the loose end of thread would be tied to the dowel with some slack so that you could lessen the tightness as well as increasing it. On the first thread though it came to me that I didn’t need to vary both ends, so I fixed the main branch end and left the thread to be altered at the tine end. With two more threads fitted in that way I was longing to get it tuned but knew it was better to wait, I didn’t even know yet how many threads there would be. I looked at it and held it in various ways and had just decided that it needed to be played with both hands at once to get a chord out of it, when Father’s head came in at the door.
"Everything alright?"
"No, I want to go out and play with Wolf" was the instant shout from Oskol.
"Alright Kizkur?"
"Yes, we’re fine."
"You can come out and play with me for a few minutes Oskol." He told me that Mother was resting with Ikaseraz and took Oskol and Wolf out with him.
When he brought them back a while later he said they would have to be setting off again soon but came in to see what I was doing.
"What’s that for?"
"It’s going to be a musical instrument. I want to play a sound like a breeze from the south."
He didn’t seem to know what to say.
"A breeze? Do you blow it then?"
"No, you pluck its threads. It’s going to have more than this." I plucked what it had got to show him. He was getting quite taken with the idea, so I showed him how you could alter the notes by tightening or loosening. He had a go with it himself.
"You could make the sound stronger - if you wanted to - by hollowing out the antler."
"Yes - I could." I smiled thanks for a good idea.
"Must get back to the others."
After he’d gone I thought that he hadn’t had much of a rest, running about with Oskol then improving on musical instrument design, and he was probably carrying by far the most up to the tundra.
The rest of the threads went in each one longer by a little and parallel to the previous one, until there was no room for more. There were ten when I had finished. As I did them I thought about hollowing out the antler. My burin wouldn’t go in far. Father might have a long rasp of some kind.
Before starting to tune it I gave Oskol some honeycomb and let the baby suck honey off my fingers. It might be late before we could all eat. When the tuning was done to my satisfaction I played a lullaby for Eraminpe. Either that or the honey worked, she was soon asleep again.
I played some simple tunes that I knew, then ran the back of my fingernail quickly down all the strings one after another. First I went from high to low, then from low to high. I had to use my thumbnail to come back towards me low to high. It was lovely, that was the first time I ever did it but it still thrills me today.
It was a crude instrument, of course, but I loved it then. When I heard them coming back I quickly packed it away. They might ask me to play for them and I needed a lot more practice. But they were all talking at once about the success of getting all the winter meat safely stored and how hungry they were, so I would probably have been safe anyway.
The next day should have been the honey collecting, but Ikaseraz was too tired to set out again so we had an easy day. It looked as if it might rain anyway or even snow, which would have made it harder.
I showed Ikaseraz my new instrument and played a few bits of things to show him what it did ending with my run across all the threads. He seemed quite impressed, for him anyway. He didn’t insult it.
When I’d hollowed out the main branch as far as I could with my burin, I took it over to ask Father about a rasp or something to do the rest with. He tried a few things with no success before finding a beautiful three-edged blade. It was perfect and did part of the job very quickly, but it was not long enough to reach the end.
"I’ll have to haft it on to a handle." Father said. "There won’t be time to do it today. I’ll do it tomorrow, but the glue won’t be set until the next day. What we could do today though is to take the top of the antler off. You don’t want that top part on do you?"
"No, it only gets in the way."
It was quick to saw the top part off and then file it down smooth, but it left a smooth patch so I suggested that we file it all down to the bottom of the main branch. When we’d done that Father couldn’t resist engraving all up the smoothed part. He was very good at engraving and carving, his weapons were much admired. I just sat and watched him. It looked really good when he had finished. There were two lines of zigzags with a pattern of branching curls between.
"It looks lovely Father. Thank you."
"The curls mean you. We named you Kizkur after your hair." I felt silly never to have thought of it, it had just been a name to me before that moment.
It looked as though it would stay fine the next day, though the wind was cold, so Ikaseraz and I put some furs on and went after honey. He usually had some bad news kept up his sleeve until we had started on something and today was no different.
"If you don’t get stung accidentally you must aggravate them deliberately into stinging you. You need at least eight stings but no more than ten. That is to start getting your resistance to them. There are times that you need bee stings to get you into trance, but you need a lot. I need about a hundred for instance. But it is not safe to go for a hundred straight away, you must build up your tolerance slowly. Ten is a good number to start with. It’s a pity that there won’t be any more this year. The bees are going to sleep for the winter. We mustn’t wake them, so we will have to wait until Spring to continue your course of gradually increasing numbers of stings." That was something anyway, after today I would get a break until Spring.
"What is the power of bees?"
"They have wings so they belong to Sky Father."
"Yes, yes. We’ve got beyond there haven’t we?" His impatience flustered me, but I thought he was perhaps more tired than he would admit.
"They make honey, sweetness… a preservative, er…, they make very neat homes."
"Not very good. They all live together and get on with each other. They cooperate. They signify the strength in numbers."
He was chanting quietly to himself so I said nothing.
"It is the group that matters not any individual person, do you understand?"
"Yes." I said, but only so as not to upset him further. It seemed upside down to me, without the individual people there would be no group.
"We will soon come to the end of our group’s normal range. Beyond there if we meet anyone we must be very polite, thank them for allowing us to use their land. It is understood between us and the south-westers that we may gather honey here, as they have more than they need, and our area is too bleak for many bees. We have nothing to offer that they haven’t got here, so we are under obligation to them."
We had been walking down the valley, sometimes beside the river, and I had noticed that there were more trees as we went towards the sun. I was busy looking for bees’ nests but Ikaseraz hadn’t finished
"Both our groups and many others are part of the larger gathering of people who celebrate mid-summer at Lazcux, so there are mutual obligations between us anyway."
But I was more interested in bees than politics and pointed at what looked like a nest to me. He agreed and as we approached the tree he made a continuous low-pitched thrumming in his throat, I guessed that he was speaking to the bees. It was at this first tree that his bad mood was reversed. He spotted that there were claw marks on the trunk.
"Look, look a bear has scratched this tree, it is a sacred one. Get out your bear tooth and thank bear-spirit for guiding us."
We did so and I was relieved to see him look so pleased.
"How did the bear scratch the bark so high up?"
"That’s not specially high. It stands on its back legs and stretches up with its front ones."
"But, look" I reached up the tree and pretended to scratch with my nails. It was nowhere near as high as the claw marks.
He laughed at me.
"But the bear is four times as tall as you."
I had never seen one so couldn’t argue, but he saw I was sceptical.
"This was probably a young one. They grow bigger than that. When we go to Lazcux I’ll show you some bear claw scratchings quite a bit higher than those. They use several caves to visit bear-spirit, I think they pass through the walls to spirit-world at the scratched points, as we use engravings on the walls to show us where to pass through. There are no marks of their claws in our cave though, perhaps the entrance is too low for them."
The tree did not look too difficult to climb. Ikaseraz gave me a push to get me on the lowest branch, that’s always the hardest part of any climb. Once among the branches it was fairly easy to get up to the nest. I only took half the honey so they would have some for the times they woke up during the winter. With only one sting I was pleased with myself when I got back down. We transferred the honey from my small collecting bag to the large one Ikaseraz was carrying. After we had made our reverences to the tree we set out in search of more.
It was quite a long time before we found another bees’ nest, but after that one we found several more in the same area. Only one was impossible to reach. The lowest branch of its tree was much too high for me, even standing on Ikaseraz’s shoulders which he did not like at all. We needed a ladder, but carrying one we would never have got this far. He was satisfied with my thirteen stings.
On our way home he said
"I believe there is some deep connection between bears and bees. When I was a young man I found a bees’ nest inside the skeleton of a bear and it seemed very fitting to me. I took the skull of that bear and set it on a sacred rock in the spirit-cave that I used at that time."
I looked at him surprised.
"You probably didn’t know that I have not always belonged to this group. I used to live a long way further to the east. When you are grown up I will tell you how I came to be this group’s enchanter."
Something else I had to wait until I was grown up for.
As we came near to our camp we were met by one of the hunters looking very anxious. His wife had been in labour for several hours and he wanted Ikaseraz to come, he didn’t know if she was alright or not. Ikaseraz told him to go home and calm his wife if he could and we would be with him as soon as we could gather what was needed from our shelter. The ’we’ shook me at first but I realised I had to learn how to do it sometime. But I had hoped to cosset my stings, no time for that. At our shelter he handed me the honey bag to store away while he searched through his things for the birthing kit. I didn’t know what was in it or what to expect. Then we were out of the door and running, I’d never seen Ikaseraz move so fast. The man was waiting for us at his door and ducked inside quickly to make way for us.
The woman was lying on her sleeping furs and looked horrible to me. Her face was twisted in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible and was running with sweat. Her hair was already wet, I supposed from sweat too, and at intervals she would scream so loudly I thought it must be a banshee. I found out later that the other children had long since been taken away by a neighbour. It was just the four of us. Ikaseraz told the man to boil up some water for purification, but he said he had already done that but did not know what to do with it.
"Give it to me and boil some more." He tested the boiled water to see how hot it was, then poured some into a smaller bowl and put his hands in it. Then he gestured to me to put my hands in while he chanted over all our four hands.
"Throw that water away outside" he told me and filled another bowl with the rest.
The woman had removed her clothing from her lower half and when I returned Ikaseraz was putting the purification water all over the bared skin. Her belly looked enormous to me. There was a really bad smell. He told me to intone one of the chants he had taught me that was a general one to implore the spirits for help. I thought what he was chanting must be one for birthing.
"Is that water boiled yet?" he shouted at the man.
"It nearly is."
"Bring it here as soon as it boils." He was extracting a potion from his kit and pouring it into a cup. Then he extended the cup to me to show me that the potion came up to the first engraved mark inside. Cold water brought the level up to the second mark and the boiling water, when the man carried it over, brought the level to the third mark.
In a pause between bouts of screaming he managed to get the woman to drink it.
"We must wait now for it to take effect,"
"What will it do?"
He lowered his voice although the man had gone to the other side of the shelter as if he were trying to keep as far away as he could.
"It relaxes the passage that the baby must come through, so enlarging it. It has opened somewhat already, but not enough and the woman is getting exhausted. It should speed things up."
We waited and waited. The woman’s screams had lessened, which made things easier for me, I think I hoped it meant they were easier for her. After some time Ikaseraz examined her again. He looked grim, but the man did not seem to notice. So he went over to him and touched him to get his attention.
"My assistant and I are going outside to consult the spirits. Watch her and call us at once if she seems to be worse."
I was rather simple at that time and when we were outside I expected that we would consult the spirits. But Ikaseraz just said
"You must be prepared for a long hard night. The outcome may not be good. The baby has moved down as I hoped, but I am fairly sure that what I can see is not its head. A baby’s head is soft, but not that soft, I think it is coming out bottom first. Once it starts to come it must come out fast or the mother’s birth passage may suffocate it.
We may have to pull the baby out, it is difficult but there is no time to think. The baby will be wet and slippery so take that into account if you are needed to pull, and do whatever I say immediately."
I could see he was worried.
"Do you think the mother might die too?"
"We should bear it mind, but if the spirits wish it, we should be able to save at least one of them. I could drug the mother but I need her awake to push. She doesn’t seem to have the strength to push as hard as she should. We’d better go back in."
It seemed a very long night, but at the end of it there was still no baby. The woman was mostly torpid by then except when she would suddenly rouse and scream. We managed to get her to drink some water and took turns to have some breakfast ourselves. Ikaseraz said we had better get some sleep in turns, I was to go first. The father was already asleep. The sun was high, towards noon, when Ikaseraz woke me urgently.
"Compose yourself and then come here quickly. The baby’s coming now."
I shook my hair back, worked my arms and legs for a moment, then joined him beside the mother. He had been right, the bottom and legs were already showing.
"Move round there. Yes, now grasp one leg in each hand. When I say, pull firmly but gently." He had both hands on the baby’s trunk.
"Pull." We did but nothing happened except that the woman groaned.
"The head must be misaligned. We will have to turn it." His eyes looked into mine, and I thought I could read them,
"We’ll turn it, very carefully, towards you, a quarter turn. Now."
We did and at the same moment the woman sat up and pushed. The head came out all at once and he screamed so loudly that he woke his father who got up and rushed across. The mother lay back panting and the father put his arms round her gingerly. Between us Ikaseraz and I got the baby boy washed and wrapped, after I had cut the cord under instruction. As I did not know the correct rituals I just watched Ikaseraz perform them. If the baby lived he would be given his real name in the cave.
With nothing more we could do we left the father to care for them.
"The mother was looking better at the end, wasn’t she?"
"That was too much for her strength, I don’t think she will survive the winter. The boy, well maybe." I thought then that it would be better to give birth in Spring.
When we got home Ikaseraz went straight to sleep. I didn’t because I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night if I did. Deciding not to start a meal in the cookbag, in case Ikaseraz slept through, I went to see Mother. I needed to talk it through with her before I knew how to feel about it. I had been frightened, bored, disgusted but I had helped to pull a baby into the world. She said all the right things as I had known she would. She made me out to be a hero and almost convinced me that mother and baby would live.
"Anyway it is a very good thing that you have got the experience now of a difficult birth. You may need it."
"But what if Ikaseraz wasn’t here. If I was the Enchanter, who would deliver my babies?"
"I would of course, or… Eraminpe."
No, there couldn’t be a time when Mother wasn’t here. I didn’t have to think about that because Father came in then and was wanting to show me the fine tool he had made of the three-edged blade. It was lovely in itself as all his tools were, he had already decorated the handle. He had carved in a wolf cub and a narwhal tusk.
"You’ve done it already! Can we use it now?" He was eager to, so I went back to my shelter to collect the instrument. Ikaseraz still slept.
Father started to enlarge the hollow that I had begun with my burin.
"Do you want to do it?"
"No, you do it." His hands were bigger and stronger, and anyway so much more skilful Of course I was hopping about trying to see properly and getting in his way by wanting to try a note on it. I wouldn’t have dared do that with Ikaseraz. But he soon finished despite me and handed it over. I tried each note and then a small tune, it needed retuning but I could do that later. He had been more right than I had thought. The sound was richer altogether. It held some power now.
I drew breath, but he said
"No need for thanks." I knew that really and smiled at him.