I volunteer to run back to camp to bring the butchers. The rest of the hunting party stands guard at the kill, protecting our food from scavengers. Where there is one saber-toothed, there is likely a pack of dire wolves nearby, or maybe even another cat.
I decide against going the way we came, but instead head south into the valley below us, running for a while along the river before breaking west toward home. Along the way I keep my eyes open, but I never see the other five mammoths. Will they move north, as other mammoth herds have, staying close to the Great Ice as it draws away from the sea?
I run the whole way, my feet splashing in puddles that dot the ground where winter ice has melted, the early summer wind chilling my ears and my nose. When I reach camp, I head straight to the kitchen, a long tent at the western edge of our close circle of hide-covered huts. Inside I find my mother sitting on the ground, working alongside her siblings and cousins. My mother has always been thin—strong in the way vines are strong—while her face, in contrast, has stayed full and rounded like a young girl’s. But today, in the speckled light of the kitchen, her usually soft-edged face appears gaunt.
“Kol!” She drops the fist-shaped stone she uses to grind greens and roots in a bowl made of the hollowed-out skull of a bison. A smooth, flat rock lies in the hearth surrounded by burning coals, the remnants of a fire. The kitchen assaults my senses: my nostrils fill with the oily scent of cooking fish, and the tips of my ears sting as they thaw in the sudden warmth. “What news do you have?” My mother studies my face. Hope is trying to creep into her eyes, but wariness crowds it out.
“The hunt is a success,” I say, and her stiff lips twist into a smile.
The kitchen tent is crowded—all available hands have been called in to help prepare what is usually a simple midday meal cooked by two or three people. As soon as the words have left my lips a cheer ripples through the room. At the back of the tent a flap in the wall has been opened to allow a second hearth to vent. Two figures bolt to their feet when I mention the kill. Though they are mere silhouettes against the light pouring through the open vent, I recognize my younger brothers before they even move.
“We’ve brought down a mammoth. The butchers are needed. But they must come quick. A cat was also killed as it stalked the same prey. Only I left the kill to bring the news; all the others stayed to keep watch.”
My mother regards me closely. I know the questions she wants to ask—Who brought down the mammoth? Who slayed the cat? But she doesn’t dare ask here. If the answers do not give credit to her sons, she doesn’t want the others of the clan to hear. At least not yet.
“You need butchers?” My youngest brother, twelve-year-old Roon, rough-hewn and awkward like an unfinished stone tool, moves toward the front of the kitchen, clambering over seated figures. Kesh, lean and lanky at fifteen, follows right behind. “We’ll come—”
“We have butchers,” my mother says, as Ness, Mol, and Svana climb stiffly to their feet from the dimly lit center of the tent. These three are all siblings—cousins of my father who are experienced and wise with regard to butchering a kill. Still, they don’t move with the energy and speed of my brothers.
“Let them come along, Mother, please. They’ll be needed to help load the meat and pull it back to camp.”
So the six of us go, pulling three empty travoises—overland sleds made of poles of birch and mammoth bone. I lead the way, enduring my brothers’ relentless questions about you and your sister. “You’ll meet them soon enough,” I say. I step up the pace a bit. I feel an urgency to return to the kill, and I need a break from questions about what happened on the hunt.
When we finally come to the head of the rocky trail, everything I’ve described stretches out before us—the dead mammoth, the cat, my father, and Pek in the company of three hunters who were all but strangers before today. Kesh and Roon drop the travois they’ve been pulling and race each other across the grass, leaving me and the butchers to bring the three sleds the rest of the way.