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Actually, the pla
The head men said good night in turn, the chief speaking first. The four set off through the darkness, their lights probing ahead. Near their camp, they heard squeals and then a chilling laugh. They hurried and were in time to see several huge hyenas slink off. They had been trying to get into the dome in which the two pet bears were kept.
When the expedition had first come, the hyenas had seemed fairly common. But when warmer weather came, the Wota'shaimg had hunted down all the large predators in the neighborhood, including the hyenas. These big brutes were dangerous, since they often hunted in packs, were not at all cowardly, and had jaws stronger than a cave lion's. But many of them died, and in a short time they ventured out only at night in this area. But the few left did venture quite close to the two human habitations.
Gribardsun checked to make sure that the bears were unharmed and that their food and water supply was full. Then he went into his own dome with von Billma
At the village, they found a bonfire going, before which the hunters, adults, and juveniles sat. The women and children sat about twenty yards away and made no noise during the ceremony that followed.
The strangers, except for Rachel, sat down at the right end of the hunters. Though she was not forbidden to take part in the hunt, she was not allowed to participate in the ceremony. She sat with the women.
As the dawn turned the world blue and green, Glamug came out from his tent. He was naked except for a reindeer loin covering, a rhinoceros skull over his head, and a cloak of bear fur. His body was painted with ocher, green, brown, black, and yellow symbols. One of these was a swastika with its arms to the right, the good-luck gammadion. This was the first time any of the four had seen this, though there were a variety of other types of crosses painted on the skins of the tents.
Rachel filmed Glamug; Gribardsun made a mental note to comment in the vessel's log on the earliest recorded appearance of the ancient and once honorable symbol.
Glamug held in one hand a rhinoceros tail and in the other two small painted figurines of a rhinoceros and a mammoth. These were made of ground bone dust mixed with ocher and bear fat and baked in a small stone oven.
Glamug danced before the hunters, shaking the rhino tail and occasionally flicking the hunters in the face with its tip. He chanted a song which the Silversteins understood not at all and which the other two comprehended only partially. After a while the two men perceived that the chant was a linguistic fossil, preserved from an earlier stage of the language. It was as if a modern Englishman were to sing a song in Middle English to an audience which did not know what half of the words meant. Gribardsun looked at von Billma
At the end of the ceremony, Glamug cast each of the figurines into the flame after reciting a short but savage prayer over each figure. As the rhino and mammoth figurines were thrown into the fire, the hunters bellowed or made a trumpeting sound.
Immediately thereafter, Glamug ran to the temporary tents at one corner of the ledge and got his weapons. All of the hunters had slept there last night, jammed against each other, keeping each other warm with their body heat. The night before a hunt for any of the large and dangerous beasts, the hunters slept away from all women. Nor were they to be touched by the women until they returned from the hunt and went through a ceremony to propitiate the ghosts of the slain beasts. The women went through a separate cleansing ceremony before they received their mates in their tents.
The man who led the hunters to the plains was not the chief nor the shaman nor the greatest hunter, Shivkaet. He was a youth, Thrimk, who had gone through the rites of passage only two years before. Last night he had dreamed that he had encountered a family of rhinos in a narrow valley debouching onto the plain. And in the dream he had skin the male. For this reason he was given the lead, and the hunters sang about his prowess-to-be as they marched along.
When they reached the edge of the plain, they fell silent. They formed into three crescents with the greatest hunters in the first. Gribardsun was put on the right-hand tip of the first crescent. Von Billma
Fleetingly, Gribardsun wondered if Silverstein was hoping that his rival (as he undoubtedly thought of him) would get killed. He was the only one who had not protested when Gribardsun said he was going to hunt with only native arms.
Silverstein, however, could not win. If Gribardsun was killed or hurt, then Silverstein's guilt would punish him. If Gribardsun performed well, then Rachel would regard him even more highly, and Silverstein would dislike him even more.
The youth, Thrimk, went straight to the pass giving onto the narrow valley he had seen in his dream. Of course, he must have seen it in reality more than once. Though the valley was six miles away from the village, it was within the territory ranged by the Wota'shaimg. The tribesmen had not come here recently, however, for fear of encountering the other people who had moved in. The Wota'shaimg called these the Wotagrub, the Bear Robbers.
The contacts of the two people had been few and brief after the invasion of the Wotagrub's village. The Wotagrub fled whenever they met Wota'shaimg, even though the latter were outnumbered. Once, however, a lone youth - Thrimk, in fact - had almost been hit by a heavy boomerang. The weapon had come sailing from a pile of boulders on the side of a hill. Thrimk had foolishly tried to locate his assailant, but the man was gone.
The head men had urged Gribardsun to clean out the Wotagrub, saying that there was not enough game in the area to support their own people for long, let alone an additional tribe. Moreover, the Wotagrub had not been punished enough for their theft.
Gribardsun had refused. He had nothing against the so-called Wotagrub, who had done only what their enemies would have done in their place. Moreover, though he did not tell the Wota'shaimg so, he intended to study the Wotagrub. And he certainly could not get friendly with them if he decimated them.
The hunters stopped when Thammash raised his hand with a spear held straight up in it. He nodded at Thrimk, who had also stopped. The youth shook his spear at them, smiled, and trotted off into the pass. He was a tall fellow with light brown hair and a scraggly beard. He had not yet attained his full growth. He was noted for his swift ru
The nucleus of the best hunters, with Kaemgron, who was supposed to stay close to his son, and Gribardsun, trotted after Thrimk a minute later. Von Billma