The ceremony over, his fears momentarily stilled, he resumed his meal. But presently he caught the faint faraway sound of an approaching footfall. Something was coming: he knew it to be a man, and a lame man. He stopped eating. He glided deep into the undergrowth and lay down with his face towards the approaching stranger, his chest resting on the meat, his axe ready to hand. He had blunted the cruel edge of his hunger and could now, for a while, give himself to watching and waiting.
There drifted into his mind a picture of Hawkon’s woman, the woman called Flint; and the hidden motive of this adventuring began to invade his consciousness. What if the coming one should prove to be no man after all, but a woman. Fire ran in Ogo’s veins. He forgot the lump of boar, cold and clammy, that the upper part of his body was resting on. He forgot his less than half-assuaged hunger; and forgot it not in a new bodily hunger but rather in a new sense of manhood, a proud resolve to go back to his tribe, as Hawkon had done, bringing a fine female for trophy. Until that should be accomplished he hated Hawkon with a hatred made sharper by frustrated love. But the newcomer was not a woman. He was a small, rat-faced fellow, and moved slowly, with evident pain but without sound, dragging a wounded foot that left a red trail in his wake. Ogo let him pass unchallenged and unmolested; and not till the rustle of his going had ceased did he conceive the idea of following him. This wounded man was on his way to a tribal squat. What else? And in that squat there must be women that a cunning one, with Hawkon’s example to inflame him, might snatch and carry away. Following was an easy matter, even in the fast-gathering darkness. Ogo came out of hiding, nosed for scent, found it. He was still encumbered by his booty, which he now carried slung across his shoulders; but its strong smell did not confound him in this new quest. Man’s blood is different. But he had not followed far before he became eager to overtake the stranger, and quickening his pace soon did so, he being so fleet and the stranger hampered by lameness. He came close upon him. The stranger turned at the sound of his step.
‘Not shout,’ urged Ogo in a husky whisper. ‘Not shout.’ He held high his axe, as a sign of power. He lowered it, fastened it again to his belt, and shewed his empty hands: a sign of peace. ‘We are friends,’ said Ogo.
The stranger, with a brief bark of terror, broke into a run; was brought down by his wounded foot; and at once overtaken. He knelt before his captor waiting dumbly for the axe to fall. His voice was silent, but his wide eyes screamed for him.
Ogo shook his head vigorously, thrust his face close to the stranger’s, and grinned reassurance. ‘Not hurt you. We are friends. Ogo wants water.’ They stood face to face, mouthing and grimacing at each other in the dark. Ogo thought his captive a stupid fellow, for he had much ado to make him understand plain speech, and he had a tiresome trick, this foreigner, of repeating Ogo’s words, slowly, as if trying them over, and then, with an insufferable air of correction, offering others in their place. But communication was established. ‘Ogo wants water. You bad foot. Ogo carry you.’ It was agreed. They were indeed friends.
CHAPTER 3
HAWKON SPEAKS WITH HIS WOMAN
There had been a time, within living memory, when the Koor family had subsisted entirely on the hunting and snaring of animals and on casual foraging for edible roots and fruits and fungus; and the hunters were still, and likely to remain, the most powerful and privileged class. Agriculture, however, was now firmly established as something more than a fantastic experiment. The wild grasses had been coaxed and tamed; the two natural terraces at the base of the Great Ox, the nearest of five surrounding hills, had been tilled and sown and cossetted with pious and bloody observances; and the grain, during many seasons, had grown more sleek and abundant. At harvest-time even the great lords of the hunt would join their humbler brethren and for a while wield the flint sickle instead of axe and spear; but in the threshing of the grain they took no part, and its grinding served to keep the women out of mischief. Other processes followed: some of the flour would be stored away in the clay pots which the women had learned to make, and some would be at once made into paste and baked in a covered pit filled with heated stones. At this point the interest of the hunters would revive. Some liked the stuff to be soggy in the middle, with a hard outer crust; others demanded that it should be hard and dry-throughout; but all found it a comfort to the belly, and a good deal better than nothing when lean times came. It was from a woman, captured by Koor himself in his more vigorous days, that they had learned the trick of agriculture; she, coming of a people versed in such things, had been the first among them to hoard grain for sowing, and scatter it over a little patch of ground cleared and tilled by implements of her own making, flint-headed picks and spades of deerhorn. For this she had been accorded as much honour as a woman needs. She became the mother of many sons, and died in giving birth to Hawkon.