“Hunting has been your way of life, it is true,” I said to Dal, “and a good way of life for you and the clan. But it is not the only way. It is not the best way.”
He looked unconvinced and very troubled. Dal was an honest, forthright man. He did not know what to believe, and he was too honest to make up his mind before he was convinced, one way or the other.
“Ava wants to stay,” he muttered, “but the elders say we must not.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to the clan. Talk to all the people who have come to the valley. Tell them what I have told you. If you like, I will speak to them myself and tell them how the grain grows. The spirits of your fathers will not be angry with you; they will be pleased that you have found a better way to live.”
He smiled slowly. “Do you really believe they will be pleased?”
“Yes. I’m sure they will be.”
Dal rose to his feet and stretched his cramped legs. Nodding his head, he told me, “I will talk to the clans. I will tell them what you have told me.”
He felt relieved. He didn’t have to make the decision. He would put it to a vote. That lifted the burden from his shoulders. Or so he thought.
Even in this simple Neolithic society, with fewer than a hundred adults to deal with, it took three nights before Dal could assemble all the people to listen to him. I was fascinated to watch a primitive bureaucracy at work. Each clan had to discuss the idea of such a meeting within itself, with the elders going into painstaking detail on how such clan conferences had been arranged in the past, where their clan sat in relation to other clans, who was responsible for building the fire, who would speak and in what order. For these supposedly unsophisticated folk, the occasion of a clan gathering was an event, an entertainment, as well as a serious time of decision-making. They savored the arrangements and the protocol, fussing over the details for the sheer enjoyment and excitement of having something to fuss over.
At last the clans gathered around a big central bonfire that had been built closer to the Goat Clan’s huts than any other clan’s. The elders of each clan spent the first few hours of the night retelling their most important stories, each old man establishing his clan’s history and stature by sing-songing legends that each person sitting around the fire knew by heart, word for word. But they all sat through each tale of monsters and heroes, gods and maidens, bravery and cunning and seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly, or at least as much as a twentieth-century family would enjoy spending an evening watching television.
Finally it was Dal’s turn to put his proposition to the assembled multitude. It was fully dark now, the night well advanced. Overhead, despite the glowing fire, I could make out the stars that presaged autumn: my namesake Orion was climbing above the saw-toothed horizon, looking down at me. He seemed different from the way I knew him from other eras, still easily recognizable, but vaguely lopsided. And there were four bright stars in the Belt, instead of just three.
Dal was no orator, but he spoke in a plain, clear way about the idea of staying in the valley through the winter. He hemmed and hawed a little, but he got across the basic idea that the clans could pen the animals against the cliffs and slaughter them at their leisure instead of tracking them down, that they could live off the grain which grew in the valley and could even grow more grain than sprang up naturally.
Everyone listened patiently without interrupting, although I could see many of the elders shaking their heads, their gray beards waving from side to side in perfect stubborn unison.
Finally, Dal said, “And if you want Orion’s words about it, he will be glad to tell you. This is all his idea, to begin with.”
A man Dal’s age, from the Wolf Clan, jumped to his feet. “We are not meant to stay in one place! This valley is prepared for us each year by our spirit-fathers. How can they prepare the grain if we stay here watching all year long? The spirits will go away and the grain will die!”
Dal turned uneasily toward me. I had been sitting to one side of the Goat Clan’s area, placed off at the end so that I was almost by myself, in a space between clans. I got to my feet and took a single step closer to the fire so that they could all see me well. I wanted them to see for themselves that although I was a stranger, I was a man and not one of the forty-armed monsters the elders had sung about earlier.
“I am Orion,” I said, “a newcomer to this part of the world. I love to hunt as much as any man here. But I know that there is a better way to live, a way that will bring all of us much pleasure, much comfort — a way that will keep us well fed all year long. Babies will be fat and healthy even in the winter’s worst cold and snow. We will all be able to…”
That was as far as I got. An explosion of bloodcurdling screams shattered the night, and flames seemed to burst all around us.
Everyone jumped every which way. A spear thudded into the ground near my feet. Screaming and yelling erupted from everywhere as men and women toppled, spears driven through their bodies. The bonfire hissed as blood spattered onto it. The clanspeople ran for their huts, terrified.
But not Dal. “They’re burning the grain!” he roared. “Get your weapons!”
Through the flickering flames I saw naked men painted in hideous colors dashing toward the huts. Some held torches, others spears.
“Demons!” Ava screamed. And they did look unhuman, the way they were painted, with the firelight glinting off their glistening bodies.
Dal had already yanked a spear from the body of a fallen clansman and was running toward one of the enemy warriors. Ava dashed in behind him, scooped up a fallen spear, and advanced to his side. Another spear whizzed past my head. A trio of the strange warriors dashed into one of the huts. Screams of pain and terror wailed from it.
All this happened in seconds. I rushed for my own hut, knocked down two warriors who tried to stop me, and grabbed my bow and a handful of arrows. I could hear more shouting and sobbing outside, and Dal’s voice clear and commanding over the din of confusion and battle.
As I ducked back into the night air outside my hut, a painted warrior sprang at me, his spear leveled at my chest. I sidestepped and floored him with a lethal chop to his neck. Over his body I stepped, out into the flame-filled screaming furor of the battle, my reflexes accelerating into overdrive, every sense alert and sharpened to its finest pitch. I felt a wild exhilaration: the waiting was over, the battle had been joined.
I notched an arrow and sent it through a warrior’s skull. Dal and Ava were off to my right, using their spears to fend off four spear-wielding warriors. I knocked off one of them just as Dal ripped another’s belly open. Ava dropped to one knee as a warrior charged her and spitted him from below. The screaming man fell atop her, but she wriggled out immediately, took his spear and rejoined the fight. By that time I had put an arrow through the neck of the fourth warrior.
In the light of the blazing grain I could see many of the clanspeople on the ground. But there were more of us on our feet, fighting. The invading warriors were falling back now, throwing their torches at us to slow our pursuit.