He felt a tug towards the magical place he had found the time he had climbed the cliffs to commune with his ancestors – Tal’s cave. Uboas went with him, to watch over him and keep him safe. At the mouth of the cave, he lit a fire and the two of them sat in silence as night came to the valley. He warned her to leave him when the anger started.
Then he soared.
And she watched over him and trembled later in the night when he flew into a rage and charged deep into the black cave, shouting for his ancestors to reveal themselves.
The next morning she fed him chunks of reindeer stomach, roasted over the fire, its contents full of the mashed grasses that had been the animal’s last meal. He told her about the soaring and the creatures he had visited as half man, half bird. When he had eaten his fill he rose and paced the mouth of the cave until his legs became strong and sturdy once again.
The pale stone walls of the cave, that outermost zone that caught the morning sun dazzled his eyes. A few steps deeper and all was dark. He thought about his journey. He had been with the bison again. And the horses. And the deer. And the bears. Before his eyes, on the cave walls, he saw the images his hawk eyes had seen, these animals in all their glory and power. They demanded respect. The bison demanded his honour.
He rushed to the fire and grabbed a kindling stick, its end charred black. As Uboas watched, he strode back to the sunny wall and began to draw a long curving line, at eye level, parallel to the ground. The charcoal line was thin and poorly adhesive and the result was not pleasing to his eye, no better than the outlines he had drawn at his mother’s knee. He complained out loud. In a flash of inspiration, he poured out the remnants of the Soaring Water from his stone bowl and pressed a hunk of reindeer fat into the concavity. He took another kindling stick with a heavily burned end and twirled it into the fat until it was black and greasy. Then he retraced the curving line and this time it was thick and black and stuck smoothly to the rock surface.
He quietly worked into the morning, dipping fatted kindling sticks and painting in equal measures with his hand and his heart. When he was done he grunted and summoned Uboas to stand beside him.
She gasped at what she saw. A perfect horse, as real and beautiful as any living creature. It was running, its hooves in full gallop, its mouth open, sucking air, its ears pointing forwards. Tal had given it a thick mane that looked so real she was tempted to stroke it to feel its silkiness. It had a captivating oval-shaped eye with a black disc in the centre, a piercing, all-knowing eye. It was the most beautiful inanimate form she had ever seen.
She began to sob.
Tal wanted to know what was wrong and she told him. She was moved by its magnificence but she was also scared.
Of what?
Of this new power that Tal possessed. He was a different man than the one she knew. The Soaring Water had transformed him into a mingler with the world of spirits and ancestors, a shaman. The old Tal was gone, perhaps for ever. She feared him now. Then her real concern erupted in a geyser of tears. Would he still want her as his mate? Would he still love her?
He gave her his answer. Yes.
When Tal’s father finally died he had become an emaciated bag of bones. He was carried to a hallowed spot, a stretch of the river where the tall grasses and reeds gently sloped to the water, a spot he had come to throughout his life to listen to the voice of the flowing water. His body was quietly left on the slope. From a distance, Tal looked back one last time. It appeared as if the old man was resting. If he were to come back in a day there would only be bones. In three days, nothing.
Tal’s elevation to head man simply happened. There was no ceremony and no words said. It was not their custom. If the clan people had any doubts about Tal’s ability to lead them, perhaps there would have been whispers, but the elders who remembered Tal’s grandfather, and the one wizened old soul who remembered his great-grandfather, agreed that Tal would be a powerful head man. Yes, he was very young but he was a healer and a soarer who was able to commune with the natural world and the realm of the ancestors. And they very much feared Tal’s Anger, that time when he was unapproachable and violently malevolent. And there was furtive talk about a magical cave in the cliffs that no one but Tal and his new mate, Uboas, had ever seen.
One day, Tal announced that he would lead the clan up the cliffs to see for themselves what had been consuming him. Even though the weather was fine the trek was slow because the oldest people had to walk with sticks and Uboas was heavily laden with a child in her belly. They arrived with the sun at its highest, splashing the river with its rays. Tal made a fire on the ledge and lit a torch slathered in bear fat for a rich, slow burn.
He stepped inside the cave and the clan shuffled at his heels.
The light of the torch eased the transition from light to dark. In the hissing glow, his people were stunned. One young woman yelped in fear because she though she was going to be trampled by horses to her left and bison to her right. A small boy became giddy at the sight of a huge black bull floating overhead and he jumped up and down making sure his mother saw what he was seeing.
Tal had been working steadily, preparing this place. With his father’s blessing, he had taken Uboas as his mate and the two of them had fallen into a joyous rhythm. When he was not hunting or catching fish or resolving arguments among clan members, he would prepare a batch of Soaring Water and climb to the cave with her. He would drink the tart red liquid, spend the night lost in his dream world and when he came back to her, energised and virile, his loins aching, he would lie with his mate on his father’s bison hide laid on the cave floor and thrust his hips until they were both spent. After a sleep, he would rage for a time, like a wild animal until his body was limp and exhausted from demon exertions.
And then he would come back to himself, cleansed, and he would paint.
Drawing upon his childhood pastime of mixing pigments from crushed coloured rocks and clays, he had prepared wonderfully rich paints which, through trial and error, he adapted to adhere to the cool, moist walls.
It was not enough to draw the outlines of the animals as people had done in the past. He saw them in vivid colours and that was the way he wanted to capture them. He chose his spots by the light of his lamps, which in and of themselves were an invention that sprang from his mind. He used his skills as a stone-shaper to fashion a shallow, ladle-shaped lamp from limestone, and in the bowl, he placed lumps of bear fat mixed with juniper twigs, which when lit, gave a yellow, slow-burning flame that Uboas held for him while he worked.
He also considered the topography of the wall. If a bump suggested a horse’s rump, then there he drew the rump. If a depression suggested a creature’s eye, that is where he placed the eye. And he was always keen to see how the lamp light played against the rock surface. He loved the sense of motion he could achieve with light and shadows.
He would draw the outlines of the animals with fat and charcoal or a lump of manganese but his desire to capture the true colours of the beasts led him to devise ways to deliver ochres and clays to the walls in a way that would faithfully coat the surfaces. When smearing pigments with his hands failed to produce the effect he was seeking, he conceived a radical solution, based on his belief that through his visions, his mission was to breathe life into these cave walls.
Breath.
Uboas tried to stop him the first time he tried the manoeuvre, thinking him mad. In a stone bowl he mixed ochres and clay and added water and spittle to make a slurry then scooped it into his mouth. He chewed at the slurry and sloshed it from cheek to cheek and when it felt the right consistency, he pursed his lips, stood a short distance from the wall and spat the colour out in a mist of fine droplets, using his hand like a stencil to shape the spray to the contour of his outlines. When he wanted to give the animal’s hide texture and body, he had the inspiration to blow his paint through a hole punched through leather to concentrate the spray into dots. It was slow, painstaking work, but he was happy, even when Uboas teased him on one day about his red tongue, on another day about his black lips.