Mammoth Boy Read Free

to guide him onwards, as a grazing herd drifts one way or the other, or a beast of prey slinks this way or that, following no plan, yet ready to bolt or spring when the need arises.
    The boy waited. He knew he would go on, but which way? He knew too that the summer warmth was short and the buzz of insects would be cut almost overnight as the long iceland winter covered the land. To be caught in that cold meant death. Strong hunters seldom survived a winter alone. All this the boy knew but it was not on his mind at present as his eyes focussed, alert to the slightest signs of movement, his hearing quickened to catch the least untoward sound, each helping his flared nostrils to sense what might be alive and stirring in the forest below. Out on the open moors he had felt safe; down there he would not.
    He gathered his spears, his satchel holding spare flints, scraps of food, the trinkets a boy collects and keeps through his boyhood, and set off to his right.
    He had gone a day and a half along the rim with no way down, and no sign of anything to tempt him down, when he saw what seemed like wisps of smoke rising from among trees below. There he settled for the night, comforted that perhaps humans existed down in the woods. He ate berries and bivouacked under briars and bracken above the spot, to be ready to spy further as soon as light broke.
    When he awoke all signs of smoke had vanished like morning mist. The conifer canopy stretched away below him. He resumed his way along the cliff top, eating berries as he went, but moving cautiously, the carefree days on the open moors behind him. There was no knowing what the forest might conceal. Any tracker could be tracked. His boy’s spears would be as much defence against hunters as a fawn’s kicks against him.
    Yet he felt drawn to find those people, danger or not, after so many days alone. Perhaps they knew the land of ice and mammoths.
    It was a while before he found a place that led down to the forest.
    The overflow from a tarn had cut a ghyll or chine down which a small beck ran. He scrambled down the incline and followed the stream till it ended at tree-top level before it tumbled over the edge into a pool below. The boy crouched, scrutinising the forest for signs of life, before daring to scale down the remaining part of the cliff. He threw his spears and satchel ahead and climbed down after them, grasping the small trees and tangle of roots that the fall of water had encouraged to grow along its margin.
    Once down, his spears and pouch retrieved, he lay under the boughs of a conifer to gather his breath and to listen. There was nothing to hear. Not even the twitter of birds. He drank from the brook and backtracked in the direction of the smoke, the cliff-face now to his left. He was feeling a need for human proximity.
    It was cool in the gloom of this forest, the densest he had ever seen. He travelled by instinct, trotting along the pine-needle floor, among these endless trees. There would be little to eat here, few clearings for raspberries, bilberries, little by way of recognisable fungus, and no game that he could sense.

CHAPTER 2
    W henever he saw a hollow or overhang at the foot of the rockface he approached it cautiously, half-hoping to find a hearth, half-fearing he might. But no sign of human habitation appeared in any. Once he disturbed bats and several times old droppings showed that game animals huddled in these natural pens for shelter.
    Spoor and signs of bigger beasts along the foot of the cliff made him redouble his alertness. Any breaks in the forest canopy, where sunlight encouraged drifts of raspberry canes and other food plants to thrive, made him especially wary. So when he came to a small clearing where he would need to cross open ground and was approaching with especial stealth, stooping under the sweeping boughs of firs, he saw something that stopped him dead: in the open, its huge head bowed till its shaggy underlip brushed the ground, stood a