The Gift of Stones Read Free Page A

the beach with its unruly rocks, its colonies of weed, its changing shape. If he could he would have squared it off. Where was the utility of the sea? What was its symmetry?
    Our village looked inland. We were not fishermen. Fish was bad to eat – though gulls’ eggs, crabs and shells were welcome in the spring. And we were not sailors either. The sea brought no one luck and so we stayed away. Lives were passed in this one place, working stone and seeking respite from the wind. For the villagers then, a still day was a day when their hair simply lifted from their foreheads. It didn’t tug their scalps. It didn’t slap their faces. And so we should picture Leaf in that short time before he struck the flint, crouching for protection behind the wall of his workshop yard, holding a wet finger to the cracks to check for draughts, pushing fussy wads of moss between the stones, vainly wiping strands of hair across his head (for he was almost bald), and imagining the perfect blade that he would make. His youngest daughter had lit the fire with driftwood and with bracken. Its flames hardly danced. Leaf’s walls had all but stunned the wind.
    He took the flint and turned it in his hands. Would it do for such a task? Leaf wanted even-textured, predictable stone. Flawless stone. He wanted stone that would not shatter but would fracture at the point that he dictated. All looked well enough. He moved his daughter from the fire and placed the unworked flint into the ashes and the flames. She brought the bellows and pumped heat into the fire. The grey and yellow mottles on the flint darkened to match the brown. Leaf squatted at his daughter’s side and watched. He dare not let the flint turn black. It could split or splinter. But he wanted a hot stone, one that could be worked easily and precisely and at speed, one that would open from the delicate, controlled impact of the softest hammer. Cold stone was resistant to the gentle arts of knapping. Hot stone was best. His daughter brought two long slates from his basket of tools. Once her father had sat on his stool with a flat stone anvil on his knees, she retrieved the heated flint with her slate tongs. She put it on the anvil and, spacing her legs for a firmer stance, held the stone in place. ‘Now all that stood between me and death,’ said father, relishing his circumstance, ‘was a hoof of roasted stone and a hairless, trembling Leaf.’

4
    L EAF’S FIRST BLOWS were simple ones, and hardly trembling. He had to form a rough but tidy core from the quarried flint so that it would sit firmly on his anvil. One blow with a crude stone hammer removed the flint’s grey rind. Another squared its base. A third removed a nugget of intrusive chalk. It was a simple matter requiring not skill or strength, but confidence. The core stone that remained would have served elsewhere, in some less sophisticated place, as an implement in itself. You could club a man to death with such a stone, or crack nuts. Where was the craft in that? But how to make a knife? Where to begin?
    Untutored hands would muster all their energy and smack the hammer on the flint. With luck, there might be tiny scrapers accidentally made that would serve as barbs for arrows or for cleaning skins. But only one stone, thus struck, in twenty thousand would provide, by chance, a long, strong splinter for a blade. Craftsmen – cautious, focused, their tongues curled and dry – would take their time. They would seek to understand the stone, to know its valleys and its hills. That tendonlike ridge on the hoof of stone – was it the length and thickness, would it serve as a blank for the amputation knife? Could it be detached easily from the core?
    Leaf placed his sharpened antler tine on the flint, exactly where the tendon was attached, and struck it with a wooden mallet. These were the perfect tools but only in hands like Leaf’s that were firm and certain. If the direction of his impact were a feather’s breadth too