CHAPTER IV
The Hunt and the Fire
On the day preceding the tribe's departure for the land of the noonday sun, two important preparations were made.
First of all, a mighty hunt was arranged. All the able-bodied men—and they numbered nearly a hundred—set out together for their favorite hunting-ground, where they stationed themselves at intervals in a rude circle about a strip of field and forest two or three square miles in extent. Then, at the signal of the chieftain's shout relayed from man to man, the hunters started at a trot toward the center of the circle, meanwhile yelling and clamoring at the top of their lusty voices and raising a hullabaloo that might have awakened the dead.
Needless to say, any animals roaming within the chosen area would take alarm. Some, wild with fear, would endeavor to dash past the huntsmen, and not a few of these would offer a target for clubs and stones; a majority, driven toward the center of the enclosure, would find themselves hemmed in by an ever-tightening ring of their foes. If they could not save themselves by a desperate flight through the encompassing lines—as many did, in fact, save themselves—they would be forced irresistibly toward the four or five pits in the center of the closing circle. And since these had been dug with careful forethought and shrewdly covered with concealing branches and grass, the victims would topple headlong into the ten-foot depths; and there, bellowing with fear or howling with pain, a mass of convulsive, twisting forms and broken limbs, they would present an easy mark for the clubs of their persecutors.
On this particular day, the Umbaddu hunters were unusually successful. Two wild boars, a wild horse, four wild cattle, half a dozen rabbits, a score of squirrels, a doe and a fawn of the giant deer, a half-grown moose and a young rhinoceros—these constituted their trophies of the chase. Now they would have meat in plenty for days and days to come! And the penalty for this gigantic haul had been exceptionally small—not a man had been killed, though the shoulder of Kuff the Bear-Hunter had been ripped open by an infuriated wildcat, and Ru had earned the mirth of his fellows by taking to the trees and saving himself by the bare fraction of an inch before the charge of a maddened aurochs.
The victims, once dispatched, were skinned and cut up on the spot; and this was a long and laborious process, for the flint knives and scrapers worked slowly and clumsily and with a vast amount of wasted effort. Much of the booty, indeed, had to be left where it lay as an offering to the wolves and vultures; yet when the hunters at last set off homeward, each was weighed down to capacity with the flesh, hides, and marrowbones of the slaughtered.
And with what a tumult they were received when, having scaled the cliff walls, they stood once more at the cave entrance! One would have thought they were warriors returning from the conquest—the women greeted them with screams of delight; they shouted with childish glee at sight of the fresh stores of food; their great broad faces grinned with apelike grimaces, and their heavy lips smacked with anticipatory joy. And every returning huntsman was welcomed by some particular woman, who smiled admiration at him from her beady black eyes—every huntsman, that is, with two exceptions.
The first exception was Grumgra, who was greeted by a circle of three or four congratulatory females. And the second was Ru, whose return seemed not to be noticed at all, but who stood by sullenly and alone, while his boisterous fellows shouted loud stories of their exploits, and the Smiling-Eyed pressed healing herbs to the wounded shoulder of Kuff the Bear-Hunter.
After the tumult had begun to die away, the women busied themselves in holding great sizzling joints above the fire and in laying out smaller joints to smoke. And now the tribe began its second preparation for the departure.