Mammoth Bone Hut Structure

Natural History Museum of Kiev

Tor found that it was hard to keep the soup down. Threw up whatever he ate. He found himself spending the morning, first in the sun in the meadow, listening to the bees buzzing around him, no longer thinking of him as a threat, Tsen munching loudly nearby and Shin at his side whimpering occasionally, scratching, and generally, uncomfortable while his wounds and swelling subsided.

He was in and out of sleep, dozing, until it got too Hot and he crawled up under the shade where it became night again. Finally, with aching joints, the next morning found Tor at a nearby stream quenching his mighty thirst and bathing, letting the cool water soothe his wounds, but still not hungry for anything solid.

But home beckoned and Tor forced himself to get moving. Fortunately, although it was difficult with his aching muscles, he could ride on Tsen and move more quickly, but he had to pay attention in order to stay on and fight occasional bouts of dizziness. Soon, they were underway with Shin able to keep up, but before long, limping noticeably again.

By midday, Tor was ready for some wolf meat. This time, it stayed down and gave him strength and more energy as he rode. He even walked alongside Tsen for a while to get his blood flowing again and to clear his head of the headaches that came and went occasionally. Tor paid little attention to his surroundings. Thankfully, the closer he got to home the more defined the trail became.

There was a minor river crossing that barely slowed them. A couple of hills and valleys that were nothing compared to the mountains they had passed through earlier. With each step closer, Tor, back on Tsen, was urging him to pick up the pace so they would get there before dark.

All around were familiar landmarks. A rocky outcropping. An ancient tree. A place where a spring delivered ice cold clear water even in the heat of summer when the Rine ran tepid. Places from his childhood. Places where he learned to hunt and made his first kills. It flowed back to his mind like it was only yesterday. The face of his lovely mother, Nila, smiling and his younger sister, Susa, soon to become a beauty like her mother was. Already the envy of the other girls. Oh, how long he had longed to be here where he was now, just around the corner from home.

The forest became more open from years of foraging for wood, the clan's only source of heat for cooking and keeping their huts warm during cold nights and throughout the winter. But the ancient giant trees remained. These trees held the spirits that guarded the encampment. Scarred with rotted holes for birds and animals to live in. Huge branches that fell in storms and provided wood for numerous uses. In the open sunny meadows that formed as a result of the clan's foraging activity, Tor saw the wheat and barley fields that his mother had planted, glowing in the afternoon sun, already golden ripe.

Tor had expected to see friendly faces by now, out and about doing the daily things that the clan required just to continue living so long there on a high bank overlooking the river where they wouldn't be reached by occasional floods. Yet able to use the river both for food it provided and a way to move up and down the waterway with their rudimentary boats, paddles and sails.

Ahead, the pathway opened up more and Tor found himself bringing Tsen to a natural trot. He stopped short of a gallop because he didn't want to arouse anyone thinking that he was going to attack them with this strange beast he was riding. Even if they recognized him, it could be a threat to anyone watching him come so fast into their midst.

But there was no one. No one on the trail and no one on the riverbank when he reached the river and looked up and down both directions. The familiar riverside trail was still there, but he didn't see any recent human foot tracks in muddy spots and that was strange. It was beginning to unravel in his mind that something wasn't right.

Tor turned left at the bank and followed the trail downriver. The encampment was close now, before long, he could see it up ahead. There was no smoke rising from fires and no activity moving about. Something that he always saw when he came from this direction home. And the place looked entirely different, less pronounced than he remembered it and more subdued. Anxiety coursed through his body as he wondered what he would find. Began to think the worst.

It was worse. The encampment's huts did not look normal. Tall grass was growing up around them. Some were blackened and he could see through their structure. He came upon bones. He knew they were human. Picked clean by wild animals and then more by cadaver beetles. When he put his foot to a skull, they scurried out of it by the multitude. It smelled bad and he was repulsed. Vomit came up in his throat as he fought to keep his stomach down.

Was this Tor's mother, Nila? It was small, it would've been one of the women or one of the children. But the whole place was dead. All of the huts had been damaged or burned with their ancient ribs, some large teeth of a massive, long dead animal, showing as wall supports holding up the thatched roofs.

Worst of all, when he came to the lodge of his father, his father, and his father before him, it was also just a shell of its former glory. The skull of the great cave bear was still there over the entrance door, left wide open, but it was charred in places where the fire that must've raged here got to it as well. That is where Tor had hoped that his mother and sister would still be, but upon entering with light coming in everywhere from the burned-out roof, all he met, was silence.

There was no bird song, or even the raucous calling of a crow, goose or duck along the river in the distance. Tor's skin crawled with what he was seeing. He wanted to stay in his home that night. But he couldn't. Nila's bones might be here, not properly sent off to the underworld like Thals had done since the beginning of time, with the proper tools and ritual ocher symbols that would protect them on their raft that was set afloat on the Rine taking them to their reward in the underworld.

The day was losing light and it was all Tor could do to continue walking through and then downriver of the encampment and its strong smell of still decaying flesh. Some distance away, Tor made camp for the night. To make his nightmare worse, the heat of that day brought up a fearsome storm. If he had been in the family lodge he would have been dry and warm. Instead, lightning struck all around, branches blew off the trees and torrents of rain came down, some of it flowing right where he lay on his bedding.

Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the storm was over, but Tor still did not sleep. At dawn, he hung up everything to dry and went to check his snares. Animals had quickly come back to the now fresh grass of early summer. He found two rabbits, caught so recently, they were still warm. With fresh meat, and needing a roof over his head, Tor decided to go back to the lodge.

The storm had knocked much of the ripe wheat down. Tor did not want to waste it. He gathered up some of the downed wheat and took it back to where his mother had a grinding stone. It was still there. He stacked the wet wheat up and let it dry in the morning sun.

Mounting Tsen who was well rested and fed, Tor rode off to where he had seen young willows growing by the riverbank. With no time to waste, he galloped there in no time. Cutting as many willows as he could tie on Tsen's back, it took him most of the morning. Shin followed and began investigating the riverbank. When a duck flew out from near the bank, Tor went to investigate. Shin had found him five duck eggs. He would get a reward for that.

With the willows, Tor set about reinforcing the burned-out places in the lodge structure. He set them deep in the ground and then bent them matching the curve of the giant teeth that still remained, black but unburned and then tied them down with rawhide. It took him all afternoon, but he was proud of his work. After replacing some stones on the lodge hearth, Tor made an evening meal. It was like home but not like home with all the people gone, some obviously dead.

Before the sun went down, Tor ground some of the dried wheat and then set about making a gruel for morning. It was women's work, but he was alone. The straw would be used to thatch the roof where it had burned. That would wait until morning.

That night, Tor tried to sleep, with a warm fire in the hearth and a nice bed made on straw. It should have been easy to sleep in spite of the deathly smell that he was getting used to, but thoughts of his mother and what had happened to her kept running through his mind like a bad dream. Mom had to have escaped whatever happened, he thought. Tor would need to try to find her. He would search the bones in the morning. He wasn't looking forward to that gruesome task.

The morning could not come soon enough. Still awake and haunted, Tor arose before dawn and by the firelight of the hearth finished making the gruel that soaked overnight in the only pot he could find that wasn't broken and ate heartily from it. He threw scraps of meat he was roasting to Shin who had slept while he didn't, sometimes having dreams, perhaps of a wolf chasing him or the boar slashing his hind quarter--whimpering and legs twitching. Nila never let dogs in the lodge. But Shin was special and there was no one around, not even his mother, to deny his best friend in the shelter the lodge provided.

As soon as it was light, Tor began collecting the bones scattered about. Some of them still stunk of decay, but many were completely clean of any remnants of flesh by the voracious beetles that took care of all dead things. Why they floated their bodies on the river. Keeping them from the attack of the cadaver beetles leaving nothing but bone behind.

Tor could not ritually send these dead to the underworld properly, so he took the bones, one skeleton at a time, piece by piece, to a place near the river bank some distance from the encampment. It would be too hard to bury them anyway, but a raft could be used carry them to the glory beyond. Tor was  good at reading animal bones to determine if the animals that he killed had injuries that made them easy to hunt. But their bodies also told much about them. Sometimes foretold disease that made him not want to eat their meat.

These bones had no bodies left on them, but he could almost guess who they were by their size, and in the case of the elders, their infirmities, calcified joints, arched backbones, old injuries to bone that were not inflicted recently. But he did find wounds. Broken skulls and some with the mark of an ax, knife or spear. Broken neck bones and severed limbs. All signs that someone had brutally murdered them. Like the old man had murdered his father and the rest of the raiders in their beds. Why that thought came back to him? Why was this becoming a purveyor of the dead?

By piecing together the skeletons and identifying some of them as children that he knew by their size. He easily discerned the males from females by their hipbones, Tor wept as he undertook this gruesome task of removing the ghosts from the encampment as much as possible. He began to think he couldn't live here anymore--too many ghosts. Unless he removed them completely. He cried when he saw the badly broken leg that never healed of his teacher, Tean. And the oldest of the elders at 63 notches, Fete, who told them stories of the clan from ancient times passed down to him by firelight every night.

As he identified some that he knew, Tor counted 17  bodies. He remembered that when he left there were about 25 people left behind in their dwindling clan. Some must have escaped. Three of them were women about his mother's age, but none had his mother's wheat colored hair. It made him encouraged that she may have escaped with others. But which way did she go?

And who were the attackers? There were only broken weapons like shattered arrows and spear tips, but nothing that he could identify with any clans that he knew. Largely because everyone used the same kinds of weapons for fighting and for hunting that he did. But all clothing and personal items had been taken from everyone that was killed. He had little of them to put on their funeral raft.  Tor cried repeatedly that day, memories that popped into his mind kept overcoming him.

For three more passages of the sun in the sky Tor worked. He finished harvesting all the storm damaged wheat, sewed together a large bag of hide and placed all the grain in it, finding a suitable place inside the lodge, he buried it and placed stones over the spot. Hoping that the seeds would not germinate in that dry place. And then, used the straw to finish patching the roof with thatch, keeping the wind, rain and snow out.

There were no intact boats from the clan left at the river bank. But Tor took the pieces that he found and constructed a large raft. He placed all of the bones on the raft, and before sending it off into the river current, said a few incantations to the gods for their good journey in fair weather. Unfortunately, he regretted not listening carefully to the elders whenever they sent off a funeral boat. And it was quite often. At his young age, he didn't have as much respect for the dead as the elders.

Once the place was made suitable for travelers who may pass along the river, and be available for him to return to face the coming winter, Tor, once again, set out in search of his mother and sister, hopeful that he would find them by traveling downriver as far as he could go and still make it back in time to harvest what he would need in the fall season of plenty.

Copyright 2020 © Ronald W. Hull

7/17/20

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