No hunter had ever dared to follow the great Knifetooth
Bear into his Fearful Forest. For beyond it lay
a greater peril--the land of _The Nameless_....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
April 1951
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_The bones lie light in the fertile soil of Sunset Fields. You can prod
them out with a few thrusts of your bare toes. The roots of the big
luxurious tree ferns carry skulls and skins and back-bones up to the
frond-filtered shining of day, and even the delicately questing purple
tendrils of the burrowflower may drag an occasional finger or toe bone
from its uneasy rest, so light they lie._
_The bones do not decay. Nobody knows why. Animal bones decay. The
skeletons of our own revered dead fall away to powder in a generation
or two. But the bones of Sunset Fields are like the unchanging granite
of the jagged cliffs, and of them we make our arrow points and lance
heads, our hammers and our needles. It is more difficult to work the
bones, to chip and flake them into form, than it is to shape our tools
of metal; for we have ways of heating and molding these, subtle methods
handed down from the far olden times of our fathers' fathers. There is
no way to heat and mold a bone._
_Our singers tell a legend that--oh, many years ago!--a man went by
stealth and slew another man with his lance. Not many of us believed
the legend even when we were children. To kill a man! Our singers say
that he possessed a beautiful woman whom the slayer desired. Who would
desire the woman of another man? Such a thing seems incredible and
childish, even to a child. There are women for all men, men for all
women, and do we not each love all others equally, reserving a special
love only for our own mate? But the legend is sung that after this
bloody deed was done, many men fought because of it, and their curst
bones lie in the earth of Sunset Fields forever, a memorial to their
fantastic stupidity._
_It is a legend of the singers. Nobody really knows why the bones do
not decay._
_Beyond Sunset Fields run the three brooks: the Gray, the Blue, and
the Crimson. Far to the south they meet, and there become the Wide
River that flows turbulently on until it reaches the silver dusk that
encircles the world. There was a man of our people who once set out to
find the end of the Wide River, but he never came back._
_Beyond the trio of brooks there rise the first grim ranks of the
Fearful Forest, line after line of tall broad-leafed trees so evenly
spaced you would think they had been planted by design. Pass the
palisades of this forest and brave its terrors, its darkness and great
angry beasts, and you will come after a time to the other side; and
there, beyond a black plain where nothing grows save crawling vines and
nauseous weed patches, you may see the towering cliffs of the country
of The Nameless...._
* * * * *
I am a hunter. My father was a singer, and his mate also; but I have a
poor voice, good for little except to shout across the valleys to my
friends, so my father, affectionately calling me Bear-throat, counseled
me to become a hunter; and this I did.
I am strong, of course. My arms are brown as a deer's hide and they
swell with muscle. My legs are sturdy and, though not thickset, can
carry me at a run for the space of a day without tiring. I do not boast
when I say this, for after all I am a hunter and my arms and legs are
my tools as much as my lances and arrows and metal knife. My name is
Ahmusk, though I am more generally hailed as Bear-throat, the nickname
my father gave to me. I have eyes the color of Blue Brook where it runs
into a deep pool. My hair, the pale golden hue of the earliest corn of
autumn, is cut short in the fashion of hunters, falling scarcely to my
shoulders in back, in front sliced off evenly just above my eyes. And I
think this is all that need be said concerning the person of Ahmusk the
hunter.
The day of which I would speak first was a day of cheerful sun and
small breezes, with that crispness in the air that makes a man stand
tall and blink once or twice, and perhaps shout for joy. I did just
that, after I had wakened, and then I sat on the edge of my platform
and looking down the tree's trunk at the grass below I was astonished
at its bright new-seeming greenness. I sucked in a great chestful
of air and shouted again. In the tree nearest mine there were two
platforms, and now someone sat up on the higher and rubbed her eyes and
grumbled. "What is it, Bear-throat?"
"The morning, girl, the morning," I said heartily.
"Need you be a herald of the dawn _every_ day?" she asked,
mock-petulantly. And I laughed.
"Throw off your furs and smell the wind, Lora," I told her. "In the
changing of the moon to nothing and back to fulness, the snow will
fly. Today is the best day of the year."
"To you, every day is the best of the year, or at least you say so each
morning." She put back her sleeping furs and stood up, naked and young
and beautiful. "When we are mated," she said, "I will see that you wake
silently, and slide down the tree to find my breakfast while I sleep as
long as I wish!"
"What a shrew," I said happily. "What a ruler of men."
"You will see." She slipped her light garment over her head. "I will
quiet you down, young Bear-throat!"
"I hope the day is soon, then, for your mating," growled her father
from the lower platform of their family's tree. "Perhaps good folk will
then be allowed to rest."
* * * * *
Grinning, I hung by my hands from the edge of my platform and dropped
to the ground. Fifteen feet from toe to turf is no drop at all to a
skilled hunter. The watchers were coming down the glen from their posts
of the night, yawning and rubbing their eyes. I hailed them and they
answered with waves of their arms.
"Any disturbances?"
"You would have heard, Ahmusk of the keen ears," said their leader.
"No, we glimpsed a knifetooth bear traveling his solitary way to the
Gray Brook, but if he killed thereafter we were too distant to hear
it. No noises save the small animals going and coming, going and
coming all night long."
"It is nearly a moon's change since old Halfspoor ranged near the
valley," I said. "He will be coming back soon, if I know his ways; and
then there will be disturbances in the night."
The leader of the watchers shivered. As far apart as we stood, I saw
him shudder. "But do not lose your day's sleep over him," I shouted
reassuringly. "This very moment I go to look for his track. If he
ranges within our lands I shall know, and a pair of hunters will watch
with you."
"Watching is our duty, not yours," he answered a little sullenly.
"Beware of Halfspoor, or he will be using your pelt for a sleeping fur,
Ahmusk."
I was angered, I suppose. A hunter's pride is a powerful thing.
"Halfspoor is only a knifetooth bear," I told him. "He is not, after
all, one of The Nameless."
They looked at me in horror; and then they turned and went to their
trees without a word. I felt ashamed of myself. It was an evil thing
to use that terrible name so lightly. Then Lora had clambered down
her tree and was standing near me, looking up into my face, so that I
forgot all that I had been saying and knew only that every day this
girl became more lovely.
"Good morning, Lora," I said.
"Are you really going to look for Halfspoor?" she asked me, her eyes,
that were like the purple bells of the burrowflower, all wide and
wondering.
"I am."
"Perhaps he has left our lands."
"I have known Halfspoor for five years, Lora, or it may be six. I know
his rangings and his times for killing; I recognize his track though it
be on the hardest ground, and I could tell you which snuffling grunt
was his if a full score of knifetooth bears were all talking at once.
He is due to come back today, or tomorrow or the next day. He is old
and wily, but set in his ways."
"I hope he has died on the banks of the Wide River," she said, brushing
a strand of her onyx-black hair away from her face. "I hope his bones
are gnawed by jackal-rats."
"And I hope your wish does not come true," I said lightly. "Because I
have chosen his hide for our mating rug, young Lora."
"Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, her great eyes going wide again. "I had
forgotten to tell you. I was asleep when you returned last night."
"I trailed a wounded deer far down the Blue Brook, and caught him late.
What had you forgotten, sleek Lora?"
"The guardian Laq asked me to be his mate. It was in the afternoon, and
he asked me in the presence of my father. When I reminded him that you
were to be my mate, he asked my father for me."
* * * * *
I was shocked, then angered above any anger I had ever known. "He asked
you, and then your _father_!" I roared. "What had your father to do
with it?"
"Laq says that in the far olden times it was the custom to ask a
woman's parents. My father was enraged and told him that we were not
living in the far olden times. Laq said it was a pity we were not,
as then the people had respect for their guardians. And my father,
fuming and rumbling until I thought he would begin to give off sparks
like Ruddy Mountain, told Laq that even a guardian had no right to ask
for the promised mate of another man. Laq then departed, saying he
would ask me again after Halfspoor had killed you, dear Bear-throat.
Halfspoor again! His cruel words had slipped my mind until I spoke them
now. Must you go looking for Halfspoor?"
"I must." Taking my bow from my shoulder, I tested it from habit, and
counted the arrows in my quiver to ascertain that there were fourteen
of them, for fourteen arrows are accounted lucky for a day's hunt. "I
do not understand Laq," I told her. "He has broken two of the strongest
customs. To ask you when you are promised ... and then to ask your
father for you, as though you were a bone hammer or a sleeping fur! Laq
must be losing his wits."
"Perhaps he was drunk on tree fern juice." She dismissed Laq and
all his works with a shrug. "The sun has lifted over the hills,
Bear-throat. If Halfspoor is so much more attractive than I am, why
then go to him, young hunter with blind eyes."
I patted her smooth cheek. "Young, but not blind. Did I not choose the
prettiest girl of all our folk, when we two were scarcely older than
sucklings?" And with this compliment, which made her preen, I left her
and walked swiftly down the glen toward Sunset Fields.
* * * * *
By the time I had crossed Sunset Fields and come to the Gray Brook,
I had forgotten Laq and pushed Lora to the back of my mind. The day
was perfect. Every bird in the world was making merry on his twig,
every small animal had left his burrow to romp drunkenly through the
underbrush, intoxicated with the bright keen air of morning. I passed
a doe with her fawn, trotting happily toward the water; and I did not
bring her down, though she would have been easy prey and good eating,
for we shared a joy that made us sib to one another.
Still, for me the pleasure of autumn was now only a background against
which my thoughts of Halfspoor the bear marched in orderly fashion
while I reviewed them one by one. I recalled his slayings of men, his
occasional and very skillful stalking of the night watchers in their
trees at either end of our valley. I remembered how on this morning he
would be found asleep in his old lair under the two fallen petrified
tree ferns downstream near the Blue Brook, while on that morning he
would be gnawing the bones of bison or cave cat or perhaps even of
jackal-rat (for he was a dirty feeder, was Halfspoor), far up the
Crimson. I visualized his footprint, unique among knifetooth bears,
measuring as long as my arm from wrist to shoulder, and with three
outer toes gone from the right hind pug. As I waded through the Gray
Brook's chilled waters I could almost imagine that I saw the maimed
sign of his pad on the silver strand before me. "How well I know that
track!" I exclaimed to myself, with an egotistic pride in my craft;
and then I came out of the waters to find that, far from so clearly
imagining it in all its enormous crippled particulars, I had actually
been looking at the veritable track of Halfspoor himself. I was
exultant and humiliated at the same time.
Halting above it, I tested my bow once more, and counted the fourteen
bone-pointed arrows in their quiver that I had made from the paw and
forearm pelt of another knifetooth bear, my lucky quiver with the claws
still hanging from its tip. The metal knife was in its sheath at my
hip, the bone hatchet dangled from a sling handy to my left hand.
I took a deep breath and began to follow the great mutilated prints
overland toward the second of the three streams.
Soon I had crossed the Blue and was approaching the Crimson Brook.
Halfspoor was perhaps two hours ahead of me. Where he had trodden in
sand, the water had filled his track, and where he had ambled heavily
across grassy spaces, the blades had sprung nearly to uprightness
again. He was traveling slowly, inspecting logs and coverts, probably
talking to himself in the gruff complaining whine of his breed. Here
and there he had lingered a moment or two, and in these places I could
often catch a whiff of his rank ursine odor.
* * * * *
At first I had no desire to catch up with Halfspoor. Almost would I
rather have come face to face with one of The Nameless! No hunter is
a match for a full-grown knifetooth bear, standing as he does more
than twice as tall as a man, with an unbelievable bulk that must
outweigh twenty-five humans, every ounce of which is full of fight
and choler and wickedness. His twin saber-tusks jut down in great
deadly arcs, yellow and sharp and long as a hunting arrow. His head
is larger than that of any animal, even than that of the cave cat who
lives to the north and can be heard yowling a full day's journey away.
When a knifetooth bear opens his maw it is like staring into a huge
fang-rimmed scarlet well. His paws are swift gargantuan weapons that
can enfold and crush the largest stag. Oh, a terrible beast is old
knifetooth! And Halfspoor was the biggest, the angriest, the wisest and
most hateful of his tribe.
I tracked him but did not hurry overmuch; when I had decided where
he would spend the night, I would return to the glen, and persuade a
dozen of our hunters to accompany me to find him. If he lay over a
kill, stupid and drowsy with eating, we would attack him. Some of us
might die, but Halfspoor also would die ... if we were lucky. By right
of my trailing I would then lay claim to his pelt, and from it make a
mating fur for Lora. And the watchers would feel happier as they sat
the nights through in their trees at the ends of the valley, because
Halfspoor would never trouble them again.
On this I thought as I crossed the Crimson Brook, and saw the first
line of trees rising from gray tangled thickets that marked the
beginning of the Fearful Forest. Halfspoor's pugmarks went straight
toward them. And it was then that I began to form my daring plan. The
bear was obviously going to go to ground somewhere in the woodland, and
no hunter would follow me into that dreadful place after sundown.
Why not follow him and kill him myself?
Of all the folk, I alone had killed a knifetooth bear. Truly he had
been but partially grown, and I had not deliberately stalked him to
kill; no, I had blundered on him and it had been slay or be slain. But
in that fight I had learnt much of a knifetooth's tactics, blind spots
and weaknesses. His arm was now my quiver, his hide my sleeping rug.
Halfspoor was only twice his size, at most, and surely the best hunter
of the glen was a match for him? I who could loose four arrows and
notch a fifth before the first struck its mark a hundred paces off--why
should old tribal fears and the experiences of lesser men keep me from
trying my hand at conquering this maimed brute?