Cro-Magnon by Brian Fagan

Author:Brian Fagan
Language: ru
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 1999-12-31T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Fat, Flints, and Furs

MORAVIA, LATE WINTER, TWENTY-NINE THOUSAND years ago. The twelve-year-old boy sits listlessly by the hearth, shoulders sagging, seemingly exhausted. He has spent the day in the cold, setting arctic fox traps with his father, with nothing but a few handfuls of lean, dried meat to eat. These are the days of hunger, when the reindeer are thin, when the people have burned off most of the fat on their bodies just keeping warm. The boy’s mother takes a practiced look at him, reaches for her precious cache of reindeer fat from the fall hunts, and melts a lump over the flames. She pours the rich lard into a skin container and passes it to her son, who drinks it greedily. He wraps himself in thick furs and drifts off into a deep sleep.

As a cold, gray dawn breaks, the boy awakes, full of energy once again. His father wants him outside to visit the traps, but his mother objects. His boots are too small, and the soles are almost worn through. He fidgets impatiently as she makes him stand on a reindeer hide laid on the floor. Then she crouches at his feet, cutting the hide round each one with a sharp flint knife. She rebukes him sharply as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “We will leave now,” says the father angrily as he polishes his spears. But the mother insists on finishing. There’s more fitting to be done. She stretches carefully prepared reindeer-leg skins around his legs, brown fur on the inside, cutting and tapering them carefully, piece by piece, deftly stitching at key seams, especially around the ankles. The boots take shape like snug tubes around her son’s legs. Satisfied, she tells him to take them off carefully and then hands them to the boy’s older sister. The father sighs with impatience and gestures his son outside. They gather their parkas and spears and vanish into the open. Meanwhile, the mother sits beside her daughter, watching carefully. Hesitantly at first, the girl joins the strips of reindeer- leg hide one to another with needle and thread, the forelimb skin at the front and the back-leg skin at the rear. The mother nags and encourages her daughter, checking that the seams are as tight and regular as possible. Then she watches her oversew the original stitching to make the seams waterproof.1

Neither mother nor daughter strays far from the hearth on this overcast, cold day, but the hunter and his son are well out in the open. A light wind from the north hints of snow. The snow-covered valley is gray and still under the lowering overcast. The conifers on higher ground stand black and motionless. A solitary bison by the frozen river paws the snow for the lichens below. Oblivious to the biting cold, father and son walk slowly across the level floodplain. Their eyes are never still, always on the alert for stalking predators lurking among the dark boulders at water’s edge.

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