Free Alaska by James A. Michener

their escape.
    But to their dismay, the little figures on two legs kept pace, coming closer and closer, and on the third day, at an unguarded moment when Matriarch was directing the others to safety, the creatures surrounded the wounded granddaughter. Intending to crush these intruders once and for all, Matriarch started back to defend her grandchild, but as she strove to reach the attackers and punish them with her broken tusk, as she had done with the sabertooth, one of them, armed only with a long piece of wood and a short one with fire at one end, stepped boldly out from among the trees and drove her back. The long piece of wood she could resist even though it had sharp stones on the end, but the fire, thrust right into her face, she could not. Try as she might, she could not avoid that burning ember. Impotently she had to stand back, smoke and fire in her eyes, as her granddaughter was slain.
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    With loud shouts, much like the triumphant howling of wolves when they finally brought down their wounded prey, the creatures danced and leaped about the fallen mammoth and began to cut her up.
    From a distance that night, Matriarch and her remaining children saw once again the fire that mysteriously flamed without engulfing the steppe, and in this confusing, tragic way the mammoths who had for so long been safe within their ice castle encountered man.
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    Ill

PEOPLE OF THE NORTH
    ome twenty-nine thousand years B.P.E. Before the Present Era, which means before the reference year A.D.
    1950, when carbon dating became established as a reliable system for dating prehistoric events in that eastern projection of Asia which would later be known as Siberia, famine was rampant, and it struck nowhere with more ferocity than in a mud hut that faced the sunrise. There, in one big room excavated a few feet below the level of the surrounding earth, a family of five faced the coming winter with only a small store of food and little hope of finding more.
    Their house provided no comfort except a slight protection from the howling winds of winter, which blew almost constantly through the half of the structure which rose above ground and was formed of loosely woven branches plastered with mud. This hovel was no more than a cave-hut, but it did provide one essential: in the middle of the floor there was a place for fire, and here half-wet logs gave off the smoke which lent flavor to what they ate and endless irritation to their eyes.
    The five people huddling in this miserable abode as autumn ended were headed by a resolute man named Varnak, one of the ablest hunters in the village of Nurik, who had as wife the woman Tevuk, twenty-four years old and the mother of two sons who would soon be able to join their father in his chase for animals whose meat would feed the family. But this
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    year animals had grown so scarce that in some cave-huts the younger people were beginning to whisper 'Perhaps there will be food only for the young ones, and it will be time for the old ones to go '
    Varnak and Tevuk would hear none of this, for although they had a very old woman to care for, she was so precious to them that they would starve themselves rather than deprive her She was known as the Ancient One, Varnak's mother, and he was determined to help her live out her life because she was the wisest person in the village, the only one who could remind the young of their heroic heritage 'Others say ”Let the old ones die,”' he whispered to his wife one night, 'but I have no mind to do so '
    'Nor I,' Tevuk replied, and since she had no mother or aunts of her own, she knew that what her husband was saying applied only to his own mother, but she was prepared to stand by this resolute old woman for as long as life remained This would be difficult, for the Ancient One was not easy to placate and the burden of tending her would fall almost solely on Tevuk, but the bond of debt between the two women was great and indissoluble
    When Varnak had been a young man,