Free Mammoth Boy by John Hart Page B

sight-lines.
    They set off through the wet grass at a hunter’s lope, armed with stone-throwers, spears and long lines that Agaratz tressed from thongs. Urrell waited to see what their use would be.
    A new stretch of the River Nani was Agaratz’s target this time and took them half a day to reach. Late mushrooms dotted the meadows. In brakes, raspberries, bilberries and whortle-berries clustered. Urrell saw where bears had raked pawfuls of fruit into their mouths in an orgy of feasting ahead of their winter sleep.
    “Bears,” he said. Agaratz nodded. They saw deer aplenty, bison in the distance while herds of small brown horses showed their pale bellies as they galloped away at the approach of two humans and a wolf, gliding over the deep grass on invisible hooves. Hares abounded. Agaratz had other things in mind.
    Through a fringe of trees they came to their destination: a loop in the Nani where the current had cut across an oxbow bend, creating a backwater. Floating on the still water were flocks of migrant geese, gathered for their long flight south, sorting themselves out by kind before flying off. So engaged were they in their own affairs that they ignored the two humans standing on the bank. Rakrak sat on her hunkers, looking on with interest.
    Urrell was now to see the purpose of the long lines.
    “You stay behind bushes and hold.” Agaratz handed Urrell one end of the thongs. Then he tied a bundle of reeds into a small raft, divested himself of jerkin and leggings, and entered the water, the thick hair on his neck and shoulders much the same rusty sedge colour as his raft. The end of the lines he held in one hand. Head barely above water behind the raft, he drifted towards the honking, bustling geese. Urrell watched as first one goose, then another vanished underwater with barely a ripple. Agaratz might have gone on all day without the flocks noticing but when he had enough he signalled to Urrell to haul him in.
    He waded ashore with nine fat geese, necks broken, tied by a leg to a line. Rakrak bounced about with excitement. The flocks went on as before, oblivious to their trifling loss.
    “Now return,” said Agaratz, draping five geese round his neck and the remainder round Urrell’s.
    On their way back they collected mushrooms. Agaratz uprooted clumps of wild, pink-flowering garlic, plucked thyme and marjoram for his pouches, pointing out herbs to Urrell and naming them in his own language while Urrell, where he could, gave names he had learnt from foraging women in his clan who gathered ingredients for their potions and old wives’ cures. Each had uses and virtues according to Agaratz, his lore far outdoing anything Urrell had learnt.
    Once back and up the climbing pole, which Rakrak had managed, if clumsily, to scale, they set about plucking the geese as the fire was building up for a roast. Agaratz signalled Urrell to pack the down and breast plumage in pouches; the quills and feathers they discarded.
    When the fire was hot enough to roast a goose Agaratz gutted one, something Urrell had not seen done before, and gave the giblets to Rakrak, saving only the delicacy of the liver, which he halved with Urrell and they ate raw. Into the cavity Urrell watched Agaratz stuff heads of garlic, mushrooms, handfuls of thyme and clumps of marjoram, the reason why he would soon learn as the goose roasted under its heaped embers while they plucked the remainder: odours such as Urrell had never known increased as the cooking went on. His belly gurgled.

CHAPTER 13
    N ever had he smelt anything so appetising. By the time the goose was cooked, its companions plucked and hanging from one of Agaratz’s frames, Urrell’s belly, empty all day but for handfuls of berries plucked on the way to the Nani and back, was quaking for food. Beside him, Rakrak whimpered and pawed the floor.
    That goose was a triumph, to man, to lad, to wolf, as they set to in companionable gluttony, hands, faces, paws soon fragrant with goosefat,