Free Manly Wade Wellman - Hok 01 by Battle in the Dawn (v1.1)

           CHAPTER I
     
                 The Land of the Gnorris
     
                THE
southern country had come to hold too few game herds, too many hostile bands of
fellow- hunters; hence the family’s spring migration, many days 5 journey into the north which these days grew warmer than
their fathers had known it.
                 This
particular bright morning found the whole nine scattered. A foolish deer,
grazing too close, bounded away with a javelin in its shoulder, and the
swiftest runners led the chase with the rest trailing behind. So from horizon to horizon and beyond, with flecks of blood to
point the way across rich green meadows, and hunger to quicken moc- casined
feet. The sun had reached zenith and passed when the first of the
hunters, gaining the top of a little knoll, saw that the prey had fallen and
died just beyond.
                 That
first-comer was the eldest son of the wandering household, and the tallest and
swiftest. He was as strong as the leopard whose pelt he wore for single
garment, and his smooth young skin showed tanned and healthy with good outdoor
living. His lion-tawny hair had been cut shoulder length and was bound back
from his shrewd face with a snakeskin fillet. His chin, plucked clean of beard
as custom decreed with bachelors, jutted squarely. His mouth was wide and
good-humored beneath a straight nose, and his gray eyes opened widely, clearly.
In one hand he swung a stone-bladed axe, and a loop at his shoulder held the
mate to the javelin that had pierced the deer. His name, and he hoped to make it great, was Hok.
                 Pausing
thus, Hok grinned triumphantly for just the half of an instant. Then his eyes
narrowed and his lips drew tight. Something dark and shaggy crouched on the far
side of the fallen animal. A bear? Hok’s free hand
flashed backward, twitching the second javelin from its strap.
                 Behind
came the patter of other feet, and a comradely panting. That was Zhik, a
younger half-brother and favorite companion. Not as tall as Hok, nor as old by
three years, the stripling nevertheless was sturdy and handsome. Hurrying from
behind, he poised a spear of his own.
                 At
that moment the shaggy thing rose from the side of the deer, rose on two legs
to face them. It was not a bear.
                 Barely
thirty paces separated the youths from the creature that disputed their right
to the meat.
                 It
had hands and feet, coarser and larger than Hok’s own; it was a head shorter
than he, but broader; it wore no clothes, and coarse hair thatched shoulders,
chest and knotted limbs. Then its eyes grappled Hok’s across the intervening
space.
                 Shrewd
were those eyes, in a broad, shallow skull like the skull of a hairy lizard.
Fire was in them, and intelligence and challenge. The two bright crumbs of
vision, under their coarse brows, did not falter before Hok’s gaze as would a
beast’s. Meeting the stare, startled and fierce on his own part, the
hunter-youth was aware only vaguely of the rest of the face—out-flaring
nostrils, a sagging lip, a hideous rank beard and forelock, ears that seemed to
prick like those of a wolf.
                 Zhik
drew in his breath, as if setting himself for the cast. “Wait,” interposed Hok
quickly, he did not know why.
                 A
third human figure had come from behind—the Chief, their father and head of the
party, a hunter still vigorous and swift but unable to match forever the pace
of these two eldest sons. He, too, balanced a javelin ready, and at sight of
the creature before them his heavy, fulvous beard gaped open in amazement.
                 As
for the curiosity itself, this last reenforcement daunted it. Slowly, clumsily,
it backed away. They saw that it moved with knees bent, back hunched, arms
hanging forward like an ape’s. Its eyes still