Mesolithic Siberia

In the dark, and the cold, and amid the heavy snowflakes chasing each other around the moose-man, and above the thick, red embers that lay hungrily in the crook of the bow-drill, a great flat slab of wood was raised, held in red, swollen, cracked hands. The dead moose-head eyes couldn’t see it, obviously. Even if the eyes had been attached to a soul —

A moose can only see left and right, never forward. That was one of the first things my grandfather taught me. When I was 9, he had branded my arms with a firestick and told me to jump in the snow and thank the Gods for its coolness. He had said that ‘we whinge when it’s cold but we would be whinging even more if it was hot.’

If he wears the moose-head, he is forced to stop looking into the future and he is made to look to his left and his right. He can consider what everybody is doing. By seeing to his left and his right, he can see what will eventually be in front of us. By looking at peoples’ actions now, he can see what they are walking towards.

This was what Ashwayta told his son now. It was his last son, surely; he was thirty-five and his wife had finished having children. She thought it was best to finish before the Gods made her finish. The better part of the tribe – men, women and children – were breaking down a mammoth they had coaxed into a trap. The big black dogs jumped around and yapped until they were thrown enough meat to appease them. But there was plenty of meat for them. They thought it was a great injustice if they didn’t take part in the feast. Wooden frames stood everywhere for nobody-knew-how-far, and each one stood above a fire and had strips of meat draped over it. As long as plenty of smoke got to the surface of the meat, it would be alright.

The moose-man was still standing far away from the rest of them. Ashwayta scratched his nose and cleared the hard-work-tears from his eyes, and he stared off at the priest. There were always a few of them that stood away from everybody else to peer left and right. They weren’t wearing parkas, or anything mildly protective beyond boots to stop their feet going black. When Ashwayta stood up, his hands almost froze stiff; even here, where the ground was hot in the wake of the fire, there was heat. The moose-man had his ember bed, but no flame.

The ageing leader, still fit after the hunt, trudged through the night and the shin-high snow, which started in a sharp bank which curved around the mammoth and gave it a wide berth. The animal must have been wary of it, of course – it was the only clear patch of ground in the vicinity, and a mammoth was as clever as any man or woman – but it was a precaution we had had to take to stop ourselves from falling in. If a person had been caught in the trap and the mammoth had bumbled in after him, his bones would have been ground to flour.

Sometimes, Ashwayta’s son ground grass-seed into flour and cooked little biscuits from it. They were horrible.

“Shaman,” Ashwayta addressed him. The moose’s head peered up, just as it does when attached to a moose; in a slow, huge, sweeping arc. “What is happening now?”

The priest’s hand tightened on his firestick. Half of it was just hardened charcoal, he had used it so many times.

“Be more specific,” the priest said. He could just about be understood through the hide on the neck. Ashwayta wracked his brain for a question. He bit his tongue as he often did; it prevented him from blurting out ideas before they were fully formed.

“Will this prosperity of ours go on?” he asked, eventually. And the priest beat his stick once against the ember-stone, and he said a verse;

“The reindeer and the moose will remain here. The mammoth and the rhinoceros will remain here. The lion and the lynx, the wolf and the direwolf, the beaver and the otter, the goat and the horse, they will remain here. They will remain here.”

“- and the men and the women, they will remain here,” Ashwayta finished the verse for him, for he had head it a hundred times before. “And they will do the same as-“

“No.”

“…No, priest?” his face grew abruptly sterner in his hood. With a man like Ashwayta, it was clear to all that it is the eyes that really hold emotion, for his beard covered his mouth but you could always tell when he was angry.

“We will go south. The men and the women will go south,” he whispered. “And if they find life where they go, or death, or if everything remains the same, it is worth the journey, because that is what the Gods will.“

Ashwayta’s broad, old face fell. Snowflakes began to settle in his beard and on his nose. He could feel them. If he strained his eyes, he could see them; great, imposing blurs that his soul hid from him so that he would not be distracted while he worked. He couldn’t see where the shaman was looking. The great moose-man fanned the embers with the board. He could not start a fire; there was scarcely anything left to burn. He smelled of moose, and everything. He was an animal. An animal-man.

“South. Right. And if we die?”

“Our relatives stay here. Some tribes go east, some west. We go south. It’s a test. Go back to your children.”

Ashwayta did not reply. He wished he had something to say, but there was nothing. This horrible-smelling old man who wore an animal’s head, this revered man who didn’t have to work. Stupid man. The Gods spoke to him for some reason.

With each strip of flesh torn from the great animal, with each word of thanks given by a man or a woman or a child, with each flint spent with effort and each great hazel spear prized from the creature, the leader felt helplessness creep upon him. He ran his fingers through the red and white strings in his hair. He was part of this great divine plan, and he had to orchestrate it. A woman in front of him – and old women, perhaps fifty or so – broke through a sinew with her knife. Ashwayta could see the effort in her eyes. The determination. The hunger.

The moose-man died in the cold that night.

Maybe the summers were warmer in the south.