And We Inherited the World
The deer had fallen in a small alpine clearing. Arrow’s father killed it with his club and the other men of the hunting party sat and butchered the animal and smoked its meat on fires they built among the rocks. The forests in that land were dark and the trees made a thick black wall around the clearing, but the men felt safe in their small patch of sunlight. They sat laughing and talking with their weapons in the dust as the meat was slowly cured. Arrow’s father was in the middle of telling a story from his childhood when he stopped and fell quiet. He picked up his hatchet and stood. The other men stood and followed his gaze.
Three figures the men had never seen were crouching in the shadows of the trees. They were dressed in rags of a make not known to Arrow or the others and they carried heavy spears and axes with dull stone heads. They had thick matted beards and the panicked eyes of wild animals. Thick tufts of hair on pale and filthy skin. Wide and bony frames. Not quite men and not quite beasts. They chirped at Arrow’s hunting party and hummed and made signs with their hands. Arrow’s father nodded in return. The wildmen pointed their stubby fingers at the jerky where it dried on the rack. Arrow’s father shook his head and beat his fist against his chest. The wildmen spat and stamped their feet and the men of the hunting party lifted up their spears. The wildmen snorted and shook their heads. Patting one another on the back, they turned and trotted back the way they had come, branches snapping at their bodies as they lumbered through the brush. Soon they were gone in the shadows of the trees. The men of the hunting party finished smoking the meat and then walked back to camp. They talked the entire way. They had all heard stories of the wildmen from the elders of their clan, but one had not been seen alive in many years. All had reckoned them to be long dead.
Many years went by. Arrow grew and became a man. He hunted and taught his son to hunt the way his father had for him, and the boy grew strong and swift. They saw the mountains and the meadows and the rivers of their ancestors and in time their clan wandered back to the land of the wildmen. They camped on the same broad beach and fished the same river they had fished when Arrow was a boy. He showed his son which forests to hunt and which fruit to pick. He told him the names of the mountains in that place. High Fist. Broad Stone. No Trees. He told him stories. Stories of his forefathers, of hunts, of his imagination, and of his time meeting the wildmen in those same mountains all those many years before. His son did not believe him. So he showed the boy the forest, and soon he found the spot where he had smoked the meat with his uncles and father and he smoked some there again. He acted out the encounter, playing the parts of his father and himself and the creatures that he saw. His son laughed and smiled and they enjoyed the morning and climbed back down once the day had grown hot and they had food enough to feed their folk.
They could hear someone screaming as they came back to camp. All the people were gathered in the middle of the huts. Before them all the woman called Snow sat wailing on the ground, clutching the bruised and bloody body of her newborn boy against her chest. Arrow shook his head in disbelief.
“What happened?”
“Wildmen came for the food in her hut,” the man called Bright Star said. “The boy was sleeping on the ground. They stepped on him and crushed him to death.”
Arrow looked around the camp. All of the huts still stood. No fires had been scattered. Nobody else had been hurt. Nobody but Snow’s young boy, who was still without a name. Bright Star put his hand on Arrow’s shoulder.
“We must find them. Are you coming?”
“I am,” Arrow said.
The men called River and Quickfoot were already gathering arrows and axes and spears. Arrow gave his boy a kiss on the head and wished him a thousand blessings. Then he fetched his spear and club and the men were on the hunt.
They moved fast over the open ground of the valley and stopped only to drink from streams or to pick fruit and nuts from the bushes they passed. The trail was clear. The wildmen left broad swaths of stamped brush everywhere they went, like animals that had yet to learn the awful wrath of Man. Arrow and his companions followed their tracks over the mountain High Fist and into a land they did not know. None of them had ever hunted there and the stories of their elders told them nothing of that place. A rich valley filled with roaming herds of mammoths. Beasts not seen in many lifetimes. They strode upon the open ground and shook their manes and trumpeted at the men as they ran along beside them. The men paid them no mind and let them be as they continued on their chase. In another generation all the mammoths of that valley would be dead and consumed.
When the sun went down they found a place to sleep between two tall pines and made their camp without a fire. They ate the fruit and nuts they had picked that day on the trail and did not speak. Soon they were asleep. When the sun came up they shot and dressed a bird and cooked it in a low bed of embers and gnawed on its bones as they followed the tracks of the wildmen. Near noon the trail finally ended at the mouth of a narrow cave. Voices and the smell of a fire came from within. Bright Star gave the signal to attack. The men let loose their war shouts and charged inside with weapons at the ready.
Five wildmen awaited them. One man, two women, and a girl. All of them were dressed in filth and their pale and sickly skin clung to wide and bony frames. The child shrieked and ran deeper into the cave while the adults scrambled for their weapons. They were not as quick as Arrow and his companions. River ran his spear through the man as Quickfoot and Bright Star shot the women. One of the women wailed as a fount of blood burst from the side of her neck. Bright Star hit her in the head with his ax until she too was gone.
Arrow went in search of the child. She had not made it far and was cowering against a wall in the rear of the cave. Arrow studied her as he approached. She had blonde matted hair and her little gray eyes were savage atop her strange nose and cheekbones. She chirped at him in her odd animal tongue. Arrow lifted his spear and stabbed her in the chest.
Then there was a flash of light and a burst of noise like thunder and Arrow saw grand expansive seas of sand and stone huts built on the rivers in that land that were lived in by people who lived among animals and brought water to flat open fields where they watched over wide blankets of golden wild grass. The huts spread across the sand and were surrounded with walls of mud and stone and across the sand were other such places filled with people who were different but still people all the same. These peoples met on a vast open field and made battle and the violence was terrible and they rode atop the backs of horses and sat in baskets dragged by the creatures and flung spears and arrows at one another until the desert was red and muddied with their blood and then the victors turned their weapons on the walled place of stone huts and they set it alight and the fire was immense and terrible and made the night into day. When they were done they took the women and the children and all the animals and they brought them to their own walled place across the sea of sand. Then more people, different yet all the same, appeared in other wild and fantastic places. They lived upon the snow and the sea and in forests so dense a man could not see ten paces ahead of him as he walked. Then they leveled these places and their numbers grew beyond Arrow’s understanding. They covered the very ground upon which they walked until the earth itself was a churning sea of moving people, all chattering in disparate and unfamiliar tongues. They set about building new places of stone or wood and these places stood forever and generation after generation passed within their walls as the places grew and the people alongside and these places confounded together and made war with peoples different from their own and the fighting would never end and so many died and yet they would not stop. Arrow thought the dead would outnumber the living but there were always more to come. Across the sea, people built mountains and columns of ice and stone and they lived within these things and wherever they walked or breathed the ground beneath them too became like stone and the people flowed like rivers. Animals riled in their own filth and were fed until they burst and then slaughtered by the kind but there were always more to come and they would always grow fatter but everything beyond their containments withered and died and faded and fell upon the surface of the earth. All the fish in the sea boiled in the water and the skies were blackened with smoke from the fires in the camps of the people on the shore. Yet as the very ground beneath them died, more people always came, and they always fought among themselves and against people not like themselves and all they spoke of was violence and all they wanted was war. Then their wish was realized and it was fantastic as the sun touched the ground and the great places of ice and stone became heaping ruins and nowhere the people ran was safe because they could not run from what they wanted and the fires scorched everything anyone had ever seen or known or spoken or dreamed about and the people became dust and their homes ash and then burning winds leveled the trees and butchered the last wild beasts in the field and then the fires stopped and the world grew cold and a lone whining wind blew over nothing because everything that ever was or will be was blackened ash and dust just drifting on the breeze.
“Are you alright?” Quickfoot said.
Arrow opened his eyes. He had fallen on the ground beside the child and the others were standing over them. He was shaking. His spear still sat in the dead girl’s chest and her wild gray eyes were open and fixed on him. His companions helped him to his feet and he collected his weapon. He looked no more upon the dead beneath his feet.
Then they turned away and never again did they look upon that place. The food the wildmen had stolen was gone so Arrow and his companions killed wild game in the meadow and cooked it over an open fire and spent that night talking and sharing stories from their past. When the sun rose they walked upon land that was newly familiar and yet beyond their knowing all the same.