But what he said was, “If this beast is as dangerous as you say, Orion, might it not come to our caves in the night and attack us? It could be more of a danger not to kill it than to hunt it down.”
I grinned at him as we stood by the stream’s muddy bank. He was thinking for himself, his slavish docility replaced now by the spirit of a hunter. Perhaps he could even become a leader of men.
Then a new thought struck me. Could this bear be a weapon sent against us by Set? A huge cave bear could kill half our little band or more if it struck suddenly in the night.
“You’re right,” I said. “Round up all the men and we’ll track the beast down.”
The eight males of the little band came with me, each of them carrying a couple of rough spears. I had a bow slung across my shoulders and a half-dozen arrows tied in a sheaf on my back. Several of the men had crude flint knives, nothing more than sickle-shaped chunks of flint sized to fit in the palm, one edge sharpened. Anya had wanted to come with us, but I begged her to stay with the women and not upset the precarious division of labor that we had so recently established.
“Very well,” she said, with an unhappy toss of her head. “I will stay here with the women while you have all the fun.”
“Keep a sharp lookout,” I warned. “This bear might be merely a diversion sent by Set to draw the men away from the caves.”
It was a long, punishingly hard day, and I was constantly on the alert. Perhaps there was more than a cave bear in these woods. Certainly there should be more than a solitary bear. Where there was one there should be others. Yet no matter how diligently we searched, that one set of tracks was all we could find.
The tracks followed the river’s course, and we trailed along its bank beneath the overhanging trees. Colorful birds chirped and called to us and insects danced before our eyes like frantic sunbeams in the heat of the afternoon.
Chron clambered up a tall slanting pine and called down, “The river makes a big bend to the right, and then grows very wide. It looks like… yaa!”
His sudden scream startled us. The youngster was frantically swatting at the air around his head with one hand and trying to climb down from his perch at the same time. Looking closer, I saw that he was enveloped in a cloud of angry, stinging bees.
I raced toward the tree. Chron slipped and lost his grip, plummeting toward the ground, crashing through the lower branches of the tree. I dived the last few feet and reached out for him, caught him briefly in my arms, and then we both hit the ground with an undignified thump. The air was knocked out of me and my arms felt as if they’d been pulled from their shoulder sockets.
The bees came right after him, an angry buzzing swarm.
“Into the river!” I commanded. All nine of us ran as if chased by demons and splashed without a shred of dignity into the cool water while the furious bees filled the air like a menacing cloud of pain. None of the men could swim, but they followed me as I ducked my head beneath the water’s surface and literally crawled farther away from the bank.
Nine spouting, spraying heads popped up from the water, hair dripping in our eyes, hands raised to ward off our tiny tormentors. We were far enough from the river-bank; the cloud of bees was several yards away, still buzzingly proclaiming their rights, but no longer pursuing us.
For several minutes we stood there with our feet in the mud and our faces barely showing above the water level. The bees grudgingly returned to their hive high up in the tree.
I picked the soggy stem of a water lily from my nose. “Still think I’m a god?” I asked Noch.
The men burst into laughter. Noch guffawed and pointed at Chron. His face was lumpy and fire red with stings. It was not truly a laughing matter, but we all roared hysterically. All but poor Chron.
We waded many yards downstream before dragging ourselves out of the river. Chron was in obvious pain. I made him sit on a log while I focused my eyes finely enough to see the tiny barbs embedded in his swollen face and shoulders and pulled them out with nothing more than my fingernails. He yelped and flinched at each one, but at last I had them all. Then I plastered his face with mud.
“How does it feel now?” I asked him.
“Better,” he said unhappily. “The mud feels cool.”
Noch and the others were still giggling. Chron’s face was caked so thickly with mud that only his eyes and mouth showed through.
The sun was low in the west. I doubted that we would have enough daylight remaining to find our bear, let alone try to kill it. But I was curious about Chron’s description of the river up ahead.
So we cut through the woods, away from the river-bank’s bend. It was tough going; the undergrowth was thick and tangled here. Nettles and thorns scratched at our bare skin. After about half an hour of forcing our way through the brush we saw the water again, but now it was so wide that it looked to me like a sizable lake.
And hunched down on the grassy edge of the water sat our bear, intently peering into the quietly lapping little waves. We froze, hardly even breathing, in the cover of thick blackberry bushes. The breeze was blowing in from the broad lake, carrying our scent away from the bear’s sensitive nostrils. It had no idea that we were close.
It was a huge beast, the size and reddish brown color of a Kodiak. If we stood Chron on Noch’s shoulders, the bear would still have been taller, rearing on its hind legs. I could feel the cold hand of reality clamping down on my eager hunters. I heard someone behind me swallowing hard.
I had been killed by such a bear once, in another millennium. The sudden memory of it made me shudder.
The bear, oblivious to us, got up on all fours and walked slowly, deliberately, out into the lake a half-dozen strides. It stood stock still, its eyes staring into the water. For long moments it did not move. Then it flicked one paw in the water and a big silvery fish came spiraling up, sunlight sparkling off its glittering scales and the droplets of water spraying around it, until it plopped down on the grass, tail thumping and gills gasping desperately.
“Do you still want the bear?” I whispered into Noch’s ear.
He was biting his lower lip, and his eyes looked fearful, but he bobbed his head up and down. We had come too far to turn back now with nothing to show for our efforts except the bee stings on Chron’s mud-caked face.
With hand signals I directed my band of hunters into a rough half circle and made them crouch in the thick bushes. Slowly, while the bear was still engrossed in his fishing, I slipped the bow from my shoulder and untied the crudely fledged arrows. Signaling the others to stay where they were, I crept on my belly slowly, cautiously forward, more like a slithering snake than a mighty hunter.
I knew the arrows would not be accurate enough to hit even a target as big as the cave bear unless I was almost on top of it. I crawled through the scratching burrs and thorns while the birds called overhead and a squirrel or chipmunk chittered scoldingly from its perch on a tree trunk’s rough bark.
The bear looked up and around once, and I flattened myself into the ground. Then it returned to its fishing. Another flick of its paw, and another fine trout came flashing out of the water in a great shining arc, to land almost touching the first one.
I rose slowly to one knee, braced myself, and pulled the bow to its utmost. The bear loomed so large, so close, that I knew I could not miss. I let the arrow fly. It thunked into the cave bear’s ribs with the solid sound of hardened wood striking meat.
The bear huffed, more annoyed than hurt, and turned around. I got to my feet and put another arrow to the bowstring. The bear growled at me and lurched to its hind legs, rearing almost twice my height. I aimed for its throat, but the arrow curved slightly and struck the bear’s shoulder. It must have hit bone, for it fell off like a bullet bouncing off armor plate.