He filled in the black. He scraped with the charcoal stick, fingered the soot into the rock. His fingers were pure black now too, and as he rubbed the charcoal in, there were times when he felt and saw his fingers go right into the rock, right into the horse’s body. Bristles of the mane as stiff as lion whiskers, bunched and upright. Black the whole head, all except a little stretch where neck met chest, just to round the figure, give it the curve that the wall itself gave the horse, a little curve of a bump so that the horse’s left leg stood out from the wall. This would be a great touch when he brought the pack in to see it, and moved the lamp to make shadows on the wall dance. He couldn’t both move the lamp next to the wall and see its effect from the center of the cave, but he could tell it would be good, a real movement. And above it the horse would toss its head.
Now his hands plunged deep into the stone of the wall. He had to move them around slowly, as if in thick mud, to keep from breaking off his fingers. The wall was cold, his fingers were cold.
When he was done with that blacking, the blackest blacking he had ever done, it took him a while to pull his hands out of the wall. When he did, he stepped back to his sack to look at the wall.
It was good. The free-standing mane between the top two heads was still strange, but there was nothing he could do about it. It worked as the cheek of the top horse, or the top of a horse seen between the upper two, or the mane of the second horse, rising before its head did, leading the head. All of those, sure. Part of the movement. And the black of it was good. Loon loved the black of the lowest horse, whose whinny seemed to echo in the dark reaches of the cave, the black spaces that the lamps did not light.
He went back to the wall with the burin, and began to scrape the area around the lowest head, to make its outline that much sharper. The mouth inside the whinny had to be as white as the woman’s kolby, there under the bison man looking across the chamber at him. Scrape it clean. Get it just right. The stone had such a texture here, granular but smooth; he could scrape it very clean, get a smooth white surface to delineate the black mass of the horse. Ah, watch out, a scrape too far down—pick up the charcoal stick, wet the finger, cover the scrape mark. The lower line of the jaw had just the jowl of that horse on the ridge, two little indentations marking it.
There was a burbling moan from below, and then a gust of wind, and all his lamps went out at once, leaving him in pure blackness, a black as black as if the lowest horse head had spilled out and poured over him and filled the whole cave.
Chapter 66
This was bad. The blackness was absolute. He could make colors appear in his eyes by squeezing them shut, but there was no point to that. He had no sight. The world was black.
The cave moaned again. It chuckled at his capture. How did the cave bears guide themselves in here? How could they see in this?
They didn’t. They smelled their way. And the chamber that contained their hibernation nests was much closer to the cave mouth. They just bumbled blindly in and smelled their way to the place where they always slept, and slept again, and woke and sniffed their way out.
For a moment he lost his line of thought, and a panic of sheer terror washed through him in a flood that left him hot and gasping.—No, he groaned, and heard a little ringing that might have been an echo or a response.
He stepped around carefully, trying to keep his face toward the wall, to keep a sense of where he was. Facing the wall, the way out was to his left. He got down on his knees and crawled, sweeping with his hand ahead of him to feel for the extinguished lamps, for his sack—for anything that might be his, and thus help him.
But when his hand hit one of the lamps, it was no good; the wick was cold, the lamp’s little depression was out of fat oil. Possibly he had gotten so caught up in the four horses’ heads that all the lamps had burned their fat and gone out together. Maybe there had been no gust of wind at all, no laugh from the thing under the floor. Although it was laughing now. Anyway it didn’t matter. He had to find his sack.
Finally a sweep of his hand ran into it. Knowing its location allowed him to find his second lamp, and then the third. They were all out of fat, or so close that their wicks had gone out. He brought them back to his sack, missing it for a while and briefly panicking; but there it was at last, so that the terror of the dark subsided in him.
He sat on his fur patch and dug into his sack, feeling for the bag of fat grease. He found it, and that was good. In that bag was light and sight. Then he reached in the fold of his belt, and found the burl with the ember inside it, and when he felt the burl he took it up with desperate care, untied the cedar cap with trembling hands, and poked in gently with his finger, hoping to be burned: but it wasn’t even warm. Just ashes. He had stayed too long.
He sat back and whimpered with fear. There in his sack were his bags of food, and the rest of his painting things. The bag of earthblood powder, it felt like, ready to mix with his water to make red paint. But he was almost out of water. And nowhere in his sack did he feel the firestarter flints, or the little bag of duff and dried wood chips he needed to start a new fire.
He didn’t know what could have happened to them. Terror struck him again, swept through him and took him off. He needed to ice over that torrent of fear and stand on it. Needed to be ice cold, and yet he was burning with fear.
After a time the terror let him go, it flung him to the floor crying. It occurred to him that he might have taken the firestarter kit out of the pack when he lit the third lamp. Although he had lit that lamp from the ones already lit, of course, using a splinter, so there would have been no reason to take out the flints and duff. But it could have happened. That had been nearby; he wasn’t sure exactly where, because in the blackness he had carried all the lamps to this spot by the sack.
He crawled in the direction he thought the third lamp had been, felt the floor of the cave. Nothing. Then he lost the sack for a while, trying to return. When he relocated the sack he cried again, and after that he took the sack with him as he crawled around. He found some rocks on the floor, and some charcoal sticks tucked against one wall in a little hole. A jaw with teeth, giant in the dark, bigger than his head: a cave bear skull, it had to be, long and toothy, with the bump and rise in the forehead that marked it as a cave bear, although its sheer size was enough to tell.
Nothing. He had lamps, wicks, and oil, but no flints or duff. No way to make fire. He banged the rocks he had found against each other, and some brief sparks flew red across the blackness, like shooting stars, but nothing like what it would take to start duff burning; and besides, there was no duff.
He was stuck in the black of the cave. There was no way out, except to try to walk or crawl in the right direction.