The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [58]
Deer picked himself up, helped to his feet the boy he had knocked over, cuffed him away from the sight of the trampled youth, and ran on. It was the firmest rule. The line of the beaters must always drive on. It must never flag, never turn aside to help a wounded friend, and never allow gaps to appear through which the herd might escape. Deer ran on, the dust thicker, the haunches of the herd suddenly looming close as the narrowing funnel slowed them. Now he could hear the cries of the men on both sides. Now was the crucial moment. Leaping forward, he jabbed his spear into the haunches ahead of him, great gray bulk after brownish mass, jabbing to keep them moving, to keep up the momentum and panic that would finally take the beasts over the cliff to their deaths.
This was the most dangerous time. Crowded together, their pace slowing as the pressure of beasts increased, this was the moment when the reindeer would be forced against the flimsy barriers of men and the skin-covered tripods. Some of them would find this was little enough barrier and burst through the line. Others would flee to the rear. This was when men and boys started to die, as the hunted took revenge on the hunters. This was the moment when safety lay only in the relentless jabbing of the spear, and the trust that the boy beside you would be jabbing too, holding the line with the discipline that was the mark of man against the beast.
His chest aching from the slamming of the escaped reindeer, his throat dry and his vision blurred, Deer knew that his breath was coming in raw and grating sobs. But he could smell the sudden taint of blood amid the dung, and staggered as his foot almost tripped over the fallen body of a young beast. If they were trampling their young, the panic was complete. Jab again, and again.
Suddenly they broke. The herd found space and ran forward. Enough of their leaders had fallen down the cliff to make a ramp of their own dead and broken bodies. Slipping and sliding, skidding and scampering, the rest of the herd rolled and heaved and fought their way across the still-warm corpses. He saw rumps pause and tauten, as the remaining beasts nerved themselves for the only escape. And then he was at the cliff edge, bellows of pain and exhaustion coming from below him, as what seemed like a living, crawling mat of beasts squirmed down to the river. Some were already swimming across.
Deer sank to his knees, exhausted, his chest sucking great gulps of dusty air as he coughed and bent, dimly aware of other boys doing the same beside him. His breath easing, he looked along the line of beaters, seeing gaps here and there in the line of tripods. There would be dead men after this hunt, and one stricken boy that he knew of. Clutching his spear, he began to haul himself to his feet. And failed. The shaft was slick with blood. It ran thickly down his arm. It was splashed all up his legs. His chest and belly were a thick paste of blood and sweat.
He felt a great push in his back. The hunters were driving the boys down into the still heaving mass below. He lost his balance at the cliff edge, and half-stumbled over, trying to turn so that he could keep his trunk on the cliff rim. But the hundreds of reindeer had kicked away whatever edge there might have been, and Deer slid on his stomach down the slope for only the briefest drop, before his leg slipped into the writhing warmth between two beasts. Terrified of his leg being crushed, he squirmed and hauled himself onto a heaving back and realized that his spear had broken. He still had the flint point, so he drove it like a dagger into the space between the shoulders, just below the hump at the base of the neck. A great tremor came from beneath him, but the beast stayed upright. He leaned forward, grabbed an antler with one hand, and rose to his knees on the back of his kill. Now he had leverage and struck down, now to a neck to his right, now to his left,