The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [129]
What he didn’t know was that from the time she had shown Brun the cave, Droog thought she carried luck with her, and saving Ona’s life confirmed his conviction. He thought of the strange girl as an unusual stone or tooth that one received from his totem and carried in his amulet for good luck. He wasn’t sure if she herself was lucky, only that she brought luck, and her asking to watch at this particular time he considered propitious. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that she reached for her amulet as he picked up the first nodule. Though he didn’t define it to himself in precisely that way, he felt she was bringing the luck of her powerful totem to bear on his endeavor, and he welcomed it.
Droog was sitting on the ground, a leather hide draped across his lap, holding a nodule of flint in his left hand. He reached for an oval-shaped stone and hefted it until it felt comfortable in his hand. He had searched long for a hammerstone with just the right feel and resiliency and had had this one for many years. The many nicks on it attested to its long use. With the hammerstone, Droog broke off the chalky gray outer covering exposing the dark gray flint underneath. He stopped and examined the flint critically. The grain was right, the color was good, there were no inclusions. Then he began roughing out the basic shape of a hand-axe. The thick flakes that fell off had sharp edges; many would be used as cutting implements just as they fell from the stone. The end of each flake where the striker hit the flint had a heavy bulge that tapered to a thinner cross section at the opposite end, and each piece that fell off left a deep rippled scar on the flint core.
Droog put the hammerstone down and picked up a section of bone. Taking careful aim, he struck the flint core very close to the sharp rippled edge. The softer, more elastic bone hammer caused longer, thinner flakes, with a flatter bulb of percussion and straighter edges, to fall away from the flint core, and it did not crush the sharp thin edge as the harder stone striker would have.
In a few moments, Droog held up the finished product. The tool was about five inches long, pointed at one end, with straight cutting edges, a relatively thin cross section, and faces that were smooth with only shallow facets showing where the flakes had been chipped away. It could be held in the hand and used to chop wood like an axe, or to hollow out a wooden bowl from a section of log like an adze, or to chop off a piece of mammoth ivory, or to break the bones of animals when butchering, or for any of the many uses to which a sharp hitting instrument could be put.
It was an ancient tool, and Droog’s ancestors had been producing similar hand-axes for millennia. A simpler form was one of the earliest tools ever devised, and it was still useful. He rummaged through the pile of flakes, picking out several with wide straight cutting edges and setting them aside to be used for cleavers useful in butchering and cutting through tough hides. The hand-axe was only a warm-up exercise. Droog turned his attention next to another nodule of flint, one he had selected for its particularly fine grain. He would apply a more advanced and difficult technique to this one.
The tool maker was loosened up now, not as nervous, and he was ready for the next task. He moved the foot bone of a mammoth between his legs to use as an anvil, and grasping the nodule, he set it on the platform and held it firmly. Then he picked up his hammerstone. This time as he chipped off the chalky outer covering, he carefully shaped the stone so that the nucleus of flint remaining was a roughly flattened egg-shape. He turned it on its side and, switching to the bone hammer, trimmed flakes from the top, working from the edge toward the center all the way around. When he was through,