Chapter 14 - The Search Party part 4

We found the body of Fodar that day, not long after the sun had reached its apex in the sky and begun to roll down the blue slope of the heavens toward the craggy mountains in the west. We were not too surprised to find him dead. Death, as I have said, dogged our every step in those rough days. It was the condition in which we found his body that upset us all so greatly.

We set out at dawn, not long after voiding our bladders and bowels. I did not eat breakfast, as I was still a little hung over from the night before and my stomach was sour. Also, I wanted to be quick on my feet if we ran into any trouble that day and a full belly always made me sluggish. There were seventeen men in our search party. Nine of them were Fat Hands. The rest were Fast Feet warriors. Most of the men of our tribe stayed behind, including my older brother Epp'ha, which irritated my father to no end. Our women saw us off, pressing packets of food and extra weapons into our hands with worried expressions. Eyya gathered the children to be cuddled one last time before I left, while Nyala ordered me to be careful and come home in one piece, or at the very least alive.

"And which piece should I bring home?" I asked, leering at her roguishly.

Her reply was a pinch that stung for several minutes.

Brulde, who was not comfortable around so many Fat Hand men, stayed in camp and didn't accompany me as he normally would have done. I could see that he felt terribly guilty about this so I made a point of it to speak with him privately before we departed.

As the hunting party made its final preparations, I took him aside. We walked down the hill toward the river, stopping behind a screen of young trees. There I put my arms across his shoulders and pulled his face toward mine.

"Husband," he said uneasily. He could not meet my gaze.

"Spit it out, Brulde."

"I will come if you want. Just say the word."

"There are enough already."

He peeked up at me, his brow furrowed. "I feel ashamed."

"Don't be. I understand."

He nodded, then smiled tentatively. "Then take care and do not let some mangy old speartooth sneak up behind you."

"I will do my best to not get killed today," I promised with a grin.

We embraced and then I held him at arm's length and instructed him to keep a close watch on our wives and children, especially if they should forage outside the village.

"Do not let any of them wander off alone," I said to him. "Especially the children. Not even to make water."

He could see the fear in my eyes. He knew a speartooth had snatched my brother from our wetus when I was a boy. He had played with Vooran as a child. "I'll keep them safe," he promised.

I had not slept since waking from my nightmare and couldn't quite shake the image of the giant reptile devouring my children. I squeezed Brulde's shoulders and stared hard into his eyes. "I mean it, husband," I said. "No napping or chasing stray pussy. Not today. I had dark dreams and they have given me a terrible foreboding."

Brulde laughed uneasily. "You are like a girl who sees a stick and thinks it is a snake." But I could see that he was worried as well. "I will be vigilant," he promised more seriously.

Before I departed, he made sure I had our best blade and spear and retied the strings of my chest armor, a vest of plated bones. I thumped him on the arm and then turned and trotted to catch up with Frag and my father.

My brother-in-law, Poi-lot, was walking a pace behind them. He looked from Brulde to me with a curious grin. Fat Hands did not share wives as we did. They sometimes took more than one wife but they rarely shared them with other men.

"Your man-wife stays behind today?" he said, trying to make a joke of it.

"He is not my wife," I said testily.

Frag and my father frowned back at him. Poi-lot ducked his head repentantly. "Apologies. Some of your ways are strange to me."

You didn't make light of our customs last night, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue.

The sun was bright that day but the wind was blowing from the northwest, where glaciers gripped the dark spires of the mountains, and it carried with it the chill and desolate smell of those creaking ice floes. As our group spread out and began to yell and beat the tree trunks with spears and sticks, high clouds tinged with gray scudded swiftly overhead.

More than once that morning, I paused to watch a V-shaped flock of geese fly past overhead. Their honk-honk-honking echoed across the lowering sky. More proof that the warm season was passing. Soon we would have to move to our winter camp. Big River was too open, the winter winds too harsh by the expansive waterway. Our winter camp was sheltered between two sets of high cliffs. It was much warmer there, and not so damned blustery.

By midmorning, our group had picked up the trail of the big cat. The ground was soft so it was easy to track the beast. We were near the border we shared with the Fat Hands, at the very edge of the land we considered our territory. It was a low swampy area full of strange animal cries and buzzing insects hungry for blood, an eerie place we did not venture too often. That was when the cry went up.

"Ayyy-eeeeeeee! I see him! It is Fodar! Ayyy-eeeeee!"

I was walking alongside Poi-lot at the time, conversing with him idly. Actually, he was doing most of the talking. Poi-lot was a gregarious man. We had lost the cat's trail a little earlier and were only beating the bushes, dispirited by our lack of success. The panic stricken cry launched me into a sprint. I gripped the shaft of my spear in white-knuckled fists. Poi raced behind me, kicking up sprays of mucky water.

It was upsetting to find the man dead. Make no mistake about that. Even so long ago, we understood death. We mourned those who passed on to the afterlife. We buried them and placed tokens of love beside their inert bodies. We weren't like the Foul Ones to the north, who boiled their dead and scraped the meat from their bones to feast on. Neither were we like the beasts, who sniffed the carcasses of their dead before moving on, giving them no further thought. A great, mournful cry went up when the missing Neanderthal was discovered, but it was the strange manner of his death that inspired our horror.

My father had reached the body before me. He turned toward me as I drew near, his ruddy face crinkled with confusion. "What manner of beast does such a thing?" he demanded.

Frag and several of the other Fat Hands were crowded around the man's body, partially obscuring it from sight. I pressed through their broad bodies and felt my jaw fall to my chest.

"No beast would do this!" Frag declared.

Fodar was dead. I expected him to be beast-savaged and partially devoured but his body had been stripped naked and hung from a tree. And he wasn't just suspended in the crook of a limb. A large cat might have done that, dragged his body into the branches of a tree to keep the scavengers from its meal. Instead, the branches of the tree had been broken into sharp spears and Fodar's body had somehow been hefted into the air and slammed onto the spikes upside-down. The narrow points of the broken tree limbs protruded from his chest and thighs in half a dozen places, but that was not the worst of it. That was not what killed him. His throat had been ripped open, and his horror-stricken face, frozen in a dying expression of agony and terror, was covered in a glittering black glaze of dried blood, making him monstrous and inhuman.

Fat Hands and Fast Feet shuffled around the body, examining it and then casting fearful glances into the surrounding wilderness.

I walked up close to the corpse. Fodar was hanging about six feet above the ground. I examined the wound in his throat, waving away the flies, then looked the rest of his body over. There were some bruises on his chest but no other signs of violence -- no claw marks, no bites. He was slightly bloated but did not appear to have been dead for more than a day or two. His arms were hanging down to either side of his yawning face. I took the wrist of his right arm and tried to move it. The arm was stiff with death, what your modern medicine calls rigor mortis. His flesh was cold and pale. There was dried blood on both hands but no injuries, nothing to indicate that he had tried to fight off his attacker.

"What is it, Fast Foot?" Frag asked in a low voice. He had seen my thoughtful scowl and come close behind me. "What do you see?"

"I once saw a bird kill a lizard like this," I said to the Neanderthal. "It skewered the lizard on a thorn so that it could eat it at its leisure, but Fodar has not been eaten. His only wounds are to his throat, and the flesh there is only torn. None of it is missing."

"What great bird could lift a man so high into the air?" Frag demanded. He looked nervously to the sky.

There were giant raptors in those days, some with wingspans as wide as the length of two men lying head-to-toe, but none could lift a full-grown Fat Hand. A small child perhaps, but Fodar was no child. Even by Fat Hand standards he was a big man, bigger even than Frag or his father Herung. But that was not the point I was trying to make.

"It was an evil spirit," one of the Fat Hands moaned.

"Look," I said, pointing to the ground. "There is only a little blood on the ground beneath him!"

I looked back to the body. It seemed to me there was a puzzle here, a mystery that needed, for all our sakes, to be solved, and that quickly, but I did not know what to make of the evidence at hand, and my father did not give me time to turn it over in my mind. In retrospect, I doubt I could have figured it out anyway, but I was still frustrated when my father interrupted my examination of the dead Fat Hand.

"Get him down!" father thundered. "We cannot leave him like that! It is an affront to his spirit."

He turned then to Herung, who was on his knees sobbing, and helped the old man to his feet. He put his arm around Herung's shoulders and led the man from the scene.

"We will bury him so that his spirit can find peace," father said to Herung in a conciliatory tone, hoping to comfort the ancient Fat Hand warrior.

"My boy, my boy, what manner of beast would do that to my boy?" the old man moaned. "What have I done to offend the gods, that they would allow such a thing to be done to my boy?"

I did not think it was a beast, nor the vengeance of some Fat Hand deity, but I kept my doubts to myself as Frag ordered Fodar's body taken down from the tree.

Old Herung wept as we tried to figure out how to get his son out of the tree in a dignified manner.