5
The Wanderer
Antiquity
One
The man rose from where the body lay. A solitary tear formed in his eye.
He did not know the word wife. His elemental language made no distinction between woman, wife, and mother. But he had spent nearly ten years with this friend, and he cared for her. She had made him warm in their crude hut overshadowed by the White Mountains. And she had borne him a son.
The year, by reckonings still millennia in the future, was some two score of centuries before the time of Christ. But the man knew neither years nor dates. He knew there were warm seasons when the soil could be dug, when his woman planted seeds that produced food. He knew there were cold seasons when the mountain became covered with white and the land was hard and unfriendly.
He and his fellows in these lands north of the Great Sea others called Mediterranean were only beginning to harness the incipient fragmentary powers of their minds. Humans of embryo civilizations in the deserts of the pharaohs and the dynasties far to the east had taken rationality a few steps further. But among the races of which this man was a part, the process of thought remained as rudimentary as their tools, their weapons, and their homes. Conjecture and analysis yet lay outside the matrix of familiar exercises for their brains. Instinct, hunger, and the elemental emotions of their humanness drove them in equal share with their dawning intellects. They did not know that in this fertile region of rivers and valleys north of the Great Mountains, they were slowly becoming a people whose influence would spread throughout the world as surely as that of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese.
As the climate gradually warmed and they spread farther north into the verdant plains between the three great rivers, these herdsmen and hunters had only begun to experiment with techniques of planting and harvesting. Those who occupied this vast region were loosely linked only by their common emergence out of a prehistoric complexity of related peoples who had made their way here from the Mesopotamian crescent where life itself had begun. It would be another two or three thousand years before they would assimilate into the warlike confederation of tribes who, with forged iron swords, would dominate the landmass north of growing Rome and west of dying Greece.
To later Greeks and Romans, these people would seem a large, wild-eyed, and hairy race of savage barbarians. But the man standing over the corpse of his dead wife knew nothing of what his people would later become. He only knew what he felt in his heart—the anger, the grief, the love.
For he was a Celt. Or such he would one day be called.
These tribes of the southern Germanic plains would gradually coalesce into a powerful race that would sweep over the continent like a raging wildfire, vanquishing all who dared stand before them. To the diverse breeds of their progeny, the Celts would give the color red—the red of fire . . . the fire of energy, creativity, passion, cruelty, conquest, and vibrant life.
This man, however, would by then long have left the central European continent behind him. As the sky brought seasons of change to the land, so the ill fortunes of man’s barbarity had brought such to him. The future race whom the Greeks called the Keltoi would have to rise and conquer this land without benefit of his progeny.
He would take his lineage elsewhere, to sire a people far away.
He was a big man for his time, though erect he would not quite have measured six feet, muscular of limb, with wide shoulders, bare of covering and hairy. His hands and feet were disproportionately large and needed to be, for they were the primary tools of his survival. The light brown hair that spread in all directions from his head, tangled and plentiful, did not stop at his neck but spread down across his back and brawny frame. His cheeks and chin and lips, large featured and abrupt, were covered with beard, which likewise spread downward over his neck and onto an expansive, rippling chest. This was the warm season, and thus he was clad in soft animal skin only about his midsection.
The man stood, raised his fist in the air as if vowing vengeance, then let out a mournful wail over his woman’s body.
He felt no shame in the tears that displayed his grief. His were a people whose energy fueled itself with powerful emotions as natural as eating and hunting. Even before the echo of his outcry faded to silence, his lips began moving again. From the depths of his throat the crooning of a strange melody could be heard, lonely and full of doleful distress. Gently his body rocked back and forth.
As the chant rose and fell, he lifted his face to the sky in unknowing supplication to powers and forces he knew not. In his own way, he committed the soul of his companion to the elemental dominions of the universe which intuitively called out to him at this moment.
He did not cogitate upon such things. The brooding song lay hidden in his deepest being. It now emerged from the vast implanted reservoir of human feeling, filling the air with melancholy strains.
After some moments the chant too, like the great wail that had proceeded it, drifted into silence.
Turning, he saw his nine-year-old son running toward him in answer to the cry.
The boy had followed at some distance as they had returned from the hunt. As he now caught up, he saw the tears on his father’s face. A look of fearful inquiry filled his eyes.
Instinctively sensing he must shield the lad from his mother’s broken form, the man ambled quickly to meet his son and led him away.
“What is it, Father?” asked the boy in a consonantal tongue now long dead.
“Nothing, my son,” replied the man. “It is time for us to seek the river. We may no longer stay in this place.”
“Where is Mother?”
“Your mother will remain here.”
“Why, Father?”
“She must remain here—forever,” he answered. He could not prevent bursting into another wailing howl.
There were many in the tribe over the hill who would immediately have charged forth with reckless unconcern for their own lives to avenge his wife, to seek and kill and mete out death for death. Such was the way of men. Of such was justice made.
But it was not this man’s way. He would not make his son an orphan. Love filled his breast, for both wife and son, with more potency than the primitive urges of conquest, greed, and retaliation that guided the footsteps of most of his era.
Revenge, he knew, would be futile. He only regretted that he and his son had been away hunting when the Helvetii had come. He knew the marauding bands had been sweeping out of the White Mountains, plundering, killing, and stealing. It had not occurred to him that they would come this far.
Had he gone with the rest of his tribe, the Boii, to live in the valley, perhaps this day would not have come. But he had always been a loner, a nomad. When he had arrived from along the Danubi fifteen years earlier, they had branded him a wandering minstrel. His parents had also been Boii. They had migrated north along the river Danubi when he was six, after one particularly severe winter. And when twenty-five years later he trekked back, the Boii who remembered him had called him the Wanderer.
The name remained, along with the lonely call of his heart. A Wanderer would he forever be.
The Boii were his people, but this was no longer his home. Wander he must. This time far away. But not to return again down the river where his parents had gone. With his son, he would travel northward, down the other great river called Rhinii. The Boii maintained relations with the Belgae far to the north. He would visit them, perhaps travel farther to lands yet unknown.
The man did not know that land ended. He did not know that seas existed or that rivers like the Rhinii and Danubi flowed into them. He only knew that the rivers brought life, and that by staying near their banks he could hunt and kill what he and his son required to sustain life.
They would wander. And they would survive.
Three
The Wanderer left the valley known as Rhaaran, which lay one range of hills removed from what the Teutonic descendants of the region would call the Bodensee. With his son he made his way, taking but few personal belongings. These consisted chiefly of hunting implements, flints for making fire, a handful of scrapers and awls and crude knives for cutting and working hide and wood, a few bone weapons and carving tools, and as many skins for warmth as they could carry.
Survive, this father and son did. For they were of Celtic blood—proud, strong specimens of a virile people whose star in the world’s history was on the rise.
Northward down the swelling river they traveled, mostly by foot, occasionally on what makeshift boat they could fashion from a dead pine or fir or what raft could be fabricated from smaller fallen birches.
Where they found food, they remained, until weather or scarcity or the wandering urge compelled them onward. Sometimes days, sometimes months would they spend in a place. But always the impulse to explore new horizons propelled them onward.
The boy grew as they went, made strong and sinewy by the constant struggle against nature and the elements. As years passed, the hair on his face gave the father pleasing evidence that they were no longer mere father and son. Now they were two men adventuring together, roaming where Boii had never been.
At last they could hunt the big elk, because there were two to outsmart the beast. Perhaps one day they might even hope to bring down a giant mammoth, whose white tusks the man coveted both for their beauty and for the sharpness of their points.
As they traveled, the Wanderer revered the memory of the woman who still lived in his heart. He taught his son likewise to honor her who had given him life and suckled him at her breast. They spoke of her often, that the memory of her face and the sound of her voice would not fade. He now called her Eubha-Beanicca, “the living woman,” to remind the boy always that not only his mother’s blood, but also her spirit, lived on through him.
As they went, the man met others who shared their Celtic blood. Never again, however, did the urge to settle among them rise within him.
When he reached the far north, the river became so large as to be fearsome. It was by foot, on the river’s south shore, for shore it was indeed by this time rather than a mere bank, that he first beheld the awesome sight—two gigantic flowing bodies of water tumbling straight one into the other in white, frothy fury, creating a new river of monstrous proportions surging out of sight, toward the sea of the north the man had never seen.
He dared attempt no crossing of this wide torrent. Without knowing it, the Wanderer and his son now stood at the lowest point of the continent. One day these places would be called the low countries. The Wanderer and his son had gradually descended since leaving the White Mountains years behind them, always moving with the flow of the great river. But after this day, toward whatever point of the sun they turned their faces, the water would be flowing downward against them. Their journey, though they knew it not, had reached a dividing region of no return.
Three days they remained at the conflux, the crashing, turbulent echo of great rivers in their ears, mesmerized by the sight that few if any other of their species would ever see.
On the fourth day the Wanderer arose, scanned the two rivers as they rushed headlong into each other, a sight that still struck both fear and joy into his breast, then turned his gaze away from the rising orb over the horizon in the east. The time had come again, as it had so many hundred times before. His feet had become restless.
It was time to continue on. They would now follow the new river from its violent collision with the Rhinii up its unknown current, westward to see where it might lead.
Water was water, and it carried life, no matter from which direction the water came. Against the flow of this new river he and his son could no longer hope to navigate any makeshift craft. But their time would be easier on the riverbank and its environs. For spread out before them, and to their south as far as the eye could see in all directions, lay the flat, open plain of the huge delta.
This new river to which they had come his descendants would name the Themii, the “dark river.”
On they marched, unaware that they had turned their backs forever on one season of their heritage. With this crossing of the great plain they were launching new streams for their proud bloodline to follow toward diverse destinies. For within the lifetime of the son’s grandchildren, a repeated series of violent seismic tremors of the earth’s surface would subjugate this lowland to the encroaching waters of the sea.
The plain that father and son now traversed would sink with catastrophic suddenness as the land wrenched itself apart. The jarring shifts of the globe’s unsettled plates would transfigure the joining of the two mighty rivers into two wide and separate mouths a hundred miles apart, spilling into the newly created sea channel between them. It would scar the Dover coastline with miles of jagged cliffs of unusual and notable coloration. They would be called “white,” or the cliffs of Alban, by the Belgae who followed. This Celtic tribe would thus give the land toward which these first adventurers walked, and to which future explorers would venture by boat, its first Celtic name, linked by the common thread of primitive language to the White Alpine Mountains they left behind.
As they crossed the plain later to be called a strait, behind them lay the continent which, in the thirty-six centuries to come, would see the descendants of the tribes of these two men rise to great heights. Though the Celts in Europe would never build a city, nor forge a governmental empire, nor even establish an absolute ethnic unity, their many strains and breeds—from the Parisii, Cornovii, and Belgae in the north to the Remi, Treveri, Helvetii, Boii, and Vindilici farther south—would loosely coagulate into a force that would lay the economic, social, and artistic foundations for most of the northern European civilizations to follow.
They would give to the Athenians and Italians who assimilated them a host of inventions—art, metallic technology far in advance of its time, the iron plowshare, the rotary flour mill, a wheeled harvester. They would grow into a dynamic, warlike, fierce, vigorous people. It would later take the full might of Caesar’s legions to subdue them throughout Gaul, Asia Minor, Spain, and the rest of northern and eastern Europe.
All these events and empires and conquests that lay ahead, however, would come to the regions now at the backs of the man and his son as they left the joining of the two rivers. They would not be part of it.
Before them instead lay a new history, a new destiny.
For they, and the handful who had preceded them, and the many of like Celtic origin who would pursue their nomadic footsteps over the wide isthmus and across the water which eventually overflowed it, would people a new land, soon to be an island known as Alba or Albion. They would imbue it with their Celtic energy, their pride, their language.
Most of all they would give this new land their blood, and the fire of their passion.
Four
The Wanderer and his son traveled west, then gradually northward once the Themii became narrow enough to navigate upstream and cross.
The son matured in strength and stature, and in the ways of living in an untamed land, as his father taught him. It was the only life they knew, the only life most of mankind knew. They hunted, they fished. Rarely did they remain long enough in one place to fashion more than a temporary shelter.
They were not the first to cross into this lush and uncharted land. They therefore met occasional beings of the homo sapiens species—though many more creatures who were not. Human encounters, in fact, were infrequent, for the population here was but a scant fraction of what it had been where many tribes were scattered throughout the valleys of the Rhine, Danube, Rhone, and Seine, whence they had come.
Here and there they came upon tribes of strange sorcerers, passed their crude stone monuments to the sun and moon, and wondered silently what they might mean. But there was no reason to tarry, for these were a queer people . . . and yet more northern lands beckoned. Out of the Wanderer’s origins near the White Mountains, the inward pull of snow drew him.
In the hilly regions north of the great river’s fount, the boy took a wife from one of the native tribes—of Celtic root like himself, though neither knew it, of a branch of the Belgae who had migrated two centuries before. She was of strong stock, powerful in her own right, brawny for a woman and standing as tall as most men, with fair skin, keen bright eyes, and shining black hair, long and straight. She could hunt with the men of her extended family and had killed beasts twice her size with her own hands. And yet she possessed as well an aesthetic temperament, inherited from her father and his Belgae forebears.
Her father had begun experimenting with stone, wood, and bone to produce ornaments and jewelry. She applied her craft to simpler expressions of the artistry of their breed. From an early age she had been singularly able to create images of animals and human shapes with the point of a stick or sharpened bit of flint. Now in the years of her early adulthood, she discovered how to make rudimentary colors from various plants to enhance the figures on animal skins or dried pieces of wood or bark. They were of no particular use. But the creating of such visible representations of the world brought a quiet joy to her heart.
Both the Wanderer and his son were drawn immediately to the daughter of the Belgae warrior. She reminded each in their own way of their departed wife and mother. She was big enough to survive and live long, keep a husband warm in bed, and endure childbirth without frailty.
The Wanderer immediately consulted his son, then held counsel with the young woman’s father. The arrangement was concluded before many more days.
When the pilgrims continued their northern trek, therefore, they were now three instead of two. Happy days were these indeed, for the sound of the woman’s voice, laughter, and song now accompanied the Wanderer and his son.
The young man called his new wife Eubha-Mathairaichean, “source of life,” for all his life his father had taught him to revere the spirit and reproductive mystery of womanhood. The son of the Wanderer and his wife came together and produced two sons, then a daughter, then another son.
The Wanderer, by now an old man and growing weary, found himself at last desiring rest. The small family settled for several years in what would later be called the Cumbrian Mountains. As their steps took them northward, the air had grown steadily colder, for they were not many centuries behind the glaciers whose retreat had made these lands habitable. With cooler temperatures came rougher terrain, different breeds of grasses and wildlife and trees, more rocks, hills higher and more jagged, longer and colder nights in winter, and more sustained periods of light in summer, though the sun did not beat down with such heat as before.
Especially there was more water—under their feet, all around them in magnificent lakes, and falling with greater regularity and intensity from the sky above them.
It was a wet land, a windy land, and a solitary land.
Nowhere at that time, upon the planet called Earth, had clusters of the subduing forces of men grown numerous. Even the beginnings of cities in Egypt and Babylonia were yet meager, rural, and agrarian. But here, in the northern climes to which the Wanderer had come, isolation reigned supreme.
The land itself, more than the scarcity of men, forbade colonization. The icy winds as they swept down from the north, laying flat the coarse grasses of open moorland with their chilling blasts, called out to all who would pursue their trek farther, “Go back! Return to the South. These regions are home only to wind and mountains, ice and snow, and those few beasts brave enough and strong enough to subsist. You dare not settle here!”
This was not a friendly land. It wanted no men.
These northern places yielded few treasures. The soil was thin and soggy and unfertile. It offered little life. Wild fruits and vegetables grew only in short supply. Only the hardiest of breeds made their homes here—reindeer, boar, elk, red deer, wolf, bear, and numerous small creatures. Those not stout enough to battle the elements for an equal share in the claim to subsist either died or migrated back to more temperate regions.
Those who came here would fight but for one thing—the right to remain, the right to live, the right to endure. This was a land destined not to spawn empire, but to fashion a peculiar and robust breed of inhabitant.
This was a land of the determined and rugged loner. Those who tramped northward and persisted in making their homes in its wild wildernesses would become a breed set apart. They would be men among men, women among women, a race of stalwart victors in the most elemental contest of life.
None but the hardiest would survive.
It was a general warming trend in the boreal hemisphere that allowed the Wanderer, and those who followed him, to make this land a permanent home.
As the glacial ice receded to allow mankind’s northward advance, however, it also scarred the land and left unmistakable imprints on a geography that would forever influence the history and character of its inhabitants.
This ice lay heavy on the land with a weight beyond comprehension. Moving along at inches a year, the deep-packed glaciers extended far below the ground’s surface, scraping, clawing, pushing, and readjusting entire landscapes as it went—tearing away topsoil and vegetation, carving deep gashes where the earth’s crust was weak. It thus created lakes and rivers, valleys and marshes, coves and sea channels, and long and numerous sea inlets or firths, and left exposed the bare rock and jagged mountain peaks strong enough to withstand its force. The ice shaped the face of the land.
The movement of glacial ice also took a share in the creation of a rocky substrata that, working in combination with the cold and wet of the climate, would give rise to perfect conditions for the natural production of the miraculous burning substance known as peat.
The most important legacy bequeathed by the Ice Age, however, was the simplest of all. The ice left behind nothing more nor less than another form of itself. For the geographic and climatic conditions created here came to be dominated by that most elemental of substances upon which life depends—water. A watery landscape became the defining substance of the region. Water fell from the sky. It lay in every hole and crevice. Its seas surrounded the land.
The ice returned every winter from above, covering the land with thick blankets of snow. The sea penetrated the coasts with long, fingery firths and scattered it about with islands. Persistent rains kept rivers full with swift, amber, peat-stained flow. And moors and water-soaked marshes were unable, because of the rocky substrata, to drain effectively.
Six
Water, terrain, and climate together insured that the region was slow to settle.
By the Wanderer’s time, icebergs no longer floated off the shores of the land. A livable degree of warmth had come, as if borne on the breezes of the southern winds, though the winters remained frigid. Vegetation and trees covered the land, however sparsely.
Those few humans who ventured here found in the wide, cold, windy spaces a correspondent melody from within their own souls. In the whispering of lonely winds through rocky clefts and in the eerie wail of gulls along high jagged coastlines, the sounds of desolation gave rise to a solitary joy of personhood unknown to those content to bask in the warmth of plenty and in fellowship with others of their kind. From out of the barren bleakness of wide gray moors came a silent, answering sense of home into the breast of those who felt the call of the north.
It was a call not heard by the many, but the few.
Eubha-Mathairaichean, who came to be called simply Mathair, or “source,” which later took on the same meaning as mother, was of similar temperament. Her Celtic blood was like that of her husband and his father. Nature spoke to her of mysteries and secrets, though she could only feel, not understand them. She often rose early, with young ones still asleep, and sought the lonely places, to look up and wonder. It was sensations from such moments that drove her to express herself with hands, in images of what she had seen, to make beauty, to communicate in a medium that required no words.
As the Wanderer and his son traveled, they had seen and learned much that enabled them to continue. Now the young wife joined them, taking an equal share in taming the land, adding strength when needed as well as fresh insights into difficulties they encountered. From occasional encounters with other men, they observed tools and implements not seen before. No metals yet—they would not come to this region for two thousand more years—but varied and cunning uses of stone, shells, tusks, and wood.
To the cagey skill with which the two men had become adept at stalking and killing wild game was now added the woman’s resourcefulness in making wider uses of what nature provided them. It was in her nature to improve, to create, to bring warmth and homeyness to their lives in a multitude of subtle ways. Her artistic bent enabled her to see what they could not—potential uses and possibilities for whatever they owned or encountered. The result was a multiplying source of skins and other beastly material with which to barter and trade.
Their inventory of implements slowly widened, a good many of feminine design, as well as ornaments like she had seen her father make, of symbolic and artistic rather than practical use. When necessary they traded such items from her hand in exchange for what they needed. Those they encountered were eager to display and adorn themselves with representations of objects which they felt possessed supernatural powers.
What they could not trade for, they studied, then, with the woman’s help, fashioned for themselves. As skill with hands and fingers became more dexterous, so did their minds. To the facts they learned, they added that great human uniqueness—ingenuity.
The most useful of these instruments proved to be what amounted to a crude saw or long-knife. A series of razor-sharp seashells—for which they had traded many skins to a tribe of fisher-people at the western shores of the sea they finally reached—were fastened in a long row, tightly bound with dry-tempered leather thongs against a slab of hardwood. The edge created along one side of the wood, with its evenly spaced, sharp-pointed shells in a precise line, made it a cutting instrument of much wider utility than mere sharpened stone or flint.
The fragility of the shells was of little use against the trunk of a tree. But they discovered it could be employed to great effect by cutting deep into the earth itself and sawing through it to extract large chunks of the grass and heather and matted root system, which extended many feet below the surface and held the soil together in a tightly bound mass.
They could not know that the boggy turf beneath their feet, so ill suited for so much and so difficult to traverse during the rainy months, in fact contained a cache of wealth that would enable them and their descendants to survive—not against hunger, as did the soil of the south, but against the elements of the weather itself. These first inhabitants sought only the insulating thickness of the sod to use for shelter. For their progeny farther north, however, the peat would provide a greater and more palpable warmth, the discovery of which would enable them to finally subdue this hostile environment and make it permanently livable for their kind.
Father, son, and daughter-in-law constructed a crude home for themselves and the son’s family from tree trunks. These they thickened against the strongest gusts of wind and rain with slabs of turf, which their shell-saw enabled them to cut from surrounding wastelands.
Inside, the wife hung skins she had cured and drew pictures and shapes on their smooth sides, adorning their dwelling with designs she hoped would keep the spirits of nature pleased. She occasionally carved designs on tree trunks as well, or scratched shapes onto rocks and boulders. As they moved about the land, the etchings came to tell the story of their travels. The Wanderer, his son, and his daughter-in-law would in turn explain the meanings of the shapes and designs to the four children of their family, thus beginning an oral tradition which they would themselves carry on to their progeny.
The youngsters were growing now too, the three sons big enough to help their father and grandfather slice down into the moist earth and drag the heavy cuttings from the moor. The daughter assisted her mathair with preparing the ground and planting what little could be grown there.
Meanwhile, the Wanderer, his hair white and his legs weary from the miles he had trod throughout his long life, watched his growing brood with all the pride of a primitive clan chieftain, which in reality he was.
Seven
It was toward the end of a summer season that the youngest of the Wanderer’s grandsons spotted the giant prints.
They were sunken so deep into the springy earth as to leave hardly a doubt that they belonged to some behemoth of a beast. The seasonal warmth had no doubt brought it down from the north, or up from the south. Never before had they seen the likes of such prints.
The moment the Wanderer heard of it, his heart began to pound. He followed his excited grandson, eyes wide with anticipation. The moment he had dreamed of was at hand!
The lad hurried back toward the bog where he had seen the tracks, father and two older brothers running at his side, the old white-haired forebear lumbering after them as well as he was able, with labored breath and heavy step. A few minutes more, and all five stood in a circle, breathing quietly from the exertion, staring down at the huge imprint of a foot.
The Son of the Wanderer, a muscular man now in the full virility of his prime, looked at his father. Both men knew what the moment signified. They had spoken of it frequently as they made their trek to this land, when the son was no older than his own sons were now.
The three youngsters—the eldest, in his teens, his twelve-year-old brother, and the eight-year-old discoverer of the print—glanced with wide eyes back and forth between father and grandfather, wondering what would follow.
The decision took scarcely a moment.
After a few seconds, the aging patriarch slumped to the ground and sat, still beholding the print with wonder. He would conserve his strength for this one final primordial contest between man and beast, this hunt for which he had yearned throughout his lifetime. Already his son and grandsons were hurrying back to retrieve spears, lengths of twisted vine-cord, slings, and their three stone axe-clubs. Whether the weapons that had brought the deer, the elk, and the hare into their power would likewise prove of effect against larger game, only time would tell.
There were five of them. Mostly they brought to this battle the cunning of mankind’s developing mind.
Ten minutes later the hunt was on.
The two eldest walked in front, father and son, each wielding spear and club in his two hands. The lanky and confident seventeen-year-old followed a few strides back, and several paces farther behind came the two youngest, whose wide eyes and uncertain knees evidenced that fear accompanied them toward the engagement in equal proportion to the anticipation of victory.
The tracks were fresh. The hunters had examined the holes with probing fingers and keen eyes sufficiently to determine that they had been made only a short time earlier, well after last night’s freeze and this morning’s thaw. The flatness and uniformity of the indentations, as well as the distance between steps, made it clear the beast was moving slowly. They should be well able to overtake it.
The five warriors hastened on.
Nothing was said. This was a moment that would bind together the ties of their family, and their bonds as men, forever. Their feet fell silently on the soft earth. Each knew the peril ahead. Such only heightened the blood-tingling anticipation racing through limbs and brains.
Suddenly the Wanderer’s son held up his right hand. His father and sons froze.
With noses bent into the slight breeze, as if in one accord they sucked in deep drafts of the morning air.
There was no doubt. The odor of animal flesh carried in the wind. Faintly accompanying it drifted into their ears the sounds of heavy tramping through the brush of a small forest ahead.
Wanderer’s son lowered his hand and signaled them to follow. Once more they marched forward, quieter if such were possible, fingers clutching yet more firmly the implements of death they carried. Into the wood they walked, peering ahead with eyes alert. Glancing this way and that, each silently hoped to be the first to spot their prey.
Providence fittingly chose the eldest.
The old man, his white hair fairly bristling with expectancy, stopped suddenly. Eyes aglow as from a lifetime’s dream realized, he raised a hoary arm and pointed through the trees with bent finger.
There stood the magnificent beast!
Never had their eyes beheld such a creature! Yet they knew the giant mammoth in an instant, for no behemoth on earth could rival it.
The furry flanks shone reddish brown, covered sparsely with coarse long black hair. The hulking shoulders loomed higher than two men. The skin from a single such beast, erected on poles, could house an entire family for ten winters! Its flesh might feed fifty families!
Such thoughts raced through the son’s brain. His father, however, had eyes only for the prized tusks of white ivory, strongly curved outward then back toward the center. He had lusted after their beauty and sharp tips for more years than his son had lived.
The two older men looked at each other, formulating even in their silence the plan with which they would make their attack. A few gestures, questioning glances, shakes of the head, pointings and nods, were sufficient.
The beast’s eyes offered the only logical target. In no other part of its frame did a vulnerability exist that would enable such as they, mere ants of men, to overpower the beast. Clubs and stones and anything else they might throw would only bounce off the thick, hulking carcass with no more potency than a leaf falling from one of the surrounding trees. But a flint-tipped spear striking deep into the massive head through the doorway of the eye would bring the animal down eventually, even if they had to track it for days. Once it fell, its strength at last given out, they could follow the first attack by finding soft flesh underneath its belly in which to drive more spears. Finally they could club it to death between the tusks with the stone heads of their axes.
The plan was daring, but the objective so enormous as to be worth the risk. It would require that the father of the three youngest put his life into the very path of what by then might be a charging demon of Herculean size, hold his ground until the final moment, and then launch his spear with perfect accuracy.
There would come no second opportunity. If he missed, he would be dead.
The Wanderer’s son now signaled his eldest boy to follow. Slowly they crept leftward, to begin a wide detour through the trees, out of sight, and around toward the front of the beast. The grandfather and the two younger boys waited some minutes, then began inching their way in the opposite direction. The five would stalk their quarry in a slowly tightening circle, silently, with stealthy step, surrounding it until there was but one direction open—toward the waiting, powerful arm that would send a sharpened spear-point into one of the only openings in its skull.
The mammoth had stopped its heavy-footed tramp and was now sending its trunk about the ground and tree foliage, foraging for edibles. So silent was the approach against him that it was the sensitive tip of its snout that first signaled an enemy was at hand.
The blowing, sniffing, noisy quest for food suddenly halted.
The animal lifted his massive head, the great fleshy ears widening in search of sound. The huge trunk rose into the air, its smaller end probing to and fro with breathy inquiry, like some strange finger of an other-worldly abnormality, seeking from what direction came this odor that dared interrupt his privacy.
A snort of challenge issued from a mouth rendered nearly invisible by tusks and trunk. Fear was no component in the makeup of a monster such as this. But he did not like what he could not see, and the unknown contained a certain element of inherent angst. Slowly he lifted one of his giant forefeet and plodded again into motion.
Two steps only he took. Suddenly some moving creature stood before him, barring his path. Another snort followed.
Glancing around, trunk flailing with seeming disregard for order, his eyes took in other minuscule forms closing toward him. Throwing his tusks upward and his trunk high, he opened his mouth. A great roar of anger echoed through the forest. The steps that followed did not plod, but tramped through the brush with the recklessness of urgency and defiance.
In its very path, the mighty warrior stood his ground—a mere nothing before this giant!
The human knew that to discharge his weapon prematurely would only enrage the beast and perhaps turn it toward father and sons. His heart pounded within him. Unconsciously he let the club fall from his left hand so that his entire strength could be amassed into the single motion required of his right.
Onward the colossus came, in a full charge now, issuing another great roar of intimidation against this tiny erect two-legged creature who had the effrontery to bar his way.
Still Wanderer’s son held his stance. Slowly he raised the spear above his shoulder, fingers tightly gripping the slender stalk of wood. Even should he succeed, how could he avoid being trampled to death? He drew in a deep breath.
The beast was nearly upon him now.
He pulled the spear back to the full extent of his reach, gathered himself for the supreme effort, then hurled it forward with the power and momentum of one mighty thrust.
The shaft released from his hand.
He lunged sideways to escape the animal’s enormous charging feet.
His spear flew through the air without a sound, finding its target with deadly precision, striking the left eye of the beast just above center, slashing through the surface and lodging its stone tip deeply at the outer extremity of the mammoth’s brain.
A great shrill explosion of pain and fury rent the forest.
Red squirted from the wound, spilling in great splotches over trunk and tusks and forest floor, while a thick black oil oozed out of the blinded eye and down toward the creature’s mouth.
One of his feet stumbled momentarily. The falling man tumbled sideways, out of the way of the treacherous feet and to safety. Another screaming bellow silenced the five human voices now shouting triumphantly. The great mammal lumbered off through the forest with the spear dangling and whacking back and forth against the two ivory tusks.
In great excitement, the Wanderer ran to his son and pulled him off the ground with shouts of victorious exuberance. His three grandsons ran to join in the celebration.
A moment more and all five were off after the wounded ogre. The slashing, crashing, breaking sounds of its feet trampling through the forest were easy enough to follow, amplified by thunderous bellowing and braying roars. Energized by their apparent success, they followed on foot, barely managing to keep the wobbling monstrosity within range of their sight.
For two hours the chase ensued.
Occasionally the mammoth stumbled to one knee, but always recovered itself. That the wound was mortal there could be little doubt. The spear had penetrated deeper than any dared hope. Blood continued to spill before their steps, and however far the chase led them, their ultimate triumph was only a matter of time.
At last the creature lurched, then tripped again, this time to two knees, and did not rise.
The five pursuers approached warily from behind, then stood some yards off. They well knew an enraged beast near death was most dangerous of all. They would wait.
Silently they watched, listening to the mammoth’s lingering cries of anger and anguish. At length one of the two knees upon which it supported itself gave way, and the huge form toppled awkwardly onto the side of its head. Exhausted from both the run and the loss of blood, the beast rolled over on the great bulk of its whalelike right flank.
To all appearances their prize was dead. The old man rushed forward, heedless of the cries of his son, whose watchful eye yet detected the movement of breath from powerful lungs housed deep inside the mighty form. His father ran forward to the head, grabbed one of the tusks, and ran his hands up and down the smooth trophy. The wounded eye was black and void of sight, crusted with blood and a thick oily discharge. But had the Wanderer—less observant now with the advancement of his years—examined the other eye carefully, he would have seen yet the gleam of lingering wrathful life.
His son hastened cautiously to the back side of the head, shouting warnings to stand away.
“Away . . . get away, Father!” he cried.
Mesmerized by the color and texture and feel of the great tusk, the old Wanderer hardly heard him. He remained standing in the very face of the beast. His son raised the stone axe high in the air, then brought the blunt edge of stone crashing down upon the head of the mammoth just above the eyes, from one of which still dangled his spear.
A great crack could be heard as the skull began to split.
A final roar of death sounded as the giant brute let out the spent conclusion of its fury. Suddenly alert to his danger, the Wanderer jumped back from the bellowing open mouth as his son raised his club for another blow.
But as Providence had shed its light on the aged man only moments earlier, now that light was extinguished by its dark counterpart called Fate.
It was too late for him to escape the tangle of tusks and suddenly twisting trunk. As it roared its last, the beast raised its head in one final frantic, jerking motion off the forest floor. The powerful serpentine trunk caught the old man’s legs, trapping him, and threw him to the ground.
The second blow from the son’s club fell with perfect aim against the huge wrenching head. The stone accomplished its work. With its neck arched upward, the beast breathed its last, and its twisted head now fell lifeless back to the ground.
But even in death it had its revenge. For one of the smooth, thrusting tusks found the Wanderer’s torso where he had fallen in a tangle with the trunk and was now struggling to free himself. The sharp tip gored him through. He was pinned to the ground by the very treasure he had sought. Man and beast emptied their lungs together in a lengthy gasp of death.
The great cry that now rose heavenward from the forest floor was uttered by him whom the gods had suddenly made eldest among them. It was an honor unsought, and accompanied by huge tears of grief and wails of torment for not keeping his father away. As his father had done for him so long ago, he immediately shielded his own sons from the gruesome sight.
Quickly he led them away, that they might grieve in solitude. The tusks and skin and whatever meat they might retrieve must wait.
Their elder was dead. It was a solemn occasion. Honor was due, and they displayed it by kneeling and weeping.
At length the Wanderer’s son rose. They returned to the grisly scene of death. Somehow, with the help of his sons, they must extricate the corpse of his father from the tusk of the mammoth.
It took some time to wield the shaggy head such that the limp body could be pulled free.
Bloody, repulsive work it was. None of the four would forget this awful day. At last the son who had traveled far lifted the broken form of his father in his arms and bore him home, followed silently by his three weeping but stalwart sons.
Manhood did not come easily to those who made this region their home.
It must often be won at great price. Though only hours earlier two men and three boys had gone in search of the great mammoth, four men now returned, bearing the lifeless body of their patriarch before them.
Eight
It took two days for son and grandsons to prepare the Wanderer’s grave. Eubha-Mathairaichean made a new drawing on a small piece of hide depicting a colossal beast and a white-haired warrior facing each other in mortal combat. She would lay it on his breast, bordered with intricate interconnected links and shapes symbolizing the continuity of life. She would say by her art that the great man lived on and had gone to become one with the earth.
The grave was not of great depth. It did not need to be. The earth spirits would soon take the body. No man nor creature was likely to disturb it then.
They lined the trough with what thin pieces of rock they could gather, pointing the venerable white head toward the north, whose frontiers he had pursued all his long life. In the crypt, along with the drawing, they placed a chunk of the tusk that had ended his earthly sojourn, to bring him pleasure and comfort during the travels toward whatever world now lay before him. At his side they laid the long shell-saw, dulled with years of use, which he had fashioned decades before with his own hands and with which those who remained had sliced his grave out of the turf. They had since replaced the tool with new and better, but this had always remained his favorite. A handful of his most cherished flints they set in his cold, stiff hand, and alongside his body a skin filled with fresh water should his journey require it.
A brief ceremony followed, with suppliant chants to the unknown powers above and below in whose hands their revered father now rested. The four men and two women joined hands around the grave, gave the white beloved face a final, tearful, stoic farewell, then silently took hold of the three great slabs of turf set alongside the hole and gently lowered them onto him. Then followed the gathering of many stones to pile atop the grave as protection against beasts, and as a monument with which to remember the fallen Wanderer.
The chief of their tiny clan was now gone.
The next days were busy ones. The great fallen beast, won with such a sacrifice, now offered a variety of wealth to the migrant family.
They could only hope to salvage a small portion of the flesh. The afternoon of the Wanderer’s death they had torn off what was possible to eat within a few days and taken it back to roast over the fire. The tasty meat, however, had contained no savor in their mouths, and they had consumed it in silence. Meat was necessary to survive. But nothing could remove the bitterness that went down with every bite. They would dry an additional quantity in the reasonable hope of storing it a few months. But it was too early in the year and there was no snow about to freeze more. The rest they would have to leave to the buzzards and the wolves.
The thick hide, if with their crude knives and scrapers they could tear it off in nearly one piece, would serve as enormously valuable protection against the elements, both above them as a roof, and around their bodies as warmth. There was easily enough to make new shoes and garments from the scraps and leg sections. Teeth, bones, and hoof-nails could be used as implements for a variety of life’s needs. The second tusk as well as several of the huge rounded ribs they were able to cut out and dislodge from the hulking mass would serve as strong and sturdy plows with which to dig in the hard soil.
It was a tedious and bloody process. After four days, the putrid stench from the giant open carcass became nearly unbearable. When his own three sons could tolerate the rancid fumes no longer, the Wanderer’s son excused them to stand watch and guard him against incursions from other even more dangerous wild beasts who were prowling daily closer and closer.
They built three large fires to surround the scene of their labors, the reeking shell of blood, fat, muscle, gut, and bone in their center. They hoped the smell of the smoke would confuse the nostrils of nearby carnivores. If not and they ventured too close, the flames would dissuade them of further approach.
On the fifth day, the Wanderer’s son still worked on, standing knee-deep in rotting entrails between the open bones and the stomach he had cut apart with his long, sharp shell knife, beating against the base of one large rib bone with a great stone held in both hands, trying to break it off at its base.
With a loud crack, suddenly the bone split and gave way at his blow.
The weight of the stone and the force of the swing threw him headlong off his feet. He fell facedown into the fetid mire with a bloody, liquid squish. Struggling to his feet, covered with the blood and viscera of his own victim, he staggered a moment, then retched violently, then again and a third time. His own vomit spewed onto his legs and feet, mingling in sickening warmth with the cold chill of death under him from the mammoth’s rotting innards.
Holding his heaving stomach and pulling himself together as best he could, he staggered away, out of the disgusting pit of death, and to the solid ground where his teenaged son watched with revulsion.
It was enough! There was nothing more they could take from this beast. The time had come to leave it to whatever other animals could yet make use of it. The rest could rot.
He gathered his sons to help him retrieve the last of the booty. They would haul it to their camp while he sought one of the small nearby lakes in which to remove from his skin the last memories of the animal who had killed the man he loved.
Nine
One morning a month after his father’s burial, Wanderer’s son, the mammoth slayer, rose early.
A chill breeze met his face, portending storms a few months distant, readying themselves even now in the arctic to sweep southward toward the lands of men. The moment of restlessness had come again, as it always eventually did. He had anticipated this day, though it saddened him that his father could not enjoy it with him.
He squinted, then breathed in deeply.
He knew that tangy smell of northernness. He and his father had pursued it since he was nine. Always it had called them farther up, farther toward its origins. Away from human habitation they had trekked, into the face of the wind and the cold itself—northward, ever northward.
Now it was an odyssey for him and his own woman and their children to continue. The blood of the solitary septentrional pilgrim pulsed in his veins more strongly now that he found himself the new head of the infant clan.
The urge to move filled his soul. And he could not remain in this place of his death.
He turned to walk back to the hut. There stood his wife waiting. She had heard him leave and knew what he felt. She felt it too.
Their eyes met as he approached. They smiled. Both knew the call of the north had spoken.
That very day, with one accord, they began making preparations. With wife, daughter, and sons, the Wanderer’s son gathered their belongings, heaping all of the mammoth’s wealth they could pull on their two wooden sledges, and took up once more the exodus into the unknown, in the direction toward which they had pointed his father’s head and toward which, he had no doubt, the old man’s spirit was still bound.
Through the hilly region of lakes the Wanderer’s son led them, then down onto a plain until, encountering the body of water that would come to be known as Solway Firth, he was forced inland. Making his way slowly around it to the east, through the boggy mouths of several rivers and streams at its head, he finally turned northward again, entering at last into the land which, though given many names through the years, would always be known by those who loved it most deeply as Caledonia.
Wherever he journeyed in those northern regions, his stories and tales and recountings of past travels always grew out of his love for the father with whom he had spent a full life. And it was from that father that he chose his name.
He could have been called many things—Mammoth Slayer, or Adventurer, or He Who Sojourned from the White Mountains. But in his own estimation, and by the love that pulsed in his heart, there was but one thing that set him apart with such worthiness as to give him an individuality and identity.
He thus ever after let himself be known simply as Son of Wanderer.
His own sons would continue the example, taking his name by which to designate their own, thus perpetuating a genealogical appellative pattern whose roots lay in remembrance of the fathers and chiefs who had gone before.
But with this patriarchal pride, he would also pass to his wife, Eubha-Mathairaichean, she who was the mathair, the source of life to daughter and three sons—and in memory also of her who had given him birth, her whom his father had called Eubha-Beanicca—the prerogative to extend his own heritage to his sons. Did not life spring from woman? Should not she, therefore, pass on its legacy?
Thus, early in this land’s history, out of the reverence of the Wanderer and his son for the latter’s mother and wife, did matriarchy come to share honor with patriarchy in the hearts of the people of this land.
Ten
It was a harsh and unforgiving land the descendants of the Wanderer occupied, and over which they took gradual dominion as millennia gave way to millennia.
What had lured them in this direction, even the Son of Wanderer himself could not have told. He was driven by what flowed in his veins—the urge to explore, to move, to gaze beyond the next river, to climb and look past the farthest peak.
Season after season, as he moved steadily northward, he came to lands where cold and water made settlement difficult, where economic and political oneness would be hard to come by in future centuries. The ruggedness and wetness of the terrain discouraged homogeneity and unity. The scars left by the retreating glacial ice—mountains raised high, and valleys carved low, with lakes and swampy bogs everywhere—provided built-in barriers to movement and settlement.
The first of these encountered by the family of Son of Wanderer was a quagmire of swampland that ran east and west between the firths of Clyde and Forth. Only in one spot could this boggy morass be breached. At the location which would one day be known as Stirling, the ice had left a narrow ridge of solid ground and natural rock, over which the east-west bog could be traversed, overlooked by a towering miniature mountain of solid stone. This site would in time become the land’s most strategic fortress and would hold the two halves of the country together.
But for now the Son of Wanderer did not cross this natural bridge but settled his family in the fertile lowlands between the two great Caledonian firths.
His own sons would in a few years bring this prehistoric odyssey to its end. It would be they who reached the northern extremities of this arm of the European continent. From the few forests that existed, though they were neither dense nor high, they would fashion boats with which to subjugate the isles that lay off the western shore. They would hunt the animals that roamed the land and the fish that swam its seas, both of which would give them meat to live. They would learn to make the land’s very starkness their chief ally in combating enemies of their own kind who would one day rise from the south against them.
Before his own days were done, the Son of Wanderer would know what had driven his father toward the north. Many would be the sights to meet his eyes in the soaring Highlands that would one day be his final home. His heart ached that the old man might see them with him. He would behold other beasts, magnificent in their own way, though none so mighty as the mammoth, that would speak to his spirit concerning this land to which he had come.
The Wanderer’s three grandsons, each in their turn as manhood overtook them, extended the Wanderer’s clan into the farthest reaches of west and north.
The eldest, known as Hunter, Son of Wanderer’s Son, would migrate east, across the fertile plain between the Clyde and the Forth where his father had settled, managing to cross the treacherous bog which made of northern Caledonia essentially an island, and thence up its eastern coast.
The memory of the giant mammoth-kill never left him. Though it brought grief to his heart, the elemental clash for supremacy, pitting brain and ingenuity against the terror of sheer size, remembering the image of his father’s bravery facing the charging beast, kindled within his bosom a restless impulse to match his own humanity against the fierceness of the lower species. Ever after, the pangs of hunger in his stomach could be sated only by meat outmaneuvered and slain by his own hand.
The nomadic spirit drove Hunter’s steps, just as it had driven his grandfather before him. He explored the lowlands along the northeastern coastline, inward to the edges of the central Highlands, and northward around to Moray. For the rest of his days he sought the footprints of those whose kind had killed his grandfather. Though he never saw their like again, his canniness was challenged to its full by the great brown bear which stood higher than he himself, by the mighty stags with racks of antlers, and by the most feared predators of all—ferocious packs of pale-eyed wolves.
He was the first of the homo sapiens genus to lay eyes on the long, narrow loch called Ness. The hunting there was not good, however. It revealed little evidence of creature life. The region surrounding the fog-enshrouded, murky body of water seemed eerily somber and empty, as if some preternatural presence lay near. Even the few birds that chanced to fly overhead glided silently on the breeze, whatever invisible spell that warned beasts away silencing their overhead songs as well. Hunter remembered the thrill of following his father and grandfather after the elephantine prints. But no such feeling filled his breast walking through this valley beside the strange water.
Sensing ominous forebodings which not even his fearless instinct desired to question, the Hunter shivered, then turned his back and with his own son began making his way northward toward the coast. If by chance there was some beast here, it did not belong to the earth and was not one he wanted to encounter. This was no place for man.
Boatdweller, second Grandson of Wanderer, would ply his skill toward proficiency in crafting boats and learning to sail them. He would explore the Western Isles of Mull, Uist, Skye, and Harris, and as far north as Lewis, before sailing south to the largest of all the islands which would come to be called Ireland, where his progeny would remain for centuries.
His descendants would not only learn to navigate upon the deep greenish gray waters, they would develop ingenuity in taking their sustenance from under it as well. The sea gave life. Boatdweller’s descendants would discover its secrets. They would come both to fear and love it.
Out of his loins would come a hundred generations of fisher people, scattering and spreading themselves north, south, east, and west through hundreds of islands besides the Green Isle, eventually peopling the encircling coastline of the entire Caledonian mainland, and in time returning from Eire to reconquer this very land of their origins.
The Wanderer’s only granddaughter, the third-born of his son, carried on the artistry of her mother and the Belgae grandfather she never knew. During her own lifetime she left behind hundreds of etchings, carvings, and artifacts which told the stories she had heard when her father and his father had come to this land, as well as those her mother passed on about her people. She found a husband from another group of Celts who had recently arrived in the vicinity, and passed along to her own daughters the nurturing strength and practical creativity that would infuse generations of their female descendants.
Two things remained that Wanderer’s generations of sons and daughters were unable to vanquish. Never would they moderate the fierce wintry snow, hail, and sleet that swept down in icy blasts from the frigid polar cap, a yearly reminder of the ice-glaciers which had only recently departed this region. Nor would they tame the mountainous inlands and rocky deserts in the far north known as the Highlands—not nearly so high as the White Mountains from whence the Wanderer and his son had begun their quest, but rugged, austere, desolate, vacant, and grim.
In spite of its gray, dreary inhospitableness, this land yet possessed a curious capacity to infect the soul. The Wanderer’s grandsons and granddaughters for a hundred generations to follow would thus remain here, would prevail in spite of the natural environment’s brutal hostility, would even come to cherish it.
The Wanderer’s third and youngest grandson, with his wife and young brood, ended his own trek in a tiny sheltered glen beneath two high mountains. The mysterious Highlands somehow bespoke to him the prophetic essence of what Caledonia would become. Ever after would he call these high barren hills and rocky peaks his home, giving parentage to a clan that would trace its origin to the Highland Mystic, Son of Wanderer’s Son.
From these original dwellers of the Highlands, future generations would know of the one stag among ten thousand, born with white coat rather than red, and what he would come to symbolize for the people of this land. More than any other in the world of beasts, the stag would come to signify the mystique of the beloved Highlands.
When Highland Mystic first set eyes on the resplendent creature he had till then only heard about from his father, standing atop a high peak, rays of brilliant sunlight reflecting off its light-hued coat and enormous crown of antlers, he felt the stag’s message, and was forever changed.
As Mystic’s own sons grew, they listened to tales and haunting ballads, songs, and poems of the arrival with his father in Caledonia of this first of its bards, with striking remembrances implanted into their young memories of the old Wanderer himself. These they would carry forth into the fabric of legend, which would interweave among many branches of the clan they would one day become.
Wanderer’s Son and his aging wife traveled north to spend their final years with the family of their youngest son. As they stared into the orange embers of fire at night, the mysterious words and tones from the Mystic-bard’s voice entered the hearts of his sons, imbuing their deepest souls with an identification with this place, and what it meant to be one with this land, its beasts, and its multitude of wonders. They listened to the tale of the great mammoth, and of the legend of the white stag. And as their grandfather listened too, his own hair now white, his heart was filled with many memories of those years with the Wanderer, when he had been no older than they.
Saoibhir sith nan sian an nochd air Tir-an-Aigh.
Is ciuine ciuil nam fiath ag iadhadh Innse Graidh,
Is easgaidh gach sgiath air fianlach dian an Dain
Is slighe nan seann seun a siaradh siar gun tamh.
Saoibhir com nan cruach le cuimhne laithean aosd,
Sona gnuis nan cuan am bruadair uair a dh aom;
Soillseach gach uair an aigne suaimhneach ghaoth.
Rich is the peace of the elements of night over the Land of Joy,
And rich the evenness of the calm’s music round the Isles of Love,
Every wing flies urgently in obedience to nature
While the path of the old spells winds inexorably westward.
Rich the breast of the hills with memories of bygone days,
Serene the face of the seas
With dreams of the times that are gone.
When the Son of Wanderer finally breathed his last, his youngest son wept, sang a doleful lament, then went in search of a suitable and fitting place to lay his father in final peace. He found a great slab of stone, nearly flat on its top, under which some animal had once carved out a now unused den. After enlarging this cavity, they buried the old man beneath the enormous rock of a shrine, filling it in with stones.
For days after, it was the old man’s wife—she known as Mother and source, now the eldest of the family—who, alone with her memories, chiseled upon the giant gravestone with sharp flint and stone a series of figures. On this stone she would tell for all time of this man she had loved and what they had seen and done together. It was she who passed into the future the legacy of her man who now dwelt beneath the stone and gave his blessing to their mystic son. With hand upon his thoughtful head, in her strong yet aged voice, in a tongue long forgotten, she intoned the words Highland Mystic would never forget.
The land, its creatures, all nature is one, and we with it.
Revere nature, honor life, forget not that existence is a circle without end.
Her voice broke into the song of a strange melody of mingled lament and rejoicing.
Look up, look around, look beyond, my children, at those who make the earth their home.
Look up and wonder.
Behold the sky, the stars, the clouds, the winged creatures, the emptiness.
Look about you and wonder. Wonder at the storm. Wonder at the brightness of the sun.
Behold the creatures and trees, the stones and brooks, the fields and the sea.
Behold those with whom you share life, for they have much to teach you.
The fertility of the earth brings life, but nature takes life in its time,
For is not life a circle without end?
Mystic’s own wife heard the words and melodies with the rest. They entered her soul, and in her turn after years she likewise passed Mystic’s blessing and her own carvings and symbols and their meanings on to their sons and daughters. Mythologies of nature worship grew out of such beginnings and gave rise to yet more symbolic art. Statues of stone and wood, later metal, came to replace drawings on leather, as idols representing a host of creature-deities. And out of the honor these patriarchs of antiquity bestowed upon their women were laid down the roots of what in later years would be a succession of kingship through the women of this prehistoric Caledonian clan.
Ever after, as long as Mystic’s family dwelt near that place, they would return periodically to the great stone, stand for a few minutes atop it, gazing upon the crude-carved story of a life, in silent contemplation of him who lay beneath it, remembering the men from whence they had come who had brought them to this land.
Eleven
The grandsons and daughters and families which sprung from Mystic’s seed and that of his two adventuresome brothers and artistic sister were followed by many others.
Hunter, Son of Wanderer’s Son, taught his descendants to kill and eat the boar, the deer, wild cattle, proliferative grouse and small game, as well as many land birds.
The progeny of Boatdweller, Grandson of Wanderer, gathered fish from the sea and shellfish from its beaches, as well as an occasional stranded whale. This would lead to the making of the first bone whaling harpoons by his fearless great-grandsons, as more and more methods were tried and discovered to extract life from the tempestuous ocean waters.
Those who succeeded Highland Mystic, Son of Wanderer’s Son, in making the wild and lonely spaces their homes also hunted for their meat. They also gradually learned to till what soil they found in the protected valleys and glens of the mountains, and as they migrated back southward into the low-lying and more fertile regions. In the absence of mammoth bone or tusk, antlers from highland deer provided the earliest form of plough with which they dug and worked the earth and put into it things to bring forth food on vine, root, shrub, stalk, and tree.
One of the Mystic’s sons migrated west, across a wide moor, and down into the protected valley which future generations would call Glencoe. There he settled, and there his family and descendants remained. Neither he nor his brothers nor sisters forgot the great slab of stone and what it signified. As generations passed, many forgot its exact location. But there always remained a few throughout the generations who knew. For bard followed bard, and mystic followed mystic. It was their duty to remember.
Not only did the Highlands give Caledonia the snow of the arctic—its very terrain provided the means to endure that cold. One of the Mystic’s sons unearthed a remarkable fact, for the Celts of ancient Caledonia a discovery as vital to survival as fire itself. The mystery was simply this: The same turf upon which they built their crude homes, and which they had learned as far back as the Wanderer’s time to cut into slabs to stack in piles to fend off the blizzards which came every year, or to partially seal the mouth of a cave against icy chill, was not dirt at all. It was a remarkably dense organic material which, when dry, burned hot and slow. It was the single discovery which, more than any other, would make life in the Highlands for the Mystic’s successors possible.
And so did the descendants of the Wanderer explore and settle the land of the north. Future historians and archaeologists, sifting through the sparse implements his people left behind, and through the cloudy, mythical stories perpetuated by the Mystic’s descendants, would wonder who came with the Wanderer to this land. Scraping through fragments and traditions and dusty legends of the past, they would speculate whether his Celtic bloodline was the first to settle. Or were the Wanderer’s people but one of several such ancient roaming peoples to migrate toward the extremities of the world’s landmass?
As the climate continued to improve for the fifteen centuries after the Wanderer’s arrival, more stalwart nomads of his Celtic race followed, in small though increasing numbers. Celtic tribes on the continent rose and expanded. Their dynamic energy pushed at the boundaries of colonization. By now the earthquakes and crust shifts and tremors had cut this land off from the rest of the continent. But across the created channel of water they steadfastly came, following if not in the Wanderer’s footsteps, at least in the direction of his path.
The small transplanted race of Celts flourished, if not in numbers, certainly in hardiness and courage. A mixing and blending of Celtic blood took place. Family and tribe remained the unit of strength. Out of the mingled origins of tribe and filial loyalty was born the clan. And though most of the derivative shoots which eventually occupied Caledonia shared common racial beginnings, their Celtic origins also infused within them a fierceness capable of erupting against rival families and clans as readily as against a common enemy.
As this was no tame land, likewise its inhabitants were no tame breed. They were, however, an emotional and intuitive people, who venerated their chiefs and bards. Spinners of tales—poets and storytellers and singers all in one—rose from within their ranks to carry on the tradition of the Mystic. They spoke and sang of past adventures, aided by crude musical instruments. Harps were made from willow, ideal for lightness, density, and resilience. Strings were fashioned from long, sturdy strings of intestines, cut and dried after a hunt, attached top and bottom with carved bits of bone. The willow was considered a sacred tree, which gave the music a magical significance. Poets and storytellers and singers of ballads placed the foundational folk epics and allegorical narratives into melody and rhyme. These bards came to be venerated alongside the chiefs of emerging clans.
They also revered their gods, for they were a polytheistic people. As Mathair, the Source, had taught them, they believed the supernatural lay all about, in the spirits which pervaded men and rivers and animals and mountains and sun and moon and all of nature.
The storyteller in time also became a religious leader. He spoke not only of what had come before, but of the invisible world all around, gradually infused with druidic influences from the south as learning and awareness expanded and overlapped. The bard entertained and instructed. He taught his people to think and seek meaning, though he yet himself knew little of the greater God to which his pantheistic deities dimly pointed.
Thus was added to the fire of Celtic emotion the kindling of religious fervor. This spiritual passion would flow through time as a constituent characteristic of these people and a dynamic force to influence the later history of their land.
Twelve
Out of the Wanderer’s and Eubha-Beanicca’s mutual seed eventually emerged the animal tamer and soil tiller whom paleontologists would call Neolithic, or “new stone” man, whose dominion on the land lasted until approximately the first millennium BC The era was characterized by the development of increasingly sophisticated uses of stone, later pottery, then metals, all of which led to wider and more stable sources of food supply.
Slowly these men and women settled the land rather than merely drifting back and forth across it.
The foraging existence of the ranging hunter and fisher gave place to a more systematic life. As more people arrived, a cross-fertilization of discoveries resulted, leading to improved implements and methods, and greater understanding of plants, seeds, techniques, and new foods.
Celts were curious after their own kind. As the Wanderer had adopted the shell-saw from a chance encounter eons before, so men continued to observe one another. Faraway civilizations brought advances to the outskirts of human settlement, carried on the feet and tongues of new generations of nomads and wanderers.
As the diversity of tools and instruments widened, forests were cut so land could be tilled. Gradually man felled larger trees, crafted longer and wider boats, fashioned both stone and wood to build larger structures.
Primitive settlements formed. Implements improved. Metalwork was refined in the early years of the first millennium BC as the use of bronze was developed, changing weaponry and toolmaking forever. Men cleared and worked the land and soil to make the earth yield more of its fruits. Planting, cultivation, and harvesting became more effective. Not only was land cleared for growing, it was cleared for pasture. Man took dominion over domesticated animals and began altering earth’s environment to suit the purposes of his expanding rule.
Steady colonization by the expanding tribes of the Celtic race followed in increasing numbers the Wanderer’s dim historical footprint. To Ireland they came, and to all parts of Britain and Caledonia, the Western Isles, the outer Isles, the Orkneys and Shetland. They came from the continent, from the Mediterranean, from the north, round the Iberian peninsula, along the coast of France, along Brittany, up the Irish Sea and to the Hebrides.
The Celtic race approached the zenith of its power and creative energy on the continent. As they arrived to these western regions they were absorbed into the ancient brotherhood of those who had come before. These new Celt arrivals carried with them a knowledge of society and technology far in advance of their predecessors. They brought major developments in metal technology. Swords, knives, chisels, cauldrons, sickles, axe heads, spear tips were fashioned and put into use, and an immense variety of additional tools and devices. Gold and silver were melted down and crafted into jewelry.
Stout explorers continued to brave the North Sea and turbulent channel. The ancient Celtic tribe of Belgae—whose very legends told of one who had wandered through their primitive camps long before, whom one of their chieftains’ daughters had married and whom some of their people had followed westward—settled in great numbers in the south.
Though in time he was all but forgotten to memory, nonetheless did the Wanderer’s blood flow throughout all the branches large and small that went to make up this surging tide of human occupation.
He was the father of this land, the Adam of a people into whom were grafted a hundred generations of newcomers. Had the old wandering nomad been able to rise up out of his grave and gaze out of the past toward the continent whence his steps had brought him, he would have seen a thriving race. They were, after all, a people of his own origin—still vigorous, still strong, still proud.
And they continued to spread the life and energy of his bloodline, as he himself had done, outward into a world still young.