I had never had much time for the Shaman and his talk of Gaia, the mother of all creatures and of this world. His imagined world of the spirits and after-life with its care of the dead had never appealed to me. To me it was all the drug-induced ramblings of a deranged man, who decorated himself with bones and feathers and stayed inside the cave. He never joined the hunt and instead drew pictures on the walls by torch-light. The tribe fed him, looked after his needs almost to the level of our leader and could not see through his ranting, at a man who had successfully invented a position we did not need!
It was at his insistence that we buried our dead with provisions for the after-world. My protestations that it was sheer idiocy to waste a good spear and choice cuts of fresh meat on a corpse had nearly got me thrown out of the tribe. The others just couldn’t see it from my point of view and they preferred the Shaman’s explanations to mine!
One night, the elders took me aside and warned me that Grad’s entries into the spirit world provided the tribe with directions to hunt and the surety, that those who died trying to feed the tribe would be rewarded in the spirit world. All of the tribe believed in him and the other tribes looked upon our gathering of humanity as greatly fortunate to have such a holy man amongst us! ‘Holy’ was a new word that had found its way into our language. To me it meant a shyster had found a way to tap into the gullibility of my friends and live off their endeavours. At threat of spear-point and expulsion into the wilderness, I agreed to keep my feelings to myself.
The years passed by and Grad took under his ‘wing’ an acolyte whose imagination was even greater than the old man’s and once Grad had died, he took over the position of Shaman to my tribe. Never once did the new follower of Gaia need to hurl a spear at a charging mammoth, or do anything close to extending the survival of my tribe. He was allocated the best meat, while the women cooked and gathered food for him from nature’s bounty. They gladly bore his children, who were also trained into the new function we had managed to live without from the dawn of time.
As I grew older, I fumed at the injustice of this system that had started when I was a young man. The parasite grew fat on the attendance of the tribe, while I seethed with increasing anger. Finally, after a bad hunt, when a woolly mammoth had stomped on two of our members and another man hurled onto the very stakes we had placed to impale the creature on, we returned empty-handed. Grad’s ‘son’ stood and railed at the tribe for not bringing back fresh meat for his hearth. He promised that Gaia would turn her face from us and leave us to starve if we did not go back and hunt again towards the West. We had circled round and made our way back to our cave from that direction and the land was empty of game. He was sending us into certain hardship and maybe death.
I stood in front of the hunters and seethed as the Shaman cursed our empty handedness. Without thinking, I let my anger get the better of me and hurled my flint-tipped spear straight into his fat chest. He died in front of me, clutching the hardened shaft of the spear as he dropped to his knees.
His eldest son cradled his father in his arms and cried out, “Gaia requires this man’s life in exchange! Kill him where he stands.”
I felt the sharpness of several flint tipped spears as they penetrated my back and the pain spread into blackness as I fell. The tribe fell upon my body and carried it outside into the night. There they hurled it down the cliff to lie where the beasts of darkness could feast upon me. By morning there would be very little left. What amazed me was that although I was dead, I could see all of this as clearly as though I was still alive. I was somewhere else and yet the mortal world was still visible to me, but I was not alone.
The mortal world retreated and I found myself in a great cave of some kind, stood in front of a presence. Whatever this thing was, He was not human and He was larger than five woolly mammoths. It was definitely male, as he sat naked on a carved stone and made no effort to hide that fact. He was far stranger than anything that the Shaman had described to his faithful. Smaller versions of his type scuttled here and there building something around Him. I looked around and was amazed to see such activity going on. My tribe was a large and important one amongst the gatherings, but there were many thousands of these creatures all busy, busy! I would later learn to call them Imps.
