BEGINNINGS : Where A Life Begins ------ I. GENESIS & RESURRECTION

Chapter Eleven

                                                                    ELEVEN 

 Uuna's mother was called Ran and her man was known as Ara and though not a hunter, he had nonetheless secured an exalted place within the group. It was he who led the menfolk in many of their ceremonies and rituals held deeper in the cave in the flickering light of burning torches fuelled by tightly bound reeds soaked in animal fats. 

From an early age when other boys had followed the men of the clan on hunting expeditions, Ara had been fascinated by the drawings on the walls in the depths of the cave the group had then inhabited. The skill and right to make these drawings was usually passed from father to son. As Ara's father had done before him, Ara had studied his own father's careful actions; mixing the deep red ochre clay with water to form a dark reddish paste and slowly singeing the wooden sticks to form black charcoal before diluting it into a thick mulch using boiled down animal fats. 

Sometimes he had been permitted to follow his father deeper into the cave and sit silently as the older man studied the contours and shadows on the rockface before fastidiously applying his pastes and powders to create the outlines of buffalo, wild boar, horses and deer which seemed to move and came almost alive in the shimmering torchlight inside the darkened cave. After about twelve summers, when boys were initiated into manhood and full membership of the group, Ara had become skilled in the techniques of cave painting and in particular, depicting horses, which had become more plentiful in recent years. But he had accompanied the group on very few hunts and had not tested his strength against the animals on the lowlands or, for that matter, against the other young men of the clan, not to mention their familiar-looking but heavily-browed two-legged enemies who roamed in small bands through the mountains and plains. 

For a long time Ara had been ignored by the others and only found his place in the clan after the death of his father, when he took over his father's cave-painting duties; creating on the walls and ceilings of the cavernous interior of their home, complex hunting scenes and evoking shadowy beasts that the other menfolk admired and feared. He had even inspired friendship and awe in the hearts of some of the older hunters by standing them close to the cave wall, placing their outspread hands tightly up against the moistened rock and throwing or blowing handfuls of red dust or black soot across their hand before they withdrew it, startling the model with an image of his own hand immortalized on the rock wall. The womenfolk smiled good-humouredly at the pride and arrogance of their men, though in their hearts, they sensed the presence of the spirits of these wild animals in and around the walls of the cave. 

In time, Ara had taken Ran as his woman. She was attractive and strong and some of the other young men were jealous of Ara's position in the group; none more so than Chnn, two summers Ara's elder. He was a clan-member who had from an early age proved his cunning and courage in the hunts and in the regular skirmishes with the groups of men and women that inhabited and wandered though that area of land from the dry mountainous region of what would later be known as Asturias and Cantabria in northern coastal Spain. They even strayed up as far as the more fertile river valleys of south-west France. Most of these clans of people were semi-nomadic though many returned regularly to the same caves of their birth, sometimes after many seasons away. 

Ara and Unna's group had tended to stay put for rather longer periods of time in this cave surrounded by forests and plentiful game, except for one long journey to the northern river valleys when a serious drought had dried the steam and driven the animals away. At that time, Ara's father had led the clan to the better hunting grounds in the north and back again two seasons later. Though still young, Ara and Ran had both survived that journey while many others in the group, including Chnn's parents, had not. Most of the time since then, the hunting had remained good and the members of the group, especially the women who treasured these more stable times spent in the same place, in some ways came to believe that the paintings of Ara and his ancestors on the walls and ceilings of their caves kept the animals abundant and in close proximity to their home.