Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

“This is not complete without you and your spear and stamping foot,” he said to Moon, who stood beside him with the two hollowed stones in which he had showed her how to mix the earthen colors. He smiled fondly, admiring her as she stood now and as she had challenged the stag. “But I can never draw the sound of your shout.”

She dipped a finger into the red earth, addressed herself to the wall, and drew the first outline of his straightened back, his arm bent to the bow, his head slightly forward in concentration. She took more paint for his braced legs and the curve of his buttocks. In her mind, the thrust of his loins did not look right. Surely the line had been straight from his head down his back to his rear foot.

“Take up the bow again,” she said, and studied him as he modeled the action for her. This time she had it right and she dipped her finger again for the curve of his chest. She wanted this first image of him to be simple, just one silhouette of Deer the archer in plain color. It should not detract from the threat of the stag poised to charge, but balance it and show the story. She took the sharpened stick as he had shown her, to trace the thinner line of the bow.

“Now you draw the fawn, down on its rump, its forelegs floundering,” said Deer. She looked worriedly at him. She had not expected this, still touched by the mystique of the beasts and the old rule that only men should draw them.

“Come,” he said, taking her hand. “You remember.” And he led her out of the cave to the stream, where they had spent the morning sketching designs in the smoothed mud with thin twigs. Her last drawing, of the infant deer, was still just visible, where the lips of mud had not quite closed over the grooves.

“You see how you made the curve of its haunch here, and then used the same curve again for the tilt of its neck to its mother?” he said, pointing with his finger. “That was so good, that is what you must remember.” He led her back into the cave and stood close behind her as she took up the charcoal and began to draw.

He began to color the stag, that rough but silky texture of the reddish fur, and the whitish yellow at its muzzle and belly. He used moss for the thicker color and dry grass for the thinner wash. The chalk here was even smoother than that at the great cave, and he saw that the dried grass could be used to trail off his colors into thin lines, almost like the grass itself. He closed his eyes again for the image. Yes, the grass. The way the earth had been kicked up by the pawing hoof of the stag, which had sent the grass stirring. He remembered that, and now saw that it was the parted grass and not the hoof itself that had given him the impression of movement and power. Why did they never paint the grass on which the beasts ran? Why did they never do anything but the same images again and again? He bent down to brush his dried grass lightly against the wall by the hoof of his stag, and lifted it quickly away. Almost right. He touched the dried grass to the wall again, and let his hand move a little as he lifted it. Yes, there were the thin wisps, parting before the power of that hoof. He stood back; a little awed by his own boldness. But that was what he had seen.

And this was his cave, his and Moon’s, where the old rules did not apply. Of course Moon must use her gift here in their cave, and he had found joy in showing her the skills he had learned, a joy that went beyond the wondrous pleasure of her. To watch her talent flower with the new skills of color and brush and charcoal that he had showed her was a happiness that was almost as sharp as the joy he found in her body. And if that old law against women was so plainly foolish, then what was the sense of the rest? There was no need of the ritual of the Keepers, limiting him to one beast, to an endless repetition of form. No law ruled here that said he must paint only beasts and not the land on which they stood, the trees and grass where they grazed, the rivers where they drank, the shape of the hills he had seen rolling away into the distance.

Suddenly the vision came to him, that the deer and horses and bulls and bears that he itched to paint could take their part in a greater whole. Beasts in their settings, bears in their rocks, deer in their copses, horses in their herds moving delicately and with some secret protocol down to the river to drink.

Exultant, he crossed to the other wall, and sketched a high line of rolling hill, tumbling into the outcrop of rock where he and Moon had sheltered that first night. And then imagination leaped beyond the constraints of memory and he drew the mouth of a cave that had not been there, and the shape of a bear, lumbering slowly after its long winter sleep, emerging to sniff the air. Then a tree, he thought, a high tall line to balance the bear’s bulk. But trees meant green, and how was he to find the color of green in the earths and clays? An image darted into his mind of children playing by the river, sliding down a long steep slope of grass that tumbled them into a pool, and the smears of green it left on their bodies. There was green in grass. How to obtain it, to make it into a color for the wall? He bent to the floor and picked up a small pebble of chalk, too hard to crumble in his hands. He left the cave, and at the stream, took one of the flat hearthstones and a rounded stone, wrapped the pebble in a handful of fresh grass and then dipped it all in the stream. He withdrew it, dripping, and slowly crushed the chalk into dust, rolling his stone until the whiteness of the chalk had taken on the greenness of the grass. It was a duller green than the grass had been, but it would serve. He sat back on his haunches and looked at the trees above him. They were not a single, simple green, but richer with other shades, flashes of yellow and gleams of white from the reflected sky. As he scraped his new color onto a small, flat stone to take it back into the cave, a part of his mind was already asking what he would do for the blue of the sky, and thinking of the colors in the wildflowers and how they would mix with his chalk.

He had left her early, after the first morning drink from the stream, to search his traps for rabbits, and to use the new thongs they had sliced from the cured hides. Moon wanted the old, supple thongs to sew their winter cloaks of rabbit fur. She had already woven a basket and soon they would fish. And they would have to start to smoke meat for the winter, which meant more reindeer skins to build the smoking tent. He begrudged each moment he spent away from the cave, away from Moon, with whom he felt a fellowship far closer than anything he had known among the Keepers and apprentices. She took his ideas and gave them back to him in different garb, and offered her own plans for the great wall of their cave that spurred his mind into new directions.

It had taken its full shape now, just as he had dreamed. The vast stretch of hillside and grassland covered the whole wall, with its sleepy bear and grazing deer, its horses bending to drink at a riverbank fringed with reeds, its great black bull standing guard over a docile cow, and the ibex perched on the rocky outcrop. This was the world as they knew it, as a cradle and a backdrop for life and movement. It was what they saw, and what they had labored so joyously to depict. There were reeds and trees, the spots of color from the wildflowers, the ripples in the water that spoke of fish, and an evening sky of dusted reds and violets. They had been Moon’s idea, when the blue of the sky had defeated him, the flimsy petals of the purple flowers failing to bring him the color he needed. And her idea was better, he thought. It gave a sense of time, of a day ending, a fleeting moment caught.

Along the passageway into the cave were the smaller sketches they had made, the bull that he had done first to be sure of the proportions, and then her delicate deer and the two horses, one at rest and one prancing. They made a fitting entrance into the great space of the cave beyond, with its large landscape on one side, and on the other, the tableau of him and Moon confronting the stag and doe and fawn. The far end of the cave remained blankly white, and he had not yet seriously applied his thoughts to its possibilities. He had been musing about it the previous evening after they ate, wondering about trying to recapture the moment of the great hunt, the tumbling reindeer, and the boys riding the beasts in their hunger to be men. There was something in it that inspired him, but to recapture what he had seen, rather than what he had felt, would be untrue to his own eye. What he had seen, mostly, was dust, and if he felt that he lived by a single law in the glorious voyage of discovery and exploration that he and Moon were making, it was to be true to what they saw.