Martin Walker: The Caves of Perigord

Yes, it had worked. Just as the different shape of the horns had seemed to turn the bull’s head toward him, so the separation of the forelegs maintained the effect. The rear foreleg thrust out forward, at a down-sloping angle to show that the bull was moving. Then before he began sketching the front foreleg he had drawn thickly the deep sagging muscle of the lower chest. Then the foreleg itself, marked off from the chest and belly by pure white space, to make the leg stand out and seem almost to move. It was perfect. Every trick that he had learned here, in the months and years in the semidarkness of the cave, they were all coming to fruition with this bull. It moved, and its movement was not simply forward but at an angle.

“This is the greatest of your work,” said the Keeper of the Horses. He was standing easily on the scaffolding, each foot braced on a different pole, as he worked in the curve where the cave wall sank to become the wall. He was close to the head of the great bull, sketching lightly in the place between the two horns. “I shall pay tribute to your work with my own.”

The Keeper of the Bulls squinted to see the faint shape of a horse’s head emerging from between the horns. He picked up one of the lamps and moved closer, climbing easily up the scaffolding poles to stand behind his fellow priest.

“You see, my work will be here, the finest I have ever drawn, a noble creature who will be imprisoned by the horns, but staring down to honor what you have done,” said the Keeper of the Horses. He was a slim, wiry man, with thinning gray hair bound back from his face with a leather ring. Smaller than the Keeper of the Bulls, and quick in his ways as befitted a Keeper of the Horses, he had the finest teeth in the valley. They were white and even, and had not a single gap. The Keeper of the Bulls tried to remember the face of the man’s daughter. He thought perhaps her teeth were as perfect as her father’s. He enjoyed the thought.

“He will have a mane of black, a skin of chestnut, a head that is neat and alert, his ears pricked forward as he shows his respect to the greatness that confronts him,” the Keeper of the Horses went on. “Is this well, my friend?”

The Keeper of the Bulls squeezed his friend’s shoulder and grunted approval. He climbed down, making way for the young apprentice who was waiting to clamber up with two small wooden bowls of freshly mixed red and black clay. The Keeper of the Horses had completed his sketch with charcoal, and with feathers and smoothed blunt sticks in his belt, was ready to begin the real work. His own apprentice was sitting, cross-legged and patient, the colors already mixed on flat stones before him and with a lump of almost black clay soaking in a bowl under a heap of damp moss. There were two lamps ready to illuminate his work. This was good, and the Keeper of the Bulls nodded approval. The youth looked relieved. The Keeper of the Bulls had a strong arm and beat the apprentices who displeased him, or even exiled them from the work.

“Bring me water to drink,” he told the youth, and turned to consider the day’s work as the apprentice moved swiftly to the cave entrance, carefully avoiding the scaffolding. The previous week, the most senior apprentice had been banished from the cave for knocking away the supports of the higher platform in the narrow cave beyond where the Keeper of the Bison was at work. He had been a talented young man, who mixed a splendid auburn red and whose sketches had won admiration. But for the carelessness and disrespect, he had been sent off to work for the women. Even the hunters would not have him.

The Keeper of the Bulls pondered how to proceed. He wanted to depict those haunches, that weight and power that had come to him as he chanted over the holy fire. Holding the lamp close to his ear, he looked closely at the rock where the haunches would be painted. There was a jaggedness, a faint thrusting of a yellower rock coming through the thin chalk skin that made the cave such a perfect surface for the work. He passed his fingers lightly over the line of the yellow rock, thinking he could use that line to add bulk to the haunch, to hint at the swell of muscle. The line of the back was already complete as far as the tail, a fine sweeping curve that established the power of the shoulder and then rose for the swell of the haunch. He would leave a space for the root of the tail, knowing that the absence of line could be more telling than the most perfectly drawn one, before starting the curve of the haunch. He would separate the rear legs again, just as he had done with the forelegs, to maintain that illusion of a half-turn. But how to distinguish between the legs, where there was no hanging muscle of chest. Suddenly, he smiled to himself. A beast as noble as this would have mighty genitals. He put his left hand to his own loins, cupping them gently, as his right hand began to sketch with charcoal. And as the thought of the daughter of the Keeper of the Horses came into his mind, he felt himself stirring under his hand. He had not thought of his woman, or of the birth, at all.

At the fire by the river, the banished apprentice sat tiredly in a brief moment of rest before the women ordered him to feed the fire again, or to get more wood or to bring more water. The screams of the woman lying on the great mat of sewn-together reindeer hides had faded to moans. He could see nothing of the birth. The other women huddled around her, some still holding down her shoulders and legs. Suddenly one turned to him, speaking coldly, and told him to run to the flint makers and bring back the sharpest piece they had.

“It must have a good gripping stone. Just a chip of flint won’t be enough. We’ll have to hold it firmly,” she said, and turned away to shout more instructions to a young girl.

He rose and began running along the river and then up the hill to the quarry where the flint men worked, the sound of their constant tapping even louder than his labored breaths. He paused as he approached, catching his breath and looking carefully on the ground ahead. Even the most callused feet could still be sliced by the shards of flint that littered the earth. The flint men themselves wore leather moccasins with wooden soles bound to them. They were men he hardly knew, who kept to themselves almost as much as the Keepers who worked in the cave, and were just as strict in their hierarchy. The head of the flint men, whose main work was to teach the craft to the young apprentices, ignored the youth’s approach for a few moments before looking up. The youth explained what the women needed.

“For a bad childbirth?” the flint man asked. He was old and white-haired, with strips of hide tied around his hands to protect them from the stones. “I’ll have to make something.”

He rose and went to the pile of stones the youngest apprentices constantly brought down from the quarry. Sifting carefully though them, he picked out a smooth rock that was almost a perfect globe, only one end jagged and split. He came back to the circle of watching apprentices, picked up his knapper, held the globular stone firmly against the flat rock that served as his anvil, and explained what he intended to do, and where his first strikes would be. He lifted his right hand, and brought the knapper down sharply onto the stone, hitting at an angle and just above the first break in the smooth globe. A large sliver of stone broke off. He turned the globe and repeated his strike, and then handed it to an apprentice and told him to do the same. Within the time it took for the banished apprentice’s breathing to return to normal, a sharp flint knife, with a perfectly smooth and round haft to fit the hand, had been produced. The flint man tested the edge against the hair on his own arm, and nodded approval. He tossed it to the waiting youth, who turned and ran back to the women at the fire.