Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Ur’s lips began to drool. Slapping his face, to prepare it for the pain ahead, he pawed his powerful feet in the sand like an animal about to fight, and with a sudden rush he sprang at the dead tree, climbed far up its side before any bees detected him, and with strong hands began tearing away rotted portions of the trunk. The passionate sound of bees springing into action assured him that there was honey to be found, so before the bees could swarm to drive him from their treasure, he tore down into the heart of the tree until he felt the honeycomb.

Then the bees struck! Fifty, a hundred flew at his face, covered his hands, tried to find his soft parts. They stung him and died with their bodies distended. But his numb hands kept tearing at the comb, bringing out luscious chunks which he threw to the ground below. Finally, when he could scarcely see, he slid down from the tree, killing hundreds of bees as he fell. Only then did he start brushing the fiery creatures from his face, and when this was accomplished he took off the animal skin he was wearing and piled the chunks of honeycomb into it. Then, as quickly as his bandy legs would carry him, he ran from the wadi, smarting throughout his body with an exquisite pain.

When he reached the well his face had swelled like a mid-month moon and his eyes could hardly see, but a child from the cave spotted him coming and shouted, “Ur found honey!” And he was besieged by children, who led him up from the well to the cave, pointing at his distorted face and screaming with joy. With brave hands they touched his sack of honey and their mouths watered. But when Ur reached the safety of the cave and opened his sack to show the luscious hoard he had stolen from the bees, he found trapped in the honeycomb more than a dozen insects, and with his thick, hard fingers he picked them out and set them free.

“Make us more honey,” he told each one. “And do it in the same tree.”

The cave into which Ur retreated had only a narrow opening, perhaps twice the height of a man, but inside it developed into a dark, capacious room with space for many people. At the far end it narrowed into a tunnel which penetrated the earth beneath the rock, and in the ceiling there was a small opening which permitted smoke to escape, while from somewhere deep within the tunnel other fresh air entered, so that the cave was comfortable. In the center a smoldering fire was maintained, which women could feed with extra wood when a flame for cooking was required, and along the smoke-stained walls hung spears and clubs, animal skins drying for later use and baskets containing grain. It was a warm and comfortable refuge, a tight cocoon made of rock, and for more than two hundred thousand years it had provided shelter for the manlike creatures who had from time to time crept into it.

In Ur’s day six associated families lived there permanently, brothers of one group who had married sisters from another, strangers who had wandered in to marry extra daughters, all members of a common stock and all working together at the gathering of food and the maintenance of the community fire. The men were hunters, and they ranged far in search of animals, killing them with arrows and spears of high efficiency. They were no longer dumb brutes plodding after primordial beasts and stoning them to death; they were skilled huntsmen who took no unnecessary risks. Their women tanned the hides of the dead animals, making an excellent leather, and spent long hours garnering the wild grain that grew haphazardly in many fields. Holding a skin beneath the brown and ripened stalks, they would beat the heads with sticks and thus collect the precious grains which they ground in stone hand mills, making a flour that would keep throughout the winter. As for the children, they played upon the flat rock, tumbling and grunting like a pack of bear cubs delighted with the sun. And at night all gathered in the great cave, beside the flickering fire, as men recounted what they had done that day and women sewed.

When Ur appeared with his honey normal activity in the cave stopped and the inhabitants fell like a pack of animals upon the rare treasure, for honey was the only sweet the cave men knew, and for a few moments the smoke-stained room was filled with grunts and growls as each hand grabbed for its chance share of the sweet, waxy stuff. Children had a hard time getting their portion, but Ur helped them wedge their way among the elders, and their squeals of pleasure proved that their small hands were reaching the hoard. Two lesser hunters were absent trying to find deer, but no one thought to save them a share of the honey; and before long Ur’s bearskin was picked clean and people were spitting the wax into a bowl, where it would be melted down to treat the sinews used in sewing. And now that the honey was gone Ur could sit on a large stone while his wife put cold water on his puffed face and combed dead bees from his beard.

The Family of Ur formed a closer group than some. It was led by the bandy-legged old man who, having lived for thirty-two seasons, was now approaching the time when he must die. His elderly wife had survived thirty; she looked after the children, a son whose distaste for hunting worried Ur, and a lively daughter who, having lived through eleven seasons, was almost old enough to have a man for herself, except that she favored none in the cave and no stranger had yet come by in search of her. It was her mother’s hope that when one did, he would want to live with the family and in time take Ur’s place.

Old Ur was a man whom the cave people respected. He was five feet, four inches tall and weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds, a stocky figure with the huge shoulders that characterized his species. Above his beard gleamed his bright blue eyes and the ruddy cheeks that liked to wrinkle upward in a grin. He laughed a lot, and now that his own children were grown, played with the offspring of his neighbors as the little round ones scrambled across the rock in sunlight. Unlike the brutish creatures who had originally wandered to the well from Africa, Ur walked erect, lacked heavy bones over his eyes, and had a smooth skin that produced no great amount of body hair. He had acquired full dexterity in the use of his relatively small hands, although he never understood why his right hand remained more agile than his left and did most of the work and all of the throwing. His skin had a peculiarity which surprised him: under his bearskin it remained a pinkish white, but where the sun touched, the coloring became dark brown, so that from a distance Ur and his partners looked like black men. In the last forty thousand years his throat, his tongue and lower jaw had been much modulated and were now flexible instruments adapted to the articulation of language; he had a vocabulary of more than six hundred words, some of which comprised three syllables and a few four or five. Every hundred years or so new experiences would accumulate, requiring the invention of new words; but this was a slow process, for Ur and his neighbors were extremely cautious and the utterance of a new word might upset the balance of nature and call into being strange forces that were better left at rest, so words tended to be restricted to the same sounds that time had made familiar. There was one other use to which the flexible voice of man could now be put, although not many used it in this capacity: men could sing—their women in particular—and sometimes in the early morning Ur would hear his wife and daughter making pleasant noises, using no words or made-up ones like “traaaaaaaa” or “sehhhhhhhhh.”

That night, when the two hunters returned with no deer and the fires were banked, when the roly-poly children slept like bear cubs and a cool breeze issued from the tunnel, the community sat in shadows as Ur with his puffed eyes explained how he had found the honey: “From the well Makor, from the depths of the water a single bee rose and called to me, ‘Follow, follow!’ I ran through the wadi till the sun was tired. Over rocks and trees where the deer feed and where the wild boar comes at night I ran. You would have fallen with cracked lungs, but I ran on, for the bee kept calling, ‘Follow, follow!’ And so I came to the hidden tree, which all have searched for but none found.” He told how he had climbed the dead trunk and, fearless of the attacking bees, had torn into the heart of their treasure, and as he spoke of the sweet burden that had filled his bearskin he threw back his head and cried in the ecstasy of the hunter who shares the spirit of the animals he tracks:“Burning with pain, I brought the honey home.