Джеймс Миченер - The Source

My eyes closed with pain, I followed the voice.

For the bee flew before me singing, ‘Ur found our honey.

Ur, the great hunter, was not afraid.

I will lead him home, back to his cave.

Back to the well I will lead the brave hunter.’”

No sound came from the cave except the quiet sleeping of the children, and all could hear the voice of the bee leading the hunter home.

Ur would probably have lived out his life hunting animals and bees and telling about it at the fire if he had married an ordinary woman, but his wife did not come from the cave. Years ago, when Ur was just beginning to run with the hunters, his father had led an expedition into lands east of the Whispering Sea and had there come upon a strange people with whom he had naturally engaged in battle. The cave men were triumphant, but after the slaughter they found that one twelve-year-old girl was living and Ur’s father had brought her home.

She knew nothing of caves; the dark interior frightened her and she supposed when she was dragged inside, that it was to her death. Later, when she learned to speak the language of the cave, she explained to Ur that in her land families did not live underground; but he could not imagine how they did live, for her explanation of how men could use stones and walls of wood to build their own caves above the ground made no sense to him. “It’s a better way to live,” she assured him, but he could not understand.

Nor did he understand, when this strange girl became his wife, her preoccupation with gathering wild grain; but she knew that unlike raw meat it could be stored throughout the winter, and she would wander considerable distances to find the best stands of cereal. One day in an open field east of the great rock she found an accidental accumulation of wild grain, and she brought Ur to the spot, showing him how much easier it was to reap a concentration of stalks instead of searching far and wide, and she asked her husband, “Why don’t we make the grain grow where we can watch it? For if we do, when autumn comes it will ripen in fields that we remember.” Ur, knowing that if the wild grain had wanted to grow at man’s command it would have done so, ridiculed his wife and refused to help her dig out the grass and move it closer to the well. His wife, bending over the stalks, looked up and said, “My father made the grain grow where he wanted it to grow,” but Ur rejected the concept: “He also built caves on top of the ground.” And with amused tolerance he went off to hunt.

Nevertheless, for the first fifteen years of their married life, Ur’s wife went out of the cave in all seasons trying fruitlessly to tame the wild wheat, but each year it was killed either by drought or flood or too much winter or by wild boars rampaging through the field and rooting up all things with their tusks; and it seemed evident to Ur that the wild grass did not intend to grow where his stubborn woman dictated. In the meantime, the other families who shared the cave went about their business of tracking down the wild wheat where it chanced to grow; and they ate well. But two years ago Ur’s wife had found along the far banks of the wadi some young shoots of a vigorous emmer wheat and these she chanced to place in proper soil along one edge of the great sloping rock, so that throughout the dry season enough moisture drained off the rock to keep the grain alive; and although its yield in edible wheat was disappointing, the grain lived as she had directed, and in the spring it reappeared where it was wanted. Ur’s wife told her family, “We’ll see if we can make the wheat grow along the edges of the rock, because I think that in those places the soil helps us.” And as the determined woman had foreseen, here her wild grain prospered.

When her daughter had reached her eleventh year, Ur’s wife satisfied herself that she could make the emmer wheat grow where she wished and she felt it necessary to reopen another problem which she had been pondering for some time, hesitant about discussing it with her husband. Now, without warning, she told him, “We ought to leave the cave and live by the well. There we can watch our grain.” The bandy-legged hunter looked at her as if she were a child trying to steal his honey.

“Men should live together,” he said. “Around the fire at night. Telling stories when the hunt has ended.”

“Why are you always so sure that your way is better?” she asked, and Ur was about to mock the question when he saw her lively face. She was a delicate woman with long black hair and whenever Ur looked at her small, determined chin he could remember the joy he had known with her when they used to lie in moonlight on the rock, staring upward at the stars. As a wife she had been hard-working and as a mother, tender and responsive. But she had always possessed strong ideas—it had taken Ur’s father a hard fight to kill her family—so he did not laugh when she repeated her question, “Why is your way better?”

“Where would we live … if we did leave the cave?” he asked defensively.

“In a house,” she said. “With its own roof and walls.”

“The first storm would blow it down,” he predicted.

“Storms didn’t blow down my father’s house.”

“You don’t have storms over there the way we have over here,” he said, and that ended the discussion. He was therefore surprised some mornings later, as he was leading his hunters forth to track gray deer, to see his wife and son working at the flat area near the well.

“What are you doing with those rocks?” he asked.

“Building a house,” his wife replied, and he saw that she had laid out a circle of rocks some fourteen feet across. Shrugging his shoulders at her obstinacy, he went off to the swamp with his hunters, but at dusk when he returned to the cave he could see at the well a substantial pile of rocks and the beginnings of a solid structure. Four days later he came back from a hunting trip to find his son erecting upon the wall of rocks a palisade of tree trunks cut from the wadi.

“Now what are you doing?” Ur asked.

And his son replied, with words that put him into formal opposition to his father, “If the trees give us walls, we should use them.” And Ur saw that his wife was bringing rushes from the wadi and reeds to be woven into a tightly matted roof, under which the family would find protection from the sun. And what he saw Ur did not like.

At nightfall he led his family back to the cave, where he recounted in vivid phrases the story of his hunt, but he ended the narration much sooner than usual, for he was worried about what his wife and son were doing. He loved this cave, so cool and convenient to the well. It bred lice, to be sure, and it smelled, but the fire was warm and the companionship a thing to be cherished. For the past seventy thousand years the cave had been continuously occupied by Ur’s ancestors, one generation after the other, leaving behind them brief mementos of their short and ugly lives. Ur could remember as a boy, in that far corner over there, finding a long-forgotten skeleton encased in hard rock which had formed when rainwater seeped down over the limestone, and later, back in the narrow part of the tunnel, he had come upon a hand axe, adroitly chipped from a core of flint by some brutish, stooped figure more than two hundred thousand years ago. On fleeting occasions in his life Ur had caught the inner spirit of the cave, that closed community which embraced its members and excluded all others. The cave lent strength to those who lived within it and the preposterous idea of his wife and son, to build a separate house for one small family by the well, was instinctively repugnant to him. Men should live together, smelling each other and bringing honey home to all.

He especially liked the moment when a dozen men surged out of the cave bent on hunting, twelve men guided by a single will, and that will most often his. He could remember how, as a boy, he had surprised the older hunters with his unusual feeling for the land and his ability to predict where animals would take cover. “Come along and show us where the lion is hiding,” they had often called, and he had led them westward as far as the Roaring Sea, clinging to the lion’s spoor until he could point to a thicket, saying, “He’s in there.” In the opposite direction he had scouted paths leading to the Whispering Sea and had taken his men along these paths in search of deer, who grew panicky when Ur and his team followed their trail, smelling them out with a canniness that was frightening. It was no uncommon thing, when the men of Ur’s cave spotted the track of a lion, for them to maintain the chase for three days or even four, driving the beast at last to cover where they could assault him with their spears and arrows.