Posts Tagged Stone age cuisine
Glub’s New Rock
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on September 2, 2009
Glub’s New Rock
The third day with no food. The young wild things were cold and hungry. Stalactites of viscous green snot streamed from their noses. Most of the time they slept, and when they awoke they howled. When hit hard, they reduced the racket to an irritating whimper. Glub sat on his favourite rock, and beat his head gently and rhythmically on the slimy wall of the cave. From time to time he stopped and stared mournfully at the shining stone in his hand, turning it over and over and hitting it against the wall by way of a change.
He had spent days grimly honing it along the grain, grinding it against a darker rock to expose a sharp edge of quartz. This had been a painful procedure, as burning flicks of light kept stinging his hands. But when it was finished and he finally threw it, instead of arcing neatly to catch the fleeing deer on the neck as his previous rocks had done, it whirled uncontrollably catching the light as it fell and scattered his hoped-for victims.
His woman, Burb, glared at him when she had to pick her way past his huddled body. She badly wanted to attack him with his own precious tool, but was afraid of his anger. One of their children had been crippled as a baby when Glub, enraged by its crying, had thrown it against the wall. Burb had tried to mend the little broken body, wrapping its crooked limbs with leaves and tying them with her hair, but it died eventually when the rains came. Her eyes watered still when she thought of it getting quieter and quieter, its mouth open, its eyes dull. She had been careful to avoid annoying her man after that, and kept the three remaining offspring well to the back of the cave when Glub was there.
In one of the lulls between howling, she ventured out, wrapping the stinking hide closely round her shoulders to keep off the rain and icy wind. She followed the animal track down to the river, and lay motionless on its bank for some time. Goosepimples rippled her back and thighs, but still she did not move. She was rewarded as the day ebbed by a flash of silver, which she snatched as it shimmied past, and landed flapping on the mud beside her.
Carrying her booty, still writhing, under her arm, she stopped to pick some of the leaves she had seen the deer eat, thought they were dry and dead by now. She also collected a handful of the hard brown things that tree animals seemed to thrive on. All the bright sweet fruit was long since gone. Picking her way carefully in the dark past the piles of crap that Glub produced just by the entrance, she paused outside the cave and listened. Glub was snoring, and one of the little things was moaning, but nothing too serious seemed to have happened in her absence.
She put the leaves down, and using them as a sound-deadening cushion, she hit the hard brown things with Glub’s precious rock, over and over again. In her heart she wanted to destroy the rock, to break it into tiny pieces, so that Glub would never spend precious days doing anything so stupid again. She was so angry with it and him. Burning spots of light hurt her hands, but she persevered, and succeeded in cracking three of the nuts.
But then something else happened – as she toiled away, the rock quite hot in her hands, the flashes of light became more frequent, and finally one of the leaves flared up, scarlet and as bright as the sun. Burb was transfixed. She watched as one after another the leaves caught light. She put out her hand to the brightness, and snatched it back with an angry yowl.
The others awoke, complaining, at this interruption of their sleep, and she had to keep the smallest one from putting his hand in the flames just as she had done. The oldest grabbed greedily at the nuts she had managed to shell, and a fight ensued, culminating in Glub hitting both the contestants and giving one a nose bleed. Glub then tried to take a bite out of the fish, failed because of his lack of teeth (lost in the duel for Burb’s hole) and threw the fish into the burning brightness with an enraged growl.
He grabbed Burb’s deer hide, and retired to the pile of dried bracken at the back of the cave where he lay with his face to the wall, thumping the floor from time to time with his fist. Burb hated him. Because he had no teeth to eat the fish, he had made sure that no-one else could eat it either by throwing it on the little sun thing. She stolidly returned to her nut cracking duties, and it was a while before she noticed two things – one that the little sun thing gave out heat and light which improved that cave no end, and the other was that the fish, rather than ruined, was beginning to smell different, a smell that made her dribble.
Burb and her children ate well, and exploited their new discovery cannily.
Glub sulked himself to death, and no-one missed him at all.
© Glub’s New Rock. Author Miranda Innes 2009, all rights reserved