Kitobni o'qish: «Primitive islands»

Primitive islands

Part 1. Stone age

Father, son and tiger.

.        Father and son hid in the bushes of laurel cherry trees on the edge of the brook. They were hunters, new people from the South. They watched the caves on the slope of the mountain, dug by ancient people of the Stone Age. The father and son of an eight-year-old boy were armed with wooden boomerangs and spears with obsidian tips.

        The Great Steppe stretches beyond the limits of the beam from the Black Sea to the Valdai and from the Carpathians to the Altai Mountains. For millions of years, the steppe was repeatedly covered by the waves of the Middle Ocean, from which the Crimean and Caucasian mountains rose, dividing it into the Black, Azov, Caspian and Aral Seas.

 In some parts of the steppe there are islands of relict subtropical forests, deciduous and coniferous trees. In the Kargin interglacial time, on the edge of retreating glaciers, steppe flowed into the tundra. All this variety of vegetation gave birth to a variety of wildlife, a mixture of northern and southern animals, residents of steppes, forests and tundra of the quaternary period: wild, tarpan horses, steppe bison and tours, giant deer and mammoths wandering in the steppes of thousands of herds. They attracted predators: cave lions and bears, big wolves and people.

People lived in the northern part of the steppe. They dug caves on the slopes of hills and beams or occupied entire caves on the slopes of mountains, so they were also called cavemen. The Father and Son watched the settlement of such people. Unlike cavemen, they were taller, dark-skinned, with curly hair. Thin skins covered their bodies. The cavemen had short, strong hands, a low, inclined forehead, large eyebrows and a nose. The eyes were small and deep. The neck was short, and the big head seemed to grow right out of his shoulders. They did not have a chin, and black or red hair covered their head and body.

         The father and son saw cave hunters with sticks and torches coming out of the camp to set fire to the grass and take the grazing animals out to the cliffs by the river. Later, the women and children left the caves and began to descend to the creek. This is exactly what the new hunters were waiting for, having prepared boomerangs for head shots. But they were not alone in an ambush. When his father smelled a saber-toothed tiger, which was also hiding in the bushes on the edge of the beam, he smelled a natural smell. The women were moving away from the fires that burned in the caves day and night.

A saber-toothed tiger jumped to the bottom of the ravine like a huge lynx. A minute later, a tiger jumped out of the ravine with a woman in her teeth next to her father and son. It was too late to run to the river, and they were hiding, hoping that the wind would not blow in their direction.  With sword-like fangs, the tiger ripped the victim's chest, broke his ribs, ate his heart and lungs, and began to eagerly take blood in his long tongue. On the other side of the ravine people came to their senses and started throwing stones at it. First, he did not pay attention, and then quietly disappeared into the bushes, leaving the victim behind.    The father and son lifted her up.    Cave hunters shouted from the rocks above the river, but the father and son were already far away, by the river where the raft was hidden.

         The boy's mother, a woman, met them on an island near a sand spit. She was naked, and her big breasts, unlike the cavewomen, were hairless. Apparently, the cave hunters liked this feature of the new bodies, and sometimes they stole these women and kept them in their homes.

       The chief of the island tribe came out from behind the trees, the only man with gray hair, approached the victim of father and son and made a sharp sound resembling the hissing of a saber-toothed tiger. Then, with one axe stroke of obsidian, he cut off the victim's head and carried it to the fire. The remains of the body were removed by the women for soaking in cold water before cooking, as the wild tribes in New Zealand now do. The main prey of the island's inhabitants was fish, which they killed with spears from trees growing above the water, or caught with wicker baskets tied to branches. On the other side of the island, a forest river flowed into the Dnieper River, the water of which was warm and abundant. A big pike and bream jump out of the water, waiting for them in the cold jets of the Dnieper, a three-meter catfish.  Small fish jumped to sandbanks, where they were collected by children.

 The cave bear

               This time the Father and Son hid in the branches of the oak tree, which stretched from the river to the Dry Balka. Here the Dnieper has dismembered a rocky massif.

The ridges formed the first large thresholds, which, like the teeth of a giant animal, protrude from the water, waiting for their victims. In some places new people put tree trunks between the stones, holding them together with vines, clinging to them and jump over the stones. Father and son move here from the island. The open ancient plateau was covered with salt from the ancient sea and then in the steppes with hills of manganese and iron ore nodules.

      Salt attracted ungulates and countless herds and herds came here. A flock of wolves, cave lions and bears waited for them here.

         The cave bear, who lived in the cracks of the cliff, was the full owner of the Dry Ravine. He looked like a brown bear, his relative, but was a third bigger, on his hind legs he was above 3 meters. Only he was not afraid of ice water, and one night he went to a small island and killed and ate all those who lived there. This monster was being watched by the Father and the Son in the hope that if he noticed them, they would flee through the branches of the trees to the doorway, where the bear could not pass.

     While hunting, the bear waited for the buffalo herd to surround the salt exits, then frightened the animals with a thunderstorm, and when they ran along the girder, he met them, trying to kill some. The Father and Son heard this roar before they saw a black bear carcass covering one of the running cows, but this time the bear failed; a huge buffalo chasing Him put a meter of horns in his side. With a terrible roar the bear turned and hit the bison with huge claws on its head, but it was too late, the fountain of blood hit the bear from a deep wound. He hit the bull a few more times, and everything was quiet.

       A flock of bison, frightened to death, fled to the steppe. No less frightened, the father and son rushed to the island.

        The chief and shaman of their tribe decided to skin such a bear immediately. Almost all the hunters ran after the Father and the Son on the battlefield. But they were the only ones to know about the bear's battle with the buffalo. The cave hunters heard a roar and guessed about the great prey. In the steppe met two detachments. Cavemen howled like a big pack of wolves, but it did not help them. Obsidian axes and boomerangs defeated sticks and teeth. The killed enemies were eaten, and the slimmer children were taken from the caves to the island.

      And the caves were empty for thousands of years.

Lake  monster

         There are few children on the island, despite the subtropical climate in the lower reaches of the Dnieper River, cold wind blew from the glaciers in winter, and sometimes snow fell out.

 Oaks and other deciduous trees fell, but the laurel, yew and magnolias remained green.

 During this time, children often died, especially boys.

Perhaps that's why the new tribe, killing and feeding on cavemen, kept a part of their children.

The women adapt better to the new conditions, most of them being lonely on the island and taking these same children away.

        In addition to a few hundred new people, there are several wolves on the island who have already found common ground with the people, but have not yet become dogs.

There were several small brown bears that were fishing and looking for acorns. There were also wild pigs, whose descendants were taken for food. In the enclosed space of the island, these animals got used to humans, recognizing their superiority.

      The children were running around the island without fear of them. They were especially friends with wolves who had grown up and accompanied them everywhere. The Son also had a wolf and a bear as friends. But recently a few small children disappeared and the hunters never found their corpses or remains.

           From the side of the forest river flowing into the Dnieper River on the island there was a lake where spring waters flowed down. By the summer, the lake had warmed up and the children bathed in it. The son and his friends Wolf and the bear were heading towards the lake, where several children had recently disappeared.

A few more girls and boys followed them.

The son took a light boomerang to hunt ducks and geese nesting by the lake. This time there were no ducks and geese on the lake, and there were several swans in the middle of the lake. This alerted the Son, and he cried out to the younger children not to enter the water. Suddenly the swan shouted and started clapping his wings, trying to fly away. Then a bear growled and went into the lake. He was tied to a liana tree.

    Liana stood up and the bear howled louder, as if he had been torn to pieces. The girls ran to the village for help. Liana was strong and the oak was quite large.

The hunters came running, Father and a few women came to get them. Everybody, holding on to the liana and dragging the bear to the shore, but on the other hand, he was pulling it harder!

 His father ordered him to bend a small tree and tie it to the vine on which the bear was held. By his order, the tree was lowered, the water column rose, and threw a huge one with a bear in his mouth with a big wave on the shore.

Som tried to return to the water, hitting with his tail, but arrows and axes are already flying into the water. When the catfish calmed down, the bear was alive, its claws crawled and it got stuck in the throat of a fish whose head was bigger than that of a bear.

Three hunters could lie along the entire length of the catfish.

Hunting

In the fall, when the leaf on the oaks turned yellow and acorns were ripening, harvesting began on the Island: women dried fish on willow twigs, gathered on the shore a chili water chestnut, similar to small hedgehogs, hazelnuts and cones. Squirrels and groundhogs also made reserves, although there was no snow on the island. But in winter, food was getting smaller. Therefore, the hunters decided to arrange a big hunt. They crossed the coast opposite a rocky cliff, waited above and, following the example of cave hunters, set fire to dry grass behind tarps and steppe antelopes grazing at the cliff. Frightened, they rushed to the cliff and fell down. When the fire went out, and it was possible to go down a yar to the bank of the river where the blood was bleeding, the hunters found that they themselves were ambushed. A large group of cave lions surrounded the ledge. Their yellow skins flickered in burnt bushes, and then, in the untouched steppe, ran from place to place a pack of hyenas and maned wolves. There were about forty hunters. They became a semicircle in two rows, closing the descent to the shore; they did not want to give up their prey. Here were the Father and the Son, and the leader. People did not have enough torches to hold the animals, and there was already nothing to burn. In the fight against the fang and claw, you must have a long arm. The monkeys realized this, throwing sticks and stones at the cats.

People had boomerangs, but cave lions pressed low to the ground and crawled closer. The axes of the hunters had too short handles. For tribes with lions, African tribes successfully use long spears, more than one on one. The hunters slowly retreated to the oak forest, on the edge of the spring, along the trees of which there was a path to the rapids and to the Island.

They wanted to take at least part of the booty, so the leader sent several people down to load the rafts. The rest were on the defensive. The son noticed that suddenly hyenas and wolves began to scatter away. And high above the grass appeared the monstrous heads of a pair of large hyenas from the Tertiary period (in Africa they were called the killers of elephants). Smelling blood, they rushed towards the hunters, and there was nothing to stop them, they were growth from a bull, and their mouths were half-meter. The hunters freed the passage and rushed to the trees.

Wolves driven to a sand spit at the end of the island were starving and therefore began to hunt piglets and gilts in the reeds by the lake, although not always successfully. The general battle between wolves and swamp boars occurred in the spring. The son and his group first heard a very loud screech of the pig, which the wolves dragged, passing each other on the braid. People climbing up the oaks saw a pig run out of reeds, followed by a whole herd of gilts, and rushed off to the scythe. There was nowhere to retreat to the wolves; wild boars swam better than them. The deadly battle lasted an hour or two.