The Huntress at Sunset

Chris Boyce with Dave Morris, 2012.

"...in many ways we have come full circle, we are returning to the beginning. The younger ones have good hearts and they will reach where we are in time. They don't yet understand but they will..." Anon.

The Mountains

Tiny plants clung resolutely rockbound in watery fissures in freeze-thaw fractured stone. Bursting into flower for a few short weeks each year; these pincushions of vibrant colour dotted the steep slopes of the near-barren mountainside above the tree line. This was a land where everything, plant and animal alike, was small, and clung to the ground. Icy blasts tore at everything that dared to put a whisker or a tendril above the rocks. Yet low down amongst the rocks and in the air, there was always moisture. Clouds swirled and clung to the peaks and passes of the mountains; fresh and cool, far away from the stifling oppression of the plains below.

Rugged peaks towered far above, glistening silver-white in the late afternoon sun. This was a shallow col; a hollow in the mountainside; close to one of the lower passes of a long range. Northeast lay the world; southwest lay frozen wastes: nowhere. The pass led to the end of the world; a vast unending void that let nothing escape its frozen claws. It drew in and held onto everything: plant, animal, rock, the air; even day itself. From it came nothing but cold. When it felt it had been ignored for too long, it drew the clouds together, building their venom in frozen gloom, and then sent them sweeping down to the plains below.

The end of the world gave life one moment while taking it back the next. In the void dwelt the souls of all animals and plants. In moments of forgetfulness, or inattention, the end let a few souls escape to be born again. Yet it must always have enough souls: it would, in time, reclaim some unfortunates to redress the balance.

Darkness would soon clothe the mountain, covering all in its emptiness. Yet still the sun shone deep into the col where one tiny, ground-hugging plant grew alone at a break of slope. This was the edge of its world. It had never flowered; it might have done soon had not a callused, cracked animal pad crushed it. The paw trembled minutely; it's almost white filaments of fur, patchy-stained red, shimmered in the breezeless chill of the late day sun.

The paw pressed down firmly. Above, a heavily muscled, chill-trembling foreleg rose. Powerful flesh tightly wrapped around a core of dense bones; skin and fur smoothly enveloping all. Above the paw the fur darkened; growing darker still above the wrist; the colour rich, even and warm. The tense mass of the body was covered by short, hairy fur. At the shoulder and beyond the tufts of dark brown at each elbow, a thick dark grey mass enveloped and hung around the shoulders, neck and chest. Behind stretched the taut, strongly curved, fine-furred, as yet un-scarred body of a young adult male lion. The curve of his delicately, downy-soft underfur rose boldly to his loins. The flesh of his hindquarters was firm, lithe and muscular, covering but not obscuring the strong lines of bone beneath. The shaft of his tail continued the line of his back in a smooth curve to a tip of rich, deep brown that seemed to absorb the light from around it. He embodied the fleeting physical perfection of youth.

Despite his vigour, power and speed, the lion was not at ease. His eyes were wide with a delicate fear. His ears twitched at the faintest of sounds that floated up from the sunset drenched world below. He seemed to hesitate; to linger as if unsure. He sniffed the air, lifting his head to the wind. Ahead and above lay an unknown and feared land of legend and superstition, behind lay a world of pressing danger.

The wind dropped. For a few moments the deathly beauty of the mountain turned a benign face to the daily round of life played out far below. To the grassland animals, the mountains were the end of the world. They formed a barrier so great that any creature that ventured there was sure never to return. The lion, the zebra, the wildebeest and gemsbok, and all the animals of the plains, even the birds that overflew the craggy foothills, knew the two worlds – plains and mountainside - had no common ground.

Only eagles, soaring alone above the lower slopes of the mountains, saw no separation of here from there: the cold mountainside wasteland was all one with the fertile grazing of the rolling hills and the sun-browned savannah grasslands. The eagles were the stewards of the mountains but heeded the calls of their distant king that did not even know that such a place as this, almost half of his kingdom, existed at all.

The mountains kept everything in its control; no matter it were the tiniest plants or the mightiest of beasts. So, perhaps for the first time in his life, the young lion felt small and very afraid. He repeatedly turned his head back and forth with staring eyes. He knew not whether go on towards the unknown or to go back to the familiar but dangerous land below. No, he knew he could not return, too much had happened for that, but the stories and fears of what lay ahead preyed on him.

His ears caught the deep, rolling remnant of the call of another of his kind floating up from below. Its distant echoes, which flowed from rock to rock, carried an urgency that drove a new sense of purpose into him. He turned his head to face ahead and stared determinedly, his choice made. He sprang forward with a surge from his hindquarters and ran on.

He was running, to where and what he did not know, he was just running; running away. Whatever lay behind, lay in the past. A past he was determined to learn from, a past he was determined to leave behind. His cubhood was finally over; he was now a lion, alone and free. He was running into his future, in which all was as yet dark. Lions are no strangers to night and darkness. Most greet them like friends, but this was different: this was unknown.

He ran boldly as the evening gathered all around him. He ran on, leaping from rock to rock. He soon realised that the oncoming night's darkness was deeper than any he had experienced before. It was cold and clinging and drained his strength and will. The farther he went, the more his progress became erratic and halting. He began feeling his way across unfamiliar and unsettlingly unstable ground. Later, in the moments when the depths of the darkness became unbearable, he told himself that he was above all this; he was the master of this land of cold shadows. Yet no matter how many times he thought it, he never quite managed to believe it, and still the mountain closed in upon him and held him down.

The thousands of blue-grey facets of stone glinted and glistened in the exploding confusion of his mind. With each step he faced new, dimly glimpsed terrors. He soon lost all memory of why he was running; running into emptiness. He was running to stay alive, but he knew was running to his death.

He had no idea of how long he ran on into the unyielding bone-chilling cold of the night. The hard stone shards under-paw grew sharper and began to cut into his pads. The endless rock gully grew narrower and steeper. Just as he thought he had at last cleared the final summit, the next rose ahead of him. Cresting each grim ridge his life receded into the darkness, each time he felt he should fall off the edge of the world and into the endless void beyond. The winds tore away his strength and scattered it over the blackness of the mountainside. Many times he stumbled; rising becoming more and more difficult and painful. The biting winds swirled around him, seeking him out, laughing mercilessly at him.

His forepaws dropped off a ridge into blackness. He tumbled forward helplessly, sliding down the abrading rock face. His flank slammed onto a flat, damp, stone surface. Pain overtook his senses and filled his mind. Through the pain he came to realise that all the stories of this endless place were true. He knew he had at last found the emptiness; the void, the end had taken his soul. Then the blackness enveloped him. Lying painfully on his side, he descended into exhausted, dreamless sleep.

1. A Distant Vision

Nengwalamwe, son of Nengwala, dozed remembering the vivid stories he had heard as a cub: of the forces of the living and the dead; of light and dark. He remembered other times he had lain awake; wondering why in all the stories there was no dawn, nor sunset. In all the stories except one, one that told of the time before the day and night became two, there was dark or light but never both. The time came when, like two quarrelsome brothers, they had to be separated. They could not understand what had happened, so the brothers chased each other's' tails forever round and round the world.

He wondered why death felt so much like life, only colder. He had expected to see other souls, maybe not different animals but certainly other lion, but there were none. Then he remembered; he was in the realm of the darkness: the emptiness in which nothing lived and everything feared, and that he too was not alive.

As he stared into the blackness, he slowly became aware of a faint but growing deep blue. The chill bit deep into his fur. The darkness began to lift away, drawing in a faint light. He lay still, pondering on how close the light seemed, then, as it grew, it receded, leaving a layer of black below biting blue that then deepened, painting the sky. He shook with fear; not just his head, nor even his mane, but his whole body quivering like a fearful cub. Below the blue the air seemed to redden, turning to brown and then to orange in a continuous band across the sky. There were no stars, no clouds; nothing but the vibrant colours of steadily climbing light. Why was the void filling with the brilliant colours of the dawn sky? Was this his life entering death?

He lay still and watched the deathly spectacle unfold around him. He was transfixed by its beauty and held down by its terrifying power. He had been the proud son of a powerful father. In life his teeth had been white, his fur smooth and unmarred by wounds, and his mane soft and un-matted. His youth intact, yet coloured by the first experiences of adulthood. Now in death he lay still and waited for the void to envelop and take him.

Still the light grew. It revealed that the void was not without form: it loomed up all around him in cold stone. Ahead and below lay open flatlands with darker patches. The light grew brighter and the patches formed into high, dense thickets, kopjes and isolated rounded rocks and crags, dusty luggas, lush green uplands and brown-grassed plains. In the middle of them all, like nothing Nengwalamwe had ever seen, rose up a rock mass that dominated everything around it. The light of the dawn sun finally pierced the cold of the night; a new day had begun. This was not the void; this was not death, and ahead lay a land even richer and more varied than the gentle Kolata hills of his cubhood.

Nengwalamwe forced himself to his paws. He had slept on a ledge that extended just a couple of lengths ahead; beyond the ground fell away sharply. He was shaking, no longer with fear, just with cold. His paws ached and his flank throbbed from bruises garnered where he had fallen on to the ledge.

As he looked to the strange but beautiful land far below he felt his strength begin to return, and with it his will to survive. He felt the breeze flooding up from the distant plains flow into his mane. He opened his nostrils to the breeze and drew it in deep. It held promise of all sorts of different prey. It was a heady cocktail of twenty different antelope, zebra, buffalo and many other animals he could not name. In amongst the scents lay faint traces of hyena, wild dog, jackal, leopard, cheetah and myriad birds, but there was no trace, not the slightest sign, of any lion. This was his: a fresh, lush land, his personal kingdom, his very own land. He threw his head back, straightened his neck, and roared powerfully. The sound echoed around him, magnified a hundred-fold by the mountain.

He waited for any reply. When none came he called again. Though the dampness still clung to his fur, the cold was receding, the iciness no longer held its grip so tightly. The air of the dawn lay still, damp and fresh all around him, coating the rocks with a glistening, sparkling sheen. He stepped forward, and bent down to lick the coating from a rock close to the edge. It was the purest, cleanest water he had ever tasted. He dropped down and lapped at the rock. He relished the delicious sensation as the chilled water tingled on his rough tongue.

Nengwalamwe was unused to looking down. He always associated 'down' with the earth. Here there was none, just cold, hard, claw-blunting, pad-freezing rock. He moved tentatively along the ledge; teetering on the edge. There seemed to be no obvious route down to the plains below. He could see none of the tracks he was used to following: etched into the grass by generations of lion and prey, indeed there was no grass. The rich plains looked to be frighteningly far away. He stretched his head out over the edge, keeping his forepaws tight in front of his hindpaws, and his tail thrust out straight behind him. Below, the slope lessened. It seemed he might be able to clamber down from ledge to bare slope, bare slope to rock, rock to ledge and then on down the mountainside. He felt unsteady, and thought for a moment before telling himself there was no way back; that there was no past, only the future.

From five or more places in the fissured rock - Nengwalamwe couldn't count well enough to be sure - burbled tiny, insistent streams of clear, pad-freezing water. The streams slid over the rock, spreading into thin sheets. The icy film rippled around Nengwalamwe's paws, condensing beyond into runnels. One by one, the runnels joined, gathering into a burbling mountain stream a little below. He watched the stream for a moment, fascinated by its delicate movement. His eyes followed its flow down the mountain, threading its way among the rocks. In places it disappeared from view into gullies, only to reappear a little farther down the mountainside, stronger than before. In the distance it vanished altogether, hidden by a change of slope. Nengwalamwe scanned around and picked up its trace, much bigger now - almost a river - as it disappeared into a green and brown mass that covered the lower slopes of the mountain as his mane covered his shoulders. Beyond the mass, on gentler slopes, it reappeared as a shining ribbon, laid out flat on the plains, heading for the distant horizon in a meandering bends and bows. It passed close to the monolithic pinnacle set deep into the plain.

Come on Nengwalamwe. It can do it, so you can too. It's not so hard. He looked down, and wished he hadn't. OK, OK, so it is hard, but I can do it, I can! He stretched out again. He looked to the horizon. The rock pinnacle that broke its perfect line seemed so far away; he felt he would never reach it. I can't do it. He drew back and sat on the ledge. His near forepaw felt unclean. He lifted it to his muzzle and was about to lick it when he felt a chilling blast of air fall onto his back. He shook involuntarily and rose suddenly, stepping forward instinctively. A second rush of cold air ruffled the knot of thicker fur covering his spine behind his shoulders. He surged forwards off the ledge, leaping down to the rock below. Then turned and leapt a second time to another, then to the bare slope.

For hours he clambered, lurched and slipped down the mountainside from boulder to boulder, always keeping the stream within earshot. The farther he went, the bolder he grew, just as the stream grew stronger as more water joined the flow. He leapt from one boulder to the next, turning each time before launching himself toward the next. Several times he misjudged the leap and fell. He was lucky to escape with no more than bruises, but they hardly mattered. Each time he picked himself up he felt his confidence rise. He was the lion who had escaped the void; he was the one who could not be hurt by mere rocks.

The lower down the mountain he got, the more the slope lessened. The ground changed from bare rock; first became moss-covered then to a thin, bare soil and now to something approximating earth. Nengwalamwe was not sure which he liked least, all felt unfamiliar and insecure and none would hold the steadying dig of his claws.

Throughout the day the plains remained distant, but towards sunset he caught glimpses of the dense green blanket, which seemed to get closer with each leap. He could not quite make out what it was. It seemed to grow out of the mountainside, a rich mass that seemed to flow out of the mountain, unsettling and dangerous. Nengwalamwe felt he should stay clear of it, but as he got closer he realised that there was no way to avoid it. The stream, now over two lengths wide and elbow deep, plunged into it. It stretched out on both banks. Far beyond, he could just make out slow-moving dark blotches in large gently shifting clusters. The movement; unhurried and halting looked familiar, as of the shifting of grazing herds; raised his hunger.

As the slope tailed off he found himself running at full pace across damp, well-compacted soil covered in tight, low grass interspersed with spongy mosses. Here at last was something approaching familiar ground vegetation.

Later still, as he padded to within a few hundred lengths in failing light, he saw at last that the green mass was not a blanket. It was nothing more than trees: the canopy of a thick forest that ended abruptly below him. He was more unsettled by the trees than he had been by the barren, open rock. As a cub back in Kolata he had often played around the sparse acacias that littered the slopes down to the Kolata River. Even the thickets had been open and small, often no more than ten sun-dried, wizened trees in all. Here were far more, and far denser trees than he had ever encountered. To the lion, the forest seemed endless with dangers lurking in its dark depths. He longed for the security of open grasslands, warm and reassuringly familiar. Anything could hide in there, lurking and stalking. They could wait for days for something to wander past. Am I 'something' to them?

As the light finally faded, Nengwalamwe crossed the tree line into the forest. The forest had looked dangerous enough from the outside, but from within it was terrifying. The trees were not open and spindly as on the plains; they were dense and towering: an overwhelmingly humid, stifling place where the undergrowth crowded round. The trees towered above, straight to the sky; heavy and resinous and covering the ground with fine, yielding leaf-litter. Nengwalamwe moved on slowly; afraid of every sound and every subtle swaying shadow cast from the moon. Sounds filled him, unimaginable unrelenting, sudden and frightening sounds. He could not imagine what kinds of animals make them, nor for all their loudness could he tell from where they came. He froze at every movement of the fallen leaves and branches, waiting to see what horror might burst forth upon him from the undergrowth.

Nengwalamwe could not sleep in the forest: it felt far too dangerous, and now he felt hungry too. He knew that if he slept he would never wake again, but could the forest at least provide him with food? He considered investigating some of the noises, particularly the rustles coming from the undergrowth, in case they came from the hunted rather the hunter.

He came to the edge of a clearing, sniffed, looked around, and then crept forwards. Something moved ahead. It turned, and looked at him with eyes filled with curiosity, as if it had never seen a lion before. Nengwalamwe was convinced that it was crying out to be taken down. He advanced, low to the ground. The animal looked up, and eyed the lion warily. Nengwalamwe froze. The animal stepped forward and, seemingly unconcerned, lowered its head again. Nengwalamwe inched forward, his belly scraping the leaf litter. The animal raised its head again and looked directly at the lion. Its eyes widened suddenly and it sprang away. Nengwalamwe leapt after it, catching it in four strides and knocking it down with an easy flick of a forepaw. "Easy prey," his father's voice rumbled in his head, "feeds only cubs."

It was almost dawn before Nengwalamwe, son of Nengwala, finally reached the lower edge of the forest. The ground opened out onto a wide treeless expanse of low hills. Exhausted, he walked to a tiny knoll and lay down, not bothering to check for signs of danger. After the bare mountain and the forest, anywhere else seemed as safe as his Kolata homeland. In a few moments he was asleep for the first time since the high mountain pass. This time he was not at all cold, and he knew he was alive.