The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

sharp flint and drew it firmly down the swollen belly of the dead mother into her groin. The girl gasped and turned her head aside. The youth watched intently as the blood welled, trickling slowly down the woman’s sides to the hide. The old woman repeated her stroke, muttering softly to herself, and then two more women began to peel the parted skin aside. The old woman began working with the flint knife inside the belly as yet another woman squatted over the dead one’s head, and began mopping up blood with the moss so that the old one could see to work. The young girl turned her head back to watch as the old one threw the flint aside, and reached deep within to draw out a small, still baby, a multicolored cord hanging from its belly and glistening in the sunlight. She looked at it carefully, poked her finger into its mouth to clear it, and then bent down to blow into its nostrils. She did this three times, squeezing the baby’s tiny chest each time, and then she slapped its rump quite hard, and the baby’s arms waved and it began to cry. It was a girl. The old one held the baby as another woman knotted the cord with a strip of leather, and then cut it. They wiped the baby clean with more of the moss, wrapped it in a reindeer skin, and then laid it by the fire.
    “We helped to save it, then,” the young girl said. He noticed that she wore that plain leather neck cord of the not-yet-betrothed, and her hair was rich and glossy. She turned and smiled at him, and he saw that her teeth were white and perfect. Her eyes seemed very large to him. “But the mother died. Did you know who she was?”
    “Yes, she was the woman of the Keeper of the Bulls. She had borne him sons,” he said. “Did you know her?”
    “Of course. My father is the Keeper of the Horses. And you are the bad apprentice who was sent away from the cave, the young man who now has no craft and no name.” She looked at his naked neck. No bone on a thong to show he was a hunter, no stone to show that he made flints, no piece of bark to show that he was wood gatherer and guardian of fire. Above all, there was no feather to mark him as an apprentice to the Keepers in the cave. They must have wrenched it from his neck when he was banished. “What will you do now?”
    “Wait,” he said curtly. “They will punish me for a season by making me work with the women, and then they will take me back. That is what your father told me when he came to visit me with some food after I had been beaten and sent away. He is a kind man.” He looked at the girl, suddenly intent on the way her cheekbones framed her face and at the soft down on her cheeks. “He is a good man, and his work is very fine. He said that I had talent and the Keepers would not let such a gift go unused. It would do no honor to the beasts of the cave.”
    “He is kind. When I am sick, he goes into the woods to bring me honey, even when the bees sting him,” she said. “But since you have no name, what shall I call you?”
    “Deer-runner was my boyhood name. Keeper of the Deer will be my name when they take me back to the work in the cave. Call me Deer,” he said, very conscious of the soft swelling of her young breasts. This was no child, but a woman soon to be betrothed. He wondered what her father’s plans for her might be. “And what do I call you?”
    “My family calls me Little Moon. My father says the moon was very small when I was born.”
    “He has not sought to betroth you yet?” he asked.
    She laughed, almost childishly. She was still very young. “No, he says we must wait until Little Moon is more of a full moon. But my new mother thinks it soon will be time.”
    He looked at her silently, enjoying her face but somehow alarmed by his own pleasure in her. He would not be eligible for betrothal until his apprenticeship was complete. Another season of banishment from the cave would take him into the summer, then at least two more seasons of apprenticeship meant that it would be midwinter before he became a Keeper. If her mother thought it was time, this girl would be betrothed before the summer was over. She could be carrying her first child by the time he became a Keeper and was entitled to take a woman. The thought put a hollowness into his belly, a feeling he had never known before. Little Moon. She was looking shyly at him from under her lashes.
    The cackle of the old woman cut into his reverie. He had to bring firewood to build the pyre for the dead woman, the pyre