Daybreak, and a silver mist has descended into the glade. Red deer hinds gather in safety on the edge of the forest clearing to witness the ensuing battle between selfish genes. A pair of magnificent stags face one another in this arena. A few strands of velvet still stubbornly cling onto their antlers early in the season. Their heavy breaths evaporate into the mist. The huge, reigning monarch steps forward and bellows at his younger challenger - who in turn bows his head. But not in submission, as he then rakes his tines of antler through a spongy leaf mould that awaits the first fall of crisp colour. Then he throws back his mighty head in defiance, tossing the stems of burnt bracken through the air.
Burnt bracken. For these two gladiators to be are fixed only on their rut, and are oblivious to all but the quickening of their noble hearts. They neither seek out nor comprehend these small clues as to the origin of this convenient clearing within a wild rain forest. They are unaware that it was not cleared by the usual forces of storm or disease, but through the tranchet sharpened edge of a hafted flint axehead, and via the controlled use of fire. Tools that belong to the two legged predators of their kind. The crowned king and his younger challenger focus on the duel ahead.
A pair of sky-blue eyes, concealed by the leafy cover of a tree-hide, focuses in turn on their movements in the rising mist. These eyes stare out from twisted sprays of pine, woven into the limbs of a lone oak, situated conveniently downwind of the herd. The owner of these starting blue eyes has masked her scent further with a smothering of damp, peaty, leaf mould over her chestnut brown skin. The same dark skin that stretches over her youthful muscles now flexed to the tension of a drawn bow string. She is Ur'salla the Huntress, Ishi of Shurak. Daughter of Ja'ankilla; daughter in turn of Marsalla; daughter again in turn of the legendary Ma'ankilla-of-the-Moon. However, at this moment, as her fingers are ready to release an arrow, she is the Goshawk.
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Six thousand years pass by:
Most of the new diggers on this archaeological excavation can easily be identified by their shiny new hand tools. But Freya's trowel is special - a scratched antique, its steel edges worn thin, with a wooden handle rubbed smooth, so that it slips into a leather holster on her belt with ease. The trowel is an heirloom, once wielded in some exotic corner of a lost empire, by a great grandmother never met by Freya in life. Later, the trowel of Freya's own grandmother, who was using it at the dig where she met Grandpa. These ancestral memories of ancient soils lend special qualities to Freya's simple hand tool. Almost as though the inanimate thing has a self. Some qualities are not obvious to the senses.
Freya angles the sacred trowel of the grandmother ancestor, and drags it gently over the dampened surfaces of an archaic dirt. Scraping with it another thin skin of soil. Following several more rapid scrapes, she pauses to survey for any sign of ancient human activity. Perhaps a cluster of sturdy stones to indicate the archaeology of a post-hole? Or maybe a patch of darkened soil, stained by the charcoal remains of a primaeval hearth? But no. In
Grandma had warned Freya:
‘Darling Girl, apply for the Roman dig on Hadrian’s Wall. It will be rich in finds!’
Instead, Freya had chosen this East Anglian excavation and with it, the diggers’ poverty of prehistory. More scrapes of her magical trowel and still nothing but more old dirt.
Was that something that the blade just bounced off?