The thick ice that had covered the rivers and lakes for long months had begun to crack. At first it moved slowly and then, as fresh chill streams began to cascade down the valleys from the high glaciers, the skein of winter gave way rapidly to the onrush of spring. The mountains were still white, but in the open coombes luminous green grass pushed upwards and flowers bloomed. When the sun shone, round bumble bees buzzed, hurrying from forage to forage.
Snow Hare sat and watched the world come alive. He had been deep in thought for several days, keeping himself to himself and listening only to the voice of the spring as it came to him from all sides.
Laid out in front of him on the grass he had a sheet of soft leather. Around the edge it had stitching, a thong which could be pulled tight to turn the sheet into a pouch, tight around whatever must be carried. On the sheet Snow Hare had placed several small lumps of pigment well mixed with elk fat. He had charcoal, long fine sticks and thick lumps. He had two flat stones, good for mixing and softening the colours. He had a simple lamp that burned fat and a little bundle of leaves, a mixture good for chewing to stave off hunger and fatigue on journeys. All of the things were ready. He felt that he was ready. The season had arrived. His day had come.
For the first time in his life, after fifteen summers, he felt alone, separate from his people. His father had told him that he would feel like an eagle on the air, untouched and untouchable. His mind soared ahead of him into the mountain pass.
His people had let him be by himself. He had never gone this long without hearing greetings called to him or without the reassuring touches of those around him. He could feel that just as he had needed solitude to become truly ready for what he must do, they had come to be wary of him in this altered state; they feared the thing that he must do and some of that fear made them fear him. For now he was not the Snow Hare that they had known; for now, for this time, he lived outside of the close embrace that was all the life any of them normally knew. He drew nearer to the spirits which surrounded them and cleaved no more to the world of folk.
The days of preparation had altered him. His mind had quietened and focused on the journey he must make, just as a hunter focuses on the animal he will chase and kill. This was the same. 'You become the beast you hunt' his father had said, 'and now you will move away from this hearth a little while. You will become the journey you take; you will hunt the spirits of the animals; you will join them.'
Now, just as he had begun to disappear in spirit from his folk, he must disappear in body. He wrapped and tightened his pouch, stood and looked about him. Those who had waited for his departure stood just as he did and watched. They did not hide their excitement and their fear. He breathed his last of the world of the sun and the company of his kin.
The first step was the hardest. He looked up at the high pass and forced himself, every part of him feeling light and shaking with anticipation of what he must do, to head upwards, ever upwards.
Thus he plunged headlong in to the true realm of the spirits. The birch trees swayed in a gentle breeze, rattling their leaves and whispering of his future. The dappled sunlight played host to butterflies; a snake parted the grass to avoid his sure path. He did not slow. Lizards watched him from sunny rocks and high above a buzzard called to its mate. Snow Hare lost himself in the bright world of life, but headed always upwards towards the darkness that awaited him.
The world was full that morning, as full as ever it could be of the spirits and their voices. It seemed to take both an age and merely the blink of an eye to reach the high pass.
He turned and gazed down upon the valley wondering how he had come here so swiftly, and then he looked up and saw how far already the sun had travelled as he had climbed. 'You must enter the river' his father's brother had told him, 'you must follow where the stream takes you.' Through the tranquillity of unceasing activity he had swum. He had walked perceiving and yet unknowing through the ever-shifting calm.
And there, too close to ignore, at the side of the high pass where the snow lay still hard on the rock, he could see the caves. A short climb along a jagged jaw-bone of cliff would take him now to the start of the descent into darkness.
Edging along the cliff he was caught in a chill wind. The morning sunlight was fast disappearing as a mass of cloud spilled down from the high peaks. He had been hot from the climb but had not known it until now, now that the sweat on his back was turning icy cold. He shivered and deep inside his body he felt a pull of fear. His journey had started with trepidation and at its end too Snow Hare found each step a new trial.
Stepping into the rock mouth took him immediately into a startlingly different world. The wind was gone, at that moment the cave felt warm and still, very still. he knelt there, halfway between the world of the sun and the world under the world. he tried to control his shaking and pulled a little wrapped bundle from his leggings. He opened it as carefully as he could; within it he had brought fire. Or at least a tiny piece of hot charcoal cocooned in moss and holding still the potential for fire, the spirit of the flames. It looked quite dead but he blew life into it, a share of his own; it smoked a little, and then it glowed. Relieved, and now with steadier hands, he lit the little fat lamp and checked again that in his large pouch were all the things that he would need below.
His tiny lamp seemed dim indeed in comparison to the bright daylight out there under the white sky. This place, the darkness, would surely devour him; it waited for him; he could feel it.He dragged breath into his body, turning his head towards the outside as if from there the air would come easier and sweeter into him. Now he had to go. He could not wait and he could not fail. One feeble step at a time he edged into the black until at last he turned a corner, made a heavy falling pace downwards and was out of sight of the sky, of the world he had always known.
Now the lamp seemed stronger, but he was certain that he did not want to see what its light showed him. Wet rock walls loomed up on either side and the now gritty, now glistening and treacherous ground fell away, sloped one way and then the other. On the edge of the yellow light, shadows played in the rocky recesses and his eyes told him that there was movement there, although each time he paused to look he saw only stone. A column of jerking black smoke rose from the lamp and vanished into a darkness blacker still, it went quickly to add itself to the black, to the impenetrable gloom.
He had imagined that the cave would be a quiet place but incessant noise was his close companion. At first he thought he could hear footsteps away in the darkness, ahead, behind, or on high galleries in the abysmal spaces he trod. Knowing finally that these were echoes of his own passage eased his mind little. How now would he tell echoes from the report of real footsteps in the darkness? Behind all of his clumsy noises there seemed to be a whisper; he hoped that it was air, a stray wind imprisoned here. He feared that it might be water; that a sudden angry torrent would drown him. But his imagination knew the hushed voice to be more terrifying than either and as he convinced himself of the worst he heard it more loudly than ever. The voice in his head grew repetitious and demanding. He could not ignore and he could not silence the terror mounting in his spirit.
Unwittingly he hastened. He ignored narrow passageways to left and to right and kept always his goal in mind, somehow remembering that whatever might finally eat his spirit or body he must endeavour nonetheless to reach the central cavern.
But his haste conjured real danger. Speed and unsteadiness combined with a head-turning anxiety at each ringing drip. He nearly slipped once, recovered, swayed, stopped and then, with the very next step, lost his footing and fell. The fat lamp spun into the air crazily shedding light all around it as it flew. Then there was darkness, utter darkness.
He came down first on one knee and then on his elbow; his body slammed on to the rock and he rolled. When he stopped he was against the cavern wall. His left leg though seemed to be hanging in open space; it tingled with that vertiginous sensation, the absence of anything beneath it but a gaping drop into nothingness. He lay still breathing like an animal at bay, waiting, fully expecting some lurking presence of the dark to come now to finish him. His unseeing eyes were wide.
Nothing came. The rock grew very cold against him. He felt vainly for some purchase with his left foot and knew then that he would have to try to roll back the way he had come. One full roll and he seemed to be completely on solid ground. He knelt up and, feeling all the time in front of him, he crawled back, always up the slope that had betrayed him. He searched for the lamp, the alternative was surely death.
He swept his hands across the rock floor in front of him until his palms and knuckles were raw; he crawled until his knees ached with the numbing cold. Around him the darkness pressed in. It seemed that there was nothing for his eyes to see, but now the blackness filled with inchoate shapes, purples and yellows, flashes like tiny dying stars. It did not matter if his eyes were open or closed, he could not exclude these images, these spirits come to watch him struggle for life, perhaps to take his life away.
There at the side of his hand, just as thought he must give up and that the lamp was lost forever, he knocked it. Afraid that somehow he might lose it over the edge of a chasm, he panicked and scrambled forwards. He found the lamp for the second time with his knee and, once it rested securely in his hand, breathed a long sigh of relief. Moments later he had pressed the revived ember against the wick and once again there was precious life.
More wary than ever now, he went on, following always the most open corridors as he had been told to do. He stopped for a moment to open his pouch, put the leaves in his mouth and chewed the bitter wad. He felt better then to taste the herbs of the hillsides and the valleys. Deep in the centre of him something settled now and somehow he regained a calm he had not had since leaving the sun behind.
Only a short while later he saw a tiny mark on the rock wall. He knelt at it and put his hand out to touch it. It was surely a painting; he laughed aloud to realise that it was a print of fingers. He had found a yellow sign; the central cavern was very close. For all the fears of what dwelt in the darkness, for all his terrors of the journey, his heart beat inside him now, pounding like the feet of a hunted stag. He was nearly there, the place of which he had long dreamed and for which he had long prepared.
There were more yellow signs. The path was clear, there could be no doubt that he came to the place now, the place his folk had come like this for time beyond remembering. He had almost forgotten his fears when in the guttering lamplight something seemed to move, to run along the wall. Snow Hare stopped and turned, close to being paralysed by this powerful mixture of anticipation and shock, but what he saw was not some horror of the caves, but a thing awesome to him nonetheless. It was a glorious painting as long as a man, given life only by the flickering lamp, a stag in every detail accurate; as beautiful a thing as ever he had seen, and painted there by one of his people.
The last yellow fingerprints led him at last into the central cavern itself and there the profusion of paintings left Snow Hare amazed. He examined every rock face and gazed in wonder on the magical works of his folk.
At last a stray breath of air, a spirited draught from the world above perhaps, troubled the lamplight and summoned the young man back from his reverie. It was time now for him to find a place on the rock, to make his mark and do what must be done if his people were to live through the coming year.
He did not stop at the first expanse of unpainted rock but rather passed several, looking within himself to find the place where he would feel compelled to paint. At the fourth open space he saw it, the slope of the rock, the shape and the relief he wanted. There he sat down and tried to summon to his mind the image he would leave.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He saw the sky and the open hillsides; clouds parted and a band of golden sunlight moved across the land. There. There in the bright day of his mind's eye he saw the animal he would paint. He saw every curve of its proud shape; its raised head; its long neck; its powerful legs and its long back. It turned its head and looked at him, its spirit was with him.
He saw only the animal now and mixed the colours without even looking down at the grinding stones as they moved in his hands. He was deep in the world; he had a clarity of vision born of having always known that which he painted. he became the animal and at the same time his hands felt their way around its flanks and to the extremities of its mighty form.
There was no hesitation. One line followed the next in a steady rhythm of intimate knowledge. And so the work went on. When he was finished he came back fully into himself; he saw the creature turn away from him and run free across the hillside, out of the broad sunlit band.
Snow Hare looked down at his hands. They were covered with paint. The pigments were gone except for one lump he had reserved for last. As he felt the pure ecstasy of clear sight leave him he put this last of his colours in his mouth and worked the greasy stuff around until it became warm and liquid.
Finding one more open area of wall he put his hand to it and felt for the heartbeat of the world. Mouth full, he drew breath powerfully through his nose and then blew hard at his hand. The outline he left was clear; he had left something of himself behind along with something of the spirit of the animal he had painted.
Now he must leave, and quickly. The fat lamp was weakening and time was short. Passing out of the central cavern he took his last chance to admire the other creatures painted there and then he speeded up.
As so often seems to be the case, his journey back was quicker than the journey in. In no time at all it seemed to him, he was under the sky again. The sun was red on the horizon and the air was warm and thick with the scents of life. He turned for home, for the valley.
How she loved him. She watched him come towards the fires of the camp. He walked like a man not a boy now. No-one else rose to go to him; they let her go alone and of that she was glad. No matter how old he was he was still her boy and she longed for just a moment alone with him at the end of this momentous day. 'Snow Hare' she said, 'I am your mother. Do you know me?'
The young man smiled his broadest smile. 'I know you Mother. I am your son and I love you.'
At the fireside the men nodded to one another and the women held back their tears.
