Fishing for Caribou (Preview)

Fishing for Caribou by Allen W. McLean

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Message of the Wisps

A necessity. \ Information must be shared, \ wisdom passed along.

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The spear pierced the riverbed. The wooden shaft jutted from the water's surface, which refracted the spear to look bent like a bolt of lightning. The Spearthrower removed his loin and waded his bare feet into the water from the rocky riverbank. He hefted the pole free and held the butt in his armpit to surface the dark gold-green fish that his slate spearhead had caught.

As he held the dying fish above their home, Spearthrower closed his eyes and inhaled a breath. He let the flow’s sensations pass between his legs. The river rushed over and around his firm gut. A cold mist splashed on his chest-hair and beard. He felt another’s pulse, underwater, and the wisps showed him once again where to strike the surface. His spearhead had caught a second fish.

He stepped with care up the rocks and the sand of the bank to toss his haul on his loincloth, which he had left on the grass. Spearthrower had already made a small fire pit and a spit with the branches of a large maple that was growing into the river. He sat near the firepit’s warmth, but it was the high-noon sun that would dry his tanned-pink skin. His campsite was like any other cave-person’s. Only the campfire was needed, which Spearthrower had established with ease. In his loincloth, he kept combinations of certain stones that, when struck together, had sparked tinder. He fashioned his loincloth, of a deer’s scoured fur, by folding and knotting above his hip and around his plyable waist to form a bag.

Every cave-person had the good sense to follow wisdom when insight came to them. Spearthrower had taken the philosophy more literal than most. Wherever he thought the wisps would be found was where Spearthrower had cast himself toward.

He had left his family's dugout, and the resulting flow of events had brought him to his current spot. His camp resided opposite from the plain he had crossed, as his trajectory had taken him by foot through the river, and now another valley lay before him. He felt doubtless over reaching some other settlement or camping ground. Spearthrower knew he was within the first months of his travels. He had once practiced carving tallies on his spear for every full moon, but the wisps took better notes of those things.

Indeed, us wisps are made of such information.

Like any paleolithic person, Spearthrower knew that tricks of the light could convey visions and memories that needed to be presented outside of the present moment. That was how he knew he would meet others like him. Though his family had lived a mobile lifestyle, as his family would move between designated campsites, the insight had struck Spearthrower upon witnessing a nomadic tribe utilizing branches and a large pelt in an invention his family was ignorant toward; a lean-to, of which Spearthrower had consulted with the wisp for. Spearthrower had learned that, by using such portable amenities, the travelers had crossed the whole landmass from one coast to the other between winters by following the sunrise, and that they had planned their homeward journey, of following the sunset to the first coast, to end before snowfall. Through the memories of this wisp, Spearthrower knew he would find humans elsewhere, even in the unlikeliest of places.

While his previously-skewered fish finished cooking over the fire, Spearthrower mended his thrown spear. He sharpened the octogonal spearhead to a point with a harder stone, which he had in his satchel. Fresh sap-resin from the tree was reapplied to the wild-grass bindings, which the spearhead had accommodating divots for, to reinforce the spear with amber-glue. He resharpened the butt of the spear, too, and anointed the tip with more of the golden-red tree-bark sap, then hardened both ends in the fire. He propped his spear in the ground.

He removed the skewer from the fire and ate the fish to their bones. Oil matted his ragged beard. The skeleton was saved for later because he knew the marrow was safe from spoilage. Spearthrower gutted his two new catches and skewered the raw fish. The wisps had shown him how the exchanging of cooked and uncooked skewers needed to happen one after the other. The two actions had to occur at different times.

In his peripheral, he saw that his spear's wisp had returned to dance on the spearhead. He decided to leave the wisp to its fluttering; he found the stories of a spear rather repetitive. As his fish cooked, Spearthrower focused on another wisp by the riverbank, dancing on the beach Spearthrower had climbed out from. Though, the dancing lights would fade away whenever one looked at them. He had learned that this was a camouflaging technique, after having misjudged the wisps for being shy. Spearthrower took his skewer from the fire and staked an end into the ground. While eating one of the fish, he mulled over how one needed to believe in the wisps; that was what they wanted. And so he closed his eyes and believed.

The wisps shared their memory through mental visualization; Spearthrower thought of a mother with one of her daughters. The river's wisp showed him, by a swift passing of days, that the two had visited the wide river’s bank every morning to catch fish and to wash their bones from previous days. The mother had been alone in the belief that predators could be avoided through practices like cleaning leftovers in the ever-flowing water. Unlike her family, one daughter understood the wisdom and, following her mother’s death in a bear attack, she continued the tradition alone. Through their memory of these visits, the wisp watched the daughter bring her own children, and grow with aging wisdom. Spearthrower noted the day she no longer accompanied her children. The visits had ended all together, soon after.

He washed his face, then the fish-bones of flesh, in the shallow beach. He packed the skewer in his satchel so that the remaining fish stuck out for him to eat with ease. He had made sure to eat the fish before his food spoiled the following morning. From his bag, Spearthrower produced a rolled fur with a set of feline ears, a dark snout and an orange tail. He draped the pelt on his dreaded head and down his shoulders and back. He wore the skin to disguise himself among the wild-things.

Spearthrower uprooted his spear, kicked dirt on his campfire and left the river.

A wild-thing was only scared by fire--that, and other wild-things. Their shapes, sizes and abilities were variable, but the wild-things always looked like humans mixed with animals. He was ever-mindful of these things, although Spearthrower had failed to notice the smallest of wild-things before being bitten in the heel.

A long-furred rodent, smaller than his ankle, darted into the tall grass with a chunk of torn-off callus. Instead of intuitively stamping the wild-thing out with his hardened spear-end, Spearthrower was betrayed by his alarmed senses. With his spearhead, he struck at the direction he believed the vermin had skittered toward. The sharpened tip snapped against the ground. The shaft bent forward, forming a crescent, before splintering into intersecting arcs. He severed the halves of his spear and stopped to stoop below the ceiling of looming grass-columns, to think, and to sense and perceive where the thing had gone.

He heard a dry shrub rustle beside him, then the wisps flashed an image across his mind. Spearthrower jabbed and retracted the butt of his weapon from the creature's ribs. The wild-thing screamed and retreated deeper into the brush. Outside observers had seen the natural order of life; a wild-thing hunting another wild-thing. Like the rodent, they would know to avoid a fight with that wild-thing.

Sparse saplings dotted the grassland. Spearthrower sat under the nearest poplar. He tossed his broken sticks to the field of stalks. The river he had crossed laid far behind him. Before him, the sun was setting into the royal orange and purple horizon, which was topped and obscured by forested leaves. Spearthrower knew he would find a settlement somewhere before then. He watched the sun dip behind the treeline. His gaze followed the horizon to his right, in the direction of the polar star. A herd of woolly mammoths was grazing near a freshwater lake. Such giants were from the frozen mountain-plains of the north, where trees refused to grow. His knowledge on this ice-expanse had come from the wisp of a wild-thing. He had seen a plateau that reflected a blinding light, which stretched beyond every line of sight, and the hairy man-beast wild-things which were shown leaping from the snow-covered shelves--a height greater than the tallest of trees--to the grasslands below.

He stood and examined the tree. The high and leafy canopy was casting a long shadow against the prairie. A cool northern wind rustled the foliage into restless animation. The trunk was far too thick to think about using as a pole-staff. Younger saplings dotted the grassland. From his bag, Spearthrower produced a length of sharpened stone and set himself to work.

He used his knife to fell a thin log, hack the branches off, and whittle the ends to a point. The pole was easy to replace; the spearhead needed to be scavenged. He had made the last spearhead by testing the hardness of stones on the butt of his knife. When he had found the right one, he had struck and fragmented the rock into sharp pieces, with his knife, then he broke off a jagged tip to work into suitable use. This time, before he had crossed the river, Spearthrower had desecrated a mastodon carcass to break their ribs; this time he used a sliver of bone that he had saved for this purpose. The spearhead needed little work to be sharpened to a tip. He wedged the spike in a crevice he carved on the end of his staff.

With his knife and the broken spearhead, which he had kept, he lit a fire to sit by as he finished his spear. There was an abundance of wild-grass to turn into rope, and he had animal skins he could cut into strips, but Spearthrower decided to use strands of sinew to secure the spearhead to the staff. He chewed the cordage in his mouth before wrapping, and applied more sap-resin, then dried the glue over his fire to bind the bone to the wood.

From his bag, he produced a stick as long and as thick as his forearm. He got up to test his new spear, carved a 't' over an 'x' on the trunk and stood a number of paces from the wider poplar. He placed the spear’s butt end in a divot in the apparatus, where the shaft rested along the stick’s length. He held the long wooden spoon by the free end and kept the spearhead at eye-level. With a sharp inhale, he launched his spear at the target by swinging his arm in an arc. Spearthrower had held onto the spear-thrower while the spear was projectiled into the trunk, parallel to the ground.

He pulled his spear from the impact site. The bone spearhead was intact.

Despite every physical part being replaced, the wisp that Spearthrower had created had returned to dance on the spear’s tip. The sun had set into a clouded night, so he decided to rest under the tree until the morning.

The other cave-people’s clubs and branches were only useful in a pinch; he found other merits in the pieces of wood. Their wisps had shown Spearthrower how to throw a spear in a spear-thrower. They had shown him how to fashion new spears to quench the instinctive desire of coveting one’s weapon and possessions, which prevented others from partaking in spear-throwing.

He always knew that the trees offered more than just the spear and spear-thrower. He meditated on how much the tree was willing to give, from kindle for his fire, to shelter for himself and for a small nest of resting red birds. The wisps had revealed that such insightful information was the root of reality. They had demonstrated to Spearthrower that they were fractals of such enlightenment, through visions of the plateau of bright light retreating to expose the grasslands he knew, but the abstract message had failed to stick with him. What he had grasped was how to visualize the wisps' light, to communicate with them. The cave-peoples could only listen to the wisp they were meditating on, while Spearthrower could will the wisps into visualizing things for him to perform in reality. What would become a simple notion for many, the cave-peoples that Spearthrower were born from could only picture and mimic the actions of the animals and wild-things they had seen, while Spearthrower could do anything he could imagine. Spearthrower knew that was how he stood out from most others; he had a system of insight that allowed him to steady his mind and accurately throw his spear.

Spearthrower was thus compelled into action. He had decided his travels were a journey of necessity, that the information he knew had to be shared--that there had to be others who felt this way about themselves. The wisps had in fact passed on their wisdom.

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Thank you for reading this preview of "Fishing for Caribou", the third book in the HaikuPrajna Collection; please consider reading the full release, which can be found in ebook format here: https://amazon.ca/dp/B09MDR2JGP

Until next time,

Allen W. McLean