aurochs, and horses, sheep and antelope, what looked like dog or wolf, and even that of a horned rhinoceros. These were the ones Kit thought he recognised, but there were as many more that he could not readily identify.
Taken as a whole, the bizarre structure possessed a distinctly eerie, alien air. The work party began untying their bundles and fitting the bones they had brought into chinks and gaps in the structure, and Kit imitated their example, finding places to work in what he had brought. They laboured with purpose and in silence. When one or the other got thirsty, he would go outside the clearing to eat handfuls of snow, then return to continue working. When the last bone from the bundles had been placed, it was back to the kill zone for another load.
Three more trips to the bone heap for materials brought them to the end of their labours. The short winter day was hastening on, and the workers were growing hungry—at least Kit was starving, and he imagined the clansmen, who appeared to require more than twice as much to keep them going, must have been ready to eat the trees.
Thag stood back, coiling his hemp rope and regarding the Bone House, his big shaggy head held to one side in the precise manner of a carpenter inspecting his handiwork. It was such a classic pose, Kit smiled to see it. Thag gave a grunt that signified satisfaction and turned away. Now that the official verdict had been received, the others grunted too, and the group departed, making their long way back through the forest. The returning labourers ate a hearty meal and, exhausted with the good fatigue of useful work, went to sleep. Kit drifted off too; but if he imagined a restful day to follow, he was mistaken.
For just before sunrise he was awakened by a touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see En-Ul crouching beside him. Into his mind came a possessive urging he understood as: Attend me.
The old chief turned away and Kit followed, moving silently through the sleeping camp. The night’s fire had burned to embers, and the sky still held a sprinkling of stars sharp as ice crystals in the cold, cold heavens. They picked their way carefully down from the ledge and found the well-marked trail leading up out of the valley. Within a few minutes of leaving the settlement, Kit realised their destination was the Bone House, and for one who had been carried into the camp, the aged En-Ul surprised Kit with his stamina. They paused only twice to rest and catch their breath—once halfway up the trail and once at the top of the gorge—and arrived in the forest clearing as the sun rose above the trees.
In the thin winter light the strange edifice glowed with a pale and alien pallor—a white mound set in a snow-white field—taking on a ghostly, almost ethereal aspect as if constructed not of bones but of the mammalian spirits of the creatures themselves. A profound apprehension crept like the stealthy cold into Kit’s soul. This curious shelter had been erected for a purpose, and it was for that purpose they had come.
En-Ul turned to him and, gazing into Kit’s eyes, willed him to understand. Kit received an impression of immense importance, of an unfathomable weight of consequence, a significance of unimaginable magnitude—as if whole worlds of significance converged in this place. There was no single word for it, but the force of the concept struck him with an urgency that was as powerful as hunger and thirst.
Kit, trying hard to understand, was overwhelmed by the thought that had been conveyed. “Why have we come here?” he asked aloud.
The old one tilted back his head and looked at the pale white sky for a moment. Then, returning his gaze to Kit, breathed into Kit’s mind the image of living things of many kinds—the creatures of the forest, the entire forest itself, whole Stone Age tribes—combined with a feeling of swimming against the strong flow of the river, or struggling against a powerful grinding, uncompromising force bent on mindless destruction: survival.
Their presence at the Bone House had something to do with the survival of themselves and their world, was how Kit explained it to himself; and although he could not see how this was so, he did not doubt En-Ul’s sincerity.
As soon as this thought had passed through Kit’s mind, the ancient chieftain turned and walked to the entrance