I don’t know how many remained. I don’t know how many got away. All day and all night, people built boats and went into the sea. The wise ones helped the foolish ones—that was really the way we divided old from young—and on about the tenth day, as I would calculate it now, I sailed with two of my daughters, two men whom I loved, and one woman.
And it is really in the land of winter, on the afternoon that I saw my homeland sink into the sea, on that afternoon, that the history of my people really began.
Then began their trials and their tribulations, their real suffering, and their first concept of valor and sacrifice. There began all the things human beings hold sacred, which can only come from difficulty, struggle, and the growing idealization of bliss and perfection, which can only flourish in the mind when paradise is utterly lost.
It was from a high cliff that I saw the great cataclysm reach its conclusion; it was from that height that I saw the land break into pieces and sink into the sea. It was from there that I saw the tiny figures of Taltos drowning in that sea. It was from there that I saw the giant waves wash the foot of the cliffs and the hills, and crash into the hidden valleys, and flood the forests.
The Evil One has triumphed, said those who were with me. And for the first time the songs we sang and the tales we recited became a true lament.
It must have been late summer when we fled to the land of bitter cold. It was truly cold. The water striking the shores was cold enough to knock a Taltos unconscious. We learned immediately that it would never be warm.
But the full breath of winter was something of which we had not truly dreamed. Most of the Taltos who escaped the lost land died the first winter. Some who remained bred furiously to reestablish the tribe. And as we had no real idea that winter was going to come again, many more died the following winter, too.
Probably we caught on to the cycle of the seasons by the third or fourth year.
But those first years were times of rampant superstition, endless chattering and reasoning as to why we had been cast out of the lost land, and why the snow and wind came to kill us, and whether or not the Good God had turned against us.
My penchant for observation and making things elevated me to the undisputed leader. But the entire tribe was learning rapidly about such things as the warm carcasses of dead bears and other large animals, and then the good warmth from their furry skins. Holes were warmer obviously than caves, and with the horns of a dead antelope we could dig deep underground homes for ourselves, and roof them over with tree trunks and stones.
We knew how to make fire, and very soon got good at it, because we didn’t find any fire to be had for nothing, simply breathing out of the rock. Different Taltos at different times developed similar kinds of wheels, and crude wagons were soon fashioned to carry our food, and those who were sick.
Gradually, those of us who had survived all the winters of the land of bitter cold began to learn very valuable things which had to be taught to the young. Paying attention mattered for the first time. Nursing had become a means of survival. All women gave birth at least once, to make up for the appalling rate of death.
If life had not been so hard, this would have been seen perhaps as a time of great creative pleasure. I could list the various discoveries that were made.
Suffice it to say we were hunter-gatherers of a very primitive sort, though we did not eat the meat of animals unless we were really starving, and that we progressed erratically in a completely different fashion from human beings.
Our large brains, our enhanced verbal capacity, the strange marriage in each of us of instinct and intelligence—all this made us both more clever and more clumsy, more insightful and more foolish in many respects.
Of course, quarrels broke out among us, as the result of scarcity or questions of judgment—whether to go this way or that to seek game. Groups broke off from the main group and went their own way.