Tag Archives: paleolithic

Hidden

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Treetop came home. Staghorn saw her dart furtively into the burrow under their leaf-tent, and lay down on the bed of leaves with her back to him. He knew she was hiding something. He did not want to talk to her though.

He sighed in frustration: Gods, she drives me crazy! Well, there’s no avoiding it. So he went over to where she was and squatted down.

Then he saw it. The tiny wolf cub latching on to her breast, suckling.

“What are you doing!” he spat, reaching for the cub. She slapped him away.

“Shhh!” she hushed. “If they see her, they’ll try to kill her.”

“I want to kill it too! Give it to me!” Staghorn demanded.

“No!” She pushed him away. “The cub is mine. I have lost my baby now. I love her, and I want to keep her.”

Staghorn could not believe what Treetop was saying. His mind spun. Has anyone ever tried to keep a wolf cub? He could not remember anyone doing that.

“Are you insane? No one has ever kept a wolf cub. No one ever will. The wolf is our enemy. The wolf kills our people. We have to kill them. If you raise this wolf, it will simply turn on us and kill us too.” Staghorn shook his head.

“I don’t care. I want to keep it and I will. If you love me, you will help me hide her.” She kept her back to him.

He thought to himself: “That’s it. I cannot stand her any longer.” He turned to walk away.

But he knew: He could not live without her. This was just another one of those things that drove him crazy about her. But when he thought about it, how she would not bend to his will, how he wanted to mate with her then!!

Gods! It was annoying. But if it wasn’t Treetop, it would be some other cross woman.

“Alright. You can keep it. For now. But how will you hide it?” he asked.

“Stop calling her ‘it’!” She insisted. “I don’t know. I need you to help me. Say that I am sick. Bring me food. I will keep her here with me and feed her. After a few days, maybe we will think of something.”

And so it was. They kept the little thing, who eventually he started to call “her”. And then an amazing thing happened. When he lay in the burrow with Treetop, spooning with her, watching her feed that tiny cub, he began to hate her a bit less. Gradually, she opened her eyes and began to gaze into his. He saw his soul in there, sometimes.

He found himself after a few days hopelessly in love with her too. He knew, crazy as it sounded, that if someone tried to kill this cub, he would have to kill him.

Hated

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ClosedFist hated wolves.

Everyone he had ever known, ever cared about, had been killed by wolves. He knew they would kill him eventually. The moment the wolves took him often haunted his dreams. He feared that moment more than anything.

This is the way he thought: The people of the tribe did fine, mostly. We could find food very well. The land where we live is good and keeps us fed. We make our leaf tents, and burrow under them. We sleep with our women and make our babies.

Life is good, mostly.

If it wasn’t for the wolves. The wolves are always there. So many! Impossible to escape from them, either. They run much faster than we do.

Often he wondered why it was that the gods decided to make people walk and run on two legs, when the wolves and other beasts have four. It is so much faster to run on four legs!

But then we would not have hands. And hands are wonderful! We make our spears, our flint tools. Sometimes if the year is good, and we take some game, we can make leather. We take the skin, dry it by the fire, and all the men take turns pissing on it. Then we take the fat from the meat and rub it on the skin until it becomes soft.

BuckHoof had taken some leather and cut it with the flint tools into long strips. Then he twisted it together. He was trying tangling the pieces together in all sorts of ways. ClosedFist did not understand the purpose of the thing that BuckHoof was trying to do, but it was interesting. BuckHoof called it rope.

So, maybe hands are good. We get to make things, do things which other beasts cannot.

But wolves still kill us all, eventually. Except Oroco. The people kept him alive. He remembers the old stories, from the priest who came before him. That was important to the village. We need to remember the old stories to know how we should live now.

So we keep Oroco in the center of the village, away from where wolves would come.

But Oroco was the only one. Everyone else always died from wolves. There were no exceptions that ClosedFist could remember.

ClosedFist

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ClosedFist was Staghorn’s friend. He knew this was his function.

He was there with Staghorn, always. What Staghorn wanted, that was what they got.

Staghorn was simply the most important man in the village.

But, of course, Oroco was the chief. He always would be, until he died.

He was old now, though. Although hale and in good health, he was stiff and tired a lot. He slept, mostly.

They brought him food. All of the tribe looked after him.

He was the most respected man in the village, and obviously he was still the priest.

But he was not the most important. That was Staghorn.

Staghorn was simply the most useful man in the village. He was the best at everything. He was always catching game. They would be out on a stalk together, just the too of them, daring the wolves to attack, driving them off with spear thrusts until they tired of the chase.

Then, they would hunt together.

But always, it was Staghorn who would find the food. Sometimes even a pig! They had been the chiefs together that night. They had brought back a male boar – with tusks! How they had feasted!

They ate the cooked pig flesh, roasted right in the fire, until their bellies bulged.

He was Staghorn’s friend. He was OK with that. He was the second most important man in the village that way.

Staghorn

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Staghorn was enraged.

He sat in front of his tent, where he and Treetop slept, with is closest friend, ally, and second-in-command, ClosedFist. His head in his hands, between his knees, he trembled.

ClosedFist knew not to try to touch him now.

It was the wolf, he knew that. The wolf had taken MonkeyHand, his son. So many people they had lost to wolves!

He remembered them all. AngryMan had gone into the forest. He had not returned. They found his gnawed corpse later, strewn through the forest.

He had wept. He wished he could weep now. Maybe later he would grieve.

Too many. Too many gone. Always, it was wolves.

But Treetop! He could not help himself: He hated her, a bit, for her betrayal, her disobedience in following the hunting party earlier tonight.

But he knew. His problem was simple: He loved her. It was the true love, the once-in-a-lifetime love. And his love for her was because of this very thing.

He loved her because she disobeyed. He could not imagine being with a woman who would obey him. He would not respect her! She needed to have her own mind, to tell him what she wanted.

He knew it was not a good thing, that he was like this. But there it was. He could not help it. He loved her.

He remembered when he first saw her, when she was just a small child. He was a very young man then, only fourteen summers or so. He was smitten with her. He noticed quickly how strong willed she was. She was always in trouble.

Later, when her breast began to form, he found himself staring at her. She soon noticed his attention. It turned out that she loved him too. Once she understood, finally, that she was the kind of woman he wanted, they had mated, and had been together ever since.

Now he knew that small hatred, the hatred of betrayal, for his beloved. Treetop would always bear some shame for this. He would never mention it to her again. He knew it would only anger her, and he had nothing to say. There was nothing to say that would change anything.

The problems is wolves. What to do about the wolves.

Treetop

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Treetop was pissed. Her man, River Monkey, had snubbed her, shouting at her to stay put. Going on and on about the prattle that Oroco spouts: Protect the open womb. Protect the baby.

So it’s too dangerous for her to go out with the hunting party? We’ll see about that.

She picked up her baby, MonkeyHand, and stuffed him brusquely into the leather pouch that River Monkey had given her, and strapped him on her back. By now, MonkeyHand knew not to cry: She would simply smother him if he did. He hated that, so he stayed quiet as she left the tent, and started following the men.

Such noise they were making! She sniffed derisively as she followed silently behind them. They were completely unaware of her, of course. No one could move through the forest better than Treetop, with her long, gangly legs. She was a woman of 19 summers with a man of her own now. Likely to be chief someday too!

River Monkey spotted the wolf as it began its kill run. It was moving in from the North, coming fast, hunting something, but not them. Then suddenly his heart was filled with fear as he saw Treetop take off running with MonkeyHand, their baby son, strapped to her back. He shouted for the men to follow, and took off after her.

Stupid! Treetop knew she was stupid! She was so busy in her own mind criticizing the men, that she had missed the wolf, and now she was being hunted. And she had the baby!

She felt more than saw the wolf pounce on her and MonkeyHand. She went down hard. She heard the sickening sound of the crunch of bone, as the wolf grabbed MonkeyHand by the head and shook him.

She heard Staghorn come in with his spear and end the wolf with a thrust through the heart. Then she reached down and picked up her dying infant son. She held him and watched as he struggled to breath, but she knew it was no good. Broken neck. Within a few seconds, he was gone.

He was gone. She felt the blow physically, as she fell to her knees sobbing hysterically. She looked up and met the eyes of her man, as she held her infant son’s body.

That moment was searing. She saw in his face the rage, the fury, at her defiance. And she knew that it was her fault that MonkeyHand was dead. She was wrong all along, and should have obeyed. Yet she also knew that is was not her nature to obey.

Desperately she looked into her man’s eyes and searched for some love, some forgiveness. And then she found it there. She knew that he was beyond anger, beyond words, for her stupidity. But she also knew that he still loved her. In that she found some small comfort.

And that was when they heard it: A soft scuffling, scratching and whimpering sound. Nearby they found the den, filled with five newborn cubs.

She reached out and grabbed his arm and said: “She was defending her cubs. We would have done the same.”

River Monkey turned and gazed at the female mother wolf, lying dead on the ground with his spear through her heart. He walked over and roughly pulled out his spear. Grinding his teeth he said: “We have lost enough of our people to wolves. I am not in the mood to forgive this one. Pebble! Kill those cubs. Let’s get out of here.”

She collapsed onto the forest ground and began to grieve. Dimly she heard the men’s spears pounding as they beat the cubs to death. And then the men, sensing that she needed to be alone with her son, began to withdraw.

She lay there on the ground alone for a long time, how long she did not know. She was lost in grief, self pity, remorse, and guilt. She wanted to undo what she had done. She wanted her son back. But she knew there was no going back now. What was done was done.

Gradually, she became aware of another sound, coming from the den. Reluctantly, she went to the den, and there she found a sixth cub, a female, lying hidden in the back, behind a rock. She was quite unharmed and helpless, her eyes still closed.

She hated this cub. With all her might she wanted to rip her throat out with her own teeth. Or she could simply leave her there to starve. That would be crueler anyway.

But as she looked at the small, tiny, newborn cub, she began to pity her. She realized, again, that the mother wolf was protecting her den. She understood that. Finally, she found that she could not bring herself to kill the tiny creature.

But what to do? Without a mother to feed and protect her, this cub would die very quickly. The solution was right there on Treetop’s chest: Her breasts were still full of milk.

Impulsively, not realizing what she was doing, she put the cub on her breast. The cub nuzzled, latched on and began to feed hungrily. Holding the cub in her arms as she fed, she made her way back to the tribe.

Treetop never knew it, but that one decision, the choice to nurture and feed that wolf cub, is the most important single thing that has ever happened on this world.

Like-A-Wolf

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I am beginning a series of blog posts that will read much like a novel, with each blog post reading like a chapter. I call this book “Like-A-Wolf”.

The basic subject is the domestication of the dog. I regard the invention of the dog (I use the term “invention” very carefully – more on that later), as the most important single event in the evolution of human culture, for reasons which will become clear.

Sooo, why do I say “invent”?

First, many of the organisms which we consume as agricultural products are human inventions. Wheat for example. The ancestor of wheat is very different from the organism which we know today. We selective bred wheat to be what we wanted: A sweet, large seed grain with specific properties.

In a similar manner, dogs were effectively selectively bred by paleolithic humans. The mutation which makes dogs different from wolves is known as empathy. As Jeremy Rifkin points out in his post The Empathic Civilization, empathy, is the most powerful aspect of our consciousness, and really defines us as humans. We have a form of hardware in our brains which enables empathy, called mirror neurons. This causes our brain neurons to fire when we see suffering in exactly the same manner as the organism which is experiencing the suffering. Hence we “feel the pain” of an organism we observe suffering.

Other organisms on the planet do not generally have empathy. Wolves, for example, have a psychology which is very similar to what in human psychology is referred to as a psychopath: Basically an insatiable killing machine. Wolves normally have empathy during the period up to adolescence. (All mammals have some form of empathy when being suckled by their mother, as that is required in order to live effectively in a den of other cubs. An insatiable killing machine would not work in that context.) Once a wolf goes through adolescence, however, the psychopath mentality eventually takes over, and the wolf ceases to make eye contact, and becomes devoid of empathy.

Once in a while, though, a wolf is born with an interesting mutation: It is permanently capable of empathy. We refer to this as “tame”. The normal fate for this cub would be to be killed by the other wolves in the pack after it goes through puberty. Empathy is definitely not an adaptive trait for surviving in a wolf pack.

What happened then is very interesting: A woman made the choice to suckle a wolf cub. (I weave this idea into the story, in which a 19 year old girl who recently lost a baby and has full breasts finds a wolf cub and decides to suckle it.)

Hence the “invention” term: Many human inventions are not intentional, but rather accidental. What makes them inventions is the human aspect. Undoubtedly, there were wolves being  born with this mutation. But a human never decided to nurture one until this point.

Once that happened, the paleolithic tribe where that occurred would quickly discover that they had a devastating weapon. Not only could a pack of domesticate wolves be used by a human hunting party against all kinds of game. (Paleolithic humans after the invention of the dog were able to bring down all kinds of big game, up to and including wooly mammoth, and at that point become the dominant species on the planet.) Dogs enabled humans to capture and domesticate the goat, sheep, horse, cow, donkey, and so forth. The dog was first, though. Effectively the neolithic experiment (i.e. the invention of agriculture) begins with the dog, which was the first domesticated animal.

Eventually, the dog was used as a weapon against neighboring tribes, with devastating effect. That resulted in the rise of the first neolithic empire, the invention of slavery, and all the rest.

We are who we are  because of the domestication of the dog.

Rethinking How We Think

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Human consciousness is a piece of software. Highly evolved, messy, counter-intuitive, massively patched, and so forth, yes. But still a piece of software nonetheless. I have observed this before, but as I decompile the HCP (Human Consciousness Program, please keep up), and as I figure out more and more about it, the more interesting this idea becomes to me.

Take inebriation. I have been an alcoholic during several periods of my life. Now, I barely touch the stuff and it does not appeal to me. Largely eliminating alcohol from my lifestyle has had huge health benefits for me. I have lost around 90 pounds, and many of my chronic health care problems have simply resolved since I made this simple lifestyle change. Which leads to the question: Why does mankind consume alcohol since it is obviously harmful to our health?

Simple: The force of evolution favors one thing, and one thing only: Reproduction. Inebriation leads to sexual activity, which leads to reproduction. Hence, mankind loves alcohol, marijuana, opiates and all the rest. Anything that makes us less inhibited, more inclined to relax, that will be preferred in evolutionary terms, because those who get inebriated will breed the teetotalers out of existence.

It gets gnarly when you talk about things like marijuana and opiates. Marijuana is also referred to as cannibis, and we actually have physical structures in our brains called canniboid recepters. These puppies receive the THC released by marijuana and causes the effects of marijuana which we experience: Increased sensory sensation, euphoria and all the rest. That same thing is true with opiates: We have opioid receptors in our brains as well.

So, obvious question: Why do we have these structures at all? I mean, again, inebriation is harmful, right?

Wrong: Inebriation using marijuana definitely increases sexual activity. So do opiates. Given two proto-humanoid primate family groups, one with canniboid receptors and the other without, assuming that both have access to cannibis, the group with canniboid receptors will breed the other group into oblivion.

Hence: Evolution favors anything that increases reproduction. Nothing more.

Which leads to my original thesis: The HCP is a piece of software. That piece of software includes features like inebriation, all of which got built in for various reasons, all related to enhancing chances for reproduction. Survival at least until successful reproduction, and rearing of viable offspring.

Here’s the problem: The HCP is based upon incorrect assumptions. Like any piece of software that becomes obsolete over time, it needs to be fundamentally rewritten. The assumptions of the HCP are the ancestral environment: Paleolithic, pre-agricultural man. Hunter gathers, in other words. We are about as far away from that as you can possibly imagine.

It reminds me of the Chicago project. During the mid-1990s, Microsoft launched a project they called Chicago. At that time, Microsoft was one of the largest and most successful businesses in the history of planet Earth, largely based upon the success of one product: Windows. Despite this, Microsoft made the odd, counter-intuitive decision to completely rewrite Windows from scratch, starting with a relatively clean slate. In the process, Microsoft somewhat trashed the work they had done before on the existing version of Windows.

The result of the Chicago project was Windows NT, which eventually led to Windows 2000, and ultimately the versions of Windows we have now. This was the most successful and profitable software project in the history of Microsoft, and maybe the entire world. But it was based upon one simple reality: Windows was dying. It was crippled by an obsolete architecture based upon assumptions that were no longer correct: Memory was scarse and expensive, networks were slow and tiny, disk space was cramped, CPUs were terribly slow, and so forth. The IT industry even has a word for this type of software: They call it “crufty”. Crufty means a piece of software that is old, obsolete, difficult to rewrite, and just needs to be scrapped.

The HCP is crufty. We need to rewrite it.

More later.

Eden

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Many human myths contain the story of an ancient garden, among them the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden described in the Book of Revelation from the Hebrew and Christian bibles. Many other ancient religions contain similar stories, leading to one of two conclusions:

  • The story is true
  • Something else is going on here

Since I am fairly sure that Satan did not literally appear to a woman named Eve in the form of a snake in order to tempt Eve into rebelling against God’s first law, I suspect that something else is going on here. This article tends to confirm what I suspect: The Garden of Eden myth is an echo of our ancient lives as paleolithic humans. While life as a paleolithic hunter gather would have been harder than our current lives in some respects (shelter from the weather, for example), in many ways, paleolithic life was pretty idyllic. Once the agricultural revolution occurred (about 15,000 BC), for humans that embraced agriculture, life became much, much harder: Death rates from disease soared and lifespan plummeted. Although human numbers increased hugely, the quality of life of early neolithic humans was terrible. Thus, early neolithic humans (especially those displaced and enslaved by early neolithic empires like Sumeria, Accadia, Egypt, and, later, the Roman Empire) would have looked back upon the days of paleolithic life with incredible longing and nostalgia. This is the basic idea behind the Shadow World series of posts I have been writing. There is no doubt that paleolithic humans survived in large number into the time of the Roman Empire. (They still survive to this day in some areas like Australia.) Many of the “barbarians” displaced and enslaved by the Romans were paleolithic hunter-gather cultures which have disappeared today.

One such group that has always fascinated me is the Faerie. Yes, there actually were people known as the Faeries. They were described in detail by the American writer Parke Godwin in his exception book Firelord, no longer available in print, unfortunately. The Faerie were likely the original human inhabitants of the British Isles, and were still extent at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD. The movie The Eagle (an excellent film which is annoyingly not available on any digital form I have found) shows the collision between paleolithic humans in far northern Britain and the Roman Empire. I suspect they had the Faerie in mind when they made this film, although the race portrayed in the film is not a pygmy race, as the Faerie apparently were. Arthur was supposedly the child of a Faerie queen (Igraine) and a Roman centurion (Uther Pendragon).

The Faerie were regarded as magical. They lived in holes in the ground, had amazing woodcraft, herbology and the like, and were adamantly opposed to agriculture. They worshipped a Goddess named Lugh who was represented as the Earth. When someone plowed a field, the Faerie regarded it as wounding their Goddess. Also, the term “beyond the pale” refers to the circle of metal spikes that Roman folks would place around their villages to keep out the Faerie, who feared and avoided metal.

The fate of the Faerie was annoyingly typical: They were wiped out. Their genetics still survive in the descendants of Romans whose children were stolen and replaced by Faerie babies, a term known at the time as fostering (from which we get the term foster child). Since the Faerie were remarkable as midwives, the Roman women who lived in the British Ilses would often use them for helping with child birth. In lean years, the Faerie midwives would secretly kill the Roman baby and replace it with one of their own, knowing that the Romans would raise the child and feed it. Arthur’s mother, Igraine, was supposedly one of these foster children. Other than that, though, the Faerie, like most paleolithic cultures in the world, are all gone.

More later.

Lopo

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Lopo was old. He felt his years. They were beyond count. His village had little use for an amount that large: They simply called it “many”. He had lived for many years, and he knew it. He squatted before his fire pit, stirring the thin soup he had made with the squirrel Hana had brought him. Poor enough gift it was! He was hungry, and this squirrel was small. Still, it was something. And she was so grateful when he gave her son back to her, fully healed.

He was a Shaman. It had not always been so. Before, he had been one of the Young Men, hunting and chasing girls. That was how he met Lelu, his Other, curse her! She had become his Other, and born him six sons and four daughters. But when the village chose him as the Shaman, she became angry, and she left. She thought the village had little need of two shamans. And so she took her brood, and moved up the hill. She hated him now, may the Goddess curse her!

When he became an older man, but younger than he was now, Lelu and he had been happy together. He had been one of the Elders, and he sat in the Place of Meeting each night. When they could find the Sacred Herb, they burned the flowers and inhaled the smoke. Otherwise, they drank the Water of Life until they became stupid. Sometimes they would laugh so hard! The Water of Life was strong medicine! But not as strong as Sacred Herb. The smoke of the Sacred Herb burned, but it awakened the True Self, and touched the Real World.

And that was how it happened. He was at the tent of meeting, and Ralo had told them that the Water of Life that he was fermenting was ruined. Some monkeys had gotten into it, and broken the skin. Now it would be many days before they could drink the Water of Life again. Lopo had thought hard upon this. He asked this question: “Shouldn’t we then seek the Sacred Herb? Since the Water of Life is denied us, why not inhale the smoke of the Sacred Herb?”

After a shocked silence, the Elders had begun debating this question: Could they actually use the Sacred Herb without the Water of Life? They did not remember any time in the past when they had had one without the other. The Water of Life was such a daily part of their lives, that it was many days since anyone could remember being without it.

In the end, they decided to search for the Sacred Herb. Lopo was proud: His question had led the Elders to a new Path! This was the first time that he could remember them taking anything he had said seriously.

He knew where there was a patch of Sacred Herb, but it was beyond their range, and into the area that was used by their rival village: The Punta. For many days, the People and the Punta had lived in peace, but occasionally Lopo would venture onto the lands blessed by the Spirits of the Puntas and take Sacred Herb, possom, squirrels or some other food. He knew this was wrong, but since no one else knew about what he was doing, he did not care.

He found the patch. The Sacred Herb was there! It was flowering! He began to pick the flowers and stuff them into his loincloth.

He felt the spear hit his head behind his right ear. He did not know it then, but it pierced the hard part of his head, and his True Self began to leak out onto the ground. The Punta hunter who had attacked him ran away. He knew that the Punta would be very afraid of a blood feud if Lopo died. When the People found him, he was senseless and raving.

For weeks he hovered between the Shadow World and the Real World. He wandered on many strange paths and saw many visions. The People were afraid of his strange and delerious cries. After a while, he got better, although his eyes did not work anymore. Instead of seeing the things in the Shadow World, he simply saw a grey mist, and occasionally he had more visions.

Ultimately, the village Elders met and decided that there was nothing to be done except to make him a shaman. He was useless for anything else now. So they threw him out and made him live in the cave in the hillside overlooking their spring campsite. And then they began to bring him patients who they expected him to heal.

At first, he was completely useless: How ashamed he had been when he had failed to heal Shiro! The poor child simply had a case of pox. He knew how to heal that now, but at the time he had been completely stupid. Shiro’s mother Lina had come to him after Shiro died and had thrown dung at him. How his face had burned! She had walked up to him in tears and had struck him across the face. He stood and wept with her, feeling her loss, and knowing that he was the cause of it. He was ashamed.

It took a long time, but finally they had brought more patients, and he had improved. Now he was as good a shaman as Lelu, and maybe better. But Lelu still hated him for taking her place, and he doubted she would ever forgive him.

For now, life was good and the forest gave everything he needed. His People gave him their respect. He knew that he had a place with them, even if he was forever an outcast.

More later.

Ti

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Ti walked silently through the forest. The Great Light shown his face upon the forest floor, dappling Ti’s surroundings with brilliant light. Everywhere Ti looked, he saw the Spirits of the Real World. He knew the world he touched, hunted and moved in was merely a Shadow World. The Spirit World, that was the Reality. He greeted the Great Rock Spirit as he moved past the diving cliff. He looked down upon the River Spirit, which was one of his best friends: River provided him and his village with the blessings of fish and water. He knew that his village would be hurting right now without the gifts of the River Spirit. The Winter Spirit was upon the Shadow World, and food was scarce. Although it was eternal spring in the Real World, the evil Winter Spirit came and waged war against the forest. Only the Spring Spirit could defeat Winter. He longed for Spring to come again and bring life back to the Shadow World.

He thought about Chana, and his love for her. He wanted her again, although he knew that The Gift was still inside her. He hoped that she would conceive this time. Although only 13 summers had touched her dark skin, he knew that she would bear him many sons. Since the day that he had first touched her, his love for her had grown. It was a powerful thing: This love. It touched him deeply, and he knew that it was a gift of The Goddess.

His entire life was flooded and pregnant with spiritual power: Everything he touched, saw, smelled, tasted and heard spoke to him of one absolute reality. He was as sure of this as anything else in his life. He knew that the Real World was a more powerful reality than the Shadow World. He knew that his True Self lived within the Real World, and that he could feel the presence of his True Self, even if he could not always see him. He could sometimes actually speak to his True Self when he went on his vision quests.

His Spirit Guide could help him to contact his True Self. His Spirit Guide was a wolf named Allepo. Sometimes when he drank the juice that Lopo provided him, he would enter into Allepo, and for a time he could run and hunt with the wolf’s swift, fleet legs. How good it felt to run with the Air Spirit through the forest! Lopo was old and bleary with his eyes dark from the years. Yet he was a powerful shaman, and his potions were strong. Ti knew that Lopo was crazy: Who wouldn’t be? After all, Lopo was always dwelling with the Real World. As his eyes dimmed to this World of Shadow, the Real World became stronger to him. Now he was always talking and muttering to the spirits. He could be frightening! Yet Ti longed to run again as the wolf.

As Ti approached the village he heard the sounds of laughter. His entire life was bound up in this village: He had never seen another person other than those who dwelt in the village. Everyone he knew, everyone he had ever known, was a member of his own family. He did not think of himself as One. No. Rather, he thought of himself as The Village. It was the gift from The Goddess to his family.

His friend and brother Rox approached him, and told him excitedly: “You need to come now. We are going on a hunt!”

More later.