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Caoimhín had just felled a stag when he heard the sound. A soft voice whispering on the morning air. He was in a thicket of shrubs and trees, and the stag was a lucky catch. The first hint of cold was in the air, and this would help feed their clan well for days. The fun part would be hoisting it back to their settlement.
That was where Mícheál came in handy. He had developed the idea of a post to slip between the stag's bound hooves, determined the best thing to do next would be tie its antlers to the post, and had arranged padded props to make it keep high enough not to drag any part of the stag on the ground. He was also willing to help carry it, but he had not yet been through enough summers to end him being on the scrawny side. So Caoimhín had sent him back to the settlement to have someone bigger and stronger come to help. It was not long after when he heard the sound of...
A lone female voice singing.
Nothing unusual about that. Women often sang as they worked. They used it as a way to keep track of each other and let their children know where they were as well as to make the day's chores less tiring. But they were usually in groups.
Caoimhín had to keep with the stag's body, so that wolves or hawks could not tear into it, but the voice was calling to him. It was too unusual...and too familiar. He listened carefully, and determined the sound came from a pond on the other side of the thicket. Near to where the water flowed past the tree named Aoibhinn.
Which made no sense. It was farther up the stream than their women liked to go, and besides...they did not fish; men did. Women gathered berries and planted barley and washed tunics and tended to children as they sewed and tanned hides, while men handled the challenge of casting nets and hauling in their catch or hunting food for winter and carrying it back to be made use of.
He chuckled to himself. If Mícheál heard him speaking that belief, there'd have been an argument. The boy was foolish in his idea that women could do anything a man can do.
"I have helped our mother repair our hutch," he'd snapped, "and she chased away a fox that tried to take our chickens while you and Da were out enjoying yourselves on a hunt."
"A hunt is not fun," Caoimhín had snapped, in response. "It's very hard. Tracking beasts for days only for them to get away before you can throw your spear. Carrying those we do manage to catch back on our backs."
"Of course. That's why you take skins filled with Mead and spin tall tales around the fires, at night. It's so hard."
"Wait till I take you on a hunt. You'll see."
"I'm happy to go on the next one," he'd said, far too nicely. "I have an idea for how to make it even easier for you."
Caoimhín had to laugh. "And already you're telling us how to do it."
Mícheál was an unusual boy. His head filled with thoughts and ideas. Their mother relied on him, greatly, to help her keep the settlement in order when the men were away, and the young ones amused. Of course, his sisters had often treated him like a pet, but it had been his ideas that protected their clan from a raid by an unknown group of men, who'd come ashore, not far away. Dark, ugly men who stank of too being long away from the earth. One of the older men who was keeping watch over the area near the water had seen them arrive and brought the alarm.
Too many of the clan's men were gone to the hunt for a good defense to be set up, so first the women and children were made safe in the cave under Feidlimid's thick base, where its roots intertwined and hid the opening even better. Then Mícheál had convinced their mother that slaughtering and roasting a couple of pigs would make for better protection.
When the Dark Men had appeared at the settlement, the smell of the sizzling meat had caught their attention. Granted, their language was strange, but some words were similar enough to get the point across, and being more hungry than anything, the men had happily feasted and drunk and laughed. They had even worked with Mícheál to make the stone spearheads Caoimhín used better. By the time the hunting party returned, they were almost part of the clan.
When questioned by Caoimhín about what he had done and why, the boy's response had been, "It was far better than trying to kill them all; we'd have been slaughtered."
Their father had praised Mícheál for his quick thinking, and had brought him along on the first hunt after the cold was gone, despite Caoimhín's protests. The only thing positive about that experience was, he'd been less trouble than expected.
But it seemed the long nights that came and the harsh cold and the white flakes of water drifting from the sky was not to the new men's liking. So most of them left on the first warm, clear day.
Two remained because each had each joined with a woman of the clan and soon would be a family. They’d happily helped on the hunts, and what was better...they had accepted Mícheál almost like a brother and kept him busy.
So it had worked out. Fortunately.
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