First, take a flint blade and carve yourself a throw-spear. Second, realise that is far too much hard work, and try your trusty sling-shot. Third, give up on stone-age technology and do the job in your imagination.
Recently I wrote a passage describing an aurochs hunt. It was cruel and grisly and dangerous and barbaric and necessary, and perhaps for those very reasons it busted me right out of writer’s block.
A big animal like a bull aurochs means hide and fat and hooves for glue. Enough meat to salt down some for winter when there’s little enough to eat in Mesolithic Scotland. If you have to hunt to live, that gives so much more meaning to eating meat. Yes, I am aware of my own weakness and hypocrisy––a meat-eater who can’t bear to hunt or fish for myself. But I can imagine a world where people lived in a deeper, truer, more spiritual relationship with the life and death of the animals they had to eat if they were to survive. If you could be ripped open by the animal you’re hunting, then you are holding your own life in your hand as you run towards it.
The thought energised my writing. Characters who’d been dragging their feet for days through smaller scenes like digging latrines, or carving a flute, found themselves running across the moors, casting sling-stones and spears, hearing the baying of their hounds, smelling the blood and sweat and anger of the aurochs bull.
And the characters didn’t react in the same way to their situation. There was a chance to develop the brutality of one who was eager and proud to be the First Spear, who saw the slaughter of the animal as a test of his prowess and a mark of his status. The other, conscious of the pressing need of food for the clan, aware of and grateful for what the bull gave them, reverent in the face of the animal’s death.
And still I’m shocked at myself, that it takes something bloodthirsty and wild to jolt me out of a patch of complacent writing, where not enough is at stake.
Trying to get closer to my characters’ experiences, I’ve spent some time today working out just how hard it would be to carve a spear with a piece of flint, and then harden it in the fire. It may take me several weeks to find a better flint knife and a timber that is more suitable than our native casuarina, but I’m going to keep at my stone-age experiments. Imagination may give me the picture in my head, but I want to have the scent of fresh bark and charcoal, the smooth touch of flint in my hand, the nicked fingers and flawed tools of my learning.