Rain fell as a soft hushing blanket, thunder rolled in the distance in an almost comforting tone. To the south lay the bleak desert; this gave way to grasslands to the west, east, and north. A steep cliff was visible in the northern distance; some vast dark woodland loomed silently through the mists to the west. In the center, here, was the place where it all began. The place where the people came together.
The tribe barely existed. A handful of the strongest and smartest of the ape-folk, they had joined together and decided to begin something greater. Something beyond deadly hunts for dangerous animals, endless scavenging for roots and tubers. They didn’t know what exactly they would do. Only that there must be something to make the future better, easier, more enjoyable.
They decided to head east, towards where the land soon left off for sea. Here the group made their first settlement, a tiny camp that they all agreed was now “home”; a new dream of a fragile claim on the savage wilds. It wasn’t long, then, before the first of many new ideas took root. How was it, one of them reasoned, that the food grew again after they had taken it all. The idea spread, and different people began to try different things with plants; burying this part, pruning here, watering there. Soon a place was set aside where people would begin sowing the first seeds, seeing what grew and why and how.
Time went on in this way, with the people undisturbed, slowly getting the basics of agriculture. It began to seem as though they had found a place of lasting peace and bounty. Then one morning, one of the plant-tenders came with ominous news: an enormous mammoth, larger than any the oldest among them had ever seen, had come ambling down from around the northern cliffs. Would it attack them? Should they attack it? Some of the tribe expressed caution and avoidance, while others wanted to confront the beast and drive it from their peaceful country. The people had begun to feel they were the only true people in the world, and some of them thought it was time to show that they were masters of the beasts of the earth, no longer to live in fear of nature.
A large group of their best hunters set forth to at least observe the beast and determine the danger. It was with a mixture of relief and regret that they soon lost the trail of the mammoth, however. How such a massive creature eluded them came down to size; a single one of its steps took distance equal to many of their own, and over terrain that they would struggle across. The keener eyes observed as the last trace of its shadow disappeared into the distance. Most of the tribe thought this was the end of it. After a few days, though, the braver and more foolish voices won out, and a good portion of them ventured north in pursuit.
Passing through an open forest that filled the land between the north cliffs and a sea, they found more grasslands and cliffs beyond. They curved back to the west, encountering a rising land of flat, rocky desert; and suddenly there it was- the majestic creature itself, now seeming even larger than before, a mythic god of the earliest dreams of man. It stood near a river that flowed from the base of soaring mountains to the west, so massive that they dwarfed the great north cliffs, its own bulk massive in turn, gently swaying its colossal trunk from side to side.
It was within easy reach, a short run down the slope. As a group, they had no concrete idea of what to expect from an encounter; even some individuals weren’t sure what they hoped to achieve. Yet at this point the hunt had captured something already; their imagination. They were, each in their own way, spellbound to meet the mammoth.
