New Novel

Well, I've decided to post the opening to the new novel I'm working on at the moment. It's called provisionally, The Hunt for the Great Bear, and this is the prologue.

They got back as dark was falling, climbing the bank up from the river and through the trees leafless and brittle with glintings of frost. The last dull light of the sun cast a bloody glow across the snow they tramped through. They were a ragged band and starved-looking, in their skins and furs and with their spears held low, and their nerves were alert to the silence, knowing something was wrong before they saw it. They came out of the trees and stood looking and he stood with them. None of them spoke. Before them lay the torn down shanties, the bodies scattered upon the frozen ground. Dark blood in the snow. As if some storm had swept through from beyond the world’s edge. They went down among them and found none living. Some they could not even recognise. He found his mother. All had some loss. The bodies were cold and stiff and they had to cut them out of the ice so that they could place them together at the centre of what had once been their Shelter. Then they dragged across the tumbled and broken remnants of their shanties and piled them around the bodies. He made a nest of twigs and struck a spark with the edge of his blade and a stone, and the twigs smoked and crackled into flame and the blaze leapt up. It wasn’t long before the flames were roaring and they stood back for the fierce heat on their faces and sang with the flames their grief to sky. Through the night they watched as the funeral pyre burned and it was still dark when the flames died and they stood watching through the dark with the cold stars above and the moon glitter on the ice. It was not until first light that they made ready to leave, and a pale and dull-washed light it was. Nothing remained now of their Shelter, only grey ash and the ice melted where the fire had burned. There was a chill wind. Bones among the ashes too. The next snow would cover them and then there would be no sign that ever a a people were there. No sign or marker of them in the world. The world that they too were leaving, never to return. They had no care for that. Their only care was to hunt down the creature that had done this. To hunt it and track it and bring it down. The bear. The Great Bear of the wildness. So they took up their weapons and set off across the ice, towards the mountains and what might lie there and lie beyond. He went last and like them he did not turn his head. There were seven of them and he was the youngest. His name was Grubhunter.