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or under the tail.
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But they ran away then, because the second bull had decided to charge too. It shook the earth, and it
screamed through its uplifted proboscis.
Gribardsun's spear had been snapped off when the beast fell on it. He had only a stone axe, which he
took from his belt and threw. But, it might as well have been made of feathers. It rotated through the air
and its head struck the animal in the open mouth. It bounced out, and now the mammoth was
concentrating on him.
He turned and ran. As he did so, he looked for von Billmann, who had been on the left with the rifle.
He could see nothing of him and had no time to speculate where he was.
Though Gribardsun was very fast, he was not as swift as the mammoth. Its long legs covered the
ground faster than his could, and suddenly the trumpeting and thundering of the hoofs was close behind
him. With a yell he leaped to one side, and the mammoth reared up and whirled around with an
unbelievable, and terrifying, swiftness.
Gribardsun ran forward and through the front legs of the startled creature and then threw himself to
one side.
The mammoth whirled around him, stopped, and reversed its horizontal rotation on seeing the man
rolling away.
Angrogrim, yelling, ran in past Gribardsun and hurled his spear into the open mouth of the beast. Its
point disappeared into the pinkish flesh.
Gribardsun leaped up and ran off with the mammoth again pursuing him. Shivkaet launched a spear
from his atlatl not ten feet from the beast, and the shaft drove at least a foot into its side.
The mammoth, however, would not be turned aside. It had its heart set on trampling Gribardsun.
The Englishman looked to his right. The tribesmen were running toward them with the intention of
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hurling their spears at the beast. Beyond, Drummond was looking through the camera's viewfinder. He
was carrying a 32-caliber rifle with explosive bullets, but he seemed intent only on getting good pictures.
The yelling hunters swarmed in and the spears flew. One scraped Gribardsun's shoulder and another
plunged into the ground and he had to leap over it.
But a series of thuds told him that many had plunged into the mammoth. He looked behind him; the
beast had slowed down. Half a dozen shafts were sticking out from its sides, and one had entered a few
inches into its right front leg and lamed it.
Then the express rifle boomed out three times, and the beast, gouting blood from great holes in its
side, fell over. The impact made the earth quiver under Gribardsun's naked feet.
Drummond, his rifle still suspended on a strap over his shoulder, walked up and circled the beast, his
camera taking in all the details.
Von Billmann, looked distressed, ran up to the Englishman.
'I'm sorry I didn't shoot sooner,' he said. 'But I caught my heel on a rock and fell on my head. I was
stunned for a minute or so.'
He brushed the back of his head and showed Gribardsun the blood still welling from the cut.
Silverstein did not comment. The Englishman said, 'I realize the necessity of taking films. But didn't
you understand that I was in bad trouble?'
Silverstein flushed and said, 'No, I didn't. By the time I realized that von Billmann should be shooting,
it was too late. And then things happened so fast that I froze. But Robert did shoot then, and everything
seemed all right.'
'In the future, the cameraman will have to be a backup for the rifleman,' Gribardsun said. 'An alert
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backup.' He turned away. There was nothing more to say. Silverstein was an intelligent man and would
realize what Gribardsun could have said. Gribardsun was not sure that Silverstein had frozen because of
panic. He might have been hoping, consciously or unconsciously, that the mammoth would trample
Gribardsun.
The Englishman waved away the tribesmen who wanted to smear his forehead with the mammoth's
blood. He sterilized the cut on the German's head and sprayed it with pseudoskin. Then he accepted the
mammoth's tail and permitted the daubing.
The rest of the day was heavy work. The beasts were cut up into pieces small enough to haul. The
entire tribe, except for the sick and the very old, of whom there were few, helped to carry the meat in.
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