"H. Beam Piper - First Cycle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

of the uplands began. Such parties would camp and then divide up to hunt and smoke meat, and quarry
and chip stone, returning to the delta country before the next flood season with their spoils. Sometimes
they would return again and again, bringing their families. Some groups decided to stay, building their
tree-houses high and taking chances with the floods. And so permanent villages began to appear along
the tributary streams of the big river.

The pirogues which had served so well in the coastal swamps were too clumsy for the smaller streams
and too heavy to carry over frequent portages. Some of the upland forests were too open for building
tree-houses, but there was no need for them on ground always above flood-level. A house on the ground
could be built strong enough to resist all but the largest animalsтАФand those were all herbivores. So they
began to build huts of poles and bark, and fence them with pole stockades interwoven with thornbrush.
They used their basket-weaving skills to construct lighter boats, covering them with skins treated with
animal fats and tree-resins. And, while bending split wood for boat-frames, they invented the bow.

With these new skills in transportation and defense and hunting, they spread through the uplands,
increasing in numbers as more of their young survived to reach maturity. Stockaded forest villages
appeared at portage-places and the juncture of streams. Canoes and parties on foot pressed up the
rivers and along the game-trails. These people no longer called themselves simply "the Navva." They
were "Nawadrov," the Forest People, to distinguish themselves from "Nawa-zorf," the Swamp People.

Crossing mountain after mountain, they came at last to the High Ridge, with its drop in three bench-like
stages to the plains two kilometers below. Here they found the blue-black Wahanawa, the Not-People.
Survivors of one of the races of the past, these were cave-dwellers who had progressed no further than
fire and crudely chipped stone hand-axes. At first, when they came swarming out of the rocks to attack,
they were feared. When it was seen that they would just mill around stupidly while they were shot down
with arrows, they came to be despised. But it was generations before they were exterminated and the
Navvadrov could descend from the High Ridge into the open veldt beyond.

In the swamps, the Navvazorf had begun building their houses on piles, independent of the trees. They
constructed silt-traps and levees of earth packed between woven brush fences, and thus filled in selected
areas of the swamps. The mudflats widened, and on them were planted the wild grasses whose seeds
they ground into flour, and tubers to roast along with their fish and meat. They found fruit trees and
tended them and learned to prune them. Weapons and boats and fishing-tackle improved; the bark fibers
of which they made ropes were woven into mats, and then cloth.

Hunting parties still went up the river; there they met and traded with their cousins the Navvadrov,
bringing home the bow and the art of making pots from baked clay. In return the Navvadrov received
skin bags of flour, and dried fish, and shell, and mats, and cloth. The Navvadrov themselves had made
something of a beginning at agriculture; they cultivated certain plants to attract game to their area, and
soon progressed from this to planting food-crops for themselves. After observing the effects of a few
accidental fires on the wild grasslands, they learned to use fire as a tool to clear land for planting.

The introduction of pottery among the Navvazorf further speeded the progress of both peoples. Jars
offish-oil and fermented grain beverages went up the river, along with flour, grain, dried fish, and cloth, to
be exchanged for flint and obsidian and animal-skins. A regular trading-place came into being on the flat
river-beach at the mouth of one of the larger tributaries; from a temporary camp it became a permanent
village. Navvadrov families settled there, hunting and farming between visits of the down-river traders.
Long sheds were erected to house trade-goods, storage paid for in kind. Bows and arrows were made
there; traded skins were sewn into robes, and stone tools were finished and set and reset into wooden
handles. The place came to be called AmarushтАФliterally, Where We Sit and Barter.