In some part of the world, some thousand years ago, some clan, some loner sitting aside while the rest of their people went hunting, circling bonfires or just kicking up dust in hopes that time passed by faster; some loner had nothing to do.
Let's say this loner is a little girl, seen only as the future raiser of more little girls. Thinking back, a threshold for allowing a barbaric eventfulness was expected to be highest in the women. So there sat this little girl, by the fire that fiercely burns the venison down to every cell; matter changing from life, to dead life, and then cooked for the prolongation of life. The little girl wondered if the meat specifically had to have belonged to a deer; a fair musing, fully aware of the lacking intelligence her clan's men possessed. Staring into the burning saw dust, watching it slowly rise, complementing the vapors of the meat, the girl wondered if this meat was that of a horse's.
She had heard earlier that the hunt that day was peculiar, more peculiar than most of their prior hunts. The meat did look tougher than venison and holding good to the girl's smile, there was nothing peculiar. 'A deer and a horse must have fallen in love', thought the innocent girl, was there any other way to look at it? A higher wit meant a higher chance of survival on a planet where the world was in rebellion against domestication. The little girl was smarter than the girls who schooled with the groups of fishes they scaled at night. Her mother worried. However, worry of her bearded, bear-like bread returning every night held greater circumstance to her. The girl did not bother herself with family or ties to her destined promises to posterity, no; the girl just watched the conflagration engulf the half-bred meat.
Once the meat was eaten, she ran towards the safest and deepest part of the forest she had found and claimed hers. No one bothered her there. No one knew she was there. Her clan followed the laws of the brute. 'Back before three dusks', was the only rule her father ever told her. Nature was subjected to teach the rest; morals, survival. And she ran. To the cave where only her breaths resonated and not the shrill cries of the mother who lost her son to the day's hunting trip. Illuminating the pathways of the cave by skillfully chipping rock on rock, she made her way to the furthest end of the cave; trepidation of what may be faced ahead did not quaver the puny brave heart. Treading calmly, picking up her pace with the familiarity of the walls, she reached the patch of land that was hers and hers alone. She smiled here. No one had seen her smile. She found no reason to smile around a group of men and women only phasing through days, eating sprigs and roots to keep forcing an existence so devoid of a nature to explore the vast realm. She yearned to meet people like her from different parts and eat their delicacies, see their men, see their art. Art. She thought to herself and smirked. Her people did not know art. From a clan of an easy ten thousand, how was she the only one who possessed man's greatest power?
She threw the flame towards the widest, incurved wall in the cave and almost cried at what her eyes beheld. Not being the first time seeing it, it always sprung an unsounded joy and despair in the girl. What ever could it be? She begged her stars to know. To all the gods known to her, she prayed to know what this was. A painting, an etching on the wall. There was no word for what she witnessed in her language. Then again, she thought, grunting and gesturing can't amount to a language. She cursed, still a thought.
It was a horse that she could ride on. Ride on it to another realm, another nation, another farm at least. It was a horse and that's as far as it could be called in her little head. She imagined. Man's greatest power wielded by the most innocent and honest mind; a child. Imagination, where putting a horn on a horse did not ridicule science, nor does it demean the possibility, even if conjured in the mind of some loner, sitting in a cave, in some part of the world, some thousand years ago, some clan.
