Taking Root by the River
Wind, campfire and river sounds change with every scene, and the music follows the story.
Long, long ago, the people of the Paleolithic Age followed the animals and gathered fruit, moving with the seasons. What protected them from the cold and the dark was fire. Then the long, long Ice Age came to an end: the ice melted, the seas rose, and the land grew warm.
Characters
She dreams of the sea
leads the group
potter
a dugout canoe
best friend
When the Ice Age ended, forests grew thick across the Korean Peninsula.
Acorns ripened on the oaks, and the rivers and seas teemed with fish and shellfish.
And people began
to fire clay.
The west coast of Jeju. People still moved with the seasons, but they knew how to take pots out of the fire.
Now they could cook their food. Tough roots and shellfish alike became a bowl of soup.
Thousands of years later.
A group of people stopped
by the Han River.
A band that had long wandered with the seasons reached a riverbank where water was close and fish were plentiful.
People dug hollows in the ground, raised posts, and covered them with roofs of reeds and grass.
in summer?
Sunk halfway into the earth, a pit house was less cold in winter and less hot in summer.
A fire always burned in the hearth at the heart of the house.
Roll clay into long, thin coils and stack them up one by one, and you get a pot.
The pots, dried well in the sun, were placed in a wood fire to be fired.
In autumn, the whole village went to the oak forest. Acorns were the food that would carry them through the long winter.
The plentiful acorns they gathered were stored in pots and in pits dug in the ground, and taken out to eat all winter long.
On winter nights, Mom spun thread with a spindle whorl, and Grandma mended nets with a bone needle.
That night, Darae dreamed of the sea.
The sea Darae dreamed of.
By that sea, too,
people had villages.
The people of the coast ate shellfish and threw the leftover shells in one spot.
The shells piled up and up until they became a shell mound.
Now and then, visitors even came from a big island across the sea.
The people of the east coast chased something bigger. They went out in dugout canoes to hunt whales.
People carved those stories into the rock, so they would never be erased.
Back to Darae’s village by the Han River.
That winter was unusually long.
Grandma never saw the spring.
Beside her they buried the shell bracelet Grandma had treasured, and a pot full of acorns.
So that she would not go hungry in the next world.
People believed that spirits dwelled in the sun and moon, and in rivers and great rocks.
A shaman, said to connect heaven and people, prayed that the grain would ripen well again this year.
In spring, they broke the soil with stone hoes and sowed seeds of grains like foxtail millet and barnyard millet.
really turns into grain?
Dad charred the inside of a big pine log with fire, then scraped it out with a sharpened stone adze.
Once they had the new boat, Dad and Uncle cast their nets into the river every dawn.
As summer passed, the millet heads turned golden and bowed.
The harvested grain was placed on a grinding slab and ground fine with a grinding stone.
The villagers were one family, bound by blood. Everything they harvested, they shared.
The village elder led the work, but ordered no one around.
Not yet did anyone
rule over anyone else.
When the autumn harvest was over, Dad took Darae in the new boat and went down the river.
It was the sea Grandma had longed so much to see.
Darae grew up, became a mother, and then a grandmother.
Darae’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter…
And so the river flowed on
for thousands of years.
Then one autumn, strangers came from the north.
Something the man in front held up flashed in the sunlight.
Not stone, not wood, but something that shone like the sun.
The age of bronze was approaching.
The riverside people who fired clay, sowed seeds and dreamed of the sea.
From the day the shining blade appeared,
the world began to change.
