The Nomadic Alternative – Page 242

or vegetable food, as they occur on his peoples' wanderings. A boy of four or so comes under the guardianship of his father and learns from him to use his new found sense of orientation to co-ordinate the relationship between the movements of the stars, the cycles of vegetation and the migrations of animals. He grows up to love the tracks of his homeland more than any other place, knows and names every natural phenomenon within it, and a sequence of associations of form, texture, colour, taste and practical use infiltrates his mind.

But, unlike Proust, the young hunter does not have a mother problem. Once explorations start in earnest, she pushes her children away from her. Girls are sent to older sisters or grandmothers, and boys are encouraged in their recklessness. For exploration also marks the beginning of the fighting stage. Little boys forge strong friendships with each other, but they also fight. And the function of this fighting is to develop their wits and bodies into efficient hunting and defensive machines. The boys in turn have an extraordinary instinct for self-preservation and the mother offers no comfort to the cry-baby. As Popp-Serboianu wrote of the Rumanian gipsies,

"they do not prevent them doing the naughtiest things, and make no moral strictures, and let them form their characters by experience. They never prevent them fighting with other children, and pay no attention to tears, cries and wounds."

Sometimes, it is true, the mother lets older children suckle at the breast. But once boyhood starts she weans her son, very abruptly. I know several reports of mothers smearing their breasts with bitter foul-tasting substance to serve as firm warning that Stage I, The Apron Strings Phase, is over. If birth is the first initiation, weaning is the second. It is perhaps the most important initiation of all. For if it is incorrectly timed all successive stages will be displaced. If the early bonds of attachment are not promptly formed, the child will grow up rootless and egocentric. But if the mother persists in her doting over her son beyond the age of three or four at a time when he should be taken by the father for education,