To Sally I say, “Tell me more about the Scavenger Folk.”
“Like animals, they were,” she says. “They could speak but only in grunts and belches. They were bad hunters and they ate dead things that they found on the ground, or stole the kills of others.”
“They smelled like garbage,” says Danny. “Like an old dump where everything was rotten. And they didn’t know how to paint or sculpt.”
“This was how they screwed,” says Marty, grabbing the nearest woman, pushing her down, pretending to hump her from behind. Everyone laughs, cheers, stamps his feet.
“And they walked like this,” says B.J., doing an ape-shuffle, banging his chest with his fists.
There’s a lot more, a lot of locker-room stuff about the ugly shaggy stupid smelly disgusting Scavenger Folk. How dirty they were, how barbaric. How the pregnant women kept the babies in their bellies twelve or thirteen months and they came out already hairy, with a full mouth of teeth. All ancient history, handed down through the generations by bards like Paul in the epics. None of them has ever actually seen a Scavenger. But they sure seem to detest them.
“They’re all dead,” Paul says. “They were killed in the migration wars long ago. That has to be a ghost out there.”
Of course I’ve guessed what’s up. I’m no archaeologist at all—West Point, fourth generation. My skills are in electronics, computers, time-shift physics. There was such horrible political infighting among the archaeology boys about who was going to get to go to the past that in the end none of them went and the gig wound up going to the military. Still, they sent me here with enough crash-course archaeology to be able to see that the Scavengers must have been what we call the Neanderthals, that shambling race of also-rans that got left behind in the evolutionary sweepstakes.
So there really had been a war of extermination between the slow-witted Scavengers and clever Homo sapiens here in Ice Age Europe. But there must have been a few survivors left on the losing side, and one of them, God knows why, is wandering around near this village.
Now I’m supposed to find the ugly stranger and capture him. Or kill him, I guess. Is that what Zeus wants from me? To take the stranger’s blood on my head? A very civilized tribe, they are, even if they do hunt huge woolly elephants and build houses out of their whitened bones. Too civilized to do their own murdering, and they figure they can send me out to do it for them.
“I don’t think he’s a Scavenger,” Danny says. “I think he’s from Naz Glesim. The Naz Glesim people have gray eyes. Besides, what would a ghost want with fish?”
Naz Glesim is a land far to the northeast, perhaps near what will someday be Moscow. Even here in the Paleolithic the world is divided into a thousand little nations. Danny once went on a great solo journey through all the neighboring lands: he’s a kind of tribal Marco Polo.
“You better not let the chief hear that,” B.J. tells him.
“He’ll break your balls. Anyway, the Naz Glesim people aren’t ugly. They look just like us except for their eyes.”
“Well, there’s that,” Danny concedes. “But I still think—”
Paul shakes his head. That gesture goes way back, too. “A Scavenger ghost,” he insists.
B.J. looks at me. “What do you think, Pumangiup?” That’s his name for me.
“Me?” I say. “What do I know about these things?”
“You come from far away. You ever see a man like that?”
“I’ve seen plenty of ugly men, yes.” The people of the tribe are tall and lean, brown hair and dark shining eyes, wide faces, bold cheekbones. If they had better teeth they’d be gorgeous. “But I don’t know about this one. I’d have to see him.”
Sally brings a new platter of grilled fish over. I run my hand fondly over her bare haunch. Inside this house made of mammoth bones nobody wears very much clothing, because the structure is well insulated and the heat builds up even in the dead of winter. To me Sally is far and away the best looking woman in the tribe, high firm breasts, long supple legs, alert, inquisitive face. She was the mate of a man who had to be killed last summer because he became infested with ghosts. Danny and B.J. and a couple of the others bashed his head in, by way of a mercy killing, and then there was a wild six-day wake, dancing and wailing around the clock. Because she needed a change of luck they gave Sally to me, or me to her, figuring a holy fool like me must carry the charm of the gods. We have a fine time, Sally and I. We were two lost souls when we came together, and together we’ve kept each other from tumbling even deeper into the darkness.
“You’ll be all right,” B.J. says. “You can handle it. The gods love you.”
“I hope that’s true,” I tell him.
Much later in the night Sally and I hold each other as though we both know that this could be our last time. She’s all over me, hot, eager. There’s no privacy in the bone-house and the others can hear us, four couples and I don’t know how many kids, but that doesn’t matter. It’s dark. Our little bed of fox-pelts is our own little world.
There’s nothing esoteric, by the way, about these people’s style of love-making. There are only so many ways that a male human body and a female human body can be joined together, and all of them, it seems, had already been invented by the time the glaciers came.
At dawn, by first light, I am on my way, alone, to hunt the Scavenger man. I rub the rough strange wall of the house of bones for luck, and off I go.
The village stretches for a couple of hundred yards along the bank of a cold, swiftly-flowing river. The three round bone-houses where most of us live are arranged in a row, and the fourth one, the long house that is the residence of Zeus and his family and also serves as the temple and house of parliament, is just beyond them. On the far side of it is the new fifth house that we’ve been building this past week. Further down, there’s a workshop where tools are made and hides are scraped, and then a butchering area, and just past that there’s an immense garbage dump and a towering heap of mammoth bones for future construction projects.
A sparse pine forest lies east of the village, and beyond it are the rolling hills and open plains where the mammoths and rhinos graze. No one ever goes into the river, because it’s too cold and the current is too strong, and so it hems us in like a wall on our western border. I want to teach the tribesfolk how to build kayaks one of these days. I should also try to teach them how to swim, I guess. And maybe a few years farther along I’d like to see if we can chop down some trees and build a bridge. Will it shock the pants off them when I come out with all this useful stuff? They think I’m an idiot, because I don’t know about the different grades of mud and frozen ground, the colors of charcoal, the uses and qualities of antler, bone, fat, hide, and stone. They feel sorry for me because I’m so limited. But they like me all the same. And the gods love me. At least B.J. thinks so.
I start my search down by the riverfront, since that’s where Jeanne saw the Scavenger yesterday. The sun, at dawn on this Ice Age autumn morning, is small and pale, a sad little lemon far away. But the wind is quiet now. The ground is still soft from the summer thaw, and I look for tracks. There’s permafrost five feet down, but the topsoil, at least, turns spongy in May and gets downright muddy by July. Then it hardens again and by October it’s like steel, but by October we live mostly indoors.
There are footprints all over the place. We wear leather sandals, but a lot of us go barefoot much of the time, even now, in 40-degree weather. The people of the tribe have long, narrow feet with high arches. But down by the water near the fish-nets I pick up a different spoor, the mark of a short, thick, low-arched foot with curled-under toes. It must be my Neanderthal. I smile. I feel like Sherlock Holmes. “Hey, look, Marty,” I say to the sleeping village. “I’ve got the ugly bugger’s track. B.J.? Paul? Danny? You just watch me. I’m going to find him faster than you could believe.”
Those aren’t their actual names. I just call them that, Marty, Paul, B.J., Danny. Around here everyone gives everyone else his own private set of
names. Marty’s name for B.J. is Ungklava. He calls Danny Tisbalalak and Paul is Shibgamon. Paul calls Marty Dolibog. His name for B.J. is Kalamok. And so on all around the tribe, a ton of names, hundreds and hundreds of names for just forty or fifty people. It’s a confusing system. They have reasons for it that satisfy them. You learn to live with it.
A man never reveals his true name, the one his mother whispered when he was born. Not even his father knows that, or his wife. You could put hot stones between his legs and he still wouldn’t tell you that true name of his, because that’d bring every ghost from Cornwall to Vladivostok down on his ass to haunt him. The world is full of angry ghosts, resentful of the living, ready to jump on anyone who’ll give them an opening and plague him like leeches, like bedbugs, like every malign and perverse bloodsucking pest rolled into one
We are somewhere in western Russia, or maybe Poland. The landscape suggests that: flat, bleak, a cold grassy steppe with a few oaks and birches and pines here and there. Of course a lot of Europe must look like that in this glacial epoch. But the clincher is the fact that these people build mammoth-bone houses. The only place that was ever done was Eastern Europe, so far as anybody down the line knows. Possibly they’re the oldest true houses in the world.
What gets me is the immensity of this prehistoric age, the spans of time. It goes back and back and back and all of it is alive for these people. We think it’s a big deal to go to England and see a cathedral a thousand years old. They’ve been hunting on this steppe thirty times as long. Can you visualize 30,000 years? To you, George Washington lived an incredibly long time ago. George is going to have his 300th birthday very soon. Make a stack of books a foot high and tell yourself that that stands for all the time that has gone by since George was born in 1732. Now go on stacking up the books. When you’ve got a pile as high as a ten-story building, that’s 30,000 years.
A stack of years almost as high as that separates me from you, right this minute. In my bad moments, when the loneliness and the fear and the pain and the remembrance of all that I have lost start to operate on me, I feel that stack of years pressing on me with the weight of a mountain. I try not to let it get me down. But that’s a hell of a weight to carry. Now and then it grinds me right into the frozen ground.
The flatfooted track leads me up to the north, around the garbage dump, and toward the forest. Then I lose it. The prints go round and round, double back to the garbage dump, then to the butchering area, then toward the forest again, then all the way over to the river. I can’t make sense of the pattern. The poor dumb bastard just seems to have been milling around, foraging in the garbage for anything edible, then taking off again but not going far, checking back to see if anything’s been caught in the fish net, and so on. Where’s he sleeping? Out in the open, I guess. Well, if what I heard last night is true, he’s as hairy as a gorilla; maybe the cold doesn’t bother him much.
Now that I’ve lost the trail, I have some time to think about the nature of the mission, and I start getting uncomfortable.
I’m carrying a long stone knife. I’m out here to kill. I picked the military for my profession a long time ago, but it wasn’t with the idea of killing anyone, and certainly not in hand-to-hand combat. I guess I see myself as a representative of civilization, somebody trying to hold back the night, not as anyone who would go creeping around planning to stick a sharp flint blade into some miserable solitary tramp.
But I might well be the one that gets killed. He’s wild, he’s hungry, he’s scared, he’s primitive. He may not be very smart, but at least he’s shrewd enough to have made it to adulthood, and he’s out here earning his living by his wits and his strength. This is his world, not mine. He may be stalking me even while I’m stalking him, and when we catch up with each other he won’t be fighting by any rules I ever learned. A good argument for turning back right now.
On the other hand if I come home in one piece with the Scavenger still at large, Zeus will hang my hide on the bone-house wall for disobeying him. We may all be great buddies here but when the chief gives the word, you hop to it or else. That’s the way it’s been since history began and I have no reason to think it’s any different back here.
I simply have to kill the Scavenger. That’s all there is to it.
I don’t want to get killed by a wild man in this forest, and I don’t want to be nailed up by a tribal court-martial either. I want to live to get back to my own time. I still hang on to the faint chance that the rainbow will come back for me and take me down the line to tell my tale in what I have already started to think of as the future. I want to make my report.
The news I’d like to bring you people up there in the world of the future is that these Ice Age folk don’t see themselves as primitive. They know, they absolutely know, that they’re the crown of creation. They have a language—two of them, in fact—they have history, they have music, they have poetry, they have technology, they have art, they have architecture. They have religion. They have laws. They have a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, that will go on working for thousands more. You may think it’s all grunts and war-clubs back here, but you’re wrong. I can make this world real to you, if I could only get back there to you.
But even if I can’t ever get back, there’s a lot I want to do here. I want to learn that epic of theirs and write it down for you to read. I want to teach them about kayaks and bridges, and maybe more. I want to finish building the bone-house we started last week. I want to go on horsing around with my buddies B.J. and Danny and Marty and Paul. I want Sally. Christ, I might even have kids by her, and inject my own futuristic genes into the Ice Age gene pool.
I don’t want to die today trying to fulfill a dumb murderous mission in this cold bleak prehistoric forest.
The morning grows warmer, though not warm. I pick up the trail again, or think I do, and start off toward the east and north, into the forest. Behind me I hear the sounds of laughter and shouting and song as work gets going on the new house, but soon I’m out of earshot. Now I hold the knife in my hand, ready for anything. There are wolves in here, as well as a frightened half-man who may try to kill me before I can kill him.
I wonder how likely it is that I’ll find him. I wonder how long I’m supposed to stay out here, too—a couple of hours, a day, a week?—and what I’m supposed to use for food, and how I keep my ass from freezing after dark, and what Zeus will say or do if I come back empty-handed.
I’m wandering around randomly now. I don’t feel like Sherlock Holmes any longer.
Working on the bone-house, that’s what I’d rather be doing now. Winter is coming on and the tribe has grown too big for the existing four houses. B.J. directs the job and Marty and Paul sing and chant and play the drum and flute, and about seven of us do the heavy labor.
“Pile those jawbones chin down,” B.J. will yell, as I try to slip one into the foundation the wrong way around. “Chin down, bozo! That’s better.” Paul bangs out a terrific riff on the drum to applaud me for getting it right the second time. Marty starts making up a ballad about how dumb I am, and everyone laughs. But it’s loving laughter. “Now that backbone over there,” B.J. yells to me. I pull a long string of mammoth vertebrae from the huge pile. The bones are white, old bones that have been lying around a long time. They’re dense and heavy. “Wedge it down in there good! Tighter! Tighter!” I huff and puff under the immense weight of the thing, and stagger a little, and somehow get it where it belongs, and jump out of the way just in time as Danny and two other men come tottering toward me carrying a gigantic skull.
The winter-houses are intricate and elaborate structures that require real ingenuity of design and construction. At this point in time B.J. may well be the best architect the world has ever known. He carries around a piece of ivory on which he has carved a blueprint for the house, and makes sure everybody weaves the bones and skulls and tusks into the structure just the right way. There’s no shortage of construction materials. After 30,000 years of hunting mam
moths in this territory, these people have enough bones lying around to build a city the size of Los Angeles.
The houses are warm and snug. They’re round and domed, like big igloos made out of bones. The foundation is a circle of mammoth skulls with maybe a hundred mammoth jawbones stacked up over them in fancy herringbone patterns to form the wall. The roof is made of hides stretched over enormous tusks mounted overhead as arches. The whole thing is supported by a wooden frame and smaller bones are chinked in to seal the openings in the walls, plus a plastering of red clay. There’s an entranceway made up of gigantic thighbones set up on end. It may all sound bizarre but there’s a weird kind of beauty to it and you have no idea, once you’re inside, that the bitter winds of the Pleistocene are howling all around you.
The tribe is semi-nomadic and lives by hunting and gathering. In the summer, which is about two months long, they roam the steppe, killing mammoths and rhinos and musk oxen, and bagging up berries and nuts to get them through the winter. Toward what I would guess is August the weather turns cold and they start to head for their village of bone houses, hunting reindeer along the way. By the time the really bad weather arrives—think Minnesota-and-a-half—they’re settled in for the winter with six months’ worth of meat stored in deep-freeze pits in the permafrost. It’s an orderly, rhythmic life. There’s a real community here. I’d be willing to call it a civilization. But—as I stalk my human prey out here in the cold—I remind myself that life here is harsh and strange. Alien. Maybe I’m doing all this buddy-buddy nickname stuff simply to save my own sanity, you think? I don’t know.
If I get killed out here today the thing I’ll regret most is never learning their secret religious language and not being able to understand the big historical epic that they sing every night. They just don’t want to teach it to me. Evidently it’s something outsiders aren’t meant to understand.
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