by John Darnton
Matt charged behind the fleeing creatures. When he reached the main cavern it was empty. He saw the pit and was about to go to it when a voice called to him from behind.
“Matt, don’t. It’s horrible. Kellicut’s body.”
He took Susan in his arms and held her for a long time. She was quivering. He was still holding her moments later when Sergei rushed into the cavern, along with Hurt-Knee, Longtooth, and the others who had been waiting in the hideaway. They resumed the chase, rushing through empty tunnels and past hearths abandoned only moments before, until they came to the entrance, the very place where Matt, Susan, Van, and Rudy had first caught sight of the creatures so long ago.
They drew up side by side and watched from the mouth of the cave as the renegades, still in panic, thrashed about outside in the pits of snow, flailing about like wounded animals. The creatures struck out wildly, even hitting each other and sending driblets of blood upon the churning snow. Matt and Susan saw Kee-wak rising up in the middle of the chaos, still a figure of commanding power.
Kee-wak stood tall and those around him fell away. In a moment forever frozen, he lifted up his chin and turned his vicious gaze upon Matt and Susan and Sergei. In a single instant all became clear to him. His blood raged at the treachery. He screamed, his head thrown back. Then very calculatingly, he raised up the holster over his head and took the gun in hand. He turned it this way and that, poked and pulled, until finally he hit the trigger. The explosion roared off into the distance. The bullet flew off harmlessly into the snow. But it was followed by another and then another.
And then came a different sound, a deeper, rumbling sound, almost like an earthquake. It grew and came closer and grew again until the mountainside itself was trembling. Then down from above came a thunderous rush of snow, falling like a glacier.
“Look out!” shouted Matt. “Avalanche!”
He and the others fell back inside the cave. But in the split second before they did, they looked out again and spotted Kee-wak, with the heavy snow raining down upon him. Kee-wak looked upward, and in his final comprehension, he stood tall, bared his teeth, and opened his throat. Out poured a long guttural howl of rage. It was a ghostly sound, bitter and anguished; it seemed to echo back through time, through centuries, through the millennia. Then the snow stopped falling and all was quiet.
28
Matt and Susan awoke with the sun already high in the sky and gathered up their things to prepare to leave. Everything they had fit easily into their rucksacks except for their windbreakers, which they carried. They would need them for the descent on the other side of the mountain. They looked around their bower one last time.
“In a crazy way, I’m going to miss it here,” said Susan.
“Crazy is right,” Matt replied.
“What do you think we should do about publishing?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been wondering about that. Obviously, if we write anything, this place is finished. Even if we disguise it, sooner or later, people will come. Kellicut was right—at least about that.”
“I agree. But I hate to think of all we’ve learned and all we know just going to waste. Think of science. Isn’t there any way we can communicate it or hand it down to later generations?”
“Not that I can come up with,” Matt said. “Not unless this society disappears sometime in the future and we have no way of knowing when that happens—if it happens.”
Susan shook her head in frustration. “How can I ever read another paper about Neanderthal? Or write one, for that matter?”
“You may have to branch out,” joked Matt. “Australopithecus. Homo habilis.”
“Or my new favorite. Homo erectus.”
They laughed.
Sergei waited near the fire pit. He had even fewer belongings than they did and was anxious to get going. But they had one last important function to perform, and the hominids had been preparing for it all morning. Kellicut’s body had been brought from the cave pit and was lying naked on a slab of rock, his head propped in place but still slightly sunken. Nearby a huge bonfire was blazing, crackling twenty feet into the air and sending up shivers of heat waves that made the clouds dance in the blue sky.
Matt looked around the village. “They’re throwing everything into the fire. Look, they’re destroying their huts, everything.”
“That’s because they’re moving up inside the mountain,” said Sergei. “They’re taking over the cave vacated by the others.” He shrugged. Matt and Susan exchanged looks. “I guess they like indoor living,” Sergei said.
The whole village turned out for the funeral. Susan was relieved to see that the population was still large, as she had feared that the earthquake and raid had decimated it. But women and children and others who must have taken refuge in the forest turned up until the congregation gathered around Kellicut’s body extended beyond the central clearing.
A place of honor was reserved for Matt, Susan, and Sergei. Behind them the young men with hollow logs perched across their legs sent up a sound of slow, mournful syncopation, and others danced in that strange, lugubrious way, turning their knees and elbows at odd angles. The fire roared ever higher until finally Dark-Eye emerged from his hut, bearing again the shell filled with oil. He trod upon a pathway of embers that was laid down for him and thrust the shell in the fire. He walked over to Kellicut’s body with a long sliver of flint in one hand and placed the sharp tip next to the nose.
“You may want to look away,” Matt told Sergei, but he could tell by Sergei’s gasp a moment later that he had not heeded the advice.
Dark-Eye retrieved the shell from the flames and poured the scalding oil onto Kellicut’s chest and legs. Then the body was wrapped in thick vine leaves and tied like a bundle, and as the drummers sped up their pounding the grave tenders materialized to carry it off. They placed it upon a newly fashioned bier that rested upon logs, crudely hewn to work as wheels.
As they left, Dark-Eye retreated into his hut with his pouch across his shoulder, ready to add Kellicut’s eyes to those of the other tribal members that preceded him.
“Okay,” said Sergei. “I’ve been patient long enough. Tell me everything. How did you pull this off?”
They had just finished a meal, their last in the valley, and were relaxing before starting the long trek out. Matt was lying down, his head resting upon his arms, looking up at the sky, and Susan was stretched out nearby, her legs extended straight and her upper body raised on both elbows.
“There’s not that much to tell,” she said. “Have you heard of the Khodzant Enigma?” Sergei shook his head. “It’s a pictograph. It turned up not far from here sometime in the last century. Part of it was missing, so no one could decipher its meaning. They didn’t have the original so they didn’t even know how old it was. If they did, they wouldn’t have believed it. It would have been like finding the stone tablet of the Ten Commandments.
“Our first time in the cave, running away from those creatures, we saw it painted on one of the walls. Only of course it was complete. Later I went back to study it. It depicted a battle, or rather a series of battles, between two implacable foes. On one side was Homo sapiens, us. On the other, Homo neanderthalensis. At some point, the two sides come together. There’s a peace council, weapons being thrown down. But on the way, Homo sapiens pulls a fast one. The soldiers rig pit traps to catch the Neanderthals, and it works. They’re the victors, though not through a fair fight. It’s a victory of cunning. With me so far?”
“So you mean to say there was one single battle? And one single trick wiped out all the Neanderthals?”
“No, not quite. There was probably an endless round of battles. They may have extended over years, scores of years, maybe centuries. But the outcome was usually the same: Homo sapiens won. In other words, the Enigma is not a single narrative out of the past, it’s a visual metaphor an explanation for the destruction—or near destruction—of an entire species. It’s intended as the embodiment of a historical lesson
. It’s teaching something. It is telling the tiny relic bands that live on through the ages, Don’t forget; there is something you should know about Homo sapiens.”
“And that is—”
“That he is duplicitous. That he cheats. That he lies. And therefore that he always wins.”
Matt spoke up. “And so if you yourself are to survive, you must learn from him. You must become like him.”
“The question that was always asked,” said Susan, “the question that intrigued archaeologists and paleontologists and everyone else from the moment that first human-looking skull was found in the Neander Valley a century and a half ago and identified as belonging to another species, was: Why me and not him? Why did we survive while he died out? He was as smart as we are. He was stronger. He was probably more numerous, over a million at least. He lived through the horrors of the Ice Age throughout Europe and Asia and was around for some two hundred thousand years. What happened to him? What critical trait did he lack?”
“And what was it?”
“Deception. The ability to deceive. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“And it’s a learnable trait or they wouldn’t have bothered to instruct,” said Matt. “But it’s not an easy one to pass on. You should have seen how long it took me to teach them that it was easier to capture an animal in an ambush than to stand in its way and kill it with a spear.”
“How did you come up with the plan?”
“It just came to me,” said Matt. “When Susan was captured, I realized I had to come up with a strategy. The numbers and brute strength were on their side, so I needed a trick. I needed deceitfulness to even up the score. I sensed that that was what was at the heart of the Enigma, that was its secret message.”
“You sensed it?” asked Susan, with a smile.
“Yes. It just came to me. A fit of inspiration.”
Susan smiled again.
“Okay,” said Sergei. “So you decide you can trick them to save Susan. How did you come up with the Trojan horse?”
“The oldest trick in the world. So perfect it’s every kid’s favorite Greek story. I knew from looking at their godhead that they couldn’t turn down the impulse to possess it. If I could make the replica close enough to the original, they would take it into the cave.”
“Then why didn’t you put fighters inside?”
“That’s the tricky part—in more ways than one. My strategy relied ultimately on Kee-wak’s being able to figure it out, at least halfway. I began with the importance of the Enigma. Why was it so essential for them to preserve it? Because of the lesson it taught: deception. If the creatures are so determined to be on the lookout for deceit, they should find it, I figured. Set a trap that they can solve. Let them undermine it. And then put a trap within the trap. It’s simply raising deception to the next level.”
“Of course,” said Sergei.
“It’s the kind of thing we humans do as second nature. That’s what chess is all about. Or the arms race. Fake and counter-fake. Levels of dissembling and misrepresentation reaching up to the sky. Tactical deception is what the psychologists call it.”
“Like those experiments with chimps,” added Susan. “A chimp can learn to deceive on one level—say, to hide bananas from a stronger chimp in a box and pretend they’re not there. The second chimp can learn deception on the second level—to pretend nothing’s wrong and spy on the first chimp until he opens the box. But chimps have never been able to achieve a third level of deception—figuring out that they’re being spied on and opening the wrong box.”
“That’s right,” said Matt. “I assumed that Kee-wak could not reach the higher level. He had learned the lesson of human mendacity, because that’s what the Enigma taught him, but he had no idea of the depths of that mendacity.”
“But how did you get him to think there were fighters inside?”
“First, because he was predisposed to. And second because he would obviously read it with the special power. That’s why I asked you to build the hideaway and that’s why we left the hominids inside it, for Kee-wak to enter them and see what they saw: semidarkness with slips of light filtering in between the branches.”
“What about those sounds from the godhead?”
“The finishing touch. I made a tape for Susan’s tape deck with my own recorder. I left it blank for half an hour. Then I inserted noises of alarm that I recorded from the hominids weeks ago. And for good measure, I added the works of one of our most distinguished musicians.” He smiled at Susan, who smiled back. “The rest was easy, rigging it up to go off. I put the tape deck between two slats of wood in the belly. I turned the volume up, pressed the on button, and inserted a wooden wedge so it wouldn’t release. I attached the wedge to a wire, ran it out the back, and fixed it to a stake in the ground. You move the structure and—bang!—half an hour later you’ve got hominids screaming.”
“How did you know that Kee-wak would burn it?”
“It’s a natural way to destroy something once you’ve hauled it into a cavern lighted by flaming torches. Especially if you’re suspicious of it to begin with.”
“And the fire set off the flares that you put behind the eyes and mouth?”
“Exactly.”
“I have to say, you Americans are even more devious than we are.”
“We were raised on Uncle Remus.”
“What’s that?”,
“Never mind. Just watch out if you hear somebody say, ‘Please don’t throw me in that briar patch.’ ”
They made their good-byes as best they could. A group of hominids walked with them up to the cave, led by Hurt-Knee, falling into his role of guide. Longtooth, now decked out in marks of red ocher and charcoal that streaked his face and chest, did not linger long. He was about to lead his group of young hunters on an expedition through the valley, where the animals, never having been hunted, were easy prey. The youths were all painted like him, and equipped with an array of spears, axes, and clubs. Longtooth himself proudly carried Sergei’s bow with the quiver of arrows upon his back, a gift.
Traversing the tunnels, they saw that Sergei was right: The hominids were moving in and taking over the abandoned hearths and smaller chambers scattered along the side passageways. They usurped the animal hides that were being cured on the walls and the ones that were spread before the fires for sleeping.
“Matt,” said Susan. “Have you noticed that the children are splitting up into smaller groups? Do you think this new living space is imposing its own logic on the social groupings?”
“If you mean do I think they’ve just invented the family, the answer is no.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, as you well know, the family was a division of labor that began when the men went off hunting and the women stayed home to tend the children. Not enough of the men are hunters yet. It was in the first textbooks we read.”
They passed a small chamber where an adult male and an adult female were tending a small fire. “Guess they’re not up on the literature,” Susan remarked.
When the group came to the main chamber, Susan ducked away for a few minutes. Matt assumed that she wanted to see the pit where she had been held by Kee-wak, but instead she went to the sacred chamber for a last look at the Enigma painting. She walked over to the final panel and fixed upon the solitary figure there. No, she had not been wrong. The artist had captured the emotion of the moment brilliantly: the defiant posture stretching upward but already stooping under the weight of the earth pouring down, the ragged teeth, murderous eyes, the full-fronted rage of betrayal. She knew just how perfect the depiction was because she herself had seen it.
Like a silent stream, Susan felt the filling up again, her mind being taken by another. She turned and there in the shadow of an arch was another stooped figure, much older. He stepped forward so she could see him. Dark-Eye. He walked over to her and stood at her side, looking at the painting. Like her, he concentrated on the lone Neanderthal. He stared at his a
ncestor, who was railing at his betrayal, as if he realized that he was caught in something more than a trap, a cul-de-sac of disastrous, historic proportions. For an instant, Dark-Eye himself seemed to be in that moment, clutching it to him. Susan felt a three-way communion, a triangle of pain and suffering but also courage and survival, and she knew with a certainty hard to explain that they were all the same, that the two species were one and that the Neanderthal were like older brothers and sisters who died in infancy but who continue on in ourselves.
At the cave entrance the hominids approached to say farewell— Blue-Eyes, Tallboy, Hurt-Knee, they all came. They looked flustered and uncertain, their faces turning a deep scarlet. Departures were not reckoned with in their world, thought Matt. Hurt-Knee, with his scar flaring across his bulging brow like a special mark, accompanied them down the slope. As they walked away, moving awkwardly through the snow, Matt and Susan and Sergei felt the hominids behind them casting their spells, gradually receding, like walking away from the surf on the shore.
It was warm and soon they left the snow line behind. Hurt-Knee appeared apprehensive about venturing so far from the cave, but he stayed with them until they came to the ravine with the bridge of vines. Here Hurt-Knee stopped and waited, as one by one the three shinnied across. Somehow it was easier going in this direction away from the mist-enshrouded summit; even so, Susan felt herself freeze up with fear halfway across. Lest she look down, she closed her eyes and rested immobile, to collect herself. Then, with her eyes still closed, she began to see the vine ahead of her, to feel the handholds, and to know that it was strong enough to carry her. She continued on until she made it to safety. Hurt-Knee stayed on his side of the ravine.