Stuck in the Stone Age

by The Story Pirates

Marisa sighed. This was going to take awhile.

  An hour later, after endless rounds of sign language, miming, and so many repetitions of the Fruit Fight theme song that the phone’s battery life fell to 62 percent, the cavemen agreed to take Tom and Marisa to a place where they could eat.

  Before they left the hillside, Tom insisted on arranging a series of rocks into a giant sign just above the spot where the time machine had landed. It read:

  WE WENT THAT WAY BACK SOON! DON’T LEAVE!

  “I hope Dr. Vasquez doesn’t come back for us in the middle of the night,” Tom said. “She might not see the sign.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Marisa. She was too tired and hungry to start another argument by trying to convince Tom that nobody was coming back for them.

  As the sun began to set, they followed the cavemen off the hill and into the woods away from the lake.

  With Dug in the lead, the cavemen led Tom and Marisa into the forest, to a wide clearing the size of a football field with the mouth of a cave at the far end. At the cave entrance, they could see a fire burning.

  “Hey, look at that,” said Tom as they approached the entrance. “They actually DO live in a cave.”

  Marisa didn’t answer, because she was very busy trying not to fall into a giant hole that had just appeared out of nowhere.

  “Look out!”

  It was a three-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep pit about twenty yards in front of the cave entrance.

  “What do you think that’s for?” Tom asked.

  Marisa shrugged. “Self-defense?”

  They followed the cavemen into the cave, skirting the edge of the fire. Their curiosity about the pit was instantly replaced by a much more immediate question: What on earth was that horrible smell?

  It was like a combination of sewage, body odor, and dead animals.

  But mostly sewage.

  “Oh, geez,” said Tom, putting his hands in front of his nose. “That’s powerful stuff.” The smell was so bad that he and Marisa barely even noticed all the bats flitting in and out of an unseen lair at the back of the cave.

  Neither the bats nor the smell seemed to bother the forty cavemen, cavewomen, and cavechildren who were sitting in a big semicircle around the fire.

  But the sight of Tom and Marisa DID bother them, quite a bit. When the two strangers appeared in the firelight, the cavepeople all gasped and leaped to their feet. A few shrieked in fear. Cavepeople, it seemed, were even more terrified of strangers than Marisa was—and strangers inside their cave was a real crisis.

  Moving quickly, one of the younger, stronger-looking men picked up a wooden club and charged straight at Tom, screaming as he went.

  Tom froze in terror. No one had ever run screaming at him with a club before, and he didn’t know how to react.

  Fortunately, as the club-wielding man rushed past Dug, the clan leader stuck his foot out and tripped him. The club went flying, and the man did a face-plant. He wound up spread-eagled on the ground in front of Tom.

  Tom and Marisa both gasped. So did most of the cavepeople.

  Dug put his foot firmly on the man’s back and yelled, “Oooga magook do-dee-doot-doot Tooka looga!”

  Everyone except Tom and Marisa understood what Dug meant, which was: “First of all, Gary, I’m sorry I had to get rough with you. But I’m your leader, it’s my job, and I don’t know how many times I’ve warned you about your poor impulse control. Once you get out from under my foot, I want to speak to you privately, maybe talk about getting you some counseling.

  “Second, and more importantly—I know all of you are wondering what these strangers with weird clothes are doing in our cave, and why Stranger Guy here has no eyebrows.

  “I have no idea about the eyebrows. That’s a mystery. But here’s what I do know: Stranger Guy has a magic rock. It goes ‘do-dee-doot-doot.’ Somehow, he used this magic rock to defeat Tooka. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. One minute, Tooka’s about to eat them. The next minute, he’s puking his guts out.

  “This is a game-changer, people. Seriously. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this magic rock situation is going to require us to fundamentally rethink a lot of our assumptions about the way the world works.

  “And there are things we still don’t know. For one thing, Stranger Guy’s got the magic rock, but it doesn’t seem to stop Stranger Lady from yelling at him. What’s the deal with their relationship? Does she have a magic rock, too? Why does she keep getting mad at him?

  “I don’t have answers yet. But in the short term, I don’t want us getting sideways with Stranger Guy and Stranger Lady. Let’s just assume they’re supernatural beings with the power to make us double over barfing like they did to Tooka, and let’s open our cave to them and give them all our food so they don’t hurt us. Okay? Everybody clear on that? Good.

  “Oh! One more thing. I have no idea why they’re both holding their noses and looking totally grossed out. That’s new. They weren’t doing it a minute ago.”

  “Other than the smell, this seems like a pretty great situation,” Tom said. “We’ve got the best seats in the cave, and they gave us all their food.”

  Tom and Marisa were sitting at the edge of the fire, as close as possible to the cave entrance so they could avoid the worst of the stench. In front of them was a good-sized pile of berries and nuts. The entire clan stared at them in silence, waiting for Tom and Marisa to eat.

  Marisa shook her head. “This isn’t good. It’s terrible.”

  “Because of the bats?” They’d both been smacked in the head by the wings of the low-flying bats that were constantly flitting in and out of the cave.

  “It’s not the bats. It’s everything else. First of all, I think they’re using the back of the cave as a toilet. That doesn’t just make it smell bad—it spreads disease. Second, look how skinny these people are!”

  Tom looked at the group. “They are a lot skinnier than I expected cavepeople to be. Those Flintstones cartoons were really misleading.”

  “You know why they’re so skinny? Because they don’t have enough food! These people are barely surviving as hunter-gatherers. We’ve got to teach them agriculture. And basic hygiene. And fast—if they’re going to make it through the next winter, they’ve got to start planting food now.”

  Tom thought about it for a moment. “I dunno. Seems like an awful lot to explain. They probably won’t like it. And if we’re only here for a little while—”

  “Tom! We’re going to be here forever. If we don’t help them now, we’ll starve, too!”

  Tom sighed but didn’t say anything. They were just going to have to agree to disagree about whether they’d be rescued.

  “I think we should share this food with them,” Marisa added. “They look so hungry.”

  “Good idea,” agreed Tom. As they both stood up to share the pile of fruit and nuts with the others, Marisa grabbed Tom’s arm.

  “Wait! There’s one more thing I’m worried about—that tiger.”

  “What about it?”

  “If the berries didn’t kill it, it’ll come back. We’ve got to figure out how to protect ourselves. And them, too,” she added, gesturing to the clan.

  “Relax,” said Tom. “These people have it all worked out. Look at that painting.”

  He pointed at the wall across from them. Just visible in the flickering firelight was a crude but unmistakable charcoal drawing of a saber-toothed tiger. In front of the giant tiger were a couple dozen faceless, stick-figure humans about the size of chipmunks. All the humans had their arms raised over their heads.

  “See?” Tom said to Marisa. “All the humans are jumping up and down and cheering, like, ‘Yay! We beat the giant tiger!’ Or maybe it’s, ‘Yay! We love the giant tiger!’”

  Marisa stared at the painting for a moment. “Or,” she said, “they’re running away and screaming. Like, ‘Eeeek! The tiger’s chasing us!’”

  Tom looked closer at the painting, then frowned. “Oh, yeah. I guess it could
go either way. We should teach these guys how to draw better stick figures. Either way, though, I wouldn’t sweat it. If they hadn’t figured out how to handle the tiger, they all would’ve been eaten by now. Maybe this fire’s all the protection they need.”

  Marisa had to admit Tom’s logic made more sense than usual. But as she scooped up a handful of nuts and berries and started to hand them out to the confused but grateful cavepeople, she couldn’t help glancing from the cave painting to the fire to the darkness beyond the entrance, wondering where that tiger was…and how soon it’d be back.

  That same moment, a little over a mile away, the tiger lay flat on his belly in the tall grass near his lair. Unlike the cavepeople, he kept his lair very clean, so he didn’t want to return to it until he was finished being sick. And he wasn’t anywhere near finished yet.

  It had been a terrible day. But in between retches, he cheered himself up by thinking about the future.

  As soon as he recovered, he was going to find those two humans—the ones who smelled like Floral Essence and Cool Breeze All Day. Then he was going to sink his teeth into them and find out exactly what those smells tasted like.

  And he’d do it in his favorite way—slowly, with shrieks of agony that lasted for hours.

  He was really going to enjoy that.

  But first, he had to throw up again.

  Lots of sights, sounds, and smells in that cave! See Write Like a Pro: The Five SIX! Senses of Setting.

  Early the next afternoon, Marisa stood in the middle of a wide rectangle of freshly plowed soil at the bottom of the big clearing below the cave. Using a three-foot-long stick, she carefully poked a long, straight row of holes in the soil.

  Dug, Edd, Jim, and half a dozen other cavemen sat on the ground just outside the plowed area, watching Marisa with looks of anger and confusion.

  The anger was mostly because that soil hadn’t plowed itself. The cavemen had done it on Marisa’s orders, using a combination of flat rocks and their fingers. It had been hard, dirty work.

  The confusion was because they had no idea why they’d done it, or why Marisa was poking holes in the newly upturned ground.

  Tom sat by the edge of the group, tossing pebbles at a little hoop he’d made using a flexible tree branch. He understood exactly what Marisa was trying to do. Even so, it was slow, boring stuff and no fun to watch.

  Marisa finished poking the row of holes. She held up a handful of seeds.

  “Seeds,” she said.

  The cavemen just stared at her. Tom tossed another pebble through his hoop.

  “Seeds,” she said again, louder and more confidently. She’d been lecturing the cavemen about the life-or-death issues of good hygiene and agriculture for seven straight hours now. She was going hoarse from the effort, but it had done wonders for overcoming her fear of talking to strangers.

  She was so pleased about this, and about the progress she was making to help the tribe, that she barely noticed how annoyed the cavemen were getting.

  “Seeds,” they all repeated back to her in dull, sullen voices.

  Marisa went down the row, putting seeds in the holes. “Seeds. Plant. Ground. Grow. Food,” she said.

  The first three hours of her lecture had been a language lesson. She hoped it had sunk in and the cavemen understood her.

  It hadn’t, and they didn’t.

  Instead, they all looked at Dug, their leader. Dug just shrugged. Then he turned to watch Tom toss a pebble at the little hoop, which was much more interesting to him than this poking-holes-in-the-ground business.

  With the seeds now planted, Marisa walked over to where a large, thick leaf held a very unpleasant item she’d retrieved earlier from the back of the cave. She carefully picked up the leaf.

  “Fertilizer,” she said.

  The cavemen just stared at her.

  She tried a simpler word. “Poop?” She moved closer to show the men the contents of the leaf.

  They looked horrified.

  “I know!” she said, scrunching up her face in a pained look. “Gross. But food! For plants.”

  She picked up a short stick and carefully added small dollops of poop to the holes, then covered them with dirt. When she was finished, she put down her stick tools and her leaf full of poop and tried to sum up the entire crop cycle using big, exaggerated hand gestures.

  “So…Seeds. Ground. Plant. Poop. Sun. Rain. Time. Grow. Food. Eat! Live! Good! Understand?”

  The cavemen did not understand.

  Dug raised his hand. “Marsha?” he asked.

  “Marisa,” she corrected him.

  “Marsha.”

  She sighed. It was hard to tell whether the cavemen couldn’t pronounce her name or just didn’t want to. “Yes, Dug?”

  “Marsha uga tuga skooga Tom alooga,” said Dug.

  Marisa had no idea what he meant by that. But the cavemen all did, and roughly speaking, it was this: “I have to be completely honest here, Marsha: This is ridiculous. First you spend three hours trying to teach us your language—which is very patronizing, because hello? There are more of us than there are of you! Why aren’t YOU learning OUR language?

  “Then you spend another two hours yelling at us about—and correct me if I’m wrong here, but this was my takeaway—how we’re not supposed to poop in the back of the cave anymore? Which makes no sense at all! What are we supposed to do, go off in the woods somewhere? Even in the winter? When it’s cold out? Personally, I don’t see the point.

  “But then you drag us out here and take it to a whole other level of crazy. You make us dig up all this ground for no reason at all. Then you pick up some poop from the cave—which might be okay where you come from, but around here, that’s disgusting—and you put the poop in tiny holes in the ground? On top of a bunch of perfectly good seeds? That we could have eaten instead? Seriously?

  “I mean, seriously?

  “Marsha, take a step back and think about what you’re doing here. This is really not normal. Personally, I’m starting to think you’re either a witch or you’re mentally ill. Either way, I don’t know why Tom puts up with it. If I weren’t so worried about him destroying us with his magic rock, we’d be having a whole other conversation right now. And trust me when I say you wouldn’t like it.

  “You want to keep poking your little poop holes in the ground? Do what you have to. But I’m out. If you need me, I’ll be over here, tossing pebbles through this hoop thing that Tom made. Which is a LOT more fun than whatever it is you’re doing.”

  Marisa watched with concern as first Dug and then the rest of the cavemen turned their attention away from her and toward Tom and the silly little pebble game he was playing.

  “Tom, can I talk to you for a second? Privately?”

  “Sure thing.” Tom got up and walked over to Marisa. When he did, the cavemen eagerly took over his pebble-throwing.

  “Can you stop doing that pebble thing? It’s really distracting.”

  “I know. Sorry! But look at them—they’re really enjoying it.”

  “They have to learn how to plant crops! It’s a matter oflife and death! I’m trying to save all our lives here!”

  “I know! But it’s been, like, seven straight hours of trying to save our lives. And we’re all getting a little antsy. I think we need a study break.”

  “A study break? Seriously?”

  “Yes! Seriously! Marisa, what you’re doing is awesome and totally helpful—but you’re pushing them too hard.”

  “Why do you say that?” The thought hadn’t occurred to Marisa. From her point of view, all she was doing was trying to help them.

  “I can just tell,” said Tom. “Look, why don’t we do this pebble thing for a few minutes? Let them blow off some steam. Then we’ll come back fresh. Okay?”

  “What IS that pebble thing, anyway?”

  “I don’t even know. It’s just a game I made up to pass the time. But they’re really into it. I’m thinking I should expand it a little. Add some rules. Maybe use bi
gger rocks.”

  Marisa watched Dug toss a pebble that just missed the hoop. The other cavemen groaned in disappointment. Then two of them scrambled to fetch the pebble while a third, pebble in hand, lined up his own shot.

  She sighed. “Okay, fine. You play the pebble game for a while. I’ll just be over here, solving our starvation problem all by myself. No big deal.”

  “Awesome! Thanks!” Tom trotted off to rejoin the cavemen.

  I was being sarcastic! Marisa thought.

  She went back to poking holes in the ground. As she bent over the stick, she realized something:

  We haven’t talked about the tiger problem yet.

  She resolved to make tiger defense the subject of her next lesson. Which would start just as soon as they got tired of that silly pebble game.

  Twenty-four hours later, Tom and the cavemen still hadn’t gotten tired of the silly pebble game.

  In fact, they were obsessed with it.

  Thanks to Tom’s creative rule-making and the cavemen’s excitement at having discovered organized sports, the game had become much bigger, more complicated, and infinitely more dangerous than just tossing pebbles through a hoop. It was now a full-court combination of basketball, bowling, and martial arts that Tom had named Rockball.

  Most of the clearing—excluding the still-mysterious open pit and Marisa’s plot of farmland—was now one giant Rockball court, with rocks whizzing through the air every which way whenever a game was in progress. For most of the day, the games had been nonstop. Tom had split the men of the clan into teams, and they were in the middle of a round-robin tournament.

  Marisa was not happy about any of this.

  “Tom! We have to talk!”

  “Can it wait? I’m playing here!”

  “What’s more important—the game? Or the fact that a saber-toothed tiger could stroll in here and eat one of us at any minute?”

  “Relax! If these guys aren’t worried, I don’t think we should be, either.”