Gibraltar

by Matthew Thayer

  Whatever the elders were conveying in their guttural words, sweeping gestures and fierce scowls, it was plain to see it pleased the younger man. His enthusiasm sparked several in the crowd to begin a soft chant. “Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh.” Stragglers sprinted from the mouth of the cave and out of the brush as the rest of the clan picked up the cadence, “Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh!”

  It was the female elder who tipped her head back to howl the call of a lone wolf and bring the crowd to silence. The numbers had swelled to 80 and more were arriving–a staggering population in this era. In our experience, Cro-Magnon clans rarely total more than two dozen, and usually, far less. As the wolf call faded, they all turned to face the trio stationed atop the flat boulder.

  At the time, I had no concept of what the male elder said as he shook his arms in the air and growled, or what his many points to many spots across the valley were intended to convey. Now at the end of the day, having seen the Neanderthal set their great fire and start their massive stampede, I imagine the old man said something like this: “Winter’s rains begin today. We will burn this valley before the rains come. We will do it by starting fires there, there, there, there, there and there. Tonight we will feast on plover and gopher! Prepare to start the fire!”

  “Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh!” The clan shouted the words until there were more than 120 males, females and children jumping up and down, circling the space fronting the cave. It took a series of wolf calls from the gray-faced woman to bring the chaos to a grudging halt. When the man had their attention, he issued his commands. Pointing, grimacing, grunting, he laid out a plan of action.

  “Stop fooling around and get busy!” That is what I think he said, or something like it. “Fire starters! Gather your conch shells and fill them with hot coals. You know where to set your fires. Wait for my call before you do! Wait for the call!

  “Women, fill this area with tinder. My woman will show you where to build your piles.

  “The rains are coming. We must hurry!”

  TRANSMISSION:

  Kaikane: “So this Dr. Dude, he brought you here?”

  Duarte: “Carlos.”

  Kaikane: “Huh?”

  Duarte: “His name was Carlos.”

  Kaikane: “OK, Carlos. And he was your boyfriend?”

  Duarte: “At the time, yes.”

  Kaikane: “And Carlos, he showed you the cave?”

  Duarte: “His brother did. We were visiting the family in Granada. Carlos’ parents lived in a white stucco villa, 36 miles northeast of here. His brother was an anthropologist and he arranged a tour.”

  Kaikane: “Took you home to meet the parents, huh? Sounds serious.”

  Duarte: “For a while it was. As long as I was willing to be at his beck and call at every moment. As long as I agreed with his every word, even if I really didn’t. Carlos had a way of making me feel small. Very small.”

  Kaikane: “Sounds like a jerk.”

  Duarte: “His friends didn’t think so. They said I was an ungrateful little bitch who used him to advance my career. Hah! What a joke.”

  Kaikane: “Tell me about it.”

  Duarte: “Carlos gave a lecture at my college on the regeneration of plant species following a nuclear blast. We met at a party afterwards and I somehow became swept up in the aura of the famous scientist. He was quite a bit older than me, and an absolute control freak.

  “We traveled the world, and he took care of every detail. In his slick, selfish way, he cut me away from my family and friends, and kept all of my energy for himself. I was like a battery that he tapped to energize his career. I did the grunt work for his papers and wrote his speeches–while receiving no credit, of course. As far as everybody else in his circle knew, I was just the quiet protégé who meekly tagged along, occasionally whispered things into his ear. What they didn’t know was, he forbade me to speak in public.”

  Kaikane: “Forbade?”

  Duarte: “Maybe that’s too harsh a word. Let’s say ‘strongly dissuaded.’ Carlos would peck at me for days if he thought I upstaged him or if I engaged in conversation with someone else at a party. He was jealous of everyone, even people from my past, or dead movie stars that I made the mistake of saying I thought were cute.”

  Kaikane: “Jealousy is such a wasted emotion.”

  Duarte: “We would be having a nice evening, there’s always the ‘up’ times of course, and then some word or action would trigger his rage. I could see it in his eyes, know it was coming, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to head it off. Our fights were awful–just senseless, stupid circles. Accusations and denials.”

  Kaikane: “What were you doing with this punk?”

  Duarte: “Good question, right? It started out fine, new love and all that. He didn’t start acting like a prick until he had me on the other side of the world and more or less completely dependent upon him. He had money, and I was deeply in debt and broke. It was a mess. My life became his life.

  “Carlos had a habit of interrupting me in public. He would actually put his hand over my mouth to shush me. And do you know what his favorite saying was? He would tell me, ‘What you say doesn’t matter.’ Right in front of people! It was like a joke. Like I was a joke.”

  Kaikane: “Oh boy.”

  Duarte: “Oh boy is right. When you said those same words to me on the raft, I almost snapped. Literally.”

  Kaikane: “Keep going.”

  Duarte: “It was near here, in the air car, flying from this cave back to his family’s villa, when I vowed no man would ever say those words to me again. At least not without a sock in the jaw.”

  Kaikane: “You punched Carlos?”

  Duarte: “Right in the kisser. The brother and I were discussing this site–it will look much different then–and I was speculating on what types of plants would have grown during Neanderthal times. Carlos interrupted with his ‘what you say doesn’t matter’ bullshit and before I knew it, his head was snapping back against the window and he had a split lip. The brother was ready to jump between us if he had to, but Carlos was too stunned to retaliate. The brother flew me straight to Barcelona Transfer and gave me the money to make the next jump back to California. Back to mom and dad with my tail between my legs.”

  Kaikane: “That’s why we hiked up here?”

  Duarte: “No. Well, maybe. I just wanted to see it. Had to. Something else happened on that sullen day. It was while I was exploring the dusty site with my jerky boyfriend’s brother that I had my first flash that studying ancient botany could be interesting. You see, during that trip to Spain, my old mentor Pedro Gomez contacted me with rumors of a crazy mission to travel back in time. He said they were putting together a team to study the earth in 30,000 B.C. and asked if I would be interested in taking a one-way journey. I told him he had been drinking too much coffee, but the notion stayed with me. Pedro was the first person I called after reconstituting in North America.”

  Kaikane: “So this cave is a big reason you came on the trip?”

  Duarte: “Yep.”

  Duarte: “Cool.”

  Duarte: “Yeah, pretty cool.”

  Kaikane: “I’m sorry, babe.”

  Duarte: “I know, me too.”

  Kaikane: “Does someone owe me a foot rub?”

  Duarte: “What? Oh yes, the rain. What if I’m in the mood to rub more than your feet?”

  Kaikane: “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  From the log of Paul Kaikane

  Recreation Specialist

  Once they were motivated, the Neanderthal surprised us by how well they worked as a team. One second they were jumping around, hootin’ and hollerin’, and the next they were pitching together to close up camp and move on. The leaders made a little speech, most of it in hand sign, to get the gang moving in more or less the same direction. They pointed out what they wanted done, and everybody got busy. Men gathered their weapons, rolled up their furs and scraped hot coals into conch shells wrapped in leather. The women were twice as bus
y squaring away camp.

  One of the leaders is a young buck with a pelt lighter than most. Maria named him Blondie. The tall, shaggy dude did a lot of shoving, ordering people around. When I asked Maria what she thought was happening, she just shook her head. She didn’t have any better idea than me.

  “I think they’re packing up,” Maria finally said.

  There wasn’t much to pack. The men shouldered their weapons–spears and clubs mostly–and the women hoisted their gathering sacks. A few had skins or furs over their shoulders, but most folks were happily naked. Cro-Magnon love their jewelry, necklaces and bracelets and shells, always have feathers tied in their hair. Not these Neanderthal. There was none of that stuff.

  In less than 15 minutes, they were ready to roll. Blondie scrambled up on the flat rock and got the chant going again. “Meh, meh, meh, meh!” Jumping up and down, shaking his long stone-tipped spear over his head, he reminded me of a pep rally leader. When he leaped from the rock and led a group of males at a trot across the valley, Maria said, “Let’s stay with Blondie, see what he’s up to.”

  Unlike the monkey men on Ibiza, they couldn’t see or scent us in our jumpsuits. We shadowed the clan as it strung a long line across the valley. Every 100 yards or so, Blondie stopped to station a fire crew to use the coals from a conch shell to build a bonfire. “Meh, meh, meh, meh!”

  Mammoth were the first beasts to recognize trouble. We were keeping pace with Blondie and his group of young warriors, running parallel about 20 yards away, when they charged up on a herd of short-haired beasts twice as big as elephants. Fifteen feet tall, strong as hell, those mammoth wanted nothing to do with the Neanderthal and their fires. “Meh, meh, meh, meh!”

  The animals trumpeted and stomped away as Blondie grabbed one of the conch shells and tossed it into a pile of dry leaves and pine needles. A couple of his boys crouched low and with a few huffs and puffs got a nice little fire going. Everybody was breaking limbs off trees, picking up deadwood to feed the fire, and in less than a minute, they had a roaring blaze going. By then, the mammoth were long gone. Blondie waited until the conch was filled with a new batch of glowing coals, then led the rest of his fire starters to climb the far side of the valley.

  We stopped when Blondie and his last handful of warriors did. From the high ground, we could see the smoke of maybe 50 fires lined across the valley. The wind was picking up as dark clouds over the Mediterranean Sea floated our way. Blondie’s crew emptied the conch and started the last fire while he cupped his hands to his mouth and began a new chant. “Nuu, nuu, nuu, nuu, nuu!”

  With the audio receivers in our helmets, we heard the chant relayed across the entire width of the valley in no more than a minute. Incredible. Zooming in with our visors, Maria and I spotted the other two leaders, an old male and female, standing atop a faraway rock with content smiles on their hairy faces. They had about 30 or 40 Neanderthal with them, mostly women, children and elders, everyone all packed up and ready to go. When the new chant reached their side of the valley, the honcho man and woman took a few minutes to sniff the air and watch the clouds. With a nod from her mate, the female barked out another new chant. “Ohh, ohh, ohh, ohh, ohh, ohh!” Burn baby burn!

  When the chant reached Blondie, he and his boys were ready to pitch fire sticks into the brambles. For a land so green, it was amazing how fast the fire spread. It must have been a while since the last rain. And as Maria points out, there is a lot of dead wood and crap lying around. In less than a half hour, they had a solid wall of orange flames stretched across the whole valley. Winds off the coast were blowing 25 knots, straight uphill.

  Now that it is over, and even after two hours of talking it to death, Maria and I still don’t really know what the Neanderthal hoped to accomplish. Did they have a reason, or was the fire just for fun? Maria has a few theories. No surprise there. She says maybe the fire was set to clear the land of unwanted trees and brush for when the clan returns next spring. Maybe it was also a way to make the area less habitable for any other clans thinking about staking a claim to the cave.

  The way the Neanderthals swayed and moaned with the flames, I think it may have been some kind of religious service, or marking of the changing of the season. It was like they went into trances. This crew really loves fire.

  Before they commenced dancing, they made sure to kick the ass of any animal close enough to lay a foot on. It wasn’t a hunt though. They didn’t kill anything worth eating. They just whacked running horses with heavy clubs and tried to set anything and everything on fire. We both think it was part of keeping the clan at the top of this land’s pecking order.

  Blondie and his guys backtracked along the downhill edge of the fire until they joined up with a few other groups on flatter land. The howling winds had already carried the fire at least a mile uphill, but here on the upwind edge, it advanced slowly. Frightened animals stampeded from the smoke as the Neanderthal skirted as close to the flames they could without, as Maria put it, “spontaneously combusting.” They threw stones at the scorched horses, chanted and danced and fooled around, tried to push their weaker pals into the fire.

  If it had been a hunt, they could have had easy pickings. Game of every type charged by. The Neanderthal concentrated their biggest abuses on the carnivores, the animals that compete with them for food and safety. Shouting, throwing fire sticks and stones, they made it a bad day to be a wolf.

  Blondie had joined up with the main group and it was just starting to rain when a young mammoth came padding out of the smoke. Eyes rolled back, hair singed, the male was in a panic. I expected the clan to stand back and let the killer trot past, but they wanted to have some fun. And, I think, teach the mammoth a lesson.

  The old man grabbed a burning limb from the embers and charged ahead of the mammoth, quartering so he could cut it off. The rest of the hunters were right there with him. “Ohh, ohh, ohh, ohh.” Burn, burn, burn, burn! The mammoth must have been injured for it was not fast enough to outrun the Neanderthal. Men and boys jabbed their smoking sticks into its flanks and tried to reignite its waxy coat. They chased it into a pond filed with cattails and kept it from escaping until they themselves had to dash away from the wall of flames surrounding the water. I swear, they were laughing as they raced downhill ahead of the blaze. Maria and I were running for our own lives when the mammoth burst out of the fire and rumbled past as fast as his giant feet could carry him. If he survives, that mammoth will long fear the Neanderthal.

  The fire slowed once the rains picked up, but it was hours before it poured hard enough to really snuff it out. I’d say it burned about a mile downhill from the starting line, across the entire width of the valley, and at least five miles uphill. Maria says besides clearing away brush, the fire will leave behind a lot of dead wood for next year’s campfires. We’ll never know for sure, but all her theories sound good to me. For now, it’s hard to gauge how smart these guys are. I’m sure she’ll figure it out. She always does.

  Maybe we’ve hung around Gray Beard and the Green Turtles so long their prejudice against Neanderthal has rubbed off. They give “Flat Heads” no credit, except for being untrustworthy and dangerous to be around. Maybe the Neanderthal up north have been beaten so far down they have lost their culture and traditions. From what little we saw of them in Bordeaux and Tuscany, they had none of the fearlessness or numbers of their southwestern cousins.

  These guys, they’re not dummies. I have no doubt that the clan came up with a plan and executed it to perfection. It may be a stretch to claim they set the fire for all the positive reasons Maria and I can come up with, but maybe not. They had it timed out pretty slick. As we shadowed the party, muscular men and women singing and dancing, chanting and laughing, I knew they didn’t build that fire just for the hell of it.

  As it was dying in the rain, they all turned their backs to the embers, joined hands and chanted the same long verse while facing into the wind. Was it a prayer? A clan history? Maria’s been racking her brain trying to figure
that out.

  When the blackened earth had cooled enough to walk into the fire zone, the clan scavenged the burned bodies of small animals. Picking up charred gophers, squirrels, rabbits and plovers, the Neanderthal dug right in with fingers and teeth for boiled guts and bits of meat. They took what they wanted, then chucked the carcass into the ashes and found a new one to chew on. They ended up having a picnic in a downpour by the side of another small pond. Once they had eaten and drunk their fill, lying low like wildcats to slurp water from puddles and the pond, the people picked up their stuff and headed for the coast.

  Maria and I talked it over and decided to hang back and explore their cave. We spent about an hour inside it this afternoon. It’s nothing fancy, just a tall cave, but she was super stoked to find a few simple cave paintings of spotted horses, and also about 25 hand outlines. She’s already talking about the reports she will write tomorrow.

  My wife the hard worker, the worrier, the planner, the spiller of beans. I know she has written about some of the times we made love. She’s even read me a few juicy parts. It seems like a strange thing to do, like telling a secret, but I’m going to give it a try.

  Our relationship has been in a funk for months. Ever since I said words I shouldn’t have, since I told her that what she says doesn’t matter. Where did that come from? Me trying to be a captain. I told her I was sorry a million times, but it’s tough being cooped up together on a small boat. Even on land, we’re rarely out of each other’s sight. So much togetherness wears on you. We can’t help but get on each other’s nerves. I’ve been biding my time, waiting for her to forgive me–really forgive me–and something about the excitement of the day broke the logjam.

  In a jumpsuit, you don’t really register fatigue or pain. The suit keeps you going as long as you need, but there is always the crash when you take the damn thing off. To me, it feels like I have been unplugged. After our peek into the main cavern, we did some exploring and found a more private cave of our own. Wriggling free of the suits, we spread our sleeping furs and then wedged the packs into the cave’s mouth so nothing bigger than a mouse could slip through.