The Last Neanderthal

by Claire Cameron

  But at some point, I moved through that too. After a particularly strong contraction, my outlook changed. My fear no longer took root in my body. I was unafraid of my death. Instead, I twisted deeper into it. Maybe like all those women who had given birth before me, I welcomed it.

  There was a panic in the room. It seemed to be in response to the sounds of the heart monitor, which was beeping more slowly. A ring of people in scrubs stood around my bed. Suddenly, the heart monitor crackled and went silent. Had the heartbeat stopped, or was the monitor just not picking it up? I didn’t know, but a nurse pointed at the screen.

  I turned my head to look, my wild eyes scanning for a blip that would give a sign of life. Many things were happening, but I took in only a few. Another nurse came rushing in with a contraption that had a hose at one end and a cord dangling out the back, and all I could think of was my grandmother’s old vacuum. The doctor rushed to my side, ripped the monitor off, and put his head right in my face. We stared at each other, chests puffing, eyes open wide and unblinking. He could see that I was alert. He knew I spoke enough French to understand him, but I don’t think it mattered. In that moment, we had a direct line of communication.

  He thumped his chest. “Le cœur a cessé de battre.” The heart is not beating.

  I nodded—the heart, the heart.

  “Vous avez un essai.” One try. One push.

  I knew exactly what was happening. The doctor’s words matched what I felt; the darkness that had crept up. My baby’s heart had slowed or stopped. With an infant that small, it took only a few moments for brain damage to set in. I looked at the circle of faces around me. One nurse held a hose with a cup at the top, and another had her hands on the top of my belly, as though getting ready to push from the outside.

  “Dites-moi,” the doctor said. “When the contraction, it comes, tell me. And you push.”

  A new contraction started to build. I nodded my head to let all the people who stood around me know that it was on the way. They took the cue and prepared. A well-trained staff, a well-equipped hospital, all the modern advantages in the world, and it still came down to what I felt at the core of my body.

  It was silent as we waited. No tick of the monitor. No cry. No gasp. I had left my fear of death behind. It could take me or not. I was the bravest I had ever been.

  The contraction became stronger. A nurse spoke into my ear in accented English: “Close your eyes, hands under knees, work from your chest down.” Two pairs of hands prodded the top of my belly. I could hear that there was a hose and suction involved. I curled up, gritted my teeth, and pushed.

  I heard a loud roar; orange and red mixed with blinding lights. The colors bled before my eyes. I pushed and felt him move and I kept going, finding the muscles and going past any kind of physical strength I’d ever had before. I growled and yelled and didn’t stop, and time didn’t move in a linear way. Every body that had come before mine, every change in our species’ structure over millennia, every flex of my ancestors’ muscles came into play. I pushed and pushed through more years than I knew there were.

  My baby came out with a face that was bright, like a blue moon. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. The doctor unwound it once and then twice.

  More silence and a long pause, a moment as endless as every birth, then a wail, and cheers from the staff. A swell of relief flooded the room. The nurse to my left leaned in and kissed my cheek. The doctor held my baby, whose legs were kicking, arms flailing. He put the thing down on my chest and I started to cry. It wasn’t joy. It was only gratitude that it was over.

  I was stitched up in places that I didn’t realize had ripped. We were wheeled out, first my baby, in a crib, then me. He was taken the other way. I wanted to ask where, but I couldn’t find the words. The adrenaline ran thick in my veins. My hands shook and I looked at them, lying on my lap like nervous claws. The colors of the hospital were sharp—a vibrant red fire extinguisher, the yellow glow of a line on the floor, and, when we reached my room, the violent green swirls on the curtain around my bed. They transferred me onto the mattress. I panted. A hand gave me orange juice and crackers. Another hand patted me on the back and stroked my hair. I could hear water drip from a distant tap.

  My baby was brought to me and placed in my arms. I managed to stop shaking enough to hold him. We had made a perfect body, with a brain and a complex nervous system, a little penis, soft gums, and a tiny yowling mouth. All I could feel was wonder. Simon and I had made him, but my body had done the construction. And how? Not with my conscious mind. Before that moment, I had thought I knew many things about how life worked. Looking at him, I realized I knew nothing.

  A lactation specialist came to help me nurse. For a small, soft-looking thing, my baby had gums that felt like razors. He clasped onto my nipple so hard that I started in pain. The specialist gave me a tsk-tsk and looked disapproving.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” I said. Excuse me. “Ça fait mal.” That hurts.

  The woman scowled in response. France is known for its first-rate aftercare, but she had no time for a pleasant bedside manner. She grabbed my arm and wrapped it more tightly around the baby, then pushed my back to contort it into the correct angle. I’d heard that France had lower rates of breastfeeding than other Western countries and now I had an inkling of why. She pushed and prodded and commented. Clearly, I wasn’t doing a good job. My nipples weren’t the kind she liked. Bigger breasts would be better. Maybe I should try sitting in a chair.

  With all the instruction, I felt like a child myself, one who was failing at school. Exhausted and sore, I still jangled from the scent of death that clung to my skin. I started to weep and didn’t even try to hide my tears. The nurse took my baby in her arms. As though she were doing me a favor, she let me know that I could have a moment to collect myself. She turned her back and rocked my baby, whispering in soothing tones into his small ear.

  My first instinct was to jump up and snatch my baby back. Mine! Did she see what I’d done back there? I made this life and I saved it too. Give me my goddamn baby and a cape, and I’m going to fly out of here like the hero I am.

  But I didn’t say anything. Instead, I sat and wept in my bloodstained hospital gown on a mechanized bed surrounded by ugly curtains. They had given me crackers and orange juice and treated me like I was ill. I knew better than to open my mouth and tell them that I was a hero. I knew that would sound crazy.

  Part IV

  24.

  Runt didn’t come back. Girl waited patiently, without making a fuss, and still he didn’t return. She pretended they were playing a game and he was hiding. Looking behind every rock and tree, she made the noise of a bison in the woods. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t jump out and scream “Boh!” at the top of his lungs. She built the fire up in case he had lost his way. She burned green branches and fanned the black smoke into the sky as a signal. If he saw it, he didn’t turn and head back in her direction. She shouted and shrieked and climbed a tree to look as far as her eyes could see. It was late afternoon when she started to retrace every step he had taken that day. Runt often walked in distracted circles, and these tracks were entangled with the steps from past activity at the camp. Each found print was like another loss to Girl.

  By dusk she’d reached a spot far from the slashed tree he must have set out from. He had traveled over the rock that rounded up from the land like a humped back and then hopped from stone to stone. She would find the prints of his toes and lose them again. They weren’t the tracks of a child on the run, which had the looping curiosity that came with the first taste of freedom. Children who ran like that were born to the family on occasion. They were called seekers and they would run off in a new direction on a whim. More often than not, they met an early end, as one of her brothers had. The boy, the youngest next to Runt, had run into the jaws of a lion before they knew he was gone. At the meeting place, a young girl who belonged to another family had met the open mouth of the river in the same way. Sometim
es, though, a seeker would find something new—a lost tool or a bowl that had been buried and forgotten—and the child would bring it back feeling proud. But Runt wasn’t a seeker, not really. This was the first time he had run away. And she had thought he was old enough to know better. What surprised her about the tracks was the speed and distance that he covered. He’d traveled in a straight line and with a purpose. Unlike Girl, who had to stop often to rub her swollen feet.

  The farther down the slope she went, the more her lungs puffed in the dry air. This was the opposite side of the mountain from the fish run. The family did not go on this side because it was so dry in the summer and fiercely cold in the winter. There were fewer trees to shield the body from the wind, and the snow dropped in thick slabs without anything to break its fall.

  Soon it was dark and the weak moon gave her little light. She imagined there were strange, glowing eyes around each bend, and tongues licking lips at the sight of her round belly and full breasts. Despite the dark and the harder terrain, Runt hadn’t stopped. In her current state, she wasn’t going to catch him.

  But that didn’t keep Girl from tracking Runt. The urge to follow him was as strong as any she had ever had. She was the one who had to protect him. The thought of the boy out in the dark on his own brought up the same fear as when the snake slithered across his back, when the male bear raised his big head, or when she had failed to catch his fat sickness earlier. These memories clouded up in front of her eyes and made it hard to see. But when the color of the morning sun cracked into the sky, she had to stop. She looked and looked, but she had lost his tracks. Without his footprints to follow, it was impossible to keep going. For all she knew, she could be moving farther away from him. Or what if he had returned to camp and was sitting alone at the hearth, wondering where she had gone?

  The walk back to camp was hard and slow, and the front edge of the storm rolled in. Snow started to fall in large flakes. Imagining Runt out in the cold made black pitch clot in Girl’s chest, especially after she saw that he wasn’t back at camp. Only the clouds were there to greet her, now so low they brushed against the ground. With the hut unfinished, she needed a more secure shelter. The vital part required for her to survive a storm, the large hide to cover the top, was missing. She had only the thin summer hide she had lugged from the fishing grounds. With lip curled up, she could feel the hard pressure of the air on her gums. The storm would clap down by the end of the day and it would be big. Only the first crust of snow was on the ground by then, not enough to build a snow cave. She found a tree that had grown deep in the slope. Below the root ball was the start of a burrow. It was the type of place that a bear would dig in. She found a flat rock the size of her two palms and started to scrape the dirt out.

  It didn’t take long to get the hole big enough for her body—even with her large belly—and Runt and Wildcat. She worked hard and fast in the hope that the boy would show up in time to take cover from the storm. Girl scooped in a side pocket for a fat lamp, then carved another as a place to store food and water. She lined the hole with fur and hide to make Runt comfortable. She lined the base of the entry with flat stones to hold the edge. She used a ripped hide from inside Big Girl’s hut to cover the entrance and make a door.

  All that day, as Girl worked, she would stop and scan the land for Runt, sometimes climbing a tree to look for any kind of twitch in the branches. There was a herd of beasts far out on the plains. Their vibrations came strong through the trees, but this didn’t surprise her, given the time of year. The deer and caribou that roamed the plains migrated as they ate up the grasses and moved on to the protection of lower-lying forests in the winter. Without the narrows like she had on the land of the family, she had no chance of catching them by herself.

  When Girl was done with the burrow, she sat in it and waited. Runt didn’t come, but the storm did and it was fierce. Girl climbed outside a few times to see if there was any sign of Runt in the snow. The winds whipped and the ice lashed her face but there were no tracks coming back up the slope. The fog moved in and the snow was becoming thick on the ground when she finally went back into her shelter without him. Wildcat scampered in and she pushed two layers of hides across the small entrance.

  There was enough height in the burrow to sit up and stretch, but most of the time would be spent on her side. Her hope was that the storm would break and a second thaw would come. Sometimes it happened that way, and the family would have more time to dig in for winter.

  But as it was, this early cold breath blew hard and strong. Girl snuggled into Wildcat for warmth. And as she drifted off, her mind went back to the memories of wintersleep and the family. She remembered being in the pile of bodies, a leg hanging slack over her hip, an arm across the back of her thigh, the warm breath of another body on the skin of her neck. She remembered how it felt to be connected to the beating hearts, listening ears, and watching eyes. It was the thing that kept her blood warm. It was why her body had stayed alive. And it was gone. Warm.

  25.

  The winter reminded Girl of a pack of wolves howling. When she peeked outside the burrow, the land had changed into something new. It lay cloaked in white and snarling. Except for the snow and wind, nothing moved outside. During a storm as fierce as that one, all the beasts tucked themselves away. They cowered in their burrows and nests in a bid to conserve their fat. Fat was needed to keep the body warm and the heart beating. Any beast who dared to walk would find all its body fat quickly depleted. For Girl, leaving the burrow would mean she’d be up to her hips in soft powder. Trying to move around would use much more fat than could possibly be gained.

  When Girl was with the family, a storm was sometimes welcome. A body could huddle down with the others and find rest. The beasts that shared the valley would all do the same. The badgers were deep in their burrows. The red squirrels had gone into their holes in the trees. The bears had found good dens that were much like the one Girl lay in. Leopards and cave lions were also hunkered down. It was a quiet time. It was a time of truce.

  Every now and then, Girl peeked out to look for Runt, but she knew he wasn’t there. Time passed in a blur and the storms kept coming, one after the other; they held all the beasts down. Runt wouldn’t be able to move around in the deep snow. Even her hope to see him had waned, and she was alarmed to find moments where she felt nothing. Not the soft side of Wildcat’s paw on her cheek, nor her weight settled on her thin hip, nor the cold on the skin of her hand when she lifted the flap to scan the land. Her body turning numb meant she was becoming indifferent to how her struggle might end.

  The days and nights blurred in the dark, slow time of wintersleep, but she couldn’t get into an entirely sluggish state. The baby inside kept kicking her awake. She felt more tired with each day that passed. When she got up to clear her bowels, the snow and cold air would blow into her burrow. She had to light the fat lamp to help her body dry out and to warm up the air again. She found herself continually grabbing at her stash of dried meat.

  Girl had lost track of time, but it felt as though she had already waited forever when the initial crack of pain ripped along her side. At first, she thought the pain was a tremor from the mountain, perhaps waking up after so many years of deep sleep. She opened her eyes and waited to feel the rumbling from deep underneath and smell the smoke that plumed up from the earth. Long before Girl was born, the sun had buried its strength deep in the mountain. When the mountain woke up, it shook to get moving again. This was an eruption, something Girl had encountered only in Big Mother’s shadow stories. The shadows made by her fingers licked up the rock walls of the cave to show fire and the burning flesh of a writhing, tortured body.

  But the shaking didn’t come from the mountain. It came from Girl’s belly, which she clutched. After one jolt, it stopped. She patted her belly and the baby seemed to turn over and go back to sleep. She felt relief, though she knew what would soon come.

  Outside, a storm raged anew and howled. The snow was continuing to build up aroun
d the door flap as the deepest part of winter arrived. At least that would help to hold in her heat. She rolled over and pulled Wildcat closer. They slowly ate what food they had stored. He was already small and too thin, and she had him wrapped in the hides to keep out the cold, which wasn’t right for a cat. During the winters before, he had been like a bear and kept himself warm. He felt her stir and moved to tuck his nose in tight. He was soft and she hummed with her cheek on his belly.

  They were settled and slow. Girl lit the fat flame and watched their movements on the side of the burrow. The smoky light flickered, and she pretended Runt was there. She told him stories with her fingers casting shadows. He would grow to be the strongest on the land, even with those knobby knees. His roar would be so loud that it would scare all the big cats. His spear would drive through the chests of beasts. He would never feel fear, and all the Big Mothers would beg for him to come to their hearths. He would be more beautiful than even Him, with bigger muscles, shinier hair, and wise eyes that were hidden under his brow.

  She pushed up on an elbow and looked for her shell but then remembered that it was still on a lash around Runt’s neck. Since she had no shell, she put her hand over her ear instead. The effect wasn’t as good, but she could pretend. Inside the cupped hand, she could hear something like the Sea. There was sand in her hair, and her skin was itching with salt. The rumble of a wave crashed on the shore. In the distance, the big fish of the ocean jumped and dived. Their tails were as broad as trees and their backs rolled like mountain ridges along the surface of the water. There was a new land inside the shell of her hand.