The Door to September: An Alternate Reality Novel: Survival in Prehistoric Wilderness (Back to the Stone Age Book 1)

by R Magnusholm

  After his targets collapsed in the snow, he stepped back and watched Spot tearing their throats out.

  “Would you be kind enough not to damage their pelts too much, Mr. Wolf?” Liz said. She started laughing hysterically.

  “Hey. Stow that, Liz.”

  She laughed harder. Tears began streaming down her face.

  He put his arms around her and held her close. “I love you, Liz.”

  “I thought you’d never say it.”

  “How can I not love someone who shoots her bow so well?”

  “Stow that,” she said, but her eyes were twinkling.

  “That’s better.”

  “I love you too, John, but what are we going to do now? The damn teddies know where we live.”

  “Let’s worry about one thing at a time.” He peered over her shoulder at the brooding woods rising beyond the river. There’d be more bears out there. Still, they killed nineteen enemies today, and they weren’t even prepared. “First, we need to demarcate the border.”

  “What border?”

  “Between our kingdom and theirs,” he said, pointing down the path that led to the ford where the bear war party had evidently crossed over, judging by the trail in the snow.

  “Teddy Kingdom,” she said.

  “Let’s stop calling them teddies. I had a toy bear as a child, and I don’t want to sully my most cherished memory. Even calling them bears is an insult to bears.”

  “But they are bears,” Liz said.

  He sighed.

  “What shall we call them?” she persisted.

  “Bloody yetis?”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “I had a children’s book where yetis

  5 were good and kindly.”

  He scratched his head. As his fingers touched the raw laceration, he winced. “How about damned ursines? I saw them in a screenshot from a computer game, and they didn’t look good or kindly.”

  “Ursines,” she said slowly, as if tasting the word on her tongue. “Sounds like an Italian dish.”

  “Well, people eat bears.”

  He knelt by the fallen creature and examined its paw. Or was that a hand? It had four fingers and an opposable thumb, but the proportions were wrong somehow. Instead of nails, the fingers had claws that appeared to have been gnawed short. These were powerful but clumsy paws, not suitable for fine work. Such paws could tear you apart with ease, he imagined, but they’d be unable to tie shoelaces. Or make arrows. Praise Jesus and Jove for that.

  The rounded muscular shoulders were well-suited for wielding heavy clubs but not for hurling things.

  He examined the crude rawhide harness worn by the ursine warrior. The edges of the strips were rough, as if they hadn’t been cut with a blade but sliced with claws and chewed. Most strips were deerskin, while others were thicker and had brown fur the same color and texture as the wearer’s own pelt. Hell, the brute had to be a cannibal. No surprise there. The ursines ate each other and used their hides to make gear.

  Liz pulled a necklace of shriveled ears off the second brute’s neck. They too belonged to ursines. She dropped the grisly piece of jewelry in the snow. Her hands shook.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I’m too thirsty to be scared. I had no tea this morning.”

  “We should probably move camp,” she said.

  “Not in the middle of winter. We’ll freeze, and they might ambush us on the way. At least at Camp Bramble, we have a strong defensive position.”

  He pulled out his dagger and began working on skinning the bears. Meanwhile, Liz built a fire from the coals she had brought in the clay pot. John beheaded the brutes, carried the heads to the river, and mounted them on spikes opposite the ford. He even cleared the vegetation to make the heads clearly visible from beyond the stream.

  “Are such theatrics really necessary?” Liz asked.

  “Hell yeah! Fear’s a weapon.”

  He cleaned his hands with snow, the cold biting and stiffening his fingers. He flexed them to work the numbness away, cupped his hands and blew into them. His hands reeked of blood, and it became ingrained in his skin creases.

  “I don’t understand why the bears . . . ahem . . . ursines attacked us,” she said. “It’s not like we’ve done anything to them. And the way they came after us! Well, it seemed they were prepared to pay any price to get us. That’s not normal.”

  “We don’t know what’s normal for a sentient bear: the bloody urso sapient scum.”

  They rolled the pelts up and turned for home, leaving the carcasses for wolves and crows. After a two-hour-long slog through the snowbound forest, they came to the place where the ursine leader lay, dead now.

  John dropped the bundle of pelts in the snow and pulled out his dagger. “Well, commander-salamander, you’re my floor rug now.”

  He stripped the monster of his pelt, hacked off its head, and mounted it on a dry pine limb by the path. He’d take it later to the border. Spot followed them, grinning. He’d eaten exceedingly well today.

  Chapter 30

  Life in Reverse

  The night after the battle, John slept like a baby, while in his dreams he roamed the woods, looking for the ursine warbands.

  He found none.

  The next few days were frantic with activity, involving much grisly and unpleasant labor. They stretched bear skins on the outside walls of their fire shelter wigwam, rinsed the intestines in the stream, and dumped most of them in the peat bog for curing. Fortunately, an inch-thick layer of ice had formed over the bog, so John could walk over it without taking off his shoes. He hacked a hole in the ice with his axe and pushed the guts into the peaty silt with the butt of his spear.

  Next, he and Liz dragged several jagged deadfall trees from the forest and reinforced the weakest parts of their defenses. As the ground hadn’t yet frozen solid, apart from a thin layer on top, John dug a narrow trench into which he sank sharpened stakes—the beginnings of a twelve-foot-high stockade around their wigwam. The thin logs themselves—mostly aspens and birches—had been cut down by beavers who had helpfully stripped them of small branches, leaving gnawed limbs.

  Liz recovered seven arrow points from the slain ursines and mounted them on new shafts while John smashed stones to make sharp flakes for more arrowheads. He also made a second bow. Should Liz’s bow break, they’d have a spare.

  A week later, he stretched by the fire at lunch break, exhausted. He’d spent the past hour whittling sharp points on twenty-four shafts of tough oak, and his fingers were cramping from the effort. Fletched with pheasant feathers, the arrows had less penetrating power than the fifteen heavy-duty flint-point ones they had also made, but they’d still inflict a great deal of harm at close range.

  He glanced at Liz. “If the ursines were hell-bent on revenge, they would’ve returned by now.”

  She lifted the Arsenal mug of blueberry tea to her lips and blew on it, pensively.

  Once a day, they made a two-mile circuit around their camp but found no fresh ursine tracks in the snow. Every three days, John sent Spot ten miles to the north, all the way to the border ford. The wolf smelled ursines on the other side, but none had crossed over so far.

  Liz said, “They’re still scared.”

  “They should be. You shot those arrows better than the Roman goddess Diana.”

  She smiled sadly. “Not better. She’d have hit the ursine leader in the forehead from two hundred paces with her eyes closed and then laughed about it. As a former vegetarian, I can’t laugh about killing.”

  “The Roman Diana was a fictional person, but you’re real.”

  A shadow passed over her face, and the corners of her lips tightened. “My full name is Elizabeth Diana Rupert-Smyth. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.”

  “It’s no coincidence, Liz. You are the goddess Diana.”

  She yawned. “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a nap.” She stretched on their bed of pine fronds and animal skins and pulled the tiger pelt up to her chin.
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  He dropped more wood into the fire pit and climbed under the green pelt next to her, stretching his weary limbs. This new life was all work, work, work. Any romantic notions he might have entertained about life in the wild had faded soon after arrival. Today, he felt not the least bit romantic.

  A loose piece of fluff tickled his nose. He plucked it off his face to discover it was a single long hair. Obviously Liz’s. He examined it in the light falling through the open side of their wigwam. The strand grew dark blonde at the root, followed by a gray band, and then it turned glossy bottle blonde. It seemed that in her previous life, Liz had dyed her hair to conceal the signs of age. Before the thirteenth of March incident, her hair had regrown gray at the roots, but then, most inexplicably, the gray gave way to a darker shade of honey blonde.

  His brain spun in his head. Either Liz had used gray hair color to make herself look older at some point in the past (how absurd) or she was aging in reverse. Even more absurd.

  Or was it?

  He peered into her face. Sleep had smoothed out the frown lines on her forehead and the smile lines at the corners of her mouth, making her appear far younger than her late forties. And she certainly was no longer on the plump side of life.

  Was he also aging in reverse? He could jog for miles through the forest or haul logs all day. To his previous self, such feats of strength and endurance would have been impossible. He let the tricolored hair drift away on a draft of smoky air and fell asleep.

  As he slept, he roamed the woods with Spot. Although his point of view was close to the ground, and the world had turned monochrome in shades of gray, that didn’t diminish his situational awareness in the slightest, for he could smell in color.

  In glorious technicolor.

  He knew that a tiger slumbered in a holly thicket to the left. Yesterday, it had dined on a boar, and was sleeping it off. A herd of deer had passed recently, a hundred yards to the right. Some of the females were heavy with fawns. A woodpigeon perched in the tree above, invisible in the dense branches. By the shore of a woodland pond, a beaver gnawed on a branch in his log pile hideout. A wolverine had slunk through the area a few days ago. An auroch herd grazed on dry rushes by the river. Pheasants, squirrels, foxes, raccoons, weasels, rabbits, and mice went about their secret lives, and he could spy on them all if he wanted.

  From the east came a faint tang of iodine—the clean breath of the sea.

  ***

  Spot lifted his sensitive nose, drinking in the frosty air. He sensed other wolves far away, and a snowstorm was brewing in the skies to the north. Snowstorms meant cold and famine. But no matter—his new packmates were excellent hunters, even if they walked on two legs and had no tails. He sniffed the air again. Still no bears. His pack brother kept asking about the bears, and Spot was happy to report that he’d found none.

  ***

  John’s eyes flew open, and he stared at the curved ceiling of the wigwam. He pulled his hands from under the tiger pelt blanket and held them in front of his face, half expecting to see furry wolf paws. He’d been so deep inside Spot’s mind, he forgot who he was. He yawned, feeling drained as if instead of sleeping he’d walked for miles.

  Chapter 31

  Gnorrk the Woodlander

  40 miles north of Camp Bramble

  Chief Gnorrk was an old bear, and age had turned his previously dark brown pelt a salt-and-pepper gray. As he gazed about the Woodland Clan’s village, his empty belly grumbled. Four dozen round huts built of branches and dry grass slumbered under a mantle of snow. More snow sifted from the leaden sky. He sniffed the air and frowned. Hunger had come and stayed like an uninvited guest.

  While the bears had no problem with uninvited guests—they simply ate them—hunger was one guest they couldn’t see off that easily.

  Half a dozen of his grandchildren—the latest hunting party to return—stood in front of him. The leader held a scrawny dead crow, while the others brought some hazelnuts and frostbitten cranberries wrapped in scraps of deerskin.

  “Is that all?” Gnorrk asked softly.

  “Yes,” the band’s leader replied. He lowered his gaze as was customary when talking to elders. “Grandpaw, has there been any news of my father?”

  Gnorrk didn’t reply. His son Senior and a warband of eighteen had gone south to patrol the strip of land by the Great Salty River to keep the rival clans out. Seven days ago, a second warband returned from the northern fringes, bringing a prisoner captured in a skirmish with the Salmon Clan. The prisoner, a young male, had been with a Salmoner foraging party, which had strayed into Woodlander territory.

  He’d been ritualistically clubbed to death and eaten.

  Gnorrk licked his lips in reminiscence. As the village chief, he’d received a big piece of the liver and a choice chunk of meat. Still, it was just one good meal. The clan had grown considerably larger since Gnorrk was a cub, and now there were over four-hundred hungry mouths to feed.

  He sighed. As always in lean times, tough decisions had to be taken. His gaze fell on the granddaughter who had collected the least amount of food.

  “Seize her!” he commanded.

  Two warriors grabbed her, and the third bopped her over the head with a club. Not very hard. Just enough to stun and discourage resistance. They dragged her off into one of the communal huts. An eager queue formed by the entrance, and grunts and groans of rutting began in earnest.

  By tomorrow evening, Gnorrk and his chosen warriors would have another decent meal. But first they would have fun.

  He listened to her weak squawks of protest for a while and wondered if he too should participate, but he was an old bear now, so he settled for a nap on a pile of pine branches instead.

  ***

  Three days later, Gnorrk rose before dawn. Hard to sleep long on an empty stomach. There was still no sign of Senior’s warband. Maybe the rascals had a good hunt and didn’t want to share? But then Senior had always been a dutiful son. Brave to the point of recklessness, true, but dutiful. Which meant that something went wrong.

  But what could it be?

  A war party of nineteen was too strong to be wiped out. Unless they had run into an entire enemy clan and instead of escaping fought to the last bear.

  Is that what had happened?

  Gnorrk pulled out a drum made of rawhide stretched over the opening of a hollow log and started thumping it with a ceremonial stick, calling a clan meeting.

  Breath steaming about their furry snouts, the Woodlanders emerged from their huts and began filling up the patch of trampled snow in front of Gnorrk’s hut.

  He waited for the clan to assemble, then raised his paws and roared to silence the milling crowd. “Warriors and mothers. We’re having some lean times. But spring will come, and with it the salmon.”

  Even though the salmon run was still three moons away, this declaration was greeted with enthusiastic growls of approval. Gnorrk suppressed a cynical smirk. His fellow clan folks were awfully simple-minded. He waited for them to quieten before continuing:

  “As you well know, our warriors went south beyond the Small Salmon Stream and have not returned. I suspect they had a good hunt and have too much meat to carry. Therefore, I will go to look for them. Any brave warriors willing to help step over here.” He pointed off to one side.

  Every male moved as one. Gnorrk sighed. The wooly heads were so easily led. But clearly, he couldn’t let all of them go as some males would have to stay behind to protect the village and cub mothers.

  He chose sixty of the strongest and fastest to accompany him.

  As the golden sun rose over the teal woods, the war party headed south. Gnorrk and the clan’s shaman walked in the center of the column. They skirted a swamp, which was only partially frozen, and by midday reached an area rich in rowanberries. Here, the bears spent several hours, foraging. They ate the frostbitten berries and filled their rawhide pouches for later.

  The shaman approached and caught Gnorrk’s eye. “We should be sending our food parties farth
er afield.”

  “Great idea,” Gnorrk replied. “Why don’t you start by sending your own grandchildren farther out?” The shaman was all talk and no action. He’d rather criticize others than do anything himself. Besides, small foraging teams were vulnerable to tiger attacks, and the farther away from the village the higher the chance of ending up as dinner.

  The shaman shuffled off, growling under his breath.

  Gnorrk watched the other bear’s hunched back in silence. The shaman was even older than himself, and a broad white stripe ran down his back. Good for winter camouflage, Gnorrk supposed. Not that the shaman was likely to participate in any activity that required hiding in the undergrowth.

  Small Salmon Stream lay more than a day’s walk away, so midway to their destination the warband encamped for the night in a snowbound thicket. Crude shelters of pine boughs weren’t as cozy as those of their village, but their pelts were thick.

  By morning, the thaw arrived, turning snowdrifts into slush. That made the going harder, but at least Gnorrk’s nose stopped freezing.

  Soon after the troop left the night bivouac, the leading scouts reported coming across a large herd of deer.

  Gnorrk thought fast. He knew the area well. To the east lay two lakes separated by a thin, densely forested isthmus. The lakes would be frozen, of course, but the slush covering the ice made it extremely slippery, especially for deer hooves.

  “Take our twenty fastest runners,” he ordered the scout leader. “Hook to the south around the herd and set an ambush between the lakes.”

  “It shall be done,” the scout said. He gathered the ambush party and took off at a fast jog.

  Gnorrk assembled the remaining warriors around himself. “Listen up. We’ll spread out and drive the herd east.”

  “Where’s east?” an adolescent, six summers old, asked.

  Gnorrk gritted his teeth. “East is where the sun rises.” He wanted to tap a knuckle on the youth’s head, imagining he’d get a hollow sound. He waited for more idiotic questions. When none came, he continued: