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

by R Magnusholm

  “We drive them toward the sun. Keep each other in sight and walk. Walk, not run.” He patted his club for emphasis. “Now, move out.”

  He watched the warriors shuffle off into the woods to either side. The shaman lingered, and Gnorrk glared at him. Reluctantly, the old bear took up position some thirty paces to Gnorrk’s right. Another bear was peeking over the bushes to Gnorrk’s left.

  He waited to give the outermost wings of their sweep time to get into position, then yelled. “Forward!”

  His command was relayed along the chain, and the Woodlanders began advancing. On the way, they shook bushes and banged their clubs on tree trunks, roared, and generally made as much noise as possible.

  By the time Gnorrk arrived at the isthmus between the lakes, the ambush party had caught five deer. One had been clubbed as the herd rushed down the narrow strip of land, and four others had been driven onto the ice where they’d lost footing and were chased and killed.

  A feast took place with some meat sent back to the village. By the time the party delivering meat to the village returned, dusk had fallen, so the warband returned to the pine grove where they’d spent the previous night. Their bellies full of venison and rowanberries, the Woodlanders settled for another night.

  Chapter 32

  Premonition

  Camp Bramble

  Twenty miles south, John slept uneasily, tossing and turning under the tiger skin. A few times he started awake and stared into the shimmering coals. He felt like a mouse running across an anvil, expecting a blow to fall at any moment. Something was afoot. But what?

  He sensed Spot sleeping in the old reed hut that had become his den as the wolf refused to enter their smoky wigwam. Lately, the animal had grown fat and lazy, sleeping all day and only coming out to dine on frozen ursine carcasses. Not that John could blame him, for getting rid of the bodies was a useful job. There was too much meat to process, and scavengers and carrion eaters of all types began to gather around their clearing.

  The rafters of their wigwam groaned under the weight of bear meat strips hanging in the smoke. There was so much meat, they had to festoon some of it on the surrounding trees for the wind and frost to dry-cure it.

  Two pairs of ravens had made a home in the fir trees a stone’s throw away from the clearing. The birds disrupted John and Liz’s midday naps with occasional croaking, but the nice black feathers they sometimes dropped were useful for fletching arrows.

  As John drifted into an uneasy sleep, his mind merged with Spot’s, and suddenly he knew how to allay his unease.

  Spot arose, stretched, and squeezed through the hole they’d left for him in the barricade. By the light of the waning moon and rising Jupiter, he turned north and loped with an easy gait across the snowy glades. It took him less than two hours to reach the ford and the border.

  There he paused briefly to slacken his thirst from the stream, then leaped from boulder to boulder to get across. The farther north he traveled, the stronger the scent of bears. By the time the moon set, and Jupiter hung low in the sky, Spot reached a lake country where rushes whispered in the night breeze. The smell of bears grew overpowering, and it didn’t take long to find their encampment.

  John peered through Spot’s eyes at the collection of brushwood shelters. Snores and occasional mutters sounded within. Cautiously, the wolf stole from shelter to shelter, sniffing. Was this the ursine village? And if so, where were the females and the young? By the intensity of the odor, there were scores of ursines—all of them adult males. They had venison and rowanberries for dinner. A trail trodden by many inward-turning feet led north. So it wasn’t a village, but a hunting camp. But why did they need such a big hunting party?

  There was only one way to find out. John directed Spot to hide in the undergrowth to the south of the camp to wait for the ursines to wake up. Spot crawled into a cozy niche under the low-hanging fir branches and curled into a ball, covering his paws and nose with his bushy tail.

  As the sun rose over the woods, Spot was woken by the sound of pounding footsteps and gruff ursine growls, all heading his way. He poked his nose out. The ursines had struck the camp and headed south en masse. They looked not so much as a hunting party, but as an army on the march. Scores of ursines. Maybe as many as a hundred.

  Spot began shadowing them.

  John felt someone shaking him insistently. He resisted, clinging to sleep and the connection he had with Spot.

  His eyes snapped open. In the diffused morning light falling through the smoke opening of their wigwam, Liz’s face swam in and out of focus. Her eyes gleamed orange and gold in the firelight, and her pupils were huge with fear.

  She heaved a sigh of relief. “I thought you weren’t breathing.”

  He inhaled deeply and let the air out. He’d slept so deeply while traveling with Spot that he must have appeared dead.

  “I was with Spot in the Ursine Country. A large warband is marching south, toward the ford.”

  A sharp intake of breath. Then: “How far?”

  “Four or five hours away from the border.”

  Liz dropped a few thick sticks into the fire pit. “Enough time for a quick breakfast.” She lowered a hot stone into the water-filled cooking skin. “This time, we’ll have plenty of ash-flavored mushroom brew.”

  They ate thin strips of tiger meat in silence, taking turns to drink the mushroom infusion from the Arsenal mug. As far as John could see they had three options: fight the ursines at the ford; fight them at Camp Bramble; or flee into the woods now, taking as much as they could carry.

  But if they ran, what then? They might meet another band of ursines.

  He eyed their array of weaponry. They had two bows with fifteen flinted and twenty-four plain arrows. He’d replaced the shaft on his long-spear and made six heavy darts out of oak staves. Their points sharpened and hardened in the flames, the darts might not kill an ursine outright, but they would surely cause damage at close range. Tufts of dry grass tied to the butt ends with strips of willow bark would provide drag in flight. And he piled more rocks for throwing.

  He supposed they could meet the ursines at the ford and kill a few there. Then they’d lead them a merry dance through the woods and hopefully lure them away from Camp Bramble. The enemies ran slower—at least over short distances—and perhaps they didn’t know where he and Liz lived. Except he had no idea how good the ursines were at tracking.

  A thought struck him. As the recent snowfalls had covered the ground since the first battle, there was a chance the ursines might not find Camp Bramble. But if John and Liz went to meet the enemy at the ford and failed to scare them off, the bastards might follow his and Liz’s footprints all the way to the camp. Should they stay put and wait?

  He agonized in indecision, for staying felt wrong, somehow. A coward’s choice.

  Liz piled hot coals in the carry-pot and added chunks of dried tree fungus that would smolder for hours. She examined a special arrow they’d made. It had a ‘warhead’ of fat-soaked reed fibers tied around the shaft above the flint point. The incendiary mixture had been seasoned with shavings of pine resin. With so many other chores, they had no opportunity to test whether the flames would survive a rapid flight, but a small-scale model kept blazing despite him flinging it around.

  He filled up his plastic container with tepid mushroom broth, wrapped it in dry grass, and stuffed it in his backpack along with a handful of shelled nuts and strips of dry meat.

  Liz bound the fire arrow in a piece of deerskin and put it in her canvas bag. She slung it over her shoulder, alongside her quiver. “Ready?”

  He nodded, grabbed his bow and two spears, and threw aside the frost-stiffened bear hide that served as an entrance flap. The snow that had begun melting in the thaw the day before had refrozen overnight and turned as hard as concrete. Well, not quite as hard, because when he stepped in a deeper patch his foot broke through the icy crust.

  Once they cleared the barricade, he re-blocked the entrance with a dry fir tree—a
futile gesture as wild animals no longer dared to approach because of the smoke, and the ursines would easily push that tree aside.

  He turned and caught sight of Liz, who for some reason headed south to the Thames, instead of north to where the ursines lived. “Liz, you’re going the wrong way.”

  “We need to hide our trail,” she called over her shoulder, disappearing into the leafless birch and aspen thickets.

  He hurried after her, his oxfords crunching in the snow. His footprints weren’t particularly clear, but they were visible all the same.

  They passed the peat bog where hides and guts were curing and reached the wide floodplain that was devoid of trees. Presently, it was covered by cracked sheets of ice that froze and refroze with tidal swells. There was hardly any snow on the smooth surface, and they hurried over it without leaving any footprints.

  Liz glanced over her shoulder. “We’ll swing a mile to the east, then look for an animal trail going north.”

  “Great plan.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  John tried to connect to Spot but found it impossible to do so while running and sliding over the ice. All he received from his furry friend were a collection of vague snapshots featuring a close up of interlaced branches and whiffs of bears and other animals. Spot seemed relaxed, but of course for him it was just a game.

  They crossed the frozen mouth of the Fleet over the thin ice that creaked alarmingly but held. Lazy trout gazed up at him curiously as he slid over the roof of their liquid world. The water there was only three or four feet deep, and the plunge itself would be survivable, but they had no time to make a fire and dry their clothes.

  As Liz had predicted, a mile east they came across an auroch trail leading north.

  “How did you know there’d be a trail?” he asked. They had never had a reason to go so far east along the shore.

  “I’ve heard them mooing a few times.”

  They hurried up a trail of churned up snow, spooking a small herd of deer that pelted up the path. His and Liz’s footprints would be lost now. He wondered if it was worth it. Maybe the bears already knew the location of Camp Bramble, or maybe they could sniff them out from miles away. God alone knew how far the reek of burning carried through the pristine woods.

  The trail curved west, and after following it for ten minutes they were obliged to abandon it.

  In patches of dense woodland, there was almost no snow under the trees, and here and there they made use of deer trails to navigate north. Two hours later, they reached the border stream and took a ten-minute break to drink tea and rest.

  John closed his eyes, steadied his breathing, and connected with Spot. He gazed through canine eyes at the colorless woods. His sensitive nose and ears told him that fast-flowing water lay close ahead, but above all, and overlaying everything, was the odor of scores of angry ursines. Spot peered from behind a pine trunk. The ursines were milling by the ford in agitation. Didn’t they like the border markers John had placed there for their benefit? Evidently not.

  The ursine army filed down to the stream and began wading across through the shallows.

  John opened his eyes. “Liz, we’re too late. The bears are crossing the river.”

  A well-trodden animal trail led along the bank, and they followed it west toward the ford. A couple of hundred yards along the path, he recognized a forked birch that grew on the other side of the ford. They slowed down and peered through a thicket.

  “There they are,” Liz whispered. “Just staring at the heads.”

  “Hmm, they’re not going further, though.”

  “Maybe they’ve got the message.”

  He watched the long file of enemy warriors crossing the partially frozen stream and bunching up by one of the heads. Most of them were still on the other side.

  To his and Liz’s left, a spur of a deer trail led up the ridge overlooking the ford and the bunched bears. The ridgetop was an ideal shooting position that they had identified on the previous visit to the border. The river-facing slope of the hill was overgrown with low bramble vines with little other vegetation to block an arrow’s flight. But should the ursines charge, they’d have to plow uphill through brambles.

  He exchanged a glance with Liz, and they began climbing.

  Chapter 33

  The Rout

  Little Salmon Stream Crossing: Early afternoon

  Gnorrk stared at his grandson’s severed head mounted on a stake. The head stared back with empty eye sockets. Of course, there was no way to tell which of his grandsons the head belonged to, for the pelt had been removed and crows had been at it. Half of the bears in the village (and all but one in the missing warband) were his grandchildren.

  Gnorrk was certain the head didn’t belong to his son Senior, though, as his son had one fang longer than another, which wasn’t the case with this head.

  Snow crunched underfoot as his troops crowded around him, muttering under their breaths.

  The shaman circled the bloodied stake. “Oh, the great Bear in the Enchanted Woods, save us from evil.”

  Gnorrk peered about but saw no immediate danger. The stream burbled at his back, and the wind soughed in the towering firs to both sides. A woodpecker tapped a dry deadwood log in the distance. D-r-r-r-r. The woods seemed so normal, except the wind carried the stink of burning whenever it gusted down the ridge rising to the south.

  He gazed up the bramble-covered slope suspiciously. Winter was the wrong time for forest fires. But since no flames raged in the trees lining the ridgetop, Gnorrk pushed that particular worry out of his mind.

  “Any idea why anyone would put a head on a stick?” he asked his second in command, one of his sons known as Split-Ear.

  “No idea.”

  Gnorrk turned to the leader of the scouts, Strongpaw. “What do you think?”

  “I guess that’s how the Sunset Clan honors fallen warriors.”

  This statement produced several growls of indignation from the assembled troops. Everyone knew that to honor the fallen warriors, regardless of whether the enemy or your own, was to eat them.

  “Why’d you think it was the Sunset Clan who’ve done it?” Gnorrk asked.

  Strongpaw shrugged. “We’ve met the Sunrise Clan, and they’re like us. But we’ve never met any from the Sunset Clan. Who knows what their customs are?”

  This was greeted with barks of agreement interspersed with growls of derision.

  The shaman began chanting. “Doom. Doom.” He headed to the nearest mature fir tree and banged his head against the trunk, producing a solid thump. “Doom!” Thump. “Doom!”

  Gnorrk watched the shaman in consternation—the silly old bear was getting senile. Perhaps they should eat him while he was still good and fat. If he sickened, his meat would get too lean and stringy. But then they’d need a new shaman, and nobody in the clan had displayed any talent for communicating with the spirits yet.

  Gnorrk gently pulled the shaman away from the trunk. “Uncle, stop pretending to be an auroch and tell us what the spirits say.”

  The shaman dropped to all fours and sniffed the snowy ground. “Doom. Can’t you feel it?”

  Gnorrk knelt next to his uncle. The reek of recent burning was unmistakable. He peered around, but no bushes were singed by flames. How odd. It was then that he detected the musky smell of tiger and the earthy odor of auroch. He also sensed a wolf and a whiff of bear. All from a single tangle of the flattened bush. Somebody had cleared the scrub in front of the stake displaying the head.

  Why would anyone do something like that?

  The shaman sprang to his feet. “Woe to us! Death has come to the woods. We must kill them, or we’re doomed. Doomed.” He shuffled off to the fir and resumed banging his head against the trunk.

  A young hunter hurried over. “Grandpaw, I think you should see this.” He led Gnorrk to a deep snowbank. The top layer of snow had been cleared, revealing a patch of yellow. Someone had emptied his bladder here many days ago. In a sheltered spot where
hardly any of the recent snow had fallen, that someone had also left a couple of clawless footprints that looked like nothing Gnorrk had ever seen.

  He bent down to examine the strange spoor. A wolf had been here, yes. And someone else. He took a few sniffs of the snow and his blood turned to an icy slush in his veins. The author of the yellow patch routinely dined on tigers, deer, aurochs, and bears. And it ate fire.

  Gnorrk straightened his back slowly and peered around fearfully.

  The shaman butted the pine trunk particularly hard. He swayed, then sat down on his rump, wailing.

  Gnorrk hurried over. “What do the spirits say, uncle?”

  The rest of the hunters gathered around the shaman, waiting for him to speak. Vapor wafted around their muzzles, and snow crunched under their feet.

  The shaman raised his head and looked about himself. “The monsters who killed our hunters didn’t put their heads on stakes to honor them.”

  A low murmur of indignation arose from the ranks.

  The shaman spoke again, “It’s a warning. If you cross the stream, you die.”

  “Nonsense,” Gnorrk said. “This is our land—all the way to the Great Salty River.”

  He received growls of agreement from the gathering.

  “So, what do these monsters look like?” one of the hunters asked.

  The shaman gazed about himself out of his small yellowed eyes. “They be wolves the size of an auroch, and they eat tigers and bears. Instead of blood, they have fire in their veins.”

  “What nonsense,” Gnorrk said. His words fell into silence. Of course, the evidence was all around them: the reek of burning, the odors of tiger and wolf.

  “They also eat nuts and mushrooms,” the young hunter, who had found the patch of yellow snow, interjected.

  The shaman began shaking and swaying. His eyes rolled up in his furry forehead, and when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it came from a great distance, “You must stop the fire wolves, Gnorrk, or we’re all doomed.” He shivered and continued in a faraway spirit voice. “Kill the monsters, kill them all. Kill . . .” His last words emerged in a choked croak.