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

by R Magnusholm

  Chapter 52

  The Fish Heart

  Still in full flood, the Fleet gushed noisily over the beaver dam with froth swirling in the eddies below. Downstream from the barrier, salmon teemed from shore to shore. They loitered just below the surface, then surged forward, easily leaping over the jumble of thin logs, packed branches, and sods. An eagle perched on the dam, watching the fish with a keen yellow eye.

  John tied the end of the harpoon line to a young birch and tugged the makeshift rope to test the knot. Liz and Spot stood to either side of him, watching.

  It was too warm for the parka, so he wore his pinstriped suit. Over the last year, it had become shabby—mainly due to being badly wrinkled—but it remained perfectly intact. His shirt collar, though, had started to fray. At this rate, in a few years, he’d wear only animal skins.

  Satisfied the line was secure, he lifted the harpoon and looked for a suitable salmon to target. With fish after fish surging within inches of the bank, he was spoiled for choice. He braced his feet, and when a particularly large specimen came close to shore, he jabbed his harpoon at it. Sun flickered on the surface as wavelets raced from the point of impact. His weapon struck nothing but empty water.

  How could he miss from three feet?

  “It’s the surface refraction effect.” Liz laughed. “Aim for the empty patch just below the fish.”

  When another salmon came along, he lunged again, and this time hit something solid. In the next instant, the harpoon was wrenched from his hand with such force that he was pulled headlong into the water. He stood up, dripping, and grinned. “Hey, my suit got an extra rinse today.” The taut harpoon line vibrated.

  From the stream bank, Liz cried, “You all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better!”

  He grabbed the line and hauled it in hand-over-hand until he reached the harpoon’s shaft. He grasped it in both hands and dragged the thrashing fish to shore. Green-backed and streamlined like a torpedo, it was at least four feet in length and weighed some twenty pounds. A trickle of blood ran down its side where the harpoon pierced its silver flank.

  “What kind of salmon is that?” he asked.

  “A magnificent one.”

  He climbed out of the water and dropped his struggling catch in the moss under the trees. As the huge fish continued to thrash, he drew his axe from under his belt and struck it on the head, a finger length behind its unblinking eye. “It looks different from the type we had at the fishmongers. Maybe it’s not even salmon.”

  “Well, whatever it is, let’s bring it in.”

  He sat down and pulled off his moccasins. He poured water out of one, then the other. Spot, who had been watching with interest, approached and stared pointedly at the dead fish.

  John caressed the animal’s ears. “Patience, buddy. You’ll get your share.”

  Later, back in their wigwam, he sat before the fire, wrapped in a bearskin as his wet clothes hung in the wind and sun outside. Whether the fish was or wasn’t a salmon he couldn’t tell, but it had oily orange flesh. Filleted into two pieces, it now roasted on a grill of green sticks over the coals of the hearth, and every wooden bowl was filled with roe. A lovely, high-class-restaurant aroma permeated the rustic shelter.

  “Let’s see what the caviar tastes like.” He picked up his dish and sampled the roe. “Not bad, but to make it into caviar we need salt.”

  “Just put some ash on it.”

  “We could get some brackish water at high tide and boil it down.”

  She shook her head. “We’re too far upstream, and there’s more silt than salt in the water.” She sprinkled a pinch of ash over her bowl. “Ash is probably healthier, anyway.”

  “You can’t know that for sure.”

  “Our distant ancestors wouldn’t be consuming refined sodium chloride,” Liz said.

  “They had an average lifespan of thirty-five.”

  “Not because of a lack of table salt. You worry too much, Johnnie boy.”

  He sprinkled ash over his roe and ate in brooding silence. Yes, he possessed worrying and sentimental streaks in abundance and worked hard on adopting a nonchalant outlook on life. He supposed being a worrier was a useful survival trait. Was sentimentalism a survival trait, too? Maybe, and maybe not.

  Earlier, when gutting the fish, he had held its still-beating heart in his hand. The creature was dead, but its heart kept on beating. Forlorn, beating against all hope. He thought of Liz and the tiny human being in her belly then and nearly wept. He hadn’t, of course. He wasn’t some weakling who cried over dying fish hearts and pretty sunsets. Unable to look at the pitiful heart any longer, he tossed it to the wolf alongside with the rest of the entrails, saving just the liver and the roe sack.

  Spot gobbled it all up, quite unsentimentally.

  Chapter 53

  The New Arrival

  George Archer Summers was born amid the howling of wolves and roaring of tigers. This momentous event in John and Liz’s lives had begun with her informing him one evening that her water had broken. The small contractions had not been too disturbing, so Liz bathed in the river, then slept nearly till dawn.

  Fretting and worrying, John slept fitfully. When the intensifying contractions woke Liz, he stoked the fire and warmed up the water in the tub. In the cooking skin, he boiled some water with bits of willow bark to act as antiseptic. He sterilized strips of rawhide as well as the scissors for cord-cutting.

  Luckily, the baby came out head first without causing perineal tearing or excessive hemorrhage. John eased the baby out, and without clamping the umbilical cord, laid it on Liz’s stomach. It took its first breath and began bawling.

  “It’s a boy,” John said tiredly.

  Liz smiled.

  He used the moss sponge to clean up the newborn, then covered their son with a scrap of bearskin.

  A few minutes later, when the cord quit pumping, John tied it in two places and cut it with scissors between the ligatures. He doused the ends of the cut cord with cold willow bark infusion and sprinkled ash over them. Now the cord shouldn’t get infected. Not that he expected it would. Ever since falling into this strange world, neither he nor Liz had as much as a sniffle, and their many scratches healed quickly. As the baby suckled at Liz’s breast, they waited for the placenta to come out. An hour later, it did—complete and undamaged.

  Even as Liz lingered in her post-partum euphoria, he fretted. Every few minutes, he checked her pulse, inquired how she felt (very well, and thank you very much) checked for excessive hemorrhage, then fretted some more. By the early afternoon, it became clear that Liz wouldn’t bleed to death, and he fell into an exhausted sleep.

  He’d slept all through the evening and the night, to wake up to the baby wailing in its crib and Liz pottering around their wigwam.

  “Caviar for breakfast?” she asked, brightly.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No fever?”

  “No.”

  He climbed from under the tiger skin and held his hand to her forehead. Cool and dry.

  She smiled. “I told you, it’ll be all right.” She picked up little George and began rocking him against her chest. He quieted down for a moment, then let out a thin wail.

  “I suppose he wants more milk,” she said. She undid the simple fastenings of the deerskin dress she’d made to wear in summer and held him to her breast.

  John watched them for a while, feeling such a surge of love for them both that he had to look away. He stepped outside, stretching. Bright slivers of morning light flooded through the gaps between palisade logs and painted the little patch of trampled earth forming the inner courtyard with orange and black stripes. The morning air was fresh and moist on his face.

  From the outside, Spot poked his nose between logs, sniffing and whining. John felt a sharp pang of guilt. Since Liz’s contractions started, he’d forgotten all about the wolf.

  “I suppose he wants to know what all this fuss is about,” Liz said.
“Better let him in.”

  John climbed to the parapet and slid the ramp down. The wolf trotted up, brushed his furry flank against John’s leg, and descended into the courtyard. His long pink tongue lolling, he approached Liz cautiously, who crouched down to let him sniff the baby. George’s tiny hands moved aimlessly.

  “Happy, happy, happy,” Spot was transmitting. His tail was whipping up a storm. He licked the baby’s face.

  “Spot says he’s happy,” John said. In the stream of images filtered through the wolf’s mind, the baby occasionally had a furry face and a tail. The transmitted picture continued to flicker, alternating between human and animal visages. “He thinks our George is a puppy.”

  She caressed the wolf’s ears. “You would, you fuzzball.”

  John picked up the leather bucket holding their drinking water. Half an inch of water sloshed at the bottom. He offered it to Liz. She drank some, then handed it back to him. He drank, tilting the bucket to catch the last few drops, but remained thirsty. The four-foot trough was half-full of water, but they had bathed their baby in there. The auroch hide tub contained a strong tannin solution that was undrinkable. He smiled ruefully, thinking back to their first full day in the wild when they suffered from thirst while surrounded by miles of brackish water. The memory seemed so remote now, so unreal, as if it happened to somebody else, or was something he’d merely read about.

  How foolish they had been, and how far they had come since that day.

  “I’ll get more water,” he said. He went to tip out the trough, but suddenly hesitated. Suppose they were attacked now? If the siege lasted for any considerable length of time, the pinkish swill in the tub would be the only water they had. He’d fetch the water, fill all their containers, and only then empty the trough.

  “I’m coming with you,” Liz said.

  “Shouldn’t you rest?”

  “I’ve rested enough.”

  She bundled George in the deerskin fashioned into a sling to carry across her chest, then picked up her bow and quiver.

  The salmon were still leaping over the beaver dam. But the birds were gone. Their clamor now sounded from downstream where they’d heard tiger roars yesterday. He suspected the big cats had feasted on fish with plenty of leftovers for the noisy birds.

  Chapter 54

  A Working Model

  Several quiet days slipped by. John and Liz settled with surprising ease into the new life with the tiny helpless being they now had to care for. He marveled at how quickly they’d adapted to such a monumental change. Of course, living in the primeval woods had nothing in common with the hedonistic existence of so many kid-adults in the First World who, protected and cosseted by civilization, devoted their lives to the pursuit of surrogate achievements such as sports trophies, amorous conquests, drunken escapades at office parties, uploading pouting selfies to social media, flaunting their flashy cars to their neighbors, climbing high peaks, or shooting big game on safari after buying obligatory permits.

  Stripped of the trappings of civilization and of any protection it had once afforded them, John and Liz faced a daily struggle for existence. And now, caring for a baby became yet another facet of that raw struggle.

  One hot and muggy day, they pulled down the stiff bear skins covering the wigwam and dragged them to the peat bog for curing.

  The dry reeds, not flattened by winter storms, clicked and rattled in the fresh breeze. John dumped the bundle of stiff dry hides into the tidal pool for soaking.

  Pantless and knee-deep in torpid water, he pulled out one of the bearskins that had been submerged in peat sludge over the winter. After rinsing the hide, he examined it and was pleased with the result. It wasn’t rawhide anymore, but partially tanned leather. Tough and in need of much softening and stretching, of course. He bent a corner of it this way and that, squashed and stretched the hide, the soggy pelt squelching under his fingers as he worked it with familiar movements.

  He dragged it to a little tidal islet where Liz had built a small fire. Used to the smoke by now, Spot lazed in the grass nearby, gnawing at an old tiger bone he’d brought with him. Tiny George lay by Liz’s side, wiggling his hands and feet.

  John pushed the by-now-softened hides into the peat and silt underwater with his feet. He then weighed them down with waterlogged lumps of driftwood.

  He slapped a mosquito on his neck and gazed about.

  All around them spread the wide floodplain of grassy meadows, slimy mudflats, peat bogs, and reed beds. Tidal channels coiled and meandered over this waterlogged landscape like glistening snakes. He wondered if they’d be safe from the bears here. Probably not. If he and Liz could wade through the marshes, so could the ursines. Tigers too.

  Still, in the golden rays of midday sun, the scenery looked so tranquil. Waterfowl paddled by in great flocks, and fish teemed in the inlets, occasionally getting trapped in tidal pools—as had happened to that two-foot-long pike, now roasting on a spit.

  Their islet was a hillock some fifty yards across. An alder grove stood in the middle with a band of lush grass around it and thick stands of reeds at the water’s edge. The tide was out, and the channels around their islet were largely empty of water and filled with oozing mud. The dank air had a faint odor of growing green things and rotting vegetation.

  He examined the trees for signs of past flooding (such as bits of waterweed caught in the branches) and concluded that the highest the water ever rose here at super tide was the base of the trunks. He thought of the tidal surge that had nearly killed them on their first day, and shivered despite the hot day.

  The alder-studded hillock was no place for a permanent camp.

  It could serve as a temporary refuge, though. An idea came to him. John headed over to a stand of last year’s reeds and gathered an armful. He laid the seven-foot-long bundle on the ground, twisted and tied both ends with ivy, and bent them upward. He stuck a driftwood stick in the center for a mast, climbed down the bank, and struggled through mud that came up to his shins to reach the channel. He launched the crude reed raft into the pool of open water and turned to face Liz.

  “You’ve made a toy boat,” she said.

  “It’s a large-scale working model.” He came back ashore, unbuttoned his shirt, and threw it on the grass next to his pants and moccasins. “And I’m going to test it.”

  Since the weather had become hot, he resumed wearing his office pants and shirt. Liz did likewise. While their old clothing was regularly washed in ashy water, he imagined they looked like a pair of vagrants living under a bridge. His shirt used to be pale blue, but now the lack of modern detergents had turned it gray. It was beyond rumpled. Stubborn blood spots stained it with rusty blotches around the collar and cuffs. Liz’s once-white blouse didn’t look any better. But at least their attire was in one piece apart from minor damage sustained on day one when they had landed in holly and brambles.

  Contrary to the popular belief promoted by Hollywood, the castaways’ clothing didn’t turn to rags within a couple weeks. John suspected their clothing would last for many years.

  He waded into the tidal channel, got hold of the floating reed sheaf, cast aside the mast, and lay atop the bundle. It held him up nicely. Like a kid on an inflatable rubber mattress, he paddled around the pool. The sheaf was large enough to stretch upon.

  Spot abandoned his bone and paced the shore excitedly. His throat worked as if he tried to speak. Finally, he took a running jump, plunged into the water, and swam next to John.

  “You’re not taking it to the open river,” Liz cried. She stood on the shore, glaring at him reproachfully.

  “Of course not. But we could build a larger and stronger version. Tied with rawhide strips instead of vines.”

  “Men messing with boats. Just what we need.” She picked up George. Her voice turned plaintive. “We can’t afford the risk.”

  “Liz, one day the damned ursines will come back. We may not get lucky again.”

  “We have the fort now and a hundred and twe
nty arrows.”

  “What if two hundred ursines come?”

  She made a dismissive gesture.

  “Two hundred of them with shields . . .” he said softly.

  “They’re not that advanced. They’re pre-Stone Age.”

  “If they can make rawhide harnesses, they can make crude shields.”

  “That’s unlikely,” she said uncertainly. “Although we don’t know how fast they can learn. Oh, why did you have to ruin such a wonderful day?”

  “Well, sorry, Liz, but we must look at all options. And I have an explorer’s instinct.”

  “Still, the river is dangerous.”

  “The woods are dangerous, too.” He paddled along the shore, then sat astride the reed sheaf. “See how steady and buoyant it is.” He rocked from side to side to demonstrate the stability of the craft.

  “The reeds will get soggy, and your boat will sink.”

  “It won’t.”

  “It might.”

  “Well, we could run an experiment,” he said. “My guess it should float fine for a few days. Didn’t some Norwegian guy cross the Atlantic in a papyrus boat?” He paddled to shore and used a long strip of rawhide to tie the reed sheaf to an exposed tree root. He left enough slack for it to float up on high tide. As the islet lay at the edge of the great marsh, the tide was gentle here, and he didn’t expect the model boat to be carried off.

  “I still think it’s too dangerous,” Liz said. She glanced at the sky. “Let’s eat the fish and go home before high tide.”

  Chapter 55

  The Ra Sails Again

  Three days later they returned to the tidal islet. John dragged out the model reed boat and hefted it, gauging its weight. Yes, it was appreciably heavier, but it floated and held his weight when he sat astride it. He had brought a light frame made from two thin poles of ash wood and several shorter crosspieces. He’d bent the poles by heating the wood over the fire to make bulging sides, a raised prow, and a flat stern. It took them four hours to dress the frame with sheaves of reeds. Each bundle was lashed with rawhide thongs to the wooden frame.