“This was how they screwed,” says Marty, grabbing the nearest woman, pushing her down, pretending to hump her from behind. Everyone laughs, cheers, stamps his feet.
“And they walked like this,” says B.J., doing an ape-shuffle, banging his chest with his fists.
There’s a lot more, a lot of locker-room stuff about the ugly shaggy stupid smelly disgusting Scavenger Folk. How dirty they were, how barbaric. How the pregnant women kept the babies in their bellies twelve or thirteen months and they came out already hairy, with a full mouth of teeth. All ancient history, handed down through the generations by bards like Paul in the epics. None of them has ever actually seen a Scavenger. But they sure seem to detest them.
“They’re all dead,” Paul says. “They were killed in the migration wars long ago. That has to be a ghost out there.”
Of course I’ve guessed what’s up. I’m no archaeologist at all—West Point, fourth generation. My skills are in electronics, computers, time-shift physics. There was such horrible political infighting among the archaeology boys about who was going to get to go to the past that in the end none of them went and the gig wound up going to the military. Still, they sent me here with enough crash-course archaeology to be able to see that the Scavengers must have been what we call the Neanderthals, that shambling race of also-rans that got left behind in the evolutionary sweepstakes.
So there really had been a war of extermination between the slow-witted Scavengers and clever Homo sapiens here in Ice Age Europe. But there must have been a few survivors left on the losing side, and one of them, God knows why, is wandering around near this village.
Now I’m supposed to find the ugly stranger and capture him. Or kill him, I guess. Is that what Zeus wants from me? To take the stranger’s blood on my head? A very civilized tribe, they are, even if they do hunt huge woolly elephants and build houses out of their whitened bones. Too civilized to do their own murdering, and they figure they can send me out to do it for them.
“I don’t think he’s a Scavenger,” Danny says. “I think he’s from Naz Glesim. The Naz Glesim people have gray eyes. Besides, what would a ghost want with fish?”
Naz Glesim is a land far to the northeast, perhaps near what will someday be Moscow. Even here in the Paleolithic the world is divided into a thousand little nations. Danny once went on a great solo journey through all the neighboring lands: he’s a kind of tribal Marco Polo.
“You better not let the chief hear that,” B.J. tells him.
“He’ll break your balls. Anyway, the Naz Glesim people aren’t ugly. They look just like us except for their eyes.”
“Well, there’s that,” Danny concedes. “But I still think—”
Paul shakes his head. That gesture goes way back, too. “A Scavenger ghost,” he insists.
B.J. looks at me. “What do you think, Pumangiup?” That’s his name for me.
“Me?” I say. “What do I know about these things?”
“You come from far away. You ever see a man like that?”
“I’ve seen plenty of ugly men, yes.” The people of the tribe are tall and lean, brown hair and dark shining eyes, wide faces, bold cheekbones. If they had better teeth they’d be gorgeous. “But I don’t know about this one. I’d have to see him.”
Sally brings a new platter of grilled fish over. I run my hand fondly over her bare haunch. Inside this house made of mammoth bones nobody wears very much clothing, because the structure is well insulated and the heat builds up even in the dead of winter. To me Sally is far and away the best looking woman in the tribe, high firm breasts, long supple legs, alert, inquisitive face. She was the mate of a man who had to be killed last summer because he became infested with ghosts. Danny and B.J. and a couple of the others bashed his head in, by way of a mercy killing, and then there was a wild six-day wake, dancing and wailing around the clock. Because she needed a change of luck they gave Sally to me, or me to her, figuring a holy fool like me must carry the charm of the gods. We have a fine time, Sally and I. We were two lost souls when we came together, and together we’ve kept each other from tumbling even deeper into the darkness.
“You’ll be all right,” B.J. says. “You can handle it. The gods love you.”
“I hope that’s true,” I tell him.
Much later in the night Sally and I hold each other as though we both know that this could be our last time. She’s all over me, hot, eager. There’s no privacy in the bone-house and the others can hear us, four couples and I don’t know how many kids, but that doesn’t matter. It’s dark. Our little bed of fox-pelts is our own little world.
There’s nothing esoteric, by the way, about these people’s style of love-making. There are only so many ways that a male human body and a female human body can be joined together, and all of them, it seems, had already been invented by the time the glaciers came.
At dawn, by first light, I am on my way, alone, to hunt the Scavenger man. I rub the rough strange wall of the house of bones for luck, and off I go.
The village stretches for a couple of hundred yards along the bank of a cold, swiftly-flowing river. The three round bone-houses where most of us live are arranged in a row, and the fourth one, the long house that is the residence of Zeus and his family and also serves as the temple and house of parliament, is just beyond them. On the far side of it is the new fifth house that we’ve been building this past week. Further down, there’s a workshop where tools are made and hides are scraped, and then a butchering area, and just past that there’s an immense garbage dump and a towering heap of mammoth bones for future construction projects.
A sparse pine forest lies east of the village, and beyond it are the rolling hills and open plains where the mammoths and rhinos graze. No one ever goes into the river, because it’s too cold and the current is too strong, and so it hems us in like a wall on our western border. I want to teach the tribesfolk how to build kayaks one of these days. I should also try to teach them how to swim, I guess. And maybe a few years farther along I’d like to see if we can chop down some trees and build a bridge. Will it shock the pants off them when I come out with all this useful stuff? They think I’m an idiot, because I don’t know about the different grades of mud and frozen ground, the colors of charcoal, the uses and qualities of antler, bone, fat, hide, and stone. They feel sorry for me because I’m so limited. But they like me all the same. And the gods love me. At least B.J. thinks so.
I start my search down by the riverfront, since that’s where Jeanne saw the Scavenger yesterday. The sun, at dawn on this Ice Age autumn morning, is small and pale, a sad little lemon far away. But the wind is quiet now. The ground is still soft from the summer thaw, and I look for tracks. There’s permafrost five feet down, but the topsoil, at least, turns spongy in May and gets downright muddy by July. Then it hardens again and by October it’s like steel, but by October we live mostly indoors.
There are footprints all over the place. We wear leather sandals, but a lot of us go barefoot much of the time, even now, in 40-degree weather. The people of the tribe have long, narrow feet with high arches. But down by the water near the fish-nets I pick up a different spoor, the mark of a short, thick, low-arched foot with curled-under toes. It must be my Neanderthal. I smile. I feel like Sherlock Holmes. “Hey, look, Marty,” I say to the sleeping village. “I’ve got the ugly bugger’s track. B.J.? Paul? Danny? You just watch me. I’m going to find him faster than you could believe.”
Those aren’t their actual names. I just call them that, Marty, Paul, B.J., Danny. Around here everyone gives everyone else his own private set of names. Marty’s name for B.J. is Ungklava. He calls Danny Tisbalalak and Paul is Shibgamon. Paul calls Marty Dolibog. His name for B.J. is Kalamok. And so on all around the tribe, a ton of names, hundreds and hundreds of names for just forty or fifty people. It’s a confusing system. They have reasons for it that satisfy them. You learn to live with it.