A man never reveals his true name, the one his mother whispered when he was born. Not even his father knows that, or his wife. You could put hot stones between his legs and he still wouldn’t tell you that true name of his, because that’d bring every ghost from Cornwall to Vladivostok down on his ass to haunt him. The world is full of angry ghosts, resentful of the living, ready to jump on anyone who’ll give them an opening and plague him like leeches, like bedbugs, like every malign and perverse bloodsucking pest rolled into one.
We are somewhere in western Russia, or maybe Poland. The landscape suggests that: flat, bleak, a cold grassy steppe with a few oaks and birches and pines here and there. Of course a lot of Europe must look like that in this glacial epoch. But the clincher is the fact that these people build mammoth-bone houses. The only place that was ever done was Eastern Europe, so far as anybody down the line knows. Possibly they’re the oldest true houses in the world.
What gets me is the immensity of this prehistoric age, the spans of time. It goes back and back and back and all of it is alive for these people. We think it’s a big deal to go to England and see a cathedral a thousand years old. They’ve been hunting on this steppe thirty times as long. Can you visualize 30,000 years? To you, George Washington lived an incredibly long time ago. George is going to have his 300th birthday very soon. Make a stack of books a foot high and tell yourself that that stands for all the time that has gone by since George was born in 1732. Now go on stacking up the books. When you’ve got a pile as high as a ten-story building, that’s 30,000 years.
A stack of years almost as high as that separates me from you, right this minute. In my bad moments, when the loneliness and the fear and the pain and the remembrance of all that I have lost start to operate on me, I feel that stack of years pressing on me with the weight of a mountain. I try not to let it get me down. But that’s a hell of a weight to carry. Now and then it grinds me right into the frozen ground.
The flatfooted track leads me up to the north, around the garbage dump, and toward the forest. Then I lose it. The prints go round and round, double back to the garbage dump, then to the butchering area, then toward the forest again, then all the way over to the river. I can’t make sense of the pattern. The poor dumb bastard just seems to have been milling around, foraging in the garbage for anything edible, then taking off again but not going far, checking back to see if anything’s been caught in the fish net, and so on. Where’s he sleeping? Out in the open, I guess. Well, if what I heard last night is true, he’s as hairy as a gorilla; maybe the cold doesn’t bother him much.
Now that I’ve lost the trail, I have some time to think about the nature of the mission, and I start getting uncomfortable.
I’m carrying a long stone knife. I’m out here to kill. I picked the military for my profession a long time ago, but it wasn’t with the idea of killing anyone, and certainly not in hand-to-hand combat. I guess I see myself as a representative of civilization, somebody trying to hold back the night, not as anyone who would go creeping around planning to stick a sharp flint blade into some miserable solitary tramp.
But I might well be the one that gets killed. He’s wild, he’s hungry, he’s scared, he’s primitive. He may not be very smart, but at least he’s shrewd enough to have made it to adulthood, and he’s out here earning his living by his wits and his strength. This is his world, not mine. He may be stalking me even while I’m stalking him, and when we catch up with each other he won’t be fighting by any rules I ever learned. A good argument for turning back right now.
On the other hand if I come home in one piece with the Scavenger still at large, Zeus will hang my hide on the bone-house wall for disobeying him. We may all be great buddies here but when the chief gives the word, you hop to it or else. That’s the way it’s been since history began and I have no reason to think it’s any different back here.
I simply have to kill the Scavenger. That’s all there is to it.
I don’t want to get killed by a wild man in this forest, and I don’t want to be nailed up by a tribal court-martial either. I want to live to get back to my own time. I still hang on to the faint chance that the rainbow will come back for me and take me down the line to tell my tale in what I have already started to think of as the future. I want to make my report.
The news I’d like to bring you people up there in the world of the future is that these Ice Age folk don’t see themselves as primitive. They know, they absolutely know, that they’re the crown of creation. They have a language—two of them, in fact—they have history, they have music, they have poetry, they have technology, they have art, they have architecture. They have religion. They have laws. They have a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, that will go on working for thousands more. You may think it’s all grunts and war-clubs back here, but you’re wrong. I can make this world real to you, if I could only get back there to you.
But even if I can’t ever get back, there’s a lot I want to do here. I want to learn that epic of theirs and write it down for you to read. I want to teach them about kayaks and bridges, and maybe more. I want to finish building the bone-house we started last week. I want to go on horsing around with my buddies B.J. and Danny and Marty and Paul. I want Sally. Christ, I might even have kids by her, and inject my own futuristic genes into the Ice Age gene pool.
I don’t want to die today trying to fulfill a dumb murderous mission in this cold bleak prehistoric forest.
The morning grows warmer, though not warm. I pick up the trail again, or think I do, and start off toward the east and north, into the forest. Behind me I hear the sounds of laughter and shouting and song as work gets going on the new house, but soon I’m out of earshot. Now I hold the knife in my hand, ready for anything. There are wolves in here, as well as a frightened half-man who may try to kill me before I can kill him.
I wonder how likely it is that I’ll find him. I wonder how long I’m supposed to stay out here, too—a couple of hours, a day, a week?—and what I’m supposed to use for food, and how I keep my ass from freezing after dark, and what Zeus will say or do if I come back empty-handed.
I’m wandering around randomly now. I don’t feel like Sherlock Holmes any longer.
Working on the bone-house, that’s what I’d rather be doing now. Winter is coming on and the tribe has grown too big for the existing four houses. B.J. directs the job and Marty and Paul sing and chant and play the drum and flute, and about seven of us do the heavy labor.
“Pile those jawbones chin down,” B.J. will yell, as I try to slip one into the foundation the wrong way around. “Chin down, bozo! That’s better.” Paul bangs out a terrific riff on the drum to applaud me for getting it right the second time. Marty starts making up a ballad about how dumb I am, and everyone laughs. But it’s loving laughter. “Now that backbone over there,” B.J. yells to me. I pull a long string of mammoth vertebrae from the huge pile. The bones are white, old bones that have been lying around a long time. They’re dense and heavy. “Wedge it down in there good! Tighter! Tighter!” I huff and puff under the immense weight of the thing, and stagger a little, and somehow get it where it belongs, and jump out of the way just in time as Danny and two other men come tottering toward me carrying a gigantic skull.