The winter-houses are intricate and elaborate structures that require real ingenuity of design and construction. At this point in time B.J. may well be the best architect the world has ever known. He carries around a piece of ivory on which he has carved a blueprint for the house, and makes sure everybody weaves the bones and skulls and tusks into the structure just the right way. There’s no shortage of construction materials. After 30,000 years of hunting mammoths in this territory, these people have enough bones lying around to build a city the size of Los Angeles.
The houses are warm and snug. They’re round and domed, like big igloos made out of bones. The foundation is a circle of mammoth skulls with maybe a hundred mammoth jawbones stacked up over them in fancy herringbone patterns to form the wall. The roof is made of hides stretched over enormous tusks mounted overhead as arches. The whole thing is supported by a wooden frame and smaller bones are chinked in to seal the openings in the walls, plus a plastering of red clay. There’s an entranceway made up of gigantic thighbones set up on end. It may all sound bizarre but there’s a weird kind of beauty to it and you have no idea, once you’re inside, that the bitter winds of the Pleistocene are howling all around you.
The tribe is semi-nomadic and lives by hunting and gathering. In the summer, which is about two months long, they roam the steppe, killing mammoths and rhinos and musk oxen, and bagging up berries and nuts to get them through the winter. Toward what I would guess is August the weather turns cold and they start to head for their village of bone houses, hunting reindeer along the way. By the time the really bad weather arrives—think Minnesota-and-a-half—they’re settled in for the winter with six months’ worth of meat stored in deep-freeze pits in the permafrost. It’s an orderly, rhythmic life. There’s a real community here. I’d be willing to call it a civilization. But—as I stalk my human prey out here in the cold—I remind myself that life here is harsh and strange. Alien. Maybe I’m doing all this buddy-buddy nickname stuff simply to save my own sanity, you think? I don’t know.
If I get killed out here today the thing I’ll regret most is never learning their secret religious language and not being able to understand the big historical epic that they sing every night. They just don’t want to teach it to me. Evidently it’s something outsiders aren’t meant to understand.
The epic, Sally tells me, is an immense account of everything that’s ever happened: the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Encyclopedia Britannica all rolled into one, a vast tale of gods and kings and men and warfare and migrations and vanished empires and great calamities. The text is so big and Sally’s recounting of it is so sketchy that I have only the foggiest idea of what it’s about, but when I hear it I want desperately to understand it. It’s the actual history of a forgotten world, the tribal annals of thirty millennia, told in a forgotten language, all of it as lost to us as last year’s dreams.
If I could learn it and translate it I would set it all down in writing so that maybe it would be found by archaeologists thousands of years from now. I’ve been taking notes on these people already, an account of what they’re like and how I happen to be living among them. I’ve made twenty tablets so far, using the same clay that the tribe uses to make its pots and sculptures, and firing it in the same beehive-shaped kiln. It’s a godawful slow job writing on slabs of clay with my little bone knife. I bake my tablets and bury them in the cobblestone floor of the house. Somewhere in the 21st or 22nd century a Russian archaeologist will dig them up and they’ll give him one hell of a jolt. But of their history, their myths, their poetry, I don’t have a thing, because of the language problem. Not a damned thing.
Noon has come and gone. I find some white berries on a glossy-leaved bush and, after only a moment’s hesitation, gobble them down. There’s a faint sweetness there. I’m still hungry even after I pick the bush clean.
If I were back in the village now, we’d have knocked off work at noon for a lunch of dried fruit and strips of preserved reindeer meat, washed down with mugs of mildly fermented fruit juice. The fermentation is accidental, I think, an artifact of their storage methods. But obviously there are yeasts here and I’d like to try to invent wine and beer. Maybe they’ll make me a god for that. This year I invented writing, but I did it for my sake and not for theirs and they aren’t much interested in it. I think they’ll be more impressed with beer.
A hard, nasty wind has started up out of the east. It’s September now and the long winter is clamping down. In half an hour the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees, and I’m freezing. I’m wearing a fur parka and trousers, but that thin icy wind cuts right through. And it scours up the fine dry loose topsoil and flings it in our faces. Some day that light yellow dust will lie thirty feet deep over this village, and over B.J. and Marty and Danny and Paul, and probably over me as well.
Soon they’ll be quitting for the day. The house will take eight or ten more days to finish, if early-season snowstorms don’t interrupt. I can imagine Paul hitting the drum six good raps to wind things up and everybody making a run for indoors, whooping and hollering. These are high-spirited guys. They jump and shout and sing, punch each other playfully on the arms, brag about the goddesses they’ve screwed and the holy rhinos they’ve killed. Not that they’re kids. My guess is that they’re 25, 30 years old, senior men of the tribe. The life expectancy here seems to be about 45. I’m 34. I have a grandmother alive back in Illinois. Nobody here could possibly believe that. The one I call Zeus, the oldest and richest man in town, looks to be about 53, probably is younger than that, and is generally regarded as favored by the gods because he’s lived so long. He’s a wild old bastard, still full of bounce and vigor. He lets you know that he keeps those two wives of his busy all night long, even at his age. These are robust people. They lead a tough life, but they don’t know that, and so their souls are buoyant. I definitely will try to turn them on to beer next summer, if I last that long and if I can figure out the technology. This could be one hell of a party town.
Sometimes I can’t help feeling abandoned by my own time. I know it’s irrational. It has to be just an accident that I’m marooned here. But there are times when I think the people up there in 20l3 simply shrugged and forgot about me when things went wrong, and it pisses me off tremendously until I get it under control.
I’m a professionally trained hard-ass. But I’m 20,000 years from home and there are times when it hurts more than I can stand.
Maybe beer isn’t the answer. Maybe what I need is a still. Brew up some stronger stuff than beer, a little moonshine to get me through those very black moments when the anger and the really heavy resentment start breaking through.
In the beginning the tribe looked on me, I guess, as a moron. Of course I was in shock. The time trip was a lot more traumatic than the experiments with rabbits and turtles had led us to think.
There I was, naked, dizzy, stunned, blinking and gaping, retching and puking. The air had a bitter acid smell to it—who expected that, that the air would smell different in the past?—and it was so cold it burned my nostrils. I knew at once that I hadn’t landed in the pleasant France of the Cro-Magnons but in some harsher, bleaker land far to the east. I could still see the rainbow glow of the Zeller Ring, but it was vanishing fast, and then it was gone.
The tribe found me ten minutes later. That was an absolute fluke. I could have wandered for months, encountering nothing but reindeer and bison. I could have frozen; I could have starved. But no, the men I would come to call B.J. and Danny and Marty and Paul were hunting near the place where I dropped out of the sky and they stumbled on me right away. Thank God they didn’t see me arrive. They’d have decided that I was a supernatural being and would have expected miracles from me, and I can’t do miracles. Instead they simply took me for some poor dope who had wandered so far from home that he didn’t know where he was, which after all was essentially the truth.