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One night Gurkan came back to the caves with a sled full of mysterious goods — cooked grains and meat in silver packets, boots made of a material no one could identify, cylinders that made a strong light on the darkest wall. This was also surprising because everyone assumed Gurkan was dead. Their assumption was not unfounded: any tribesman caught in a blizzard and lost for more than a night, two at best, was mourned, painted on the cavern walls, moved past without fear as he joined his brothers.
Gurkan explained, with some difficulty, what had transpired. After facing great starvation and blindness due to the extreme winter conditions, he had collapsed of weakness, fate accepted. The next moment he was awakened by smiling strangers, dressed oddly, like white cones. They explained that he had been frozen in the ice for quite some time — they spoke his language, but the motion of their mouths did not match the noises they made, frightening Gurkan — and that they just wanted to say hello before sending him back. His terror intensified. After further struggles with meaning they meant back to before he was frozen, not back to his death. And they asked me a few questions about mammoths and furs and that was it, Gurkan finished.
Of course, he was looked at with great favor for these minor gods attending to his fate, and some deliberations by the elders made his funerary portrait instead a monument to the holy Gurkan and these strangers, painted like a child’s angel above his furry head. The cave people continued with their lives — placid, cold, prideful lives dominated by the twin poles of the white outside and the subterranean interior. The artifacts from the cone people were enshrined in a crevice and demonstrated twice a year, once per solstice.
Some months passed when Gurkan’s brother, Frokhan, was outside in a situation much like his sibling’s, though he thought nothing of this yet. The cave people demonstrated a cunning pack intelligence when it came to tracking meat — scouting happened in singles or pairs, and hunting only happened once a scout spotted a herd, requiring a human herd of its own.
Frokhan stopped at a hill covered with permafrost, the treeline to the south, his opening to the womb of the earth a little farther northwest. The wind whistling through the eddies and flows of falling and fallen snow — those million little mirrors of that age’s cold sun, reflecting the patience of that century — resembled a microscopic imitation of an assembly covering a vast field, an assembly we would call “windchimes”.
Frokhan felt a tickle at the back of his neck separate from the wind. Turning back to the treeline, he saw two yellow eyes grow brighter in the distance. Frokhan ran.
The sabertooth tiger did typically ambush its prey in forested or shrubland areas, where there was limited visibility and places for ambush, or in places where mobility of prey was limited like the historic La Brea tar pits. This specimen had made a calculation — Frokhan was not far enough from the treeline to return to the safety of his mountain habitat or call for help. The tiger was faster than the man, and with the sun setting, all the time in the world could be taken to drag him back into the frosted wood.
With his head start, Frokhan had a little bit to think, and think he did — his salted and dried meat were thrown down behind him along with his primitive wood-and-bone sled — lost ballast. It wasn’t enough. Cresting a second ridge, he dared to turn for a moment to see the creature in much better detail: a young, risk-taking male, even worse than he had thought. Frokhan scurried down the other edge of the ridge, hearing now the paws of the tiger, and had his last good idea.
All of a sudden Frokhan threw himself in the snow and held his spear up between his legs — he dare not throw it earlier — forming a kind of acute angle with the closed part being the butt of the spear and his ankles and the open end being the tip of the spear and his head. The tiger, blind to this ruse, had just leapt over the blind edge of the short ridge paws and fangs out, and was rewarded with a slice from his chin to his belly. The tiger’s body continued its flight over Frokhan, spraying blood, tumbled to a halt mere feet away, and with a last effort to right itself, perished.
Frokhan couldn’t believe it. He stood up slowly, careful not to injure himself with the flint tip of the spear. He walked the few steps to the creature — noticing how much blood was on the ground and on his clothes. An incredible amount of blood. Even more blood, he now noticed, than was present seconds ago.
He lifted his mitten to his chin and the mitten came away a glittering red, already different than the rouge and maroon littered around him. Frokhan’s heart sank. Their battle was a draw. Already he felt weaker, the insides of his fur suit slick. The sabertooth must have nicked him in its tumble — what horrible luck, what horrible luck, Frokhan groaned.
And then he remembered his brother. His blessed ignoramus of a brother, Frokhan thought, who had squandered his gift from the gods — now was his turn! Now was his chance! Turning back to the snowy outcropping, he found a suitable place that was vicera-free and had plenty of loose snow to pack himself in. Yes, let’s see those gods! You would die of stupidity and starvation — they will find the battle here and know me as a warrior! Let’s see those gods! Let’s see…
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Frokhan woke up. Surrounded by an oversized clear plastic bell, surrounded by fake rocks and lichens, with humidifiers pumping vapor clouds he choked on over and over again, he began to weep. Outside he saw no white-coned angels, but a large collection of children, or what looked like children, with one or two full-grown towering over them. These demons must reproduce very prodigiously, Frokhan thought, or they are trapped as children by some kind of evil magic. He fainted.
In a tongue Frokhan did not recognize and never would, full of chopped syllables and odd tongue-tones, one of the schoolteachers said: “They just got this ancestor in. Supposed to be very aggressive, but he’s not performing today.” The children whined at this, scratching their ears, picking their noses, leaving tiny hand-smears on Frokhan’s glass prison…
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And to one side of the laboratory, in his own enclosure, a long-toothed cat with a surgery scar down its middle twitched and dreamed peacefully, dreams of large prey and little kittens.
