Neanderthal

by John Darnton

Matt joined the others at what had been the campfire, now a broken circle of rocks that held a mound of scattered, sodden ash. Van knelt down and picked up a piece of charcoal and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. “Six months ago the weather was even colder than now, so he’d have wanted to keep the fire going no matter what.” He picked up a half-burnt stick. “Looks like it was doused by water, so unless it was rain­ing at the time, which is possible but not likely, he put it out de­liberately.”

  “Meaning,” said Susan, “that it was probably the last thing he did here. A final bit of housekeeping. Doesn’t look like he was attacked or scared off. Which means that all this damage we see was done after he left.”

  Matt sifted through the ashes, which stuck together in wet clumps. “I’d say it’s old. It all depends on what the weather’s been, but I don’t think there’s been a fire here for two or three months, maybe longer.”

  “Yeah,” said Van. “He’s long gone. Whatever happened to him, he hasn’t been back here.”

  “Probably not since he sent the package down with Sharafidin.”

  “So what do we do now?” asked Rudy.

  “We look for him,” replied Susan.

  “I’ll betcha one thing,” said Van, with a depth of feeling that surprised the others. “If we find him, we’ll find them.”

  At this altitude, the sun set later than in the valley below, but the half-light didn’t bring any warmth. Soon the sun was behind low-lying clouds, a chill wind began blowing, and gusts of fog came rolling down the upper slopes like a ghostly avalanche, enveloping them so completely that at times they couldn’t see beyond the campsite.

  They put their food supplies on the larder platform, built up the fire, and wrapped themselves in sleeping bags while waiting for dinner to cook. Rudy served black coffee all around.

  Van was feeling a bit better, though he tired easily and had an off-and-on nosebleed, a little trickle down the side of his face. He ruminated while staring at the sparks flying up into the mist. “You can tell a lot about a man the way he sets up camp,” he said. “Even more than his house. The house was there before him, but a camp is something he builds all by himself in the middle of nowhere, and he puts his own stamp on it.”

  “For instance?” asked Matt.

  “For instance look at the latrine. Couple of logs over a pit. Kind of crude, don’t you think? And the larder, pretty basic. I’d say the professor is not someone who spends a lot of time worrying about amenities.”

  “I’d say you’re not far off the mark there,” Matt said.

  “And the lean-to isn’t much to write home about. Why couldn’t he be bothered to build something more substantial? I mean, it gets colder ‘n shit up here. Either he thought he wouldn’t be here long or he just didn’t care.”

  “No contest there; I’d say he didn’t care,” said Matt.

  “Then there’s the site itself. If he wanted to be secluded, he could have found a cave; there must be dozens of them up here. But he picks the most conspicuous place around. Not very sMatt.”

  Susan bristled. “Unless he wanted to be seen.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” said Matt. “Announce his presence. Make them come to him.”

  “Or maybe he figured they’d know where he is anyway,” said Susan. Van spun his head and gave her a peculiar searching look. He seemed to be trying to figure something out.

  Susan continued. “The person who built this camp certainly wasn’t afraid—and knowing Kellicut, I’d say that fits.”

  “But didn’t he see any footprints?” Matt asked. “We did, and we weren’t even searching for them. You’d think that would give him pause.”

  “Probably the opposite,” Susan said.

  “So you think he wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “No.”

  “Then why didn’t he worry that they might be afraid of him? Why be so open? Why not try to sneak up on them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Susan. “He probably didn’t buy into that theory to begin with, all that business about Neanderthals retreating to get away from Homo sapiens. Certainly he never empha­sized that in his publications. He seemed to romanticize them as some kind of possibly superior beings.”

  “Or perhaps there’s something we don’t know,” continued Matt. “Maybe he found out something that made him realize they’re not fearful after all.”

  They fell silent around the fire. Rudy was dozing off. Van thought for a minute, then shook his head and looked around again. “Another thing. Look at the way it’s laid out. It doesn’t make sense. Here’s the fire over here, and the well is way over there. Why didn’t he put the fire near the water? Surely that’s more convenient. And what’s the larder doing all the way over there? Think about it. To make a meal you have to walk from there to there to there. It just—”

  “Wait a minute,” Susan interrupted. She jumped up excitedly. “You’re right. Look at that. It’s a triangle. A perfect triangle, Matt”

  The same thought struck him too. He jumped to his feet. “Could it be?”

  “Quick, get some rope.”

  Rudy opened his eyes. Matt burrowed in his rucksack and came up with a coil of rope. He held one end and tossed the other to Susan, who began measuring the distance between the fire and the well.

  “Would you two mind letting me in on your little secret?” said Van. He was trying to sound nonchalant, but there was irritation in his voice.

  “It’s only a possibility,” said Susan. “I don’t know if we’re right.” She measured the rope and marked it by gripping it in her fist; then, still clenching it, she moved over to measure the distance from the well to the larder.

  “It’s a kind of sign that paleontologists use—or at least Kellicut did. It became a sort of ritual on our digs. Before anything else, we’d go over the whole area and survey it, looking for likely places to dig—you know, judging by glacial development, settlement, erosion, that kind of thing—and wherever we thought we should go down, we’d make an equilateral triangle with rocks. Then we’d come back and dig in the center.”

  Now she was measuring the third leg, and Matt picked up the explanation.

  “Kellicut, clever dog that he is, knew that he had to find a secure hiding place. But where? Rocks are no good; they could be dis­turbed, or something might come along and disturb them.”

  “So he used the campsite itself?” Van asked.

  “Eureka,” said Susan, holding up the rope. “A perfect equilateral triangle.”

  She cut the baseline in two, marked it with a stone, ran the rope up as an altitude marker and paced off alongside it to the exact center, and dug her heel in at the spot.

  Matt got out a portable shovel and started digging. The ground was packed hard and each shovelful yielded only a handful of rocks and bits of flinty earth. Rudy helped by chopping at the hole with a hatchet.

  “Can’t believe he would do this,” said Matt. “Even for him, it’s sneaky.”

  Soon the shovel struck something. He dug around it, pried it loose with the tip of the shovel, reached down, pulled up a metal box, and brushed dirt off the lid. He had to tug to get it open. Inside was a thick red diary, soiled and dog-eared.

  8

  Eagleton didn’t like the uniformed man sitting across from him, but he knew he was the best in the business and he needed him. So he had agreed to give Colonel Kane a full briefing—relatively full, that is. Eagleton never told anyone everything.

  As a gesture of good faith, Eagleton tossed the four-line cable from Van across the desk. It was a useless message in any case. The man leaned out of the shadows to read it and then grunted.

  “Where was I?” asked Eagleton.

  “Kellicut.”

  “Yes, Kellicut. Well, as I said, we’d been funding him for years. Little bits here and there, nothing big-time. We never dreamed he would hit pay dirt. It was always low priority.”

  “Low priority? That surprises me. Especially now.” Eagleton leaned back in his seat and took a
drag on his cigarette in his dainty way. “Well, cryptozoology has never been big at the Institute,” he explained. “We’ve had a couple of people working on it from the very beginning, but more as a hobby. Nothing serious, nothing that got the attention of the big boys—at least until now.”

  “Go on.”

  “Mostly we just kept files. The odd sighting here and there. Items in newspapers, that kind of thing.” He gestured toward a stack of files on the windowsill. “We really did it because we knew the Rus­sians were doing it. Not to be behind in anything; that was the game then. And they were into it in a big way, God knows why. It was hard, back then, to see any military advantage. Maybe it was just like our intelligence services doing all that work with porpoises—one of those idiotic times when someone somewhere takes an inter­est in far-out research and the bureaucracy can’t shut itself off.”

  Eagleton told him of the previous Russian expeditions, beginning with an explorer named Badzare Baradiyan in 1906 and later a Buryat Mongol, a professor known only as Zhamtsarano. They were arrested and exiled for their pains, and their voluminous files disappeared somewhere in the bowels of the Leningrad section of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Academy of Sciences.

  In 1958 an expedition to the Pamirs headed by Boris Porshnev ended in failure and worldwide ridicule, thanks to some mocking stories in British tabloids judiciously placed by MI6. “Nothing personal. Just the Cold War,” he chuckled. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he sent Van to make contact with Rinchen, the expert, who was tracked down in a yurt in Mongolia. Rinchen led Van to the lost archives in the Academy, classified under a Mongolian word that translates roughly as “the invisible one who exists.”

  “A gold mine. Seven hundred and eighty-one separate items. Larger than our whole collection. We got everything we wanted. We entered all the data in the computer, cross-referenced it, and came up with the best spot to look. Presto! A perfect blend of data and analysis—Marxist labor and capitalist technique, if you will.

  “Our idea—it was mine, actually—was to forget the big operation, the grid search, infrared, and all that. How can you use an army in that terrain, those conditions, against creatures who know where you are before you do? Better to establish a continual small­-scale presence, something that wouldn’t attract too much atten­tion. Send over someone who knows what he’s looking for. Let him stay months, years if necessary. Get to know the locals, hear all the stories.

  “That’s how we came up with Kellicut. He was the natural choice, and of course he was interested. He’s such an egomaniac. We only had to dangle it in front of his nose.”

  “Did you tell him about Operation Achilles?”

  Eagleton hesitated a split second. He had not been aware that Kane knew about Operation Achilles, the most secret of secrets, the divine intervention that had kicked off the whole damn thing. Christ! If he knew, then others knew. “No. No, we didn’t. We didn’t see any need to ... complicate his research.”

  “I see.”

  “We weren’t even certain he would succeed, not by a long shot. Certainly not so quickly. We didn’t give him much in the way of support or supplies. He likes to rough it anyway.

  “We got one or two messages at the beginning, nothing of importance. Then silence, months of silence. It was as if he’d fallen into a black hole. We were really getting worried. And then the package came for us.”

  “For doctors Arnot and Mattison.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s a technicality. We were the ones financing the operation.”

  “Operation? Or expedition?”

  “Expedition.”

  “I see.” The man in the uniform rose. “Thank you for the briefing,” Kane said. “I will of course tell no one else. If we have to go in and spring them, I’ll have to get a team and start training. Once we’re ready we can move within four hours. Is there anything else I should know?”

  “No, nothing else.”

  The man saluted brusquely before leaving. The gesture struck Eagleton as disingenuous. But at least he neglected to ask me the key question—whether the Russians themselves were mounting an expedition to the Pamirs. He saved me from having to lie, Eagleton thought with a chuckle.

  * * *

  Feb. 12. Cloudy, cold. Spent all day building the camp. Totally exhausted. Damned hard to build a lean-to when there’s precious little in the way of material to do the leaning. Chopped down four trees and lugged them up 40 or 50 feet. Sharafidin’s not much help. He’s willing, poor guy, but he has no idea what to do. I have to tell him everything. Also, I think he thinks I’m crazy. He could well be right. Anyway, in keeping with my new domesticity, I am starting this journal, fulfilling a promise I made to myself weeks ago—that I would pick up the pen the day I set up base camp, not a moment before. I have already decided where I will leave the journal. If you’re reading this, Susan and Matt, I congratulate myself and I suggest you should raise a glass to your cleverness and mine. If you do not find this, no one will, and these words will never come to light. Perhaps that’s just as well ... Too tired to write more now. Tomorrow I’ll pick up the thread of this narrative.

  Matt read the journal out loud against a background of rustling wind. Sitting around the fire as the night pressed in, the mist reflected back the shadows cast from the fire and made them dance around like spirits. He had proposed passing up some of the jour­nal’s earlier entries to skip to the end to see if it shed any light on Kellicut’s disappearance, but they would have none of that. Espe­cially Susan; she wanted to experience it sequentially, the way the author had lived it.

  The entries began in a style both labored and literate. Kellicut de­scribed the early days: his trip up the mountain, his preparations, and his equipment, which was surprisingly sparse. He expounded on the flora and fauna, complete with Latin names for some of the flowers. He wrote about the hawks, who “puff up their chests and circle overhead as if they’ve been told they’re vultures.” There were some trenchant asides and a few obscure quotes. Then the style be­came something more immediate and real, as if fatigue, loneliness, and adventure were stripping away his pretenses.

  Somehow Kellicut had obtained a rough map of the upper slopes. Every day he ventured out on a predetermined course that took him to a different sector. The idea was to make himself visible, to call at­tention to his presence by making noise, discarding objects, or otherwise acting like “a normal obnoxious, despoiling human being,” as he put it. Hansel and Gretel in reverse, mused Matt, reeling the ogres in on a trail of litter. The strategy was based on several fundamental premises. One was that the creatures, whatever they might be, wouldn’t simply descend on him one night and bash his skull in. An­other was that they themselves wouldn’t be frightened to death and so wouldn’t withdraw to someplace even more inaccessible. What if either of his two premises was wrong?

  Matt came to a critical entry dated February 27. By this point, Kellicut was occasionally dropping use of the first-person pronoun, a touch that seemed to correspond with a significant change: His strength was ebbing and his overall sense of purpose was slipping away. Matt read it aloud:

  Feb. 27. Had visitors last night. I’m sure it was they, I know it was. Saw something had changed right away in the campsite as soon as I awoke. Hard to say what. Sixth sense, mostly. Also smelled a pecu­liar odor, difficult to describe—pungent like wet animal skins or a skunk run over on a road. Only thing disturbed was the larder, but it was done in an unusual way. Bits of leftover food were taken, some smoked hare and other meats. They were lifted from the cen­ter, for all the world like some shopper in a supermarket. The food around—jam, sugar, condiments, etc.—was untouched. Simply no way an animal could have stood upright and reached over the rest without knocking it over. Saw no footprints anywhere, though searched surrounding area for hours. The good news is that they can’t be far away. If they can track me down, I can track them down. Curiosity is a powerful lure. Who knows? Perhaps my noc­turnal visitors are picking their teeth and spying
on me at this very moment!

  Later, same day: Just made it back to camp by dark. Exhausted. No luck. Saw nothing unusual. Don’t want to scare Sharafidin.

  Feb. 28. Searched all day, dawn to dusk. No success. Shara was glad to see me. Guess he gave me up for a goner. Too beat to write more.

  March 1. Nothing.

  March 2. Five miles up (quadrant four, sector SE) began encountering paths. At first I thought I was merely following natural curves along ridges. Then noticed bushes worn away, ground softened, and rocks broken. Could be rams, goats, and even bears. But I have hopes that the paths were made by them. Have new tactic now: I set up a position along a path and simply wait. My strength is flagging—I’m not eating enough, I fear.

  March 4. Nothing to report. Sat all day beside what I hoped was a major path and saw nothing except one strange rodent-like animal. Couldn’t catch it. Still feeling bad.

  March 5. Can’t go on like this. Need to make excursions farther and longer, but doubt I have strength to move campsite or rebuild. Will try to take some food with me and make trips of three to four days. Tried explaining this to Shara but not sure I got it across. Nothing important today in way of sightings.

  March 8? (not sure of date, losing track). Spent nights at sites marked on map (quad 4, sector 12F). Covered lots of ground but saw little. Still feeling dizzy. Afraid I’m suffering dehydration. Maybe oxygen depri. Not sure this is best way to go about search.

  March 14. Returned after long exploration. Nothing of note. Need time to recuperate. I am afraid.

  March 15. Stayed in camp. Fever.

  March 19 (approx). Feeling bit better. Able to sit up and drink broth. Sharafidin been wonderful. Owe my life to him. Hope to get strength back.

  Days passed without entries. There were scribbled jottings from time to time, odd visions, panic attacks. Then came long rambling passages, sudden illogical leaps, and even bits of nonsense. Every so often the writing rambled off the page and was barely deci­pherable. At times Matt had the sensation that he was reading the words of a madman. Then Kellicut appeared to make a key dis­covery, a bridge of some sort, though it was not clear whether it was a natural bridge or a construction made by an intelligent being. He referred to it only as “the link” and provided no coordi­nates, not even for the nonexistent map. He seemed to have so lost his equilibrium that he forgot he was writing a manuscript for others. It was now only for himself, a record of a declining mind and a still-strong ego spilling onto the pages like blood. He talked again of fever. He raved that he was the greatest explorer in his­tory, Balboa looking at the Pacific Ocean, Galileo peering through the telescope. Greater than any of them.