Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  Van recited the Lord’s Prayer. It came to him out of nowhere, his distant childhood, and he was not even aware that he knew the words. Then he quoted snatches of verse that flowed out in no par­ticular order, a jumble of nursery rhymes, a bit of Yeats, a Shake­spearean couplet. He sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his voice cracking on the high notes.

  The creatures sharpened sticks and propped them against the log to hold it in place while Van rattled on. He sang bits of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as they pushed dirt against the log to steady it further; the dust rose up in a cloud around Van’s face, but he continued singing. As the drummers started up again, Van sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as counterpoint: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord …”

  Out of the darkness stepped a creature carrying another heavy disk-shaped stone. As the drumming increased, he moved to the center of the clearing and stood in front of Van. Slowly, struggling, he raised the stone above his head as if it were a barbell and kept it poised over his head at arm’s length, his feet shuffling in tiny steps to maintain his balance. Susan looked away but Matt felt he had to bear witness. “His truth is marching on—”

  The stone came down with a force so strong that it turned into a blur. It struck deep into the spinal cord to smash against the rock below, then rested precariously on edge for a second before toppling over. When Susan looked up, Van’s body, still strapped to the log, was headless.

  The drumming struck a strange, arrhythmic cycle. Kee-wak stood stock-still as the log before him rolled to one side and stopped when the body struck sideways upon the ground. Blood poured out of Van’s severed jugular into the dust like wine from the neck of a smashed bottle. The executioner stooped, picked up Van’s head by the hair, placed it in a large earthen bowl, laid the vessel at Kee-wak’s feet, and stepped back as Kee-wak gave the long, deep bellow of the victorious warrior.

  Matt had been too traumatized by what he had seen to think of moving, but now escape was the only thing to think about. As he turned his head from the slats to look about the hut, his heart sank; the sole exit was the door through which Van had walked, in full view of the creatures. It would be difficult to slip out through the woven branches at the rear, especially without making noise that would attract the killers. Susan was looking at the ground, trying to collect herself. She had heard the sounds outside and felt as deeply distressed as if she had watched the murder. Matt wondered if they could risk remaining where they were, hoping that the revelry out­side would continue to occupy the creatures. And maybe Van had been right in thinking that the creatures had come for him alone.

  But as soon as this thought crossed his mind, Matt knew it was not true. Already Kee-wak appeared restless, like someone about to scan the horizon who has been momentarily distracted. He lifted his protruding head, glanced around, and then, like a bloodhound homing in on the scent, fixed his eyes on the hut. Matt’s legs went lifeless and his insides seized up. He felt the beginnings of a powerful flow of energy in his cerebral cortex and somewhere deep inside his brain stem. When he looked at Susan, the alarm in her eyes told him that she felt it too.

  At this moment the executioner standing next to Kee-wak picked up the bowl with Van’s head in it and held it aloft with one hand. With the other he reached in and raised up the bloody prize, tossing the bowl to the ground and reaching for a long thin sliver of flint as sharp as a stiletto. Turning the head upside down, he rested the point of the flint at the base of the cranium and was about to thrust it downward when suddenly, out of nowhere, a human voice rang out in song. It sounded like an echo of Van’s singing and the execu­tioner actually looked down, perplexed, at Van’s face and lifeless dark lips. He was still looking a fraction of a second later when a whizzing sound rent the air, his chest exploded, and out of it sprang a slender wooden stalk, causing him to sink to his knees, making tiny gulps for air. There was still a look of incomprehension upon his face as he dropped Van’s head and the flint, pitching forward into the dust and falling on the shaft so that it poked through his back.

  The death of the executioner broke the murderous siege. The creatures tumbled over one another in their efforts to flee, abandoning clubs, torches, and drums and uttering small, high-pitched squeals of terror. The scramble kicked up a cloud of dust that en­veloped the clearing and by the time it settled, covering the huts, bushes, and Van’s body in a thin blanket of gray, all of them had disappeared and everything was quiet.

  Matt and Susan cautiously made their way to the door and stepped outside. Looking in all directions, they saw and heard nothing. Suddenly the bushes across the clearing stirred as if brushed by a sudden wind, then parted, and out into the moonlight stepped a figure. It was another human. He was dressed in blue pants, a torn windbreaker, and thick boots, and slung across his chest was the band of a quiver filled with arrows. He carried a bow in one hand and with the other he waved lustily, as someone might who had crossed a desert, seen hundreds of mirages, and now finally has laid eyes on water.

  Kane looked around. It was bleak up here, icy cold, and the sky had a grayness that was not from clouds obstructing the sun but from an emptiness that seemed to extend for miles in every direction. It’s going to snow, he thought.

  The Black Hawk helicopters had flown them up to Kellicut’s camp. Kane had expected it to be deserted, and it was. The rest of the men were waiting in a lower field a hundred yards downhill from the choppers. He didn’t want them traipsing all over the place, ruining clues in their ham-fisted fashion.

  A sharp-eyed observer could pick up a lot of information. Kane had already established, for instance, that those other three scientists, Arnot, Mattison, and that fellow Van from the Institute, had been here. He knew it from the boot prints, discarded cans, and other garbage. Sodder had remarked that the transponder had al­ready placed them here for at least one night.

  Kane walked over to the lean-to, lowered his head, and ducked inside. It looked as if it had been ransacked. What animal would do such gratuitous damage? He thought back to that creature inside Resnick’s cell, bound and lying on the cot.

  Sodder walked over and handed him the portable phone. Kane knew who it was.

  “Kane here … We’re there now ... There’s not much, a small hut, some kind of larder in a tree ... Yes, there’s a latrine, but no, I haven’t investigated it ... Well, I just got here ... We’ll contact you after we’ve looked around … Roger, out.”

  He handed the phone back to Sodder, who had a smug look on his face. “You didn’t tell him about the hole,” he said.

  “What hole?”

  “That one over there in the middle of the campsite. The one that was dug up and filled in again.”

  Kane walked over to a little mound of freshly packed dirt. The son of a bitch was right. “Okay, big shot. Call the men over and tell them to start digging.”

  His name was Sergei, and he offered a big hand to Matt and Susan. “I’m sorry I arrived so late,” he said somberly. “Your friend was already killed, but at least I got revenge.” He held up the bow and arrow. “What do you think? This puts me ahead in the arms race, no?”

  Sergei was about thirty-five, handsome in a Slavic way, with an open guileless face. He spoke nearly flawless English—from his studies in Britain, he told them. All the other members of the Russian expedition had perished, and his joy at finding other humans was palpable. “We’ve got to stick together,” he said fervently. “Solidarity of the species, yes?” Susan glanced at his arm muscles, visible through a tear in his jacket, and was gratified to see that he was strong. Judging from the look of him, he had been through a rough time but apparently had emerged intact. He was sure to be resourceful, she felt.

  Sergei held his exhilaration in check out of deference to Van’s murder and to Matt and Susan’s obvious distress over the attack upon the village. They looked over the battlefield. The moonlight was bright enough for them to see that the damage was extensive. Bodies were scattered about. The fires ha
d by now burned down to embers that were going out rapidly.

  In the center of the clearing, Van’s headless body lay in a puddle of blood. They carried it to the stream. It was a grisly procession, with the three of them holding his trunk by the arms and legs and his head resting on his belly. Under the branches of a juniper they dug a shallow grave, using stone axes. Susan wanted to cover the body with some sort of shroud but they did not have enough clothes among them, so she settled for covering his head with a rag torn from her shirt. Matt tossed in the dirt, which pressed the cloth tightly on Van’s eyes and the indentation of his mouth, and Susan recited the Twenty-third Psalm, the only one she knew by heart. Then they patted the dirt on the top of the grave and walked back to the center of the village.

  There, the hominids were already cleaning up the damage by the light from the moon. A dozen bodies including Lancelot’s were lying side by side next to the large hut where Longface had died weeks before. Hurt-Knee, Longtooth, and Blue-Eyes, among others, had lived, though there were many wounded and there seemed to be even fewer women than usual.

  The hominids appeared to be in deep mourning. Dark-Eye walked among them with his staff and stopped from time to time to touch one or two of them on the shoulder with an outstretched palm, a gesture that neither Matt nor Susan had seen before. The children, normally boisterous, were wide-eyed and subdued and helped carry off rocks and broken branches with solemnity.

  Dark-Eye grabbed Susan by the arm and led her to the center of the village, where she saw what was troubling him. The fire had been extinguished. The raiders had thrown dirt in the pit, smothered the flames, and scattered the logs. This destruction of the cen­tral hearth, so carefully tended over countless generations, was an attempt to eradicate the soul of the tribe, she thought, and the lit­tle contact that she’d had so far with Kee-wak convinced her that he was malevolent enough to have plotted it. When she told the others about it, Sergei smiled and with a flourish produced a pack of matches. “Keep them,” he said. “I ran out of cigarettes long ago.” When Susan returned to the hearth, struck a match, and lit a piece of dry grass, the hominids fell back in amazement. Dark-Eye was watching her closely, and she handed the matches to him as a gift. He took them carefully, holding them in his cupped hands as if they were an offering from the gods, and placed them in his pouch.

  Within minutes the fire was raging again, and on this particular night virtually everyone slept outdoors on the ground, close to it and to each other, extracting what little comfort they could from a communal strength and the simple fact that others too had survived the brutal assault. Moments before she fell asleep, Susan wondered about Kellicut. She had not seen him the entire night.

  In the morning, Sergei joined Matt on a walk while Susan went to the lake. They had decided to leave while the hominids conducted the burials, a ritual that was bound to consume the day. Even at a distance they could hear the wailing. The Americans asked Sergei about his background and the Russian expedition.

  “I work at the Darwin Museum in Moscow,” he said. “We’ve heard tales of these extraordinary beings for years, going back as far as our records.” A critical sighting came in 1925, when a mounted regiment headed by Major-General Mikhail Stephanovitch Topilski was chasing a band of White Russians high into the Pamirs. “The bandits hid in a cave, where they were attacked by these strange be­ings. They shot and killed one, and after they surrendered they took Topilski to see it. But his men couldn’t carry the body out, so they buried it under a cairn of stone.”

  For three decades it had been politically impossible to investigate reports, but in 1958 the Academy of Sciences sent out a team under a botanist named K. V. Stanyukovitch. It was equipped with snares, concealed observation posts, telescopic lenses, trained sheepdogs, and even sheep and goats as bait, but it ended in fail­ure. “Now I know why, of course. These Yeti knew everything about the movement of the hunters before they even got close.”

  The current expedition was sent simply because the Russians had heard that Washington was fielding one. Sergei, an anthropologist and mountain climber, was the deputy leader. They had started out nine weeks ago with guns, nets, traps, and other equip­ment, but when they came to the vine bridge they had had to leave most of it behind. Mysteriously, the leader insisted that they not store it but throw it into the ravine.

  “Later we put our heads together and figured out that he had been afraid the equipment would fall into the hands of the Yeti. He always kept us in the dark. The rest of us didn’t really know what we were looking for. We didn’t even know these savage creatures possessed a higher power. There was a zoologist on our team, Dr. A. Shakanov, and he seemed to have a great deal of information about them, but he kept it to himself.”

  The team got trapped in a blizzard and lost practically everything, including their guns. They were able to salvage only the food they could carry. They found refuge in a cave and lived there for weeks, making excursions for wood to keep a fire going. As the wood got scarcer, the excursions got longer. One day the leader did not return. The zoologist, whose fear was contagious, insisted that they go out only in pairs. But the very next day the two who left did not come back.

  “Now Shakanov and I were alone, and he finally explained every­thing to me; he told me there were reports from a survivor of a pre­vious expedition about a strange power to see through another’s eyes. He said this meant that we could never surprise them and that they could track us down anywhere. Our only hope had been supe­rior weapons, but without the guns we were at their mercy.”

  Sergei insisted that they leave and descend the mountain. But soon they came to a slope so steep they had to climb. Shakanov got in trouble; he lost his footing and fell down twenty feet onto a nar­row ledge. He could not go up or down, and he screamed, “Don’t leave me!”

  “I had a rope, so I lowered it down to him. He tied it around his waist and eventually I was able to hoist him back up. It took a long time and I was exhausted and having a strange sensation in my head. When I told him about it, he said this was a sign that the beasts were close.”

  The rest of that day the two climbed, but they did not get far. Fi­nally they stopped to sleep for the night, taking turns on watch. When it was Sergei’s turn he fell asleep. “Suddenly I heard something, and I woke up and saw him struggling with three or four of them. He shouted for help, but there was nothing I could do. When they carried him away he was still shouting, ‘Help me, Sergei!’ But I could do nothing, so I ran away.”

  Sergei ran and climbed throughout the night. He fell down a slope and hurt his shoulder. The next morning he came across a path that wound down the mountain. At the end was a crevice that brought him into the valley. Soon he encountered the hominids, who seemed different from the creatures who had killed his comrades, but he was still scared. He made a bow and arrow to catch game and lived in the wilds for weeks.

  “Yesterday I felt the earthquake and heard the drums on the mountain, and I saw the other Yeti come in their skins and attack the ones here. They eat the brains, you know; that’s what Shakanov told me.”

  Matt was impressed by Sergei and the matter-of-fact tone in which he delivered his narrative. He thought his story emblematic of human endurance. Perhaps it’s that, a kind of atavistic refusal to give up, a perseverance against all rational odds, that marks us as the survivor species, he thought. Maybe we are evolution’s chosen ones because we do not give evolution the choice to do away with us. We’re always scheming, anticipating, playing the angles—his­tory’s original sharpies.

  “This crevice, could you find it again?” Matt asked.

  “That’s the strange part,” replied Sergei. “I went there only yesterday and it was completely blocked. The rocks above it had col­lapsed and filled it in.” He paused. “I thought it must have been done by the earthquake. Either that or—”

  “Or what?”

  “Or it was somehow done by the Yeti.”

  “So there’s no way out of the valley?”
r />   “That’s right. No way but one—through their cave.”

  Kane had been right about the snow. It seemed to come down sud­denly like a curtain dropping just as the helicopters lifted off. With the rotors spinning, the flakes spun against the windshield in great swirls, so that flying through them was like passing through a mixer of whipped cream. Kane had noticed that the chopper was struggling, and he was worried.

  As if to substantiate his fears, the Black Hawk tilted to one side so that Kane’s shoulder was pressed against the window beneath him. He felt cold wind rushing by his right ear. The aircraft seemed to be sliding as if it had hit a patch of ice, and the motor was la­boring and complaining in a high-pitched whine.

  “How high can this thing go?” Kane shouted.

  The pilot looked over at him, lifted off one earphone, and shouted back, “What?”

  “How high can this go?”

  “Depends. This load, this speed, hovering, I’d say about twelve thousand feet.”

  Kane looked over at the altimeter. It was showing 13,600. The pilot followed his eyes and grinned. “I know,” was all he said.

  “So what do we do?”

  The pilot lifted off the earphone and tilted his eartip with a fore­finger. “Hey?”

  Kane shouted out the question again. Behind him he felt the men’s faces turned toward the cockpit, their looks zeroed in on the instrument panel as if all those dials and needles and flip switches could tell them something.

  “Your call,” said the pilot. “We could turn back and wait for the storm to clear or I could chuck you out right here.”