The Last Neanderthal

by Claire Cameron

“Simon?”

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t live like this!”

  “Like what?”

  I took a hard look at the mess. “I need to go to the site today, but I’d like to fix this space. All the clutter. I can’t leave it this way.”

  “But you are leaving it. We’re going home.”

  “Will you help me sort it out on Sunday, before we go?”

  Simon looked at his shoes on the floor and back at me. It was clear that he didn’t see what I did, but he knew better than to argue. “Okay…what did you have in mind?”

  “I need to go to Ikea.”

  12.

  There was a border around the edge of the family’s territory. It wasn’t indicated by anything visible, but it wasn’t imaginary either. It marked the land about a day’s travel in every direction from the camp. A body who came to it might not know it was there unless she had a sharp nose for detecting the liberal sprinkling of badger and wolf urine around it. But Girl knew exactly where it lay. To her, it was the boundary of the family.

  Girl couldn’t stay on the land, but it was difficult to know what to do in the absence of the family. When she was with the others, they would wake up hungry, and each day was shaped around filling their bellies. She didn’t consciously decide where to go; it was not a choice, but an instinct. Big Mother might set the course, but the seasons governed their movements, the patterns of the beasts showed them the way, and the weather dictated the speed at which they traveled. None of that would happen now. Without a family, she had no one to follow. Girl just squatted by the river and waited for the dawn.

  As the gray light stretched out into the day, her grim situation sank in. The land was in a morning state; bright green shoots were starting to push through the forest floor, but the colors looked muted and the clouds were flat. The mud stuck in cold clumps to her feet. The mist blended into a light rain that touched her forehead and dampened her skin as she huddled near the rocks of the crossing. There was nothing in the way of comfort.

  When the day settled in, she started to walk. The rain had stopped; the family might move out from the hut, and she couldn’t risk being found so close to the camp. Big Mother would take it as a threat. Girl followed the river down and walked in the direction of the water. It was the same way they went for the fish run, so she decided to walk that way as far as the boundary of the family’s land. Once she crossed it, there she would remain. It was as close as she could stay to the family without challenging Big Mother. It was as far away as she had ever been on her own.

  Girl stopped often to rest. When she saw a nice round boulder or a comfortable-looking log, she would lower her large frame down and rub her feet. Her muscles were better designed for short sprints, big lunges, and powerful thrusts. Walking over an extended period wore on her.

  Sitting on a rock, Girl took a foot in hand. She looked at the calf meat on her leg. It was round and curved, and the oily skin was stretched over it like the best hide. All she could think of was Big Mother, how the old woman had given Girl’s thick thigh an admiring pat and said, “Chewfat,” a word of encouragement that meant “Keep your leg bones inside this nice meat.” Or when they were resting, how Big Mother would often give Girl a soft pat on her head and mutter, “Pitch,” meaning “Keep your head attached to your body.”

  Girl’s legs felt to her like tree trunks. Down from each bulky thigh was a thick knot of muscle, then a solid knee. Her calf curved out, and a sturdy ankle joint anchored the bottom of her frame. Rubbing her feet, Girl worried that these ankles might become thin. Her body required a tremendous amount of food to survive every day. Without the family, she wouldn’t be able to hunt and eat meat. Her legs would soon become like the thinnest twigs on the trees. They could snap in a light breeze.

  Girl’s vanity was fundamental to her survival. Only the strongest and most impressive girls became Big Mothers. The others could stay in their families or move to other ones to breed, but they didn’t have the power of a Big Mother. And one good indication of a body’s strength—and therefore its worth—was its leg muscles.

  Girl knew she was focusing too much on the future. This was dangerous. To survive, she needed to reset her mind to the things immediately around her. She forced her senses outward from her body. She curled her lip, felt for heat, and carefully sniffed the wind. The leopard wasn’t following her, as she’d thought he might. He had tracked her progress for a short while. It would be a way for him to gain a meal, picking off a lone body, though he knew she wasn’t an easy target.

  When Girl sniffed the breeze and found no trace of the leopard, she was almost disappointed that he had decided to turn away. A leopard watches and waits for his best chance. He can read the patterns of prey. He anticipates where the creature will be and waits in a tree. When he leaps, it’s often from at least twenty feet. He will aim for the back of its neck, and his large fangs will sink in. If he doesn’t kill on first strike, he will lie on top of his prey and close off its windpipe with his powerful jaws. Suffocate the body to keep it still and then pin it down and eat. Girl knew it would have meant a swift and sure end to her life. There was some comfort in that. In a way, Girl already felt half dead. To take a body out of the family was like a severing a limb.

  Near the end of the day, Girl got to the place where the river valley became steeper and rockier. A few seasons before, Big Mother had pointed to a path that went up a break in the cliff toward the setting sun. She had cupped her hands to show that it led to a small, clear tarn of water. Now Girl made her way up the rock and found what her mother had described. It was a small lake fed by springs, a sharp blue like the middle of her eye. She knelt down on a small strip of pebbled beach and took a drink with a cupped hand. It soothed her throat.

  It was a rocky part of the land. The mountain flank plateaued into a large shelf that gave a wider view than she had on the family’s land. She could see down through the trees and this made her feel exposed, as though the top of her head had been lifted off. Like a bird, her eyes could soar and look out over an expanse that seemed endless. And that meant the birds could see her too.

  But Girl knew she couldn’t go back. Fly away had been done, so she crouched by the clear water and looked up into the face of the hanging moon. It traveled in the sky despite the sun still hanging over the land. And that moon was large and round and full of menace. The family believed that the moon was made of the coldest kind of ice. She couldn’t walk on its surface because it would freeze the soles of her feet. It would go up through her body within a few beats of her heart. The moon was a stark place that had no meadows for bison to feed. There was no river, no crossing, no thundering hooves, no sweet stink of bison shit. On the moon, a body would never feel warm.

  She looked around to take in the sharp edges of the rock and the silky-smooth surface of the water. There was no immediate threat in the air. She supposed that this land was too barren to attract other meat-eaters. As night fell, the moon was hard against the black sky, which meant it had become the dominant force in this land. The flecks of light from the moon, the stars, stretched across the sky. Her skin shone with the grit of her journey. Her muscles burned too bright. She wanted to cool them for sleep. She pulled at the lash on her waist and let her cloak slip down.

  She walked until she stood knee-deep in the water. It was cold but clear. A good spring was feeding it from a source deep in the belly of the mountain. She closed her eyes and raised her palms toward the mountain, feeling its pull on her skin.

  After a deep breath, she went under. The cold pushed the breath out of her lungs. When she resurfaced, she shouted out with the thrill. She went under again, slowly this time. Underwater, it was quiet and still. She lifted up and sucked back a big gulp of fresh air. She didn’t swim, but she liked to float. It was shallow, so she laid her head back. With her bum touching sand, she put her feet up.

  Toes kissing the surface, she looked up at the circle of rock around the tarn. She knew that it had existed longer than th
e family. The trees at this spot had also lived much longer and were wiser than her. The mountain had been here long before, and the moon and the stars had seen more than she could feel. She would change faster than the rock, and that felt right. And these were odd thoughts, but there was a reason they were coming so freely. She wasn’t part of the family for now. For the first time, she didn’t have a job to do. There were no bison to hunt. The boughs of the nest didn’t have to be changed and she didn’t need to feed the fire. But something else came over her too—an odd sense of freedom. Though it wasn’t necessarily welcome. Her way of experiencing time passing had evaporated. To fill the void, new feelings and thoughts crept in. They made new paths in her mind, like worms churning through and changing the dirt.

  Girl lay back and looked at this strange land of the moon. All she felt was profoundly alone. She thought of the death of the bison calf and wished that someone would take pity on her the same way.

  It was only after she got out and put her cloak back on that the dark sky came down and wrapped around her. She felt scared. She had never been in the night alone. There were a few bigger boulders around the tarn that loomed like scary beasts. In the cliffs were dark cracks that looked like they wanted to swallow her whole. She wondered if eyes peered out at her from the dark. This place felt full of strange creatures that she couldn’t smell or know. Unless she wanted to go to the trouble of starting a fire this late, there was no way to make the night feel smaller around her.

  Only one thing looked friendly. A large pine stood about twenty feet from the tarn. It was the biggest tree around and obviously had taken advantage of the water source to grow. Maybe a body had been buried under it at one time. She crept up to the broad trunk and put her arms around it. Her hands didn’t quite touch on the other side. She closed her eyes and sniffed. The spicy smell was warm and deep. Did she sense something in the tree? She wondered if it was someone from the family. But there was…a sound. A snap of a twig in the night. What? She was not alone.

  Through the dark, a warm body was creeping. It had approached from the slope as she had, probably following her trail. She stayed stock-still and curled her lip. Her impulse was to climb the tree, but it might be a beast that could follow her up. She stood beside the base, her arms wrapped around the trunk. It was hard to focus on anything in this place. Everything was new. Everything was different. Her senses were swamped.

  She smelled cat breath and the sour stench of fish on whiskers; the leopard must have found her. Maybe he was above her, already in the tree and planning to pounce? She wanted to run but knew better. A predator had a strong urge to chase fleeing prey. There was no time for another plan—something soft brushed against her leg. She pulled her foot away and let out a yelp.

  There was a movement by her foot, but where exactly? Her eyes searched in the night shadows. It had moved behind the tree. She looked for a rock to throw. Her spear was two strides away, close to the water. Could she grab a broken branch? She didn’t know the land. Nothing was near enough. Her breath came in shaky huffs. She heard a pebble shift and a single sound in the dark. Like a chirp. From a throat smaller than a leopard’s. A cat. Wildcat had come.

  13.

  Each day the sun climbed into the sky and then slipped back down. Girl came to know what was the same about that place. The smells settled down. The sway of the tree became familiar. Her legs didn’t turn into twigs, but they did look more and more like the branches of the tree where she slept. It made her wonder if she might turn into a tree. That might be why the trees had always felt so alive: they were lone daughters standing along the ridge.

  She came to know that a family had lived there. Not hers, but another. She found a stone tooth, a hand ax, that had been dropped or left behind. What body would be so careless as to leave an ax? It was a different kind of ax than she knew. The flint had been flaked in a different pattern from the stone core. She found an old hearth, a scar from a fire that had been lit many nights in a row. She found grooves on her tree from where the feet and hands of the family had worn it smooth from climbing. It was a lookout tree that had been used to scan the land. She wondered about the family, who they were and why they had left. Big Mother hadn’t told their stories with her shadow. The trace of a scent from long ago barely clung to the trunk.

  She didn’t hunt, but Wildcat did. He offered her the limp body of a rock mouse, a kindness that she gently refused. He gave her an odd squint and settled down to chew its guts.

  There were things around the tarn to nibble, but most of them were green. She didn’t like green food and ate only enough to quiet her growling belly. She drank water because thirst was so sharp, but that was all she took in the way of sustenance.

  Mostly she waited for what she thought might come: death. She was listless, dull, and empty. But each morning she woke to find her head still attached to her meat. “Pitch,” she would spit angrily, and she meant it with none of the usual goodwill. It was more that she was horrified to see her body still in one piece.

  Her bad fortune continued. The leopard didn’t come to maul her and end her life quickly. The crows left her eyes in their sockets. No lightning struck her skull. Her body remained stubbornly resistant to the wrong side of the dirt. Nothing was altered. It was as if the land had stopped its constant cycle. She didn’t grow older. She didn’t change, which might have been what she’d wanted a few days before. But now a moment stretched out and went on forever. Away from the family, she left time behind.

  And then, just as she became convinced that everything would always be still, the changes caught up. If time had been held back for a moment, it now rushed in. That morning, when she stood by the tarn, a shift entered the air. A warm ripple of heat came down the river valley. She closed her eyes, curled her top lip up, and tried to feel what it was. She tilted her head toward the meeting place farther down—maybe the families were gathering early. But it wasn’t coming from there. The air in that direction was still cool and dry and undisturbed. The ice clogged the shallow parts of the river and was in only the first stages of softening its hold. The fish weren’t yet able to make their run and she didn’t think that any families had arrived or set up camp. She pushed her senses up and over the valley toward the next fork of the river. It was the direction her sister had gone when she became a Big Mother, but it was too far away for her to feel any changes.

  Still, there was something, a thin but heavy strand in the air. It came down with the river. It tasted of iron and was thick like blood.

  Eyes open, she looked up toward the land of the family. She ran to her tree. Silent, hand over hand, she climbed and pushed at the branches with soles that were as rough as bark. As she climbed up to see out, finding a place for a foot and for a hand, she could sense the bodies of the family that had lived here before. The bark held their memory, though faintly. Now she could feel the smoothed wood on the holds from the family climbing this same tree. She became the family, climbing alongside all the hands and feet that had used this tree over suns and moons. She wondered if it was their blood she sniffed, the story of what had happened to them, that had come in a dream the night before. Or maybe that was what she hoped.

  She put a foot on a sturdy branch and held the trunk with arms wrapped tight. She pressed her body against it. The warm trunk pulled her in and her body melted into the trunk like softened sap. Her limbs stretched down to dirt, and sap ran in her veins as if it were blood. This was the strength of the forest. Her fear became just a tremor on the needles. Light vibrations. Listening. What?

  The trees stood together like the whole body of a family lining the ridge. The swaying branches talked and told one another of what they saw. One flicked a branch. A few dead leaves that still clung after the winter storms rustled. The limbs let the secrets pass among them. Twigs snapped and the needles clattered together in discomfort. They swayed with sadness.

  Meat that is alive sends pulses of heat into air. This comes from the fire inside the chest of a body. When this warmt
h hits the air, it moves in patterns around the trees. It pushes and pulls at the leaves in particular ways. Just as the surface water in a river tells the story of what lies underneath, the patterns in the air can tell the story of what disturbance it flows over. The trees that line the valley take up and exaggerate the movement. They pass the message down. If Girl watched and felt the patterns in the leaves, she could read them.

  She cocked her head and held her breath. Only the sap ran. A bad pattern came through the leaves. Something was wrong. It was too far away to know what, but there was a disturbance. There was trauma. She pulled away from the trunk. The blood ran back in her body and around her bones.

  In the sky there was a clatter of birds. Her head snapped up to look. Three birds, black crows, flapped their wings. Their shiny beaks caught the glint of the sun as they passed. Talons curled in and oiled feathers soared. The birds screeched and brayed as they noisily made their way up the valley. They were heading toward the land of her family.

  She climbed down, and when she hit the ground, she clicked her teeth to let Wildcat know that she was going back. She ran to the lip of the plateau and then down the slope. Soon she picked up the faint trail by the river and made her way up to the crossing. She was breaking the rule of Big Mother, but the family numbers were too low. She would risk showing her face at the hearth. Nothing could stop her. Nothing did.

  14.

  Girl’s longing to return to the hearth of the family was like a need. She filled it without question. She made the bison crossing by midday and then, nose to the wind and top lip curled up, turned cautiously for the camp.

  Girl didn’t know that when she’d left the hearth of the family, the leopard had followed her for longer than she’d thought. In her experience, leopards were fairly timid beasts. They used their superior sense of smell not for tracking the family, but for staying clear of them. When Girl left, though, the male leopard was interested to see the small group fracturing further. He followed her tracks long enough to know that she was going far away from the camp. He might have kept trailing her, his interest always drawn by what the hunters were doing, but he picked up another scent. This one was familiar.