Over the Darkened Landscape

Ancients of the Earth



Through the frozen streets of Dawson, Samuel runs from two cavemen.

They’re well-dressed, these cavemen, one of them even in tie and tails. But their hair is long and scraggly, and Samuel would almost swear that their brows slightly protrude; aside from the already out-of-place fancy dress, a neanderthalian version of your typical northerner, not at all worried about the niceties of polite society, here at the ass end of the nineteenth century.

Except that most northerners, even trappers and prospectors who spend almost all of their time alone in the bush, can speak in more than grunts and gibberish, and Samuel doubts even the most ruthless of them would be so keen to smash in his skull.

It is late in the evening, and the temperature is most certainly below minus twenty. Samuel rounds a corner, skidding on packed snow and patches of ice, but he retains his balance. Down an alley to his right he catches a glimpse of two more, one a cavewoman, resplendent in a glittering evening gown, which is up around her waist as the male apparently has his way with her from behind. They both yell inarticulately as Samuel passes them by but do not break off their primeval assignation.

Another yell tells him the first two cavemen are back on his trail.

He rounds another corner, and the door to a dilapidated cabin swings open. From the blackness within a voice quietly calls to him. “Quickly! Inside!”

Samuel does as he is bid, and the door closes behind him. It is darker inside than out; he can see nothing, but outside, over the pounding of the blood in his temples, he hears the footsteps of the two cavemen going past and strains to listen as they fade into the distance.

He hears his rescuer stand and shuffle over to the window. In the sliver of light allowed in from outside, he can see now who it is. “How’d you get here?” he asks.

She puts a finger to her lips and holds up her other hand, and pretty soon two more sets of footsteps go running by, accompanied by words in a guttural, prehistoric tongue. When they’re gone she sits on the floor beside him. “They saw me when they first arrived, but I don’t think they’re after me. Still, I came here to stay safe until they’re gone.”

Samuel frowns. “How do you get to be so lucky? The moment they saw me I could see they wanted to get all over me like sled dogs on a bone.”

She takes his hand and feels at the makeshift bandage he still has wrapped there. “I think you know.”





Twenty-Two Days Earlier



Two miners managed to melt and dig their way through a patch of permafrost at the bottom of a stub of a cliff, and there they found the remains of a strange and large creature. News spread round the town, and soon a gaggle of onlookers stood in the mud surrounding the site, watching as the still-frozen remains were dug up.

Once the creature was finally completely disinterred from its grave of ice and soil, several of the bystanders allowed that they thought it looked something like an elephant. Perhaps a circus had come through town, one time long before anyone there could remember, and one of the beasts had passed on and been taken out onto the bush and pitched over the edge of the cliff and then had somehow been missed by the wolves and crows until it had finally been swallowed by the frozen earth.

No, by consensus that didn’t seem at all likely.

Standing in the cold wind, staring down at the remains of an alien creature that looked as if it could have died just yesterday, one of the miners had the idea to fetch Samuel. He was book smart, was Samuel, a former schoolteacher who’d come north to make his fortune in a fashion that involved as few personal ties and relationships as possible.

Unlike the miners who had discovered the creature, when the gold rush had petered out Samuel had given up on his stake and settled into his one-room cabin, writing the odd dispatch for the local rag and tutoring ill-lettered prospectors in exchange for flakes of gold dust or odd fossils that they felt had no value. Once Fanny Alice had even given him a molar from what Samuel assumed was a mammoth, one that she’d been given by a customer, and that tooth—larger than his fist, yellowed and dirty and well-worn from an apparently long life of grinding down vegetation—held a special place of pride in his small collection. She had told him that it had special “properties,” but he had dismissed that as exaggeration.

It so happened that Samuel was just bidding farewell to one of his students—scraggly and unkempt, smelling of tallow and burnt caribou flesh, as they all did—when a small crowd seemed to spontaneously form on the icy patch of road beside his sagging gray front stoop. He blinked in surprise at the sight of so many people, wondering if perhaps he’d drunkenly promised a group lesson the other night while consuming his self-assigned monthly allotment of alcohol.

“We need you to come see somethin’, Samuel,” said a trapper named Ozark who had a line not too far from town and who would come into town for drinks himself. “Mick and Temple come up with some strange creature while they was diggin’ at their claim, and we figure you’re the man who can tell us what the hell it is.”

Samuel scratched his head. “A creature, you say. How do you mean, like a bear or something?”

“Nope,” said Fanny Alice, who was out pretty early in the day considering the line of work she was in. “Bigger than that. Looks somethin’ like a smaller version of Jumbo the elephant.”

It turned out to not be an elephant. At least, not exactly.

The creature was still young, that much was apparent. Not just the fact that it was only about five feet tall at the shoulder, but also that there was something ineffably youthful about its appearance, like how a puppy could easily be distinguished from an adult dog. Excepting, of course, that this creature was not actually a dog.

It had a trunk, just like an elephant, but its ears were small and its tusks were still just ivory nubs, and it was covered with thick reddish-brown fur. It lay on its side in the partially frozen mud, and Samuel could see that a puddle was beginning to form below its belly as it thawed in the weak mid-day sun, which was soon to disappear behind the small overhang immediately behind Samuel.

After a moment or two of searching, Samuel found his voice. “That’s no elephant,” he said, and he jumped down into the mud beside the beast. “It’s a woolly mammoth.” He grinned up at Fanny Alice. “A young one probably of the same type as the one that tooth you gave me last year came from.”

“A woolly what?” asked one of the miners.

“Mammoth,” said Samuel. “Probably an ancestor or distant cousin of the elephant, from many—many—thousands of years ago.” He looked back down at the animal’s corpse. “Maybe even longer.”

“An antediluvian beast somehow washed up on our frozen and landlocked shores,” said Pete Marliss, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Pete was a town councilman, a large and florid man with a full thatch of white hair and an equally white and bristly beard. He was also a local hotelier as well as a lapsed Presbyterian minister who still sometimes exhibited signs of that faith. “Certainly anything older than the time of Noah is, of course, impossible. It seems obvious to me that this poor unfortunate beast was unlucky enough to step off the edge of the ark one unfortunate night, perhaps as the result of a stumble when the vessel bumped up against an iceberg. Its poor mate likely spent the rest of its days alone and despondent, aware that she was the last of her kind.”

Samuel glared at Pete for a moment, astonished by his delusional line of reasoning, but after searching for the right words he finally shrugged in response. He knew from tired experience that there was no sense in stepping into an argument with Pete. Instead, he turned his attention back to the baby mammoth and put his hand on its shaggy coat and instantly felt the shock of ages drift past and run up through his arm and through his body, grappling with his memories all the way. For a fraction of a second he saw and smelled a different world, enormous stretches of gleaming white punctuated by small oases of green, and then he felt himself stumble as a dreadful pain lanced into his right side.

He snatched his hand away and sat down hard on the mud beside the creature, rubbing his ribs until the ghost pain died away. When he finally thought to once again pay attention to his surroundings, he saw that Fanny Alice was bending over and had her hands on his face, trying to get his attention.

“I’m with you,” he said, and gingerly he stood again. “Sorry about that. I don’t know what happened there.”

Now, it was widely accepted that Fanny Alice was not the best-looking woman to ever practice her trade, but it was also well known that she had some conjuring skills and that some of those skills involved activities in the non-marital bed. But other skills of hers had nothing to do with physical bliss, and she was often useful that way, seeing the magic in life when others might have completely missed it.

This, Samuel was sorry to realize, appeared to be one of those times.

“Somethin’s reached out and touched you,” she said, and she herself reached out and put a hand on his side, where he’d felt the sharp pain. “I don’t know that I recognize it, but I can tell you that I don’t like it. It looked like very old magic, and very powerful as well. Certainly different than the magic in that tooth I gave you.”

Samuel’s own experiences with magic had been low-key and usually from a great remove. He was disinclined to think that this had been anything other than sheer imagination, him working himself to a state of great agitation and excitement over such a discovery. At worst, though, it could only have been an echo of something from thousands of years before, long dead and forgotten but still hanging in the fabric of the world, like ripples at the edge of a large pond long after the rock had been dropped. So he smiled and shook his head in disagreement. “I’m just fine, Fanny Alice, and you can be assured that there was no magic involved. Only me being overwhelmed by the idea of reaching across millennia and touching flesh that could as easily have been alive only days before.” He walked away from her and from the corpse of the mammoth, stepping gingerly even though the pain had long since faded. “I’ll tell Ed he should get down here and take a picture for the paper. And maybe we should consider getting word out to some scientists somewhere.” Suddenly completely and mind-numbingly exhausted, Samuel raised his hand to bid them all farewell and shuffled back to town and to his cabin, fighting the urge the whole way to look back over his shoulder in case he was being followed.

No, not followed. Stalked.



*



The herd is in a panic, spread out across the open land, any hope of working together defensively gone, that hope scattered to the cold winds as effectively as each member of the herd. He runs, terror crushing his heart and his breathing ragged and punctuated by desperate pleas to his mother, to any of the aunties, but none of them answer.

He risks a turn of his head and sees that the two-legs are still after him, coming up the side of the hill. They raise their sticks, and some are thrown at him. He feels a horrible pain in his side and stumbles and bleats in fear and pain but regains his feet and continues running. But then one of the aunties comes to his rescue and heads off the creatures running hard on his heels. A toss of her head sends several of them flying through the air, and he is free of them, still running, still feeling that agonizing pain in his side but unwilling to stop while fear remains.

The ground gives way, and he first stumbles and then falls and falls some more. Pain returns, but after a few moments that fades away, as does everything else.





Weird dreams plagued Samuel’s night, and he awoke with the pain in his right side renewed. He lay there for a spell, unwilling to jump from his warm cocoon of a bed and dash for the stove to rekindle the fire before having to make an even madder and colder dash to the corner to piss in his bucket. Staring at the ceiling, though, all he could think of was that dead animal and the fact that he was likely the only one in town who knew just how significant and important it was.

Having an interest in things prehistoric, Samuel fancied himself as pretty knowledgeable about fossils and such. But he thought it pretty obvious that you didn’t need to have even a marginal interest to know that a find such as the frozen body of the baby mammoth would be of vital importance to scientists and to newsmen. Pretty obvious often didn’t cut through the fat up here, though, since you could never tell just how capable any one person was at recognizing what was required of them in a social situation.

And so with a strangled cry he threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, the cold floor clawing at him even through his woollen socks, the air working quickly to find its way to his skin through his undergarments. The embers were low, but some dry kindling and a few choice gusts from his lungs got the flames hopping again, and after adding a small log he ran to the corner and did his morning business, desperately happy to tuck things in when he was done and run back to the stove to put on a pot of two-day-old coffee and feel the tenuous curtain of heat reach slowly outward from the fire and find its way to the farthest corners of the cabin.

Once his fingers were warm enough and the jolt of tar-like coffee had re-ignited his brain, he gave the juvenile mammoth more thought. Obvious as it was to him, he knew he couldn’t rely on anyone else from town to do the right thing about the animal. He’d told Ed to go down and get a picture, but wasn’t sure if that would translate itself to an attempt to get the news out to the world at large. If anything, he feared that instead it would result in someone contacting some two-bit circus impresario, and there would go any chance for any true science to be done. Or worse, someone with magical powers, either real or imagined, would make some wild and bizarre claim about the creature that would lead to some freakish hoodoo rites being performed as its body was burned at a makeshift altar.

He had a quick breakfast and then got dressed, all the while working through his mind how he could word a telegram to make the most impact, convince people to come here at this time of year rather than them asking for the corpse to be packed in a railroad car full of blocks of ice and shipping it on to Skagway and then south by boat to California. And hour later he found himself at the telegraph office, pen and paper in hand, dashing off a note to his sister’s husband in Toronto. The fellow was a teacher and was smart enough to know who to approach and how to do so.

Unfortunately, Fanny Alice’s words kept drifting back into his head every time he made to write his message, and several fits and starts were only able to produce sad attempts such as “Mystical find of great value, send help” and “Dead baby mammoth. Frozen. Of interest to someone warmer” and “Frozen mammoth body dug up nearby, how did it die?” This last was moderately conversational but not at all useful in getting across the main point, which was of course that someone with a modicum of expertise needed to come north forthwith and be here to supervise any investigations into the former life of this extinct creature.

He shook his head to clear it of all of Fanny Alice’s nonsense about magic. Finally, he decided he needed to splurge for a few extra words, and soon enough the message was sent. “Frzn baby mammoth found whole. Get news out. None here qualified. Hurry.” Satisfied, he left the office and headed over to see what Ed had for photos and how he intended to run with the story, perhaps even talk him into allowing Samuel to write something about the beast and what he knew of its former life.

Ed was at his desk wearing his shit-eating grin when Samuel walked in. “You done good telling me to go out and get a picture of that beast, Samuel!” He jumped up and ran to the darkroom and hurried out with a handful of pictures he’d taken of the mammoth, all but one with Mick and Temple posing beside the body, the miners who’d found the creature. The exception was a picture of the baby mammoth with Pete Marliss, doing his best to look important as only a town father should. Even in a moderately out-of-focus photograph he managed to look like a stuffed-shirt blowhard.

“Glad it worked out for you,” said Samuel. “Bet you one of these pictures ends up in a big paper down south somewhere.”

Ed grinned again. “Just about guaranteed, I’d say. I sent a telegram first thing when I got back from taking the pictures yesterday. Pretty sure there’ll be some newsmen coming up from Edmonton, or maybe across from Alaska. And my pictures’ll be the only ones they can use!” He sounded positively gleeful at this.

Samuel scratched his head but couldn’t help smiling in response to Ed’s infectious good humour. “Hell, Ed,” he responded, “there’s no guarantee that they won’t bring along their own photographer or at least send along someone who’s capable of using a camera.”

“Yeah, but the body won’t be here by the time anybody arrives. Just bones by then, I expect.”

This bit of news brought Samuel up short. “How’s that again?”

“Jesus, Samuel, what’ve you been doin’ all morning? It’s practically all anyone in town has been talkin’ about. You even walked right by it when you came through the door.” He smiled again and puffed out his chest. “My printing press, and I did the layout for it, too.”

Samuel blinked away his momentary rush of confusion and looked over to the door where Ed had waved his finger. On it was tacked a small poster with the words at top big enough, all in capitals and bold type, that he could read them from across the room:



SPECIAL TOWNWIDE PREHISTORIC FEAST!!!

“Holy shit, Ed, no,” said Samuel in a low and worried voice, and he rushed over the read the rest of the poster.



Come celebrate the amazing mammoth discovery this Saturday night, 7pm, at the Klondiker Hall. $5/head gets you a THREE course meal INCLUDING STEW made of choice cuts from 6 THOUSAND YEAR OLD baby MAMMOTH. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity! Tickets from Pete Marliss.



Without another word to Ed, Samuel ran out the door and down the road to the Klondiker, blood rushing in rage through his head, keen to find Pete and give him a piece of his mind. At the very least.

“Marliss!” shouted Samuel as he slammed through the doors into the hotel lobby. His target looked up from whatever he was working on at the front counter and smiled, but before he could say anything Samuel proceeded to tear into him. “What the blue blazes do you think you’re doing, offering up that fossil for a f*ckin’ banquet?”

“I bought the body from Mick and Temple,” replied Pete. “It’s mine now, and I get to do with it what I like. And since it cost me money, I aim to make back that investment and then some.”

Samuel was beside himself with rage, and for a moment he had trouble finding any words. This was a travesty, a crime against science and reason and humanity. Finally, unable to think of anything else but needing to say something in response to the smirk that had formed on Marliss’ face, he said, “But you can’t! The body should be preserved for the scientists to study.”

“I’m sure they’ll be happy with a complete skeleton, don’t you think? I expect there will be plenty of museums willing to pay for one. And maybe a different one to pay for the hide, too.”

Samuel’s hands bunched into fists, but before he could take a step toward Marliss the man had calmly placed a shotgun on the counter. Still smiling, he said, “Now, Samuel, you stay calm with me, and I just might have a present to give you.” Seeing where Samuel’s eyes were looking, he chuckled and said, “No, not a rear full of buckshot.”

“Then what? What the hell do you have that I could possibly want?”

Marliss reached under the counter and came up with something small that he tossed across the room to Samuel. It looked like a stone, but just before he caught it he saw that it was a spear point. As his hand closed over it the sharp edge bit into his palm, and for a brief second he could feel his blood spill over the artifact.

And then everything faded away.





There are precisely a hand of them able to hunt, not enough to hold off starvation much longer. This will be their last attempt before they again have to run from the ice and snow, and the shaman knows that the magic for this hunt has to be especially strong.

He starts with a dance that represents their prey, one of the hairy long noses that are still in the valley, eating the last of the green before they also escape the oncoming wall of ice. The five hunters sway in time to his chants, skins and furs dangling loose from scrawny bodies. Outside of the small circle, the women and children and elders watch and wait for him to finish, only the oldest of them able to conceal the desperation and hunger that crosses the faces of the others.

Or the anger. He knows that a ruined hunt this time might indeed do worse than damage his reputation as the holder of the magic, that failure will, at best, result in banishment from the tribe, at worst bring about a demand for his sacrifice, either to feed the tribe through the strong magic that would come from his death or by a more direct and hideous route.

Once done with the dance, but still chanting, he grabs the spear from their strongest hunter and slashes his palm, then takes the hand of each hunter in turn and does the same, intermingling the blood of each of them. He then takes the spear to the outer circle and cuts in turn the palm of each tribe member’s palm, until that one spear is imbued with the power of the blood of the shaman’s entire tribe, now truly glowing with the strength of their unity of purpose and desire. His words grow stronger, calling down all the magic he knows and much more than that, magic he can sense and see but magic whose full capabilities he is unaware of. Everything in or nothing out. He repeats this ritual with four other spears, although only with his own blood and that of the other hunters, and then presses his bloody hand to the ground beneath his feet, feeds some of his life to the life that surrounds them, an offering in return for the upcoming life that he and his tribe plan to take.

It is all he can do. All five spears stand high above the heads of the hunters, sharpened edges crusted over with their blood, power shining from each and every one of them. After a short nod to his young assistant, he shouts the finality of the ritual to the tribe and to the sun and the earth, and they go. The hunters casually wave aside all the calls of goodbye and the imprecations and pleadings, stern and strong and anxious to prove that they can still provide for the tribe, and yet cautious not to show any break in their masks, for fear that they might be seen as weak or afraid.

Normally the shaman would not go with them, but he needs to keep these five in sight and in earshot, make sure that they are not conspiring against him. Certainly these are lean times, but he has kept them all alive through worse than this, and he is not yet ready to hand it all over to his apprentice. He knows that his apprentice does not feel he is ready, either, and so feels safe leaving him behind with the weaker members of the tribe.

The walk to where the long noses are supposed to be is almost a half a day, leading them away from the running water and over fields and small hills, places mostly still green and alive but increasingly covered in white as snow falls and refuses to melt under the gaze of the weakened sun. As they approach the bottom of the hill that leads to the overlook where their prey should be, the shaman feels relief wash through him, powerful enough to weaken his knees for a moment, when he hears the sounds of the creatures in the distance.

He has the hunters lean their spears inward one last time, all of the points touching, and chants and prays some more, adding strength and luck at this final stage. Then he separates from them, goes to find a safe place from where he can watch the hunt.

The long noses have been tracked by the tribe as they walked their path over this plateau, finding their way through the green and away from the ice. But almost everywhere they’ve been it has been impossible for the hunters to get close enough to make a kill. So the hunters scouted ahead, and the shaman consulted his secrets, and together they came to an agreement that, on this day at this time, the long noses would be here, in a place where they could be more readily and more safely hunted.

He makes it to the top of the hill and settles in behind some rocks, watches as the hunters flow down the hill, almost invisible even to him. He sees even before they single it out that their target will be a young one, off grazing far from its mother and in the right direction as well.

The hunters jump as one then, screaming and slashing the air with their spears, the magic in the points amplifying everything, noise as well as numbers, and the long noses go wild with fear and scatter in all directions, the young one ever further separated from its mother and the rest of its family. It runs up the hill opposite the shaman—a mistake—as it stumbles on the loose rocks there, and it realizes this mistake and turns to come back down but instead sees what it thinks might be an opening and is running across the side of the hill, somehow managing the increased steepness.

All of the hunters still chase it, and two, including the strongest, raise their arms and hurl their spears. The shaman speaks words to the air to aid the flight of the spears. The words connect, and one spear flies true, stabbing into the side of the young long nose; it stumbles and bleats in agony. He is so sure of the kill to come that he doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t see the adult long nose rush up the hill until it is already in the midst of the hunters, throwing them angrily through the air with its tusks and crushing them with its huge stamping feet. He is then so intent on watching the future of his tribe die before him that he doesn’t see the young long nose lose its footing and fall.

All he can see is that none of the hunters are getting up, or even moving. As the snow begins to fall, heavier and heavier with each passing moment, he searches for and finds one last incantation of magic that he pulls deep from the earth and sends it toward the animal that had so indiscriminately killed the hunters of his tribe, the adult long nose . . . and toward the rest of its herd. The magic is invoked in a fit of anger that the beasts probably do not deserve, but this act of vengeance makes him feel at least slightly better—at least for a brief moment. And then he picks his way back down the hill and tries to retrace his path back to his people, all the while worrying at the scab on the palm of his hand.





Samuel woke up on a chair in Smitty’s Barbershop, across the street from the Klondiker. Fanny Alice was there, leaning over him and looking with no small amount of concern into his eyes. “You still in there?” she asked.

He tried to talk, but his mouth was too dry. A moment taken to reinvigorate it with spit, and then Samuel croaked, “I’m fine. How . . .” He paused, found more spit. “What the hell am I doing here?”

“Ed was worried about you,” she replied. “Once he saw you running over to the ’Diker, he came and found some folks who could get you out of there before you went and did somethin’ stupid.”

“Stupid.” Samuel looked down to his hand, saw that it was still balled into a fist, blood crusted underneath his nails and even down to his wrist. He opened it and stared at the spear point, stained with blood both ancient and new. “They tried to kill that mammoth, wanted to eat it.” He looked up, saw that Fanny Alice was not the only one in Smitty’s, that perhaps a dozen people were there, all watching him with worried eyes. But in Fanny Alice he could see something else, a spark of some sort of recognition.

Smitty himself stepped forward. “Hell, Samuel, ain’t nobody coulda killed that mammoth. It was deader than a doorknob when Mick and Temple found it. You know that.” He rubbed his hands anxiously, probably worried that with Samuel taking up a seat and everyone in here just standing around he had no chance of getting any business.

Samuel stood up and pocketed the spear point, then with a nod of encouragement from Smitty dipped his hand into a basin of ice-cold water. He spoke as he scrubbed away the excess dried blood. “It’s wrong what Marliss is doing, you know.” Nobody interrupted, nobody argued, so he continued on, now drying his hands on his jacket and looking around for a clean cloth he could wrap around the wound on his hand, which he had reopened. “That creature is an amazing find, a find that should be dedicated to science, not to some base desire to consume so precious a rarity.”

Looking somewhat aghast at the blood dripping onto the floor, something that shouldn’t have bothered him considering his reputation with a razor, Smitty tore off a strip from a relatively clean white towel and handed it to Samuel, then said, “He bought it fair and square, Pete did. I don’t see how anybody can stop him from doin’ this.”

“Besides,” interjected Loudon McRae, a trapper who had been one of Samuel’s students and had likely come into town to trade some pelts for supplies, “there’s plenty of folks who’ve bought tickets already. I expect if he doesn’t watch how many he sells he may have trouble feeding everyone. Just about the whole damn town wants to go, although mostly only the business folk can afford it.”

Samuel tapped the pocket where the spear point rested, some small part of him aware that his behaviour was scaring the rest of them. And so instead of carrying on in front of them, with the slightest of nods to Smitty and to Fanny Alice and then the rest, he stalked out the door and headed back home.

The scent of defeat and loss followed along behind him, whether from the here and now or from his prehistoric hallucinations he couldn’t be sure. Certainly there was enough to go around.