Over the Darkened Landscape

As the night of the banquet approached, Samuel noticed more and more that the people of Dawson were avoiding him, giving him wide berth wherever he went, and not visiting him for lessons or company when he was home in his cabin. His one attempt to go out for drinks—not at the Klondiker, never again at the Klondiker—was a sour and shortened evening at the Northern Light, a bar poorly populated as most carousers that night were already off celebrating with Pete Marliss, even though the banquet was still a day away. Even the patrons at this bar, though, were unwilling to come near him, lest he harangue them about the atrocities being visited on science and knowledge and their complicity in it.

The day of the banquet he had been out for another unhappy walk, and when he returned to the cabin he saw that two pieces of paper were nailed to his door. The first was a telegram, from a fellow at the Museum of Natural History, all the way down in New York City: Sending team from Edmonton to preserve/ship mammoth. Pls keep frozen. Advise of any problems.

He crumpled the telegram into a tight little ball and stuffed it into his pocket as he leaned back against the doorframe. Even if some miracle brought the team into town today, he could be sure the bones had mostly been picked clean by now, what with the banquet only hours away. He thought for a moment about heading back to the telegraph office and sending off a message telling the museum director to recall his team, but then he thought that they could at least recover the skeleton. He left it for the time being, figuring he could spare at least a day before he had to make a hard and fast decision.

The other piece of paper was a yellowed envelope. He opened it carefully and then blew into it to open it wide. Inside were a note and two small chits with numbers on them. He read the note first:



Samule, I know you dont want ta go, but i got theese tikets from a customer and need some one to go with. We dont have to eat the thing, but I figure we shold be there so you can no about it and tell about it. FA.



Samuel sat down on the porch, heedless of the cold wind blowing up the deserted street. Should he go? He knew that everyone important in town was going to be there and that most of them would be dressing up in their Sunday finest, or even nicer if they had it. He had no nice clothes to speak of, and Fanny Alice had known well enough to suggest that they needn’t eat the primeval stew. He sat there and turned things over and over again in his head, trying to find one good reason to go, and then, after finding that, searching for one good reason to turn down the invitation. By the time Fanny Alice came to collect him, he had come up with at least a dozen good reasons in either direction, the last being that it would at least be warm in the banquet hall of the Klondiker after all those hours spent sitting out in the wind.

She helped him pick an outfit that would at least not peg him as a grubstaker just in from the bush, and then they walked on to face the desecration of the past, her hand resting gently on his elbow. In another situation the looks he got when he presented the two tickets would have perhaps made it all worthwhile, but there was no way in hell he was going to grant anyone satisfaction out of this evening, especially himself. He allowed that he would be good company for Fanny Alice and that he needn’t harass each diner this evening—his presence here was scold enough, he felt—but that would be the outer limit of whatever good nature he normally had.

It turned out that Marliss had known, or at least hoped, that he was coming and had arranged for Samuel and Fanny Alice to sit at a special table up front, along with Mick and Temple as well as Marliss, his wife (who was decidedly uncomfortable in the presence of Fanny Alice), and the mayor. Upon hearing this Samuel had started to beg off and insist that he would sit in the back, but one look from Fanny Alice had quashed that attempt. She had a way of bringing out the meek in him, he realized.

Drinks weren’t a part of the price of the evening, but there was very little grumbling over that situation as pretty much everyone in town knew what Pete Marliss was like and had expected nothing more. But Marliss did buy a round of drinks for the VIP table, and once they arrived he stood on his chair and waited for the crowd of diners, some sixty strong, to quiet down.

“You all know,” he started, looking what Samuel thought was pretty damned smug, “that our friends Michael Callahan and Roger Templeton recently found the whole remains of a supposedly ancient baby mammoth—” Someone at another table raised a hand, and Marliss paused, obviously trying very hard to not get angry at being interrupted so early in his speech. “What?”

“Um. Who found the mammoth?”

Marliss rolled his eyes and then looked down and gestured to Mick and Temple to stand. When they did, he said, “These guys,” which was followed by a lot of muttering and nods as people who had never in their lives heard Mick and Temple’s proper names finally understood. Applause followed, and Marliss had to wait even longer, and finally he pointed at their chairs; the two miners, both somewhat red-faced, sat back down.

“As I was saying, Mick and Temple discovered the body, and our friend Samuel Denicola was the one who identified it.” More polite applause, although Samuel could see by the looks on the faces of most of those nearby that they were indeed worried that he was here. Marliss carried on. “Now, as you are no doubt aware, there has been some controversy over the final disposition of the body of this creature that Mick and Temple found, but I am here to tell you that I have no doubt more bodies will be found as more of the north is opened up and explored, and I also have no doubt that some of those creatures will be sacrificed on the altar of science rather than the altar of community and business. But with Ed Mortensen here to take a photograph . . .” Here he paused and gestured at Ed, who was busy setting up his camera on the stage in preparation of taking a picture of everyone as they tucked into their meal. Again, everyone applauded, and Ed took a second to wave in response. “As I was saying, with Ed here to take a photograph and to write about this historic event, we can be assured of plenty of attention by the outside world. Why, all that coupled with some good and honest hard work, and we may be able to recreate some of the action that we all remember from the peak times of the gold rush. And wouldn’t that be something!”

There were cheers and huzzahs at this, and soon enough most people in the room were standing as they applauded. There were few trappers and prospectors who would say they wanted more people coming back to Dawson, but most of the folk in the room that evening were businessmen, people whose livelihoods depended on as much custom as possible. Store owners, bar owners, hotel owners, restaurant owners, now that Samuel was paying attention he could see that most attendees held those occupations; as he’d been told in the barbershop, others from town couldn’t afford the tickets, or perhaps had been too late to buy them. At that moment he understood why his belief that the mammoth should have gone to science would have never panned out: too many people in town had a stake in the success of this evening. He sat back in his chair, finally feeling the complete acceptance of defeat.

Marliss sat back down, and the people around Samuel made small talk as they waited for their dinner. Samuel brooded, idly playing with his silverware and waiting for the first course to arrive. Fanny Alice stirred in her chair, looking increasingly uncomfortable whenever Samuel glanced up at her, but she didn’t seem to want to make eye contact with him, so he left her alone.

Waiters finally came out from the kitchen, and Samuel saw that almost all of them were prospectors that Marliss must have hired for the occasion. Each table got a large plate of sourdough bread and a bowl of thin soup, which Marliss stood and announced was the course before the stew and contained nothing from the mammoth. There were more mutterings at this, although Samuel imagined they were likely in relief that this meagre offering hadn’t been what everyone had come for.

Happy that there was at least something there he could eat without feeling guilty, Samuel spooned some into a bowl for Fanny Alice and then for himself and then cut off two slices of bread, saving the heel for himself. For the next ten minutes or so there was little sound aside from the slurping of soup and the clanking of spoons against the sides of bowls. Almost everyone seemed to be rushing through this course, hoping to speed up the main offering of the night, most probably.

Knowing he wouldn’t be eating the stew, Samuel procured himself a second bowl of the soup and another chunk of bread in order to mop up its remnants. Thin though it was, it wasn’t at all bad—although the fact that it was free had predisposed him in its favour early on. But soon enough he was done, and the waiter was there to take his dirty dishes away, likely to clean them for reuse with the stew.

There was time then for talk as they waited for the next round. Marliss sat back in his chair and eyeballed Samuel for a moment, a big grin on his face. “Glad to see you’re no longer of a mind to harass or attack me, my friend.”

Samuel shrugged. “What’s done is done. But I don’t think you’ve figured this whole thing out so well.”

Marliss cocked an eyebrow. “How so?”

Samuel looked up at the stage where Ed was ready now, waiting to take the photograph once everyone had received their main course. “Any pictures or stories that go out about this, no matter how pretty they dress things up, are going to make us look like a bunch of illiterate, ill-mannered troglodytes. You’ll attract few people, and the ones you do get will just be more of the same. Buffoons who have no respect for nature or for history, who are only out to make a fast buck, no matter the cost.”

Marliss frowned and leaned forward across the table, glass of whiskey in his right hand. The rest of the hall was dead silent, waiting to hear what came next. “Your opinion in this matter is certainly of interest to me, Samuel, but the fact that I am a successful businessman and you are . . . not, tells me I can value it only so much. I’m sorry that you feel this event will reflect on us so poorly, but that is in fact but one man’s opinion, and it must be weighed against the greater good.”

Samuel rolled his eyes. “Greater good?” He was about to say more, once again feeling free to rant about money and greed and superstition, but the kitchen doors swung open with a crash and in came the waiters bearing bowls of mammoth stew. The hall erupted in applause and cheers, and while Samuel sat back in his chair with his arms folded, knowing that he looked for all the world like a petulant child who was refusing his supper, bowls of piping hot stew filled with carrots and potatoes and small chunks of extinct mammoth were delivered to all the diners.

A bowl was set in front of Fanny Alice and another was almost given to Samuel, but a glare from him had the waiter beating a hasty retreat. Fanny Alice leaned forward and smelled the stew and immediately her face turned white. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She stood, and so did all the other men at the table—Mrs. Marliss was again discomforted and irritated by this attention to a woman such as Fanny Alice—and then Fanny Alice walked away, out the doors to the lobby. Samuel made to follow her, but the others sat back down then everyone else in the hall was now digging in to their stew, and on the stage Ed decided that that was just the moment to take his photograph. Flash powder went off, a noise that was almost immediately followed by a few grunts and then some strange sort of gibberish.

His eyes momentarily blinded by the powerful explosion of light, Samuel stood there, listening as the sounds around him grew increasingly strange and frightening. When the spots cleared from his eyes he saw that a strange sort of miasma had risen up from the tables, like a greenish-yellow fog, and he was worried for a moment that the flash powder had done serious and permanent damage to his eyes.

But then he heard a grunt from the table to his right, and saw that the fog was rising from the bowls of stew and that it was surrounding and seemingly permeating the people who were eating. They were all making similar, strange noises, not at all simple grunts of pleasure derived from a meal well enjoyed, but primitive, angry rumbles and groans, accompanied by what he thought were words but that were beyond his comprehension.

Samuel then heard a gasp from the doors where Fanny Alice had exited, but before he could turn that way one of the diners looked up at him, and he saw that this was no longer a citizen of his town, or even a citizen of his time. This was a primitive man of some sort, complete with hair and beard and a furious, equally primitive look that announced that Samuel was no longer safe in this room.

On the other side of the tables, Ed gave a strangled cry and fell back to his rear, and for a moment the attention of the primitive man turned that way, but then his eyes were back full bore on Samuel and with a cry and a stream of unintelligible gibberish he jumped to his feet and pointed. Around him, other cavemen—Samuel knew full well they had nothing to do with caves, but this was still the term that came to his appalled and frightened mind—jumped to their feet and did the same, and then they launched themselves at him, fighting with each other to get around tables and chairs while struggling with unfamiliar clothing, all of which gave Samuel the slimmest of head starts.

Which is how he found himself running down a darkened, frozen street, being chased by primitive men from another time, beings somehow brought to life by feeding on a stew that also, at least partly, dated from their time.



*



“They think you’re the baby mammoth,” whispers Fanny Alice in the darkness of the dilapidated cabin.

Samuel nods. “They do.”

“Something must have transferred over to you when you touched the body. Some life force, still strong after centuries and centuries.”

“But why me?” He does his best to keep his voice low, although the fear and aggravation over the situation threatens to raise it to unsafe levels. “Mick and Temple must have touched the beast digging it out, and I didn’t see them getting singled out.”

“I don’t know. What makes you different?”

Samuel reaches into his pocket and pulls out the spear point, fiddles with it while he thinks. “Don’t know,” he finally answers. “As far as I know, I’m just an ordinary guy. I never claimed to have any special powers or to be able to see any spirits or ghosts or any such nonsense. But then there was the mammoth, and after that there was this.”

“That’s right, there is that.” Fanny Alice reaches out and takes the spear point, turns it over in her hands. “What happened to you when you touched the mammoth?”

“I—I became it, I was inside its body while it was running from the hunters.”

“And what happened?”

“I—um, no—it managed to get away, but then it slipped and fell, and I expect that was when it died.”

“All right, so what about when you touched the spear point?”

“Well, I wonder if it wasn’t so much that I touched it as it was that I cut the palm of my hand with it. Then I was in the body of the, uh, the shaman, the medicine man for this tribe that was hunting the mammoth. He did something special, some sort of big magic, with the spears of all the hunters.” He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to remember what it was he’d experienced. “But things didn’t work out so well. They thought they had the baby, one of them managed to stick it with his spear, but then a big adult mammoth came in with tusks and trunk and feet all going in different directions, attacking all of the hunters, and I’m pretty sure all of them were killed.”

Fanny Alice is silent for a moment, and then she says, “We have to get back to your cabin.”

Samuel doesn’t like the sound of that. Where they are feels as safe as he will ever be, and that’s good enough for him. “Why? They’ve gone running on past, I’m sure things will be just fine when morning comes around.”

“They won’t, I’m afraid. If the rest of them jumped forward in time to hunt for the baby mammoth, for you, then I would think the medicine man did as well. Whatever magic he works, I don’t doubt that they’ll soon turn to him and ask him to lead them to you.”

“Son of a bitch. If you’ll pardon me for saying so.” Samuel leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes, feeling completely helpless and hopeless right now. “So how does going to my cabin make this any better for me? Or is it just so I can die in my own home instead of some stranger’s place?”

She squeezes his hand. “I never touched that frozen body, Samuel, but I’ll bet you that if I had I’d be the one being hunted right now instead of you. There’s one other piece of ancient magic that somehow came out of this, something that ties it all together. Can you think of what it might be?”

Samuel casts his mind back, looking through the memories of his current life and memories from his two experiences back in time, once as the baby mammoth, the other time as the shaman. And then he remembers the molar sitting on the shelf beside his wood stove in his cabin. The mammoth molar. “I’ll be damned,” he whispers. “That tooth. The shaman, he cast a final spell as he left after all the hunters died, something that was meant for the adult mammoth that killed them all. Do you suppose the tooth is from that very animal?”

“I think it’s likely. At least, as likely as any of this has been. That last spell he did must have tied everything together, and whatever is happening now it’s the remnants of that spell and of any others he cast playing themselves out, all these thousands of years later.”

Samuel starts to stand, then catches himself. “Wait,” he says. “What the hell do we do when we get the tooth? Do we just bash them over the head with it? Don’t know how many I could hit before they got a hold of me and I was skinned to feed the remainder of the tribe, of course.”

Fanny Alice stands and then takes Samuel’s hand and pulls him fully to his feet. “What’s on that spear point that Pete Marliss gave you?”

He strokes the edge gently with his thumb. “Blood,” he answers. “My blood, and the blood of the shaman . . .” At first he doesn’t know what the feeling is, having never sensed it before, but suddenly he knows how this could work, how everything over the eons connects to this one point of time and space. His voice quavers with wonder as he finishes his sentence, the pieces all slowly coming together: “And of the entire tribe.”

“And?”

“And . . .” He tightens his grip on the artifact. “Blood from the baby mammoth!” He leans forward and looks out the window, happily sees no sign of the cavemen. “So what do we do with the tooth when we get there?”

“I’m not really sure,” she answers. “All we can do is hope an idea reveals itself to us.”

Samuel shrugs and grunts.

One last check out the window, and then the door is open, and they are running.





The run to Samuel’s cabin is remarkable only in the fact that so much of it is rather unremarkable. Every noise and every shifting of shadow sends his heart jumping and his mind racing off into new and frightening territory, but for almost the whole distance there is no sign at all of his Paleolithic pursuers. He begins to think that this might be his lucky day, but then he notices that Fanny Alice, whose hand he is holding, is chanting something as she runs, and he realizes that she is using what magic she has, probably to keep them off his trail.

Then they round the final corner, and he can see his cabin down the street, but Fanny Alice slips on the ice. As she falls to the street, she loses her grip on him and stops her steady stream of incantations. Just like that, the protection or charm or whatever it is has been broken, and he hears the shouts and cries of the prehistoric hunting party as they suddenly appear behind him. Samuel reaches down and hauls Fanny Alice to her feet, and they are running again, luckily avoiding the oncoming spears—spears? where did they get spears?—that clatter to the road on either side of them. And then he is inside his cabin and reaching up onto the shelf to pull down the mammoth tooth.

Fanny Alice has for some unknown reason stayed outside, and he tries to pull her in with him, but she pulls harder, and he finds himself standing on the porch, spear point and molar from a long-dead mammoth in his right hand, a lady of the night at his side, and an advancing horde of primitive men and women coming down the street, prepared to kill him and probably to eat him as well. The absurdity of the situation, coupled with the absolute physical and mental exhaustion he feels right now, prompts him to giggle.

Fanny Alice stares at him for a second, then takes the molar and puts it down on the street. Then, with the cavemen less than one hundred feet away and their spears quite obviously being prepared for more deadly throws, she grabs Samuel’s hand and pulls him until he is standing over top of the tooth. She takes the spear point from him and once again cuts his hand with it, then shakes the resulting blood over top of the tooth; the blood that misses it stains the snow and ice it sits upon.

Samuel hears a strangled cry from the oncoming tribe, and although he never saw his face in his vision, he knows that this must be the shaman, and he also knows that the shaman is aware that what Fanny Alice is doing will have its desired effect. An effect the shaman probably doesn’t want, judging by what little Samuel can see of the look on his face and by the tone of his voice.

The others in the tribe react almost instantaneously, arms up and ready to throw their spears to finish this once and forever, but before they can do so the tooth is suddenly gone and Samuel realizes he can no longer see the cavemen. Instead, the only thing he can see is the large, smelly, hairy rear end of a very large mammoth.

No, scratch that. Several very large mammoths. Lots and lots of very large mammoths.

He jumps backward and would fall if not for tumbling right into the arms of Fanny Alice. The mammoths, every one of them, recognize the smell of the creatures who took away their young one all those millennia ago, and with trumpeting and a cataclysmic stamping of feet launch themselves toward them, bent on retribution. Samuel can’t see them, but he assumes that the entire tribe of cavemen turn and run. By the time the mammoths have disappeared from view, the streets are completely empty.

Samuel looks at Fanny Alice, and he can tell by the look on her face that she feels every bit as bewildered as he does. One, maybe, but an entire herd . . .! A question comes to his lips even as he knows she wonders the same thing: “What do we do now?”



*