Helen's Hi-jinks Part VI
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Chapter VI – The Pleistocene (part 1)
The almost smooth valley, reaching stretching out as far as an eye could see, was covered in places by copses of fir and spruce trees. Between these copses lay wide, open spaces, overgrown by grasses and picturesque, low-lying shrubs. Here and there were also the white spots of birches as well as the taller poplar trees, whose pyramidal tops almost touched the clouds.
"Well, at least it's summer," Helen Cutter muttered, as she made her way the Ice Age European tundra. "In winter the name of 'Ice Age Period' is much more truthful, indeed!"
Helen was no stranger to this time, in fact, when she was observing the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, she had spent a lot of time during such an Ice Age winter, and thus was fully prepared to face it once again, if she were to accidentally end up in that time period. What she regretfully was not prepared was the actual Ice Age spring, when all sorts of bloodsuckers – gnats and their kin – came out en masse from their polar bogs and feasted on the warm mammalian blood. Helen Cutter, with her distinctive lack of a protective covering on her face and body, was a prime attraction to those invertebrates.
"Think, you fool, think," Helen purred to herself, as she staggered around the plains. "The Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons use ochre on their bodies as a mud cover. Where did they get it? From what parts of the soil?"
Meanwhile, the spring wind up in the sky was able to tear away the grey covering of the snow clouds into thousands of smaller pieces and scatter them to all sides of the world, revealing the clear blue sky with its warmly shining sky. Apparently, the long, cold and hungry winter period was over for good. The Ice Age spring came into its own, and it was when the time anomaly had taken Helen from the Miocene woodland and deposited her in the tundra instead.
As Helen shooed away the various horseflies, she caught a look of a mountain ridge to the north. Its upper portions were covered in white ice sheets that gleamed in the light of the sun. These ice sheets formed a definite border – nothing could live beyond their edges. Therein lay only various ice valleys, marred by innumerable cracks that were hidden under deep snow.
Yet on the southern sides of the ice sheets, a very different picture was emerging. From the melting edges of the glaciers came down streams of clear (and just as cold) water that created the bigger rivers that flowed south. Even in such rather uncomfortable conditions appeared the plants adapted to such climate, plants that in later times be found only in the tundra of the Arctic or the alpine area of the mountains.
Herein lay the various flowers of the avens family, with big, saw-edged leaves and big, beautiful, white flowers. A poetic observer would compare these flowers to snowflakes in the sun or thousands of resting white moths. However, a poetic observer would have had to be someone different from Helen, could just ignored the flowering plants in favour of their more woody counterparts.
Instead, Helen's attention was directed to the numerous polar willows that formed long copses, while remaining no taller than Helen's palm. However, Helen was not concerned with the shortness of these plants. Instead, she gingerly began to cut off their twigs and foliage and chew on them – during her previous Ice Age winter sojourn, Helen Cutter had a rather close run-in with scurvy, and though this looked to be a different time of an Ice Age year, she was not taking any chances. Consequently, she took her time nibbling on the tender new buds, shoots and bark, ignoring the bizarreness of that act, as it would appear to the uninitiated. Even back in her life with Nick, Helen Cutter was never the one to bow down to the popular opinion... and neither was Nick, of course, that's why they became a couple in the first place.
Upon realizing that she was thinking about Nick yet again, Helen shook her head and wiped her mouth, smearing the bitter juices of the willows around her chin and cheeks. To her surprise, the blood-sucking insects reacted with disfavour to these new developments, as they stopped biting her there, and instead tried to move on to the other parts of her body. However, Helen Cutter was just starting her fight with them.
As she moved south, away from the barren ice sheets, the original polar willow was replaced by the more southern dwarf willow species. These tiny trees formed carpets around icy lakes and rivers of molten snow intermixed with the species of arctic mosses and other bog-dwelling plants. And here Helen stopped, produced a small shovel and began to dig.
This particular tool was designed not for work in the garden, but for palaeontology or archaeology, where precision was more important than bigger shovelfuls. Here, it was more of the reverse, but Helen did not care. Eagerly, she dug-up shovelfuls of thick black mud and splattered it all every naked part of her body. She knew that she looked scary and ridiculous, but she did not care - this was not ochre either, but it would serve.
Soon, Helen finished moved on – to the south, ever to the south. Here, the willows were joined by equally tiny birches, conifer shrubs, and even heather. Once again, Helen stopped and eyed the trees with a thoughtful look. She had learned by this time that the springtime sap of birches could be a very healthy thing, and so was the tea, made with the needles of certain conifers. Still, she was sure that these conifers were of a completely different kind than the ones used to make tea, and the birches were too small – she would probably have to squeeze them all dry to get a mug full of sap. That would be just a waste of time, and so Helen moved on.
As she moved south, she encountered coppices of real conifer trees, scattered like black blots amongst the grasses and shrubs of the polar steppe, dotted with tiny lakes, bogs, swamps as well as interwoven by the silvery lines of streams and rivulets.
Suddenly, Helen stopped. Before her lay a big indentation in the ground, wide and relatively shallow. Could it be that she was geographically back at the Triassic desert and the highland plateau, where the plateosaurs had once roamed? True, here and now the land mass was much bigger than the one back in the Triassic, but given the shifting of the tectonic plates over hundreds of the millennia gone past, Helen would not be surprised if the seashore that she had camped on in the Triassic became a part of a continental mainland instead.
However, Helen had no concerns for such lofty thoughts. Instead, she carefully checked to ensure that her feet were positioned on solid, permafrost land, and leaned forwards, grabbing handfuls of mosses and other plants with both hands and pulling them out. She took them, sniffed at the roots, and carefully produced her shovel yet again. This time, she dug a small straight pit, the shovel's carefully honed edges slicing straight through the sphagnum and similar plants.
Not that it was in Helen's character to be wasteful – every shovelful of sphagnum was carefully squeezed dry into a spare flask of water: Helen was not about to waste any natural resource she came across – not in this tough environment, where only the hardiest of all beings survived. Still, even with this slowed process, she soon cleared away a substantial hole in the upper crust of the indentation, and discover that underneath a pleasant carpeting of sphagnum, sedges, sundews and other plants lay a nearly bottomless pit of reddish-brown sticky mass of waterlogged dead plants – a death-trap as efficient as the combination of Carboniferous mud and Triassic dust and heat. This time, however, Helen did not feel an urge to go right through the bog, as the time anomaly was not going to open so quickly. Instead, she decided to go the long way around and see what the future would bring.
Helen looked at the sky and frowned, displeased. One of the bigger disadvantages (in her point of view) of the polar latitudes was the difficulty with the times of the day. Polar day and polar night were sufficiently clear-cut, sure enough, but the in-between periods were trickier and could catch her flat-footed, unawares – as it did now. The sun was slowly setting below the horizon in the west, and Helen was about to be caught in an open steppe at night. To avoid this from taking place, Helen wisely moved to a copse of walnuts and birches – only to find it already occupied.
Helen had met several megaloceros, also known as the Irish elk, in the earlier periods of the Pleistocene, when she was overlooking a Heidelbergensis hunt – she was curious as to how those first true European hominids different from their predecessors, Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, and discovered that the similarities far outweighed the differences, but that wasn't the point. The point actually was that back then it autumn, the megaloceros had proudly bore – like a crown of incomparable majesty – its trademark antlers, half again as long as the elk itself was tall. Now it was spring, and the megaloceros great antlers were just buds, still looking very much the same as the antler buds of the cervids of a similar size – the wapiti and the moose.
Carefully, the megaloceros and Helen looked at each other, as neither wanted to confront the other being just yet. After a brief but tense moment, the pair moved apart to the different parts of the copse, and began to settle for the night.
Somewhere in the distance, a snow owl emitted its hooting cries. Helen, who was busy making her newest campfire, ignored the avian hunter. This was not a Harry Potter novel after all. The yet distinct howls of the grey wolves, still somewhere in the distance, brought on a frantic rush of activity, on the other hand: Helen quickly moved her small camp to a sufficiently thickly grown part of the copse, gathered all the firewood she could find, sat with her back next to a tree and started to make a fire. She knew that she could not count the wolves fear of humans, because in the Ice Age, the wolves killed and ate people probably more often than the reverse – wolf meat was not very tasty. Not that she had any different knowledge – cannibalism was one sin that Helen had no intention of committing.
The megaloceros too heard the approach of the wolves. It was a pack that had hunted in this area for long time now. It had shrunk somewhat with the beginning of spring, as several wolf couples to split to live on their own during the spring and summer, but it was still strong.
The pack was led by a grizzled old veteran, who had seen and survived many cycles of the seasons, and knew where to find what food where. Right now, though, luck was against them – the only thing they managed to find and eat was an old snowshoe hare, a small morsel to so many ravenous predators. Therefore, the wolves went on.
Soon, they came onto the copse, and smelled the presence of Helen in it soon enough. Contrary to Helen's expectations, this pack had little experience with humans in general, the smells of burning wood, dry moss and smoke were found not to their liking, and so the pack bent into a crescent shape to move around at a respectful distance from the unpleasant place. However, the smell of the megaloceros was both familiar and pleasant to the carnivores, and therefore, when they came across it, they struck.
For its own part, the megaloceros was grazing at the farthest edge of the copse, where the broadleaf trees were replaced by the conifers, completely oblivious to the upcoming threat: the night was pleasantly windless and quiet for a change, and so the deer couldn't smell the carnivores... but then it noticed a shadow moving through the moonlit woods, then another and another... the deer fled.
Now, the megaloceros was a creature of the open steppe and plains, as its massive antlers banned it as a rule from the deeper parts of woodlands. However, right now, it remembered with its memory that in the direction of the open steppe lay not only a bog, but also the strange smelling creature – a human and its servant the fire. Therefore, it could only whirl around and run in the only direction safe from any threats – the deep woods.
However, Helen Cutter had not stayed at the edge of the forest either. In fact, she never intended to get caught in the open, easily assessable not only any carnivores, but also to the Ice Age winds, which could be as deadly as any carnivore, and even more unstoppable. Therefore, she made her camp (after meeting the megaloceros and hearing the wolves) much deeper into the forest – and so, it was a rather unexpected irony of fate when the same megaloceros had burst from the trees several hours later and raced right past her campfire, followed by a couple of wolves, who got so caught up in the thrill of the chase that they ran into the campfire instead!
The howl and stench of the burned skin and hair seemed to feel and shake the very trees themselves. Helen could not explain even to herself just how she was able to so quickly climb the tree that she sat beneath moments earlier, and what was she to do now?
The answer came to her from outside – she had to do nothing. The wolves, albeit badly singed, managed to jump away from the fire and by rolling on the ground, put it out before it could do them irreparable damage. The hunt itself was hopelessly ruined, as the megaloceros had acquired a huge advantage in time, and furthermore, two more members of the pack were as good as lost for the next several hunts.
...This served as a poor, if any, consolation to Helen Cutter, as she had to spend the rest of her night in a tree, as the wolves spent the rest of that time below her, seeking out any new prey. But it was hopeless. (Helen's very presence had altered the events of a single night and several nights afterwards.) When the sun had risen, the wolves left the forest.
...Helen Cutter had finally climbed from her tree and stretched her stiffened limbs. "The first time is always the hardest, and the night was windless anyways," she muttered. "I got to leave this place and seek a better observation point and shelter."
She packed and re-checked her belongings and went on.
To be continued...