Helen's Hi-jinks Part VII
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Chapter VII – The Pleistocene (part 1)
Through a steep valley, hedged in from both sides by steep cliffs, through a narrow path that was almost unseen under the shadows of ancient trees, walked a man, dressed in wolf-skin clothing.
In his left hand, he held a heavy spear, in his right – a bow and a quiver of arrows. A necklace of wolf and bear teeth was hanging around his neck, its whiteness contrasting sharply against the tanned chest of the hunter.
The hunter carefully moved forwards, carefully surveying the cliffs and the dense undergrowths. His eyes held no presence of cowardliness or worry; they almost glowed from the realization of the hunter's bravery and strength.
Behind the hunter walked a woman, too dressed in soft hides and her own dark clothing. Grasping her clothing were two small children.
The hunter's name was Agli and he was accompanied by a woman named Gina and her kids. They were journeying for several days now.
Agli was a young and self-conscious hunter, who could not stand it, when the others laughed at him. When few days ago he and his friend Rill returned to the camp empty-handed, and that evening the other hunters began to haze him around the camp's fire. The gloomier did Agli become, the harder the jokes aimed at him flew. The others said that Agli knew not how to stalk the beasts or to intercept and ambush them.
When the hunters' mockeries began to include clear statements that the man's spear and arrows too often miss the beasts, Agli had enough. Insulted beyond his endurance, Agli jumped up and yelled that he could do anything as well as the next man, and that did not need anybody's help in catching beasts. In this aggravated state, he did not understand that the other hunters were joking, that they did not intend to demean his hunting prowess. After all, it happened that they too would return to the camp empty-handed.
Agli decided to strike out on his own to prove that he was sufficiently brave, strong and capable of taking care of himself. His friend Rill decided to join him as well. In this state, the pair ignored the warnings of the older hunters that great dangers and hardships waited for whoever would leave the communal safety of the clan behind; they did not heed the persuasions and worries of women.
Therefore, on the first sunny day the two friends went out on their own, determined to make their mark on the world. As they already were some distance away, they heard someone calling out for them. Turning around, they saw Gina, one of the women of the camp, and her kids. Gina too decided to leave the old camp because it was too cramped and loud and not personal and comfortable enough for her tastes. Once Gina and her kids caught up with them, the small group continued on their way.
However, after the first night spent outside the camp, Rill decided to return there. After staring mockingly at his friend's retreating, Agli, Gina and the kids continued on their way.
By now, Agli discovered several caves for their camp, but none was found appropriate. One was located too high up on the side of a steep mountain, the other was too low in the valley, thus easily assessable by any predator, and the third was too small and cramped. Consequently, Agli led on his posse further.
The valley, through which the Cro-Magnons were walking, suddenly widened. The path left the shadow of the old fir trees, approached a running stream, and continued to follow it. Agli looked in that direction and looked around the valley. Seeing that nothing was wrong, he walked on, until he arrived at the bend in the creek, where a cliff was raising itself high to the sky. The cliff's sides were white and steep.
When Agli came over to the cliff, he stopped and began to examine it. After all, this cliff greatly resembled the one, in whose shadow lay their old camp. Around him the old trees creaked, the brook bubbled, the birds sang and the various insects buzzed and chirped their songs, but Agli ignored them, his attention tied to this cliff. Could it be that this was what they sought?
As Agli examined the cliff, Gina walked over to him and sat down. The children too seemed tired, but as soon as one of them spotted a mottled lizard in the grass near them, the two immediately jumped up and pursued it.
The noise shook Agli out of his initial mood. Turning around and seeing his companions, he spoke:
"You are feeling tired already, Gina? Then take a rest here with the kids. I'll examine this cliff and be back with you soon."
Agli put down his bow and arrows, and armed with just his spear alone, vanished from out of sight.
After walking for a short time, he came back to the creek and saw several biggish brown fish and spotted crayfish that hid under rocks as his shadow fell over the waters.
With several big jumps from one boulder to another Agli navigated the creek. He ran through the tall grasses and the stunted shrubs and came to the foot of the cliff. A steep and smooth wall of natural stone rose before his eyes. Nowhere could he see boulders or ledges via which he could have climbed up. Therefore, Agli continued to walk around its foot.
He had to carefully navigate around large boulders that had fallen from the cliff's flanks under the pressure of time. Many green-coloured lizards saw his approach and hid under the rocks.
A big and old snowshoe hare noticed the human's approach too, but unlike the lizards, it opted to flee into the shrubs growing around the cliff's sides instead.
A hunter's excitement came over Agli when he saw the hare's retreat into the stunted shrubs, but he suppressed it. He had a more important goal on his schedule: to find a new cave, which would protect himself, Gina and the kids from the darkness and horrors of the night, from the predators; where he would be able to start a new fire without risking any dangers.
The cliff's round side suddenly vanished, and Agli found himself at a smaller, sideways-turned valley, which smoothly went upwards in one direction, and vanished in the open steppe in the other.
Surprised, Agli began to examine the slopes of the new valley. Here, the cliffs weren't as steep as in the valley through which he and others had walked to get here, and neither they were so barren: in many spots time had created various clay ledges on their sides, now overgrown with deep shrubs or trees, whose roots spread into openings and cracks that dotted the sides.
Agli, who carefully was examining the rocky ledges, suddenly stopped as his attention settled at one spot, where he saw a dark hole, covered on both sides by shrubs and hiding in the shadow of an old, half-dead, fir tree.
Agli quickly realized that that was an entrance to a cave. He thought that it looked like a good cave. It was found close to the valley's floor, it had plenty of free space before it, and there was water close to it. Now all he needed was to find out if it was sufficiently wide and dry inside.
Agli did not waste any time and immediately moved towards the cave. He started at a brisk trot, and then broke into a full run, jumping over rocks or fallen tree trunks that lay in his path. Soon, he was right at the cave's side.
After catching his breath, Agli continued to climb. Finally, he climbed over the ledge that led to the cave and looked around. Now he could see that the cave was really a small grotto that narrowed sharply inside and emerged outside as only a small entrance – consequently, Agli had to drop to his knees to peek inside. As his eyes adjusted from the daylight outside to the twilight inside, he saw that the cave was indeed wide and spacious, just as he had wanted and hoped for.
Still, before Agli moved himself and others into the cave, he needed to thoroughly check that it was not already inhabited by a cave lion or bear. Therefore, he continued his investigations.
First, he examined the cave's floor just before the entrance, but nowhere the soft soil showed the terrible footprints of a lion's or a bear's paws, and neither did the space right outside of it.
This, however, was not enough for Agli. He looked around for stones and found several lying some distance away from the clearing. He carried them back to the cave and threw them into the darkness inside. This he followed by several loud yells. In return, there were some sounds, but no infuriated roar of an angry predator woken from its slumber.
Then Agli decided to investigate the cavern in person – he had thought up a plan. He put the spear aside and took from his side a leather bag that contained several of his personal belongings – flint knives, stone axes, scrappers, drills, cutters, pieces of dry wood and moss.
Agli gathered a bit of dry wood, grass and moss into a small pile and then chose two more pieces of wood. One of them was black and coal-like. He put it between his legs and began to roll the other piece, round and smooth, between his palms, drilling it into the first piece more and more quickly, until a spot of fire and smoke appeared in the first one. He stuck the burning wood into the prepared pile of fuel and began to blow at it, until sparks, tiny tongues of flame and smoke did not appear.
Then Agli jumped, crossed the clearing and stopped at the old fir tree, which loomed over the scene like some ancient guardsman. With an effort, he tore off several of lower and older branches and then, tearing off the ends of these paw-like appendages, threw these ends into the growing fire. As the fire grew, Agli fed it fir needles and twigs, until all that he had left were several thick sticks that smelled of tar.
Agli stuck one of these sticks into the fire before him, and once it began to burn, he took it into his left hand and swinging it several times for good measure he saw a long, smoky flame appear on its other end; Agli took his spear into his right arm and walked into the cave – the light of the burning torch illuminated it.
Agli stopped and looked around. He saw a wide cave that had a large accumulation of stones at one of its ends, the result of an ancient earthquake. In height, that cave was not too tall, but neither it was too low to prevent Agli from walking upright. The cave felt dry and there was no wind.
Agli continued to move forwards, keeping his flank to the fallen rocks, ready to jump behind them if necessary. Yet, so far, the only living things he had encountered were some bats, woken from their diurnal slumber by his smoking torch.
Agli stopped at a particularly big rock and looked at the other end of the cave. There, the wall made a particularly big curve, forming a wide space covered in dry yellow clay and few stones.
Agli looked at that spot and imagined Gina laughing as she sat and worked there, the children playing around, his prey, weapons and tools as well as plenty of dry grass and moss, many sown hides upon which one could rest after hunt, work and rest. And from this picture of imagined happiness, almost real already, Agli felt like he could sing.
The creak of the burning branch made Agli snap out of this. He shook his impromptu torch, causing it to flare into a bright flame once more, and walked on into the darkness of the cave.
Now he walked through a narrow path amongst the fallen stones. Soon, however, even that path had vanished, but Agli was not stopped by that. He climbed onto the impromptu wall and began to jump from one stone to the other.
Soon he stood on the last boulder in the line. And here he saw that the cave somewhat widened once again, and then make a sharp turn to the right. However, he could not see anything beyond that, as the light from his simple torch was too weak to reach there.
However, Agli decided to go until the end – however, as he reached the turning point in the cave, he thought that he heard a quiet noise.
Silence fell, dark and heavy, befitting this subterranean place.
The noise came back – from the same direction Agli intended to go to.
Agli turned to the right – and saw the biggest cave hyena in his entire life.
However, the cave man was not frightened. Unlike the cave-dwelling lions or bears, the cave hyenas were cowardly and craven and attacked other animals only while in packs. In addition, they would strike out on their own, away from the pack only when they were having pups – the male hyenas were cannibals.
As quick as greased lightning, Agli lashed at the hyena, his spear aiming into the beast's side. However, the carnivore was no longer there – it jumped into the widening area, its head lowered and a threatening growl resonating from its throat.
Agli whirled around, aiming to keep the sharp end of the spear and the burning end of his torch between himself and the predator, but the hyena struck first, its bone-crushing jaws snapping on the spear, just behind the pointy end, effectively putting an end to it as a weapon.
Agli used his torch as a fiery club, but the hyena managed to jump away just before the fiery weapon could smash into it, and so while Agli regained his main weapon, it had been greatly weakened by the hyena.
The animal once again tried to flank him, but Agli was through with it. He charged at the carnivore, prepared to impale it via a frontal attack, but the animal nimbly jumped to a side, and Agli shortly lost track of it in the dark cavern.
Agli was quick-footed as he was strong, and so he instantly turned around, ready to face the beast, but it was later than he had thought. Three more hyenas, younger and smaller than the first but already quite mature, burst from the darkness, going straight for his spear-wielding side. The sets of bone-crushing jaws bit and locked down on Agli's spear, spear-wielding arm, leg, pulling him off balance. Then the first hyena struck, biting down on the arm that wielding the torch, and these jaws locked down much more strongly than the others did. The torch fell out of the pain-wracked hand and rolled away from the combatants, leaving the cavern once more in an almost complete darkness.
And shortly afterwards – into silence.
Meanwhile, as the noises of the struggle had neatly transformed into the sounds of an unexpected meal, Helen Cutter finally realized that she was not dreaming the whole thing and got up from her sleeping quarters.
It had been quite a while, though less than a year, since she came from the north and found the mountain cavern. Her instincts told her that the time anomaly will open eventually here as opposed to any place else, and since this was not the Permian, the Triassic or the Eocene, she was fine with waiting. She had been in the Ice Age period before, when she was studying the humans who had lived there, and planned to do so again. Still, this was a bit later from that previous time, and therefore this meant that the Neanderthals were likely to have been gone, replaced completely from the Cro-Magnons that have began to spread from Africa at last.
The noises had stopped altogether, and Helen decided to investigate – she smelled wood smoke, and since there was no other animal other than man who used fire that gave-off smoke, this warranted an investigation. Helen stood up and left her sleeping quarters.
As she exited through the short darkened corridor on her left, the smell of smoke was replaced by other smells – of flesh and blood and sweat. "Feeding time at the zoo – oh dear," Helen muttered as she also noticed the almost burned down wooden torch. "My dears, what had happened here?"
The female hyena and her three offspring looked up at Helen from their meal, with blood and other liquids dripping from their muzzles. "Here's somebody who won't be making any he-man boasts anymore," Helen said thoughtfully. "Maybe it was a potential ancestor to Leek, eh? Although... he does seem to be somewhat taller than that rat."
Helen paused, her eyes narrowed in thought. "People are social creatures – just like you," she told the hyena, as something crunched under her foot – a simple spear of some sort, apparently. "Therefore, it is highly unlikely that this fellow just struck out on his own, just like he accidentally found our cave. That's just troublesome."
It was troublesome indeed, as Helen knew that she did not really have anything in her repertoire to deal with an entire community of Ice Age people that probably did not include widespread destruction of that community. An avid student (and doctor) of anthropology, Helen always considered the Ice Age Cro-Magnon to be an important step in the human history – the link that connected humanity's biological evolution with its social, its prehistory with its history, and to mess with something so vital on a big scale would be madness. This would have left her with attempting to flee... only Helen did not intend to leave the place where the time anomaly would manifest itself first. Yet, that left her with...
As Helen shook her head, trying to figure out her next course of action, she climbed over the stony wall that separated her sleeping quarters from her working area, followed closely by her pets. On that side, there was more silence, and that was re-assuring – the natives, upon finding Helen's belongings behind a pile of rock would have made noises and sounds as they tried to figure out what they were. Since there were no such acoustic indicators that meant...
...that there were no natives, no other natives that is with the man that had come to Helen's abode on his own. Yet, Helen could not stop. She had to find out from where that man came from, or even if it was possible that his cohorts were waiting somewhere nearby.
Looking grim and determined, Helen Cutter ventured forth. On one side of her valley, the mountains turned to steppe, in parts overgrown in shrubs. There grazed the massive woolly mammoths as well as much smaller and slimmer wild horses, some already having foals with them, looking especially fragile.
Upon seeing the horses, Helen could not help but flash a self-satisfied grin. She was not quite sure just what had happened back in the Eocene (the Miocene didn't count, she was there for less than a day, and judging from the megaloceros and similar animals that she had met earlier in this Pleistocene, the deer, who had descended from palaeomeryx and similar animals went on strong. However, the horses... possibly because of the creodonts... had. Forget the graceful runners of the plains – these animals still resembled the orohippus and other, more ancient equines, and were more at home in the scrubland and woodland than in the open steppe. As the glaciers – Helen knew – would melt, the forests would advance north, shifting the whole ecobalance of this region. As a result, Helen knew that the horses were in for a tough time, a different ecological niche or not. The creodonts, though, still went on strong, managing to occupy the hyenas' niche instead. Of course, this meant that they would vanish from Europe, just as the hyenas did in her original timeline, but that was all right. They would hang-on in Africa and Asia all the same. Still, these hyenas would perish, unless she actually...
Helen shook her head away from maddening thoughts and looked on at the steppe. Beyond the mammoths and the horses grazed some aurochs, the ancient ancestors of the domestic cattle, alongside a megaloceros stag, its antlers already halfway to their full size for the autumn. There was even a woolly rhino or two, grazing at a respectable distance from the mammoths, looking rather dangerous with their flat, two-meter-long horns.
Once more, a faint smile appeared on Helen's face. "Oh yeah, I rule it all! Nick, you and your little friends can eat your hearts out!"
The whine of her part-time pets brought Helen out of her haze. "All right, where it, lads and lassies, is" she said evenly. "Of you go and lead me to it!"
The hyenas raced-off in the opposite direction. Soon, Helen could see her unlucky intruder's companion – his wife and kids as much as these labels meant in this simple and primitive land and age.
For their parts, the other woman and her children were shocked. Helen, in her travelling garb, could be an intimidating figure on her own, but with the hyenas adding an 'aura' of sorts to her, she looked downright bizarre and outlandish, and so the children began to cry. Their mother was more composed, but that was because she was more shocked, and therefore began to cry-out something incomprehensible to Helen instead.
For her own part, this behaviour caught Helen flat-footed. She escaped the other woman to get out while the going was good, because when you are unarmed and are approached by four cave hyenas, armed with their teeth, escape tends to sound good. However, this woman stayed – and put Helen back on the spot, as Helen was in no hurry to actually order the hyenas to attack, especially since the woman did not seem to be in a right mind to attack her either.
"So, if she won't fight or flee on her own, what is there left to do?" Helen muttered, and then she remembered that when she was back in high school, her own mother used to tell her scary stories about witches like Baba Yaga and Black Annis, and what would they do to the unwary or foolish human that came across their paths.
"Every legend got to start somewhere," Helen muttered, "might as well start this one with me."
After barking of a command to the hyenas, she left briefly and returned with the intruder's spear and skull. The latter she put on the former with a ceremony almost out of a book of Tolkien's, and stuck the whole composition on the shore of the creek. The other woman gasped and moaned, but she held her ground.
"Oh boy," Helen muttered, clearly disgruntled by this development. "The pseudo-scientific approach does not work, and I am not going to kill her. Maybe...maybe this is my first ancestor."
That thought was a wrong one to think, as the next immediate thought that came to her mind was that maybe this woman was actually related to Nick, and by killing her, she might have her revenge in the future at one fell swoop. This time, though, Helen's nature that is more humane won. "No!" she firmly told herself. "I am anthropologist, not Baba Yaga or another witch! Maybe this company just does not want to turn back to the carnivores – always a wise move. Well then, let me take the initiative instead."
As if on cue, the other hyenas, to whose pack her part-time friends tended to bond with, howled their sharp cries in the valley. The kids grasped their mother who looked like she was about to faint. "Go," Helen told 'her' hyenas, and the massive animals eagerly responded and ran-off. The humans watched their leaving, and then Helen, after giving the other woman one last demonstratively pointed look, also left, without looking back. She had other things to care about, after all.
The Cro-Magnon woman and her children re-appeared at the cave's entrance at the sunset. To say that Helen was inhospitable to them would be misleading. She had spent the rest of the day examining the remains of the corpse, as well as its belongings. She carefully examined and sorted all of the stone tools and carefully compared them to her acquirements from the earlier visits to the Ice Age, which used to belong to the Neanderthals. She also took the pieces of bone and flesh and carefully buried them outside, alongside with a disposable pair of gloves that she used on the sorry remains – there were some lines that she as a woman was not about to cross. Therefore, between all these undertakings and a brief meal of energy bars, she had quite forgot to start her own fire...and realized that she had forgot only after she decided to investigate the Cro-Magnon's own external fireplace after burying him. The sight of the deceased's companion and children was not a welcome one at all after this.
"What do you want?" Helen growled, now almost ready to set the hyenas on them. Fortunately, the hyenas were out, hunting their own meals, and probably will not return until after midnight. "Don't you have a clan or a community or whatever to go to?"
As Helen narrowed her eyes, she saw that the woman did not come exactly empty-handed (the children did not count), but with a pile of furs, obviously their bedding or something. "Lady-lady, can we have a bit of food, because we're so thirsty that we've got no place to sleep," Helen muttered to herself. "Why doesn't she leave?"
The woman meanwhile was casting tentative looks at the cave entrance, the campfire sight, and the fish that Helen had caught earlier – though she preferred meat, she had more practice with fish, especially when using her improvised spear. Helen's eyes narrowed further, this time from less malicious thoughts.
"So, you're thinking of settling in, do you?" she muttered to herself. "Let's see what you think once you see me doing chores instead?"
'The chores' to which Helen was referring was making her own fire, and that was what she did. She had seen the natives, whether Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon do this before, and had imitated them to get into practice. However, she didn't see the other woman's eyes narrow in surprise as she observed Helen start a fire in a manner quite similar to her old tribe's – but she did see how the children took the furs into the cave, while the woman produced several stone tools out of her own leather pouch and begin to clean the fish.
Helen's eyes widened in surprise. She tended to prepare her meals using the more modern tools – a Swiss army knife, to be exact. To see a native use stone blade instead was an interesting revelation.
Meanwhile, the children emerged from the cave once again – without the furs. They have not been long enough to find Helen is sleeping quarters, which meant that they settled for the outer section, where the hyenas would sometimes stay during the night. Humans and carnivores together could usually end up in someone being eaten. Helen was never too much at home with the idea of humans being eaten (unless it was Leek, but Leek was a rat, really). Ergo, unless she wanted to sleep tonight with an uneasy conscience, she would have to do something about it.
It was darkening. The carnivores' happy cries seemed to sound all over the steppe, which meant that they had captured something significantly bigger than some crayfish or frogs. In the sky, the sun had set, and thousands of stars lit up overhead, and the moon's silver disk seemed to fill-up all the space in the sky over the dark forest in the distance. The mismatched quartet sat around a campfire, eating the fish. The children were telling something to their mother, in voices that sounded just too happy for people who just lost their father.
"Maybe this was not their father," Helen muttered to herself. "But in this case, why he would want a woman with kids to take care of out here, in the wilds?"
Suddenly, the crickets in the valley fell silent, as Helen's hyenas returned from a successful hunt, their tongues lolling and tails wagging excitedly. Though she did not feel like having fun, Helen could not help from feeling bemused, as the natives stared at the excited predators with rounded eyes. Instead of rolling her eyes, Helen led the hyenas to the spot where the other woman dumped the fish's innards, which were promptly consumed by the hyenas. As she saw the animals fight over the scraps, Helen could not help but smile. It was her habit of throwing away the innards that had attracted the first hyena to this spot. Apparently, those scraps of fish were a pleasant treat in a monotonous meat diet after all.
As she turned around, Helen tried to kill her smile – a feat that she did not quite succeed at. The others were staring at her and the hyenas with looks of concern, surprise and amazement – not fear per se. "I am turning in early," Helen said, deciding that a direct approach worked best of all in these circumstances, "and I am rising tomorrow early. You want to stay with me at my place? Then adjust!" And she turned around entered the cave.
Inside, sure enough, she found the furs in the outer caves. Feeling the others watching her, she picked them and took them inside, followed by her guests. (She could not really describe them in any other way – she certainly did take them as prisoners!) Once she and her procession reached the sleeping quarters (which were actually quite wide and spacious, unlike the hang-out of the hyenas), she put the furs some distance away from her own sleeping bag. She turned around, and sure enough, the other humans (the hyenas had their own sleeping arrangements, away from her) were looking at her.
"You'll sleep here for now," Helen said curtly. "If you don't like it, then leave."
She turned around and went to her own sleeping bag.
She did not have good dreams that night, but nothing lasts forever, and so that night slowly sunk back from where it came – the depth of eternity. Outside, the sky was becoming brighter and more definite by the moment, until the sun's first rays burst through the distant trees. Like arrows of gold, they spread throughout the universe, piercing first the very treetops, then the various shrubs, until they reached the grassy plains and the bubbling creek.
In the trees sang various songbirds, praising the beginning of a new warm and bright day. The limestone cliffs shone with whiteness from the bright sun, the forests grew sunlit and inviting, and the dewdrops, hanging like tears on the blades of grass reflected the entire magical beauty of this new morning. The diurnal animals were waking up from the nighttime slumber, and that included humans.
Helen Cutter, upon waking up from the night of an uneasy sleep, was disappointed to see that she hadn't dreamed of having unexpected guests since last afternoon. The still present pile of sleeping furs, occupied by their owners, clearly showed that not unlike the hyenas, the natives did not pack up and leave late in the night.
Helen frowned in thought. It appeared that she was stuck with them, at least until the time anomaly opened, and that would be awhile. How would they – not unlike the hyenas again – would deal with her disappearance, if they were still around? Maybe she was ought to... but here Helen Cutter shook her head and chased away the thoughts that she learned to chase away ever since Stephen had died. That mental train was derailed and would not be going any further.
As Helen got outside, the others followed her suit – apparently, the 'early to bed and early to rise' axiom was true to them to, or maybe they just adapted quickly. Humans were adaptable creatures after all...
And imitative, apparently. As Helen washed her face in the creek, the children did it too, acting rather like monkeys, with their mother (if it was their mother) looking tentatively at them, apparently wondering if she should join as well. Meanwhile, the hyenas had joined them too, and not unlike the real dogs (or wolves, jackals, coyotes and so on), they too eagerly joined on the fun, albeit somewhat more downstream, as Helen had managed to teach them.
The children, meanwhile, once more stared at the cave hyenas with wide eyes. The grown-ups had taught them to fear the nigh hunters, who would sneak silently during the darkness and steal anything that came in their way, including little children. During the daytime, though, the hyenas seemed to have lost of their mystique, and were instead big and massive predators, able to crush the children with just one lucky bite of those solid jaws and sharp teeth.
Yet...these particular animals were in no hurry to inflict those bone-crushing bites upon these children. Possibly, because they felt not threatened, and Helen did not look threatened either, they tolerated the children, who became quickly distracted by a large crayfish that had crawled from underneath its rock in search of some struggling fish or frog. Instinctively, in the manner of all children, one of the kids tried to catch it, but was nipped for all the trouble. The other one laughed, and soon the two of them were struggling on the grass, ignoring everyone else around them.
Helen's lips thinned. She had once thought about children, but...therein lay despair, and madness, and that core of red-hot fury that Helen tapped only occasionally, usually when she was confronted by an especially persistent dimetrodon, or ichthyosaur, or mesonychid, or some other prehistoric animal that could not know any better. These people had not deserved to be treated to psycho Helen – so far. Better to concentrate on something else – maybe breakfast.
Helen was never really a very gluttonous person. Some fish, some meat, occasional fruit or vegetable or energy bar – and she was often set for the day. However, the Cro-Magnons would not probably mind another meal, even after a relatively late (for Helen) supper.
As Helen mused, she suddenly saw that the others were walking towards a certain shrub with particularly big leaves. Helen knew that they probably intended to use these leaves and branches to supplement their bedding. Unfortunately, this shrub was already used by the hyenas for a completely different purpose, and right now, the latter were observing the newcomers with a decisively unfriendly curiosity.
"No!" Helen barked as she grabbed the other woman by her arm and began to lead her away from the shrub. "You two! No!"
As the others were forced to abandon their approach, Helen emitted a snorting sound that she knew that the hyenas recognized as a sound of approval and similar emotions. And indeed, in response the hyenas dropped their unfriendly stances and approached their shrubbery in their own hierarchical order, doing their daily release of waste and other by-products in a rather dog-like style.
An indescribable expression appeared on the other woman's face when she understood just what kind of leaves she would have taken for her bedding. She turned to Helen and said something was a decisively gratitude overtone. Then she nodded to her kids and the two went to a completely different shrub, the one that the hyenas did not use.
With this little crisis averted probably for good, Helen turned back to her original plan of catching them a meal. This plan, however, was interrupted, when she saw ravens flying overhead, and that meant only one thing.
Helen gave the hyenas, which had relieved themselves and were just sunning around a good hard look, which was ignored, as usual. Being neither cats nor dogs, these animals had qualities of both, which occasionally could be quite infuriating. Consequently, Helen stopped giving them the evil eye quickly enough, and instead, getting her knife, followed the ravens, ignoring everyone else.
She was back shortly before noon. Last night the hyenas managed to bring down a chamois, a stupid young creature that got too far away from its mountain home and so was quickly dismembered and partially eaten. However, the hindquarters were still good, and besides, it was not a good idea of having a leftover kill relatively close to your home. Scavengers or other predators could come in, and Helen was not excited in a possible confrontation with a cave lion – she had seen these massive felines attack and kill many different animals, from humans to mammoth calves, and did not expect to experience this sort of an attack on herself. And thus she returned, and split the chamois into two, throwing one half to the hyenas, who eagerly began to fight over the already chewed bones that still had plenty of meat attached to them, and beginning to skin the other half. Suddenly, she felt a presence nearby.
She looked-up – sure enough, it was one of the kids, and apparently, as she looked at him closer, Helen was amazed to realize that the kid was actually a her. "What do you want?" she snapped, before she remembered that none of her roommates understood English. "You want me to come with you? Okay. Just let me finish the skinning-" The girl had left... only to return shortly afterwards with her mother in tow, who looked at Helen and too beckoned into the cave.
Helen sighed and pointed at the meat and the hyenas, which were finishing gnawing the bones and were getting into a frisky mood. The other woman nodded, pointed to a place next to her, and made a series of gestures that suggested that Helen still should go inside to look. After giving her opposite a suspicious look, Helen left for the insides of the cave.
Inside the cave, there was a surprise: the natives had added soft leaves and twigs not only to their own furs, but to Helen's sleeping bag as well. Fortunately, they have not exactly figured it out how the bag works, and so they added leaves and twigs only underneath it. Furthermore, they had begun to store drying grasses, mosses, small twigs and such-like as the fuel for the future fires. Helen just sighed. They clearly intended to stay here and make themselves useful. All that Helen could do was sigh and go back outside, where the other woman was waiting...
...for Helen to finish skinning the chamois hindquarters. Helen smiled and gave her opposite a wry grin. Clearly, whatever the times were, canny women were always canny women...even when they had to deal with just each other.
Therefore, the times went on. The months flowed one after another, their passage marked by Helen on a special stone. The warm and sunny summer was gone all too quickly, and the children, adults and animals stopped spending so much time at the creek. The days were growing shorter and the nights longer.
The bird songs stopped having the jubilant notes of spring and summer, and the insects too chirped less and less during the days. Fog began to appear during sunrise and sunset. It would appear over the creek, and its milky white flakes would scatter around the valley, until they would fill in completely. The leaves in the deciduous forests were turning red and yellow, and falling from the trees. All the signs were telling that summer was gone, and autumn was upon the Ice Age world...
Helen was growing more and more concerned by the day. She knew that her food supplies even for just herself were very scanty and will not last her and her expanded family through the full Ice Age winter. She also knew that the time anomaly would not open by itself until the winter was in the full swing, or maybe even around springtime. She was also quite aware that the natives probably would not make it back to their original camp without her help either and altogether all of those factors added to a picture that Helen began to really dislike.
"Why are you staying?" she once asked the other woman in a cruder version of the native tongue. "Don't you miss your other people?"
"Got my children. Got you," was an equally crude reply.
Helen bit her lip. From what she learned, the Cro-Magnons were as sociable and gregarious as the Neanderthals were, even more so, because a loner could hardly last on their own in an Ice Age environment...unless they had some equipment from the future times, of course. However, Helen did not really share her equipment with the natives, and did not intend to; and there was another side to this matter, the one that really bothered her.
"I'm not your people. I'll leave in time," Helen pressed on.
"Winter soon. Snow and deep snow sooner. You can't leave."
"Maybe I'll leave in spring-" The other woman gave a snort of doubt. "Maybe I will leave sooner. I am not your people. I will leave."
The other woman gave Helen a sceptical eye, as the two of them continued to look around for edible roots, or tasty tubers and fruits. Usually, the Cro-Magnons would smoke or season meat for the long cold nights ahead, but this particular gathering did not accumulate all that big store of meat at all; besides, with a handy supply of fish and crayfish so close by, the lack of meat was not really felt or noticed during the summer. Now, however, things were changing, as Helen knew. The animals were moving away from the plains, either down south, or into the woods, or even up the mountains, where other, coniferous forests grew. Consequently, Helen and her neighbours began to depend more and more on other sorts of food, such as plants, but due to Helen's lack of botanical knowledge, and the other woman's lack of local knowledge, their building of vegetation food supply went on slowly.
"What are they doing?" the other woman suddenly interrupted Helen's musings. Helen followed her gaze and shrugged.
"Teaching the hyenas to play fetch," he said calmly.
"Tell them to stop!"
"You're their mother, you tell them," Helen shot back.
"Can't. They have to become men. I am a woman. You-" and the other stopped, remembering that Helen herself was a woman, thank you very much.
"Exactly," Helen said flatly, as suddenly the situation before them shifted. The leader of Helen's small pack, who had been ignoring the playing of the younger members, suddenly sat up and began to howl, resonating across the mountain valleys. The other hyenas immediately joined in.
"What means?"
"Bad weather is coming," Helen told the other woman. "Maybe early tomorrow, maybe later today. Tell your men that, would you?"
"Later. First, finish harvesting," the other woman gave Helen a look. Helen nodded in reply, hiding her small smirk, and continued to harvest as well.
A sudden growl interrupted this peaceful scene. Slowly, Helen and her companion looked in the direction, and saw a very angry wolverine, a relative of the badger (and thus related to the weasels and ferrets rather than bears, despite the appearances), but even bigger, stronger, and more vicious. Armed with formidable claws and teeth, the wolverine was a professional climber, and if wounded, could go into a berserk rage, until either it or its enemy was dead.
This particular wolverine could easily be around a meter in length (or even more with its bushy tail) and over ten kilograms in weight. It snarled and approached the humans. Unwilling to deal with the carnivore directly, armed with only a basket of various plant matter, Helen whistled sharply, and that brought the attention of the pack.
All true carnivores (and even some of the more demanding omnivores, like black and brown bears) are sharply protective of their territories, and the smallish hyena pack was no different. They had held this stretch of land for over eighteen months now, and not intended to share it with another predator, especially the glutinous and demanding wolverine. Growling, they began to advance upon the other carnivore.
Despite their superior numbers, the wolverine did not budge. Like the other mustelids, weasels, stoats and martens, it was stubborn and reckless and had every intention of taking on the pack. As the hyena leader approached, the wolverine lunged, size-wise a match for any predator of even a slightly bigger size. Yet Helen struck first, by grabbing an appropriately shaped tuber from her basket, and threw it at the intruder.
An ordinary person would have missed by meters, but Helen had plenty of experience of throwing things at fast-moving targets, and the wolverine wasn't that much different in size (or speed) from some of the bigger fish that she had to hunt during the earlier time periods – the tuber hit the wolverine, causing it to miss its intended target, and to land clumsily on the ground. As it shortly turned around to see what had hit it, the hyena closest to it grasped the wolverine by the neck and squeezed. The wolverine squealed, lashing out with its claws, causing the hyena to release it, but another was upon it, and with its bite, it broken the wolverine's skull and neck.
Then the pack pulled back, leaving the humans to witness and possibly applaud their fighting and killing prowess.
Helen turned to the other woman. "Skin it?" she asked calmly.
"Skin it," the other woman nodded, "finish harvest first."
Helen paused and pointed to sky. Formerly clear blue, it was now covered in low-slung, heavy-looking grey clouds. "Finish harvest fast," she said flatly, and pulled the wolverine's corpse close to her and away from the hyenas. The autumn season was upon them at last.
That night, despite the rain, the humans had stayed later than usual during the evening hours, as they worked over the wolverine's hide, of deep black fur with two creamy yellow stripes. "Pillow," the native woman suggested and Helen nodded, as she thought over the cold and rainy days (and later on snowy days instead) ahead of them. She had a spare pair of winter boots aside from her usual pair, but that still left her with the children's footwear as well as the other winter clothing. The other people had no experience of hunting, and that meant that it was up to Helen, as usual, to do something about it...
Meanwhile, the hyenas were back on the plains, hunting. Helen did throw them the skinned corpse of the wolverine, quickly reduced to several scattered bones, but not unlike the fish guts, this was more of an appetizer than a main course. Consequently, they seemed to have found something bigger for their meal, and it sounded as if it was the size of a bison at least...
Helen grimaced. The last thing she needed was to found a wounded or crippled hyena back to health – the bison bulls were beginning to joust each other for males, and if Helen knew anything such jousting herbivores, it was that that they were willing to attack anything head-on – especially upstart herbivores that did not know when to quit...
Time went on. The hyenas continued to hunt on the steppe plains, and the humans too ventured out and about the scrublands. The things were going poorly, and Helen often regretted a lack of a rainy-day umbrella. Normally, she intended to stay inside during such periods of poor weather, making new notes or checking her old ones, but with three other people to feed, she had to go out more often to hunt or fish. Sadly, she was not a very good hunter, especially of the bigger prey animals, and consequently she usually had to hunt every day.
Then there was the other concern – the time anomaly. However, the others could not know it, but it was going to open in their sleeping chamber – the large semi-circular inner cave. Once it would open, she would be gone, leaving the others strangled... and that, possibly, included the hyenas as well.
Of course, there was the other option... but it was madness, madness. It just had to be. Helen Cutter could not be taking them somewhere else to start a family – a new family – of her own, now could she?.. Those thoughts would often keep Helen awake and sleepless during many nights.
The others were not faring so well either. The other woman was busy doing the bulk of the household chores, while the kids usually spent their days collecting various fuels for the fire and drying them out in a separate corner of the cavern complex. The hyenas continued to stay near to them during these days, often catching whatever small game the children would flush by their passing. This was apparently a welcome supplement to their regular hunting, which too was becoming harder and harder, as the prey animals moved away or formed big, well-protected herds of mature adults, armed with hooves, horns or antlers.
Then, one day there was a lucky break, on several levels. Firstly, the sun did break through the clouds, bringing forth some warmth to the chilly autumn air. Secondly, when Helen went out to get fresh water for the morning meal (if it could be called that), instead she found a stag, drinking from the same creek, ignoring the hyenas, who slowly circled around him. The reason for the latter was quite natural, for the stag looked quite emancipated and sickly, a loser, who failed to keep its harem of does, or to acquire it from another stag. At any rate, it was a natural meal for the local predators, namely Helen's hyena neighbours, but Helen had her own plans, and these included literally braining the unlucky animal that was too tired to move away when she approached him, with her fishing spear still held in a non-threatening poise. The animal promptly fell down, and Helen stabbed its throat right through.
The hyenas, who were circling the apathetic animal, were now very attentive, and so Helen whistled loudly for assistance, even as she dragged the carcass up to the cave's entrance, flanked by the carnivorous animals.
The stag was received by cries of excitement, and everyone, human or animal, could barely wait until Helen finished skinning and gutting the beast. The hyenas were satisfied with all the guts and smaller bones that Helen threw their way, even as the children dragged the stag's skin to their mother's working area, and the two women were busily beginning to partition and prepare the meat. Even such a malnourished beast promised the inhabitants of the cavern complex some good eating until the end of the week.
Tomorrow, however, was a different day. It was marked by a light frost that began to nip at the naked skin, promising the coming of the true Ice Age winter. The ground, waterlogged by the rainy autumn, was now as hard as bone, and the tree sparkled with the first of snow. The sky was covered in leaden-grey snow clouds, which soon melded into one giant cloud that covered the sky and hang low over the grounds.
"Winter is all but here, and the time anomaly will follow it soon enough," Helen muttered to the hyenas as she put on her winter shoes. "Still, scurvy is one thing that we do not have to deal with, so I need to collect conifer needles to make medical tea for that happenstance."
Therefore, accompanied by the hyenas, who for some reason thought that yesterday's stag was a sign of new, better times to come, Helen ventured forth.
The conifer copse to which she was walking grew not too far out in the open steppe, an environment distrusted by Helen due to her various previous experiences: though it was already winter, technically, meeting a hormone-driven bull mammoth or aurochs was not high her priority list. Instead, she went to a copse of conifer trees that hugged the mountainside for some protection from wind, and the fate did not think it was any more appropriate to send Helen a completely new challenge – the reddish-brown woolly rhino, coelodonta antiquitatis, the faithful environmental companion of the mammoths.
Helen gulped. Some of her old sources said that unlike the bigger and more south-dwelling elasmotherium, the coelodonta was slightly more than two meters in height. However, perhaps this was a younger or sicklier animal, or perhaps Helen's meddling in the past had affected the rhinos as well, but this creature looked a bit shorter than that, approximately one and a half meter in height, around the height of a tall human. However, at a body length of over three meters, and with two nasal horns, the bigger one longer than the fir tree at Helen's cave site was thick, this shortage of height was not really felt by Helen to be a comfort.
The woolly rhino, meanwhile, was busy pawing the air and sniffing with its nostrils. The wind was blowing in Helen's direction, and that was why the rhinoceros had not tried to charge at her yet. A purely herbivorous beast in its diet, like all rhinos, the woolly had a notoriously bad temper, a powerful charging attack, and a nasty way of trampling its victims under its hoofed feet.
Upon seeing this large beast, Helen reacted quickly, by diving behind a large shrub, hoping that the rhino had not seen her yet (and the woolly had eyesight as poor as its smell was keen), and that the wind will not shift to enable the rhino to smell her. However, she had forgotten about something else – the hyenas. Although quite small and fragile if compared against the coelodonta, the carnivores had no fear of taking it on. Possibly, the deer meat that they ate last night made them overly confident, or maybe with their other cohorts at the side they were used to attacking rhino calves or old and sickly animals. At any rate, they charged straight at the grazing giant, howling and snarling.
The rhino, however, was not impressed. Obviously, it too had confronted hyenas on the steppe, and knew that it was more than three times long and fifty times heavier than the biggest member of these carnivores was, and therefore it had little to fear from them. Therefore, all it had to do was to confront the attackers with its great horn, and in time, the pack would give up and leave, seeking easier prey. However, this pack had an ally hidden in the shrubs.
For her part, Helen could not explain why she decided to help her neighbours. Possibly, it was because she had gotten used to their company, and they had proved to be useful for her life with the Cro-Magnons. Whatever the reason, though, Helen stood up on one knee, aimed carefully (just not carefully enough) and threw the spear.
The spear, incidentally, was more than just a long stick with Helen's knife tied to one end. Instead, it was a carefully cutout and worked-out long straight stick with one end carved in the shape of a tooth of a Carboniferous freshwater shark, long gone from this world. It was shaped like a small trident, and when it hit the rhino beneath its tail and went-in for almost a third of its length, the pain it caused the herbivore, was substantial.
The rhino yowled and stood on its hind legs from the unexpected, sudden and painful attack from the behind. This gave the hyenas the openings they sought. Two of them attacked one of the rhino's hind limbs, tearing the knee joint, while the other two tore at its' belly. Still, the rhino would have fought them off even despite its accumulative wounds, when Helen struck once again, this time throwing her knife. Years of having this blade as her main principal weapon in the prehistoric wilds gave Helen a sufficiently high skill with it, whether piercing, stabbing, slashing or throwing, and this time her aim and hit were careful enough. The blade struck the rhino behind a knee of an already weakened leg, and it gave out altogether: the animal collapsed on its wounded side.
Instantly, the hyenas pounced in, as they grabbed the rhino's throat and head from different angles and ripped and tore at it. Being beyond the current reach of the rhino's still lethal horn or the trampling forelegs, the hyenas could finish the beast their leisure, but Helen, now emitting shrill whistling signals in the direction of the cavern, ran over to the dying herbivore, tore out her spear from the wound, and running over the rhino's fallen body, rammed the spear again – at the place where the skull was connected to the neck. She felt something snap – but it was not the spear; instead, the rhino shuddered one last time and died.
Helen, feeling rather embarrassed or befuddled by this whole event just sat down on the corpse and whistled loudly in the direction of the mountains, hoping that the echo will catch up and bring over her roommates before some other carnivores or even her own hyenas would arrive at the smell of cooling blood.
Helen did not own a watch on hand – these devices did not work in the time anomalies and broke down after the first one or two time shifts. Still, the other woman arrived at the scene quickly enough, obviously expecting anything but a dead rhino in its prime or quite near it: her eyes goggled and the facial expression that she had could be the best described as "Wha-?"
Helen in return gave her a rather sheepish smile, suggesting that whole event had happened so spontaneously, that she honestly had no idea how it had come to this. The hyenas were more excited, jumping up and down at the sight that suggested even to their animal brains that things would now proceed, as they should.
To the other woman's benefit, she got over quickly over her initial shock. "Skin; carve?" she turned to Helen, who nodded, and pointed to the slight sled that she had taken with her to transport some conifer branches and needles back to camp:
"Sled?"
"Lots of trips," the other woman nodded and yowled in the direction of the mountains, a sound that brought her children running over. Thinking quickly, Helen pointed in the direction of the copse in question and told them to bring some fuel – she suspected that they would need firewood before long.
And she was right. Though it was shorter than she had imagined, the rhino was still a lot of flesh to be taken out and transported to the cave. When the night fell – and it was as black as coal, without either moon- or starlight shining, the only thing that kept the children from getting lost were markers, that Helen had the foresight of establishing along her original trail. Fortunately, it also didn't snow, but the hyenas, once they had eaten their fill of rhino meat, showed clear signs of wanting to get back into the sheltered cave, and that served as a motivation to people the double-up their efforts. Working themselves to the bone, they managed to strip the rhino from most of its meat and long, reddish-brown hide, and transport them to the cave (alongside a lot of fir and spruce branches both dried and green, complete with needles to Helen's delight), before the first snowflakes began to fall sometime around the next sunrise.
Then, the leaden-grey sky began to drop snow in earnest, more and more of them, until they hid the utterly quiet cliffs and trees of the neighbourhood.
Then came the wind. It grabbed all the snowflakes it could catch and began to twirl them around in its grasp. Sometimes few of snowflakes would get caught somewhere solid – like in the tree branches or on the ground – but the wind would once more pluck them up and send them dancing in the air.
The wind grew stronger and stronger. It charged around the steppe, burst through the woodlands, and bashed itself against the limestone cliffs. From all sides at once came a whistling and a howling, a roaring and a crying, mixing into one terrible symphony that could be created only by a snowstorm...
The storm went for two days straight and showed no signs of abating. The winds ear-piercingly whistled in the steppe, howled in the woodlands, roared in the cliffs, as if it intended to destroy all life in the neighbourhood. The snowstorm rampaged everywhere, sending its deadly frost in practically every hole in the cliffs.
However, not into one cave. In the autumn, Helen had set aside a particularly big stone that partially sealed away the relatively small entrance into the cave, and had now put it to a good use. Further, inside the cavern complex, away from the entrance, a fire was made to be merrily burning and smoking around the working area of the caverns, where its occupants were busy working the rhino's hide, smoking and otherwise preparing its meat, and boiling conifer tea to keep their strength up. Admittedly, that frantic pace of activity started only some time after the whole group managed to walk to the cavern, partially seal it off with the stone, and fell asleep in one big knot, human and hyena alike. However, once that was over, people in the caverns began to frantically work with their great catch once again, unlike the hyenas, which carefully lay away from the entrance, with their noses pointing to it, and whining softly to each other. To leave the caverns right now would have been suicidal, and yet eventually they had to go their shrub to relieve themselves. Since the smell of the hyena waste in the closed confines of the caverns would have been intolerable, in the end it was Helen, who had the warmest clothing of them all, who walked the hyenas to their usual spot and had them relieve themselves, one after another. It took their combined strength to get back to the cavern, where the rest of its occupants had been nervously waiting for them to return.
Outside and overhead, the frosty storm still rampaged through the air, as even centuries-old trees could not withstand its advance. The howl of the wind was now mixed with the crack of broken branches, or even entire trees, as they fell before the elemental onslaught. The snow too still flew and circulated round in the air, but in some places, it began to accumulate into deep snow piles instead. In the gloomy twilight, the snow created some sort of a whitish murk that erased the line between sky and ground, between light and darkness. It was a real bad time to be outside, a bad time, as the snowstorm seemingly tried to obliterate all life on earth.
The snowstorm died only on the fifth day. The strong wind stopped blowing, and the snow stopped falling as well. The trees stopped groaning, the snow clouds vanished, and the sky began to glow with a bright cold light.
The surviving animals emerged from their caves, cold, hungry and tired. Helen and the others too unrolled the stone from their entrance and looked around at the changed neighbourhood. The bottom of the valley was buried under a powerful layer of snow. All irregularities had vanished, and so had the creek. The valley's very appearance had changed, especially the cliffy slopes of it: all the ravines and steep slopes were buried under piles of snow; only some mountain peaks protruded from them.
And it was cold, burningly cold. It was a good thing that Helen and others had made new clothing for themselves – their summer get-ups would not have protected them for more than a few moments from this biting cold, when even the hyenas in their bushier wintry coats seemed distinctly uncomfortable in venturing into outside; in fact, as far as Helen (or the others could see), the horizon seemed to be devoid of animal life, big or small.
"Well, there's nothing to see, let's get back inside," Helen muttered but was suddenly confronted by the other woman.
"Fuel. Need more of it," she said simply.
Helen blinked and belatedly realized that her interlocutrix might have a point, seeing how they had been using a lot of firewood during the snowstorm days. "Fine. I go. Don't know for how long though."
"Take one of them with you!" the other woman suggested, but Helen shook her head. The hyenas had never been properly trained or even tamed, and from the look on their muzzles, they were in no rush to go out into the snow either. Still, when Helen finally dressed-up and left, the two of the animals followed her, apparently decided to run around and stretch in the snow all the same.
Helen Cutter had never fancied skis, but she had experienced an Ice Age winter before, and after deciding against bringing in a snowmobile to move around during one, she had settled for a nice pair of snowshoes instead. Big and wide, they did a decent job of supporting her over deep snow.
The hyenas did not have any of such inventions on their side, but they did have natural adaptations. Eagerly following Helen's tracks, the two of them and Helen began to cross the stretch of the now-open steppe towards the woodlands. Everything was clear and barren; only far at the horizon another wall of grey snow clouds was on the rise. Helen noticed it, and quickened her pace – being caught in another snowstorm was not something that she intended to do.
However, other than the possible repeat of the snowstorm, everything seemed to be quiet – maybe even too quiet, one could say. All irregularities of the old steppe had vanished; it stretched to the abovementioned horizon like an unbroken smooth surface, white and monotonous, sad and glum. The freezing wind blew unimpeded, undeterred by nothing in its path. Not even a footprint could be seen in regards to the animal life. The steppe was empty and lifeless.
Therefore, it was on their own that the trio of the travellers made it to the woodland. Whereas in the valley the wind had blown and pressurized the snow into one single smooth surface, in the woodlands it created deep snow drifts instead – no skiing terrain here! Instead, piles of loose snow high enough to reach to Helen's waist, if it was not for the snowshoes.
The two hyenas stayed outside that area, and Helen didn't particularly go deep into herself, even as she kept a wary eye on the new wave of clouds: she would've preferred getting caught in the woods instead of the steppe, but would rather get to the cave than stay in the woods. Therefore, when the wind began to grow stronger once more, and the hyenas grew visibly nervous, she looked at the sky: the snowstorm was coming back, and the odd twilight, overcoming the woodland, suggested the same thing.
"Time to leave," Helen said flatly, and turned around, leaving the woodland behind. The two hyenas, which had also grown sufficiently edgy, eagerly began to follow her, when a whine caused them to turn around. It was another member of the species, but smaller and probably younger than Helen's pack. Stuck in the woodland for the last five or six days, it was undoubtedly starving, and only its physical weakness and the fear born from this weakness prevented it from attacking Helen and her companions. However, Helen's hyenas were not afraid of this new starveling, as they bared their teeth and growled in warning.
The newcomer flopped on its back, revealing its unprotected throat and belly, and whined, submitting to them. Meanwhile, the first snowflakes began to fall, and the winter itself prepared for another strike. "We need to go," Helen said curtly to the hyenas. "Move it."
However, the starveling was not done yet. Clearly opting for the quicker death by the others over the unavoidable starvation, it did its best trotting behind the others, obviously intent of making it to their place or dying in the attempt. The older hyenas, for their part, were not sure how to deal with the intruder, who was hardly a threat to them as it was; but their instincts prevented them from turning onto their own kind unless it could not be avoided, and right now, these instincts suggested that it could be.
Suddenly, a rather wicked smirk came onto Helen's lips. Neither of these hyenas was the pack's leader, which was still back in the cave. And the pack leaders tended to react with suspicion and irritation to strangers of their species, especially persistent ones. Perhaps the problem of the new addition will be solved by the hyenas themselves... With those thoughts, Helen trudged on, followed by both her hyenas and the newcomer.
Sadly, this also meant that she had to move slower than when she came here, and a full load of firewood and them walking against the wind meant that they were still a distance to go, when the starveling fell, apparently out of strength. Helen just shrugged, and would have moved on, but the wretched animal propped itself up and emitted a whining howl so full of plain primeval animalistic despair, that something inside of Helen simply broke – and it was probably more than just her patience. She grabbed the smallish animal and put it on top of her load instead. This slowed her pace some more than before, but not as much as the deepening gloom. Helen knew that she was still too far in the open steppe to be out of danger, and so she quickened her pace, ignoring the strain on her arms and body. The hyenas too quickened their pace even more, as the darkness deepened further around them.
Then... a smell of baked meat reached Helen's nostrils. The smell of warmth and food proved to be a great invigorator to both her and the hyenas, including the starveling, who had been lying limply on a pile of conifer wood. With a renewed stride in their steps, Helen went forth and soon enough found herself back at the cave, where several concerned faces and muzzles were looking for her and at her, though when they saw the new addition, these expressions changed.
"What's that?" was the question asked by the children's mother, and it was not in a very nice tone of voice.
"That's for them to settle the matters with," Helen replied calmly, sending the starveling in the direction of the other two hyenas. The pack's leader stepped forth, already growling and the head in a threatening poise. The starveling turned on its back and began to whine as pitifully as it could. This would take awhile, and Helen was hungry. "Got any meat left for me?"
"Yes, come," the other woman nodded, and led Helen to the fireplace, where baked rhino meat was gleaming brown and tasty. The children tarried behind, having already eaten, most likely, and more interested in the hyenas interacting with one another. The runt was still lying on its back, whining statements about how harmless it was, while the hyenas of the pack decided what to do with it – let it stay or turn on it.
As Helen chuckled softly and bit into the meat, thinking that another crisis had passed, it had happened, and the realization made her eyes bulge out – "No!"
"What's wrong?" the other woman said quickly, as she saw Helen's face turn pale. "What's wrong?"
"I...I will need to leave soon," Helen muttered quietly, knowing in her heart that that moment was as unavoidable as time itself and just as merciless. "I... I told you before, didn't I?"
"It's winter. Where can you go? You stay," the other woman said, but somehow she was lacking her usual conviction – probably because Helen had not said it in her usual off-hand manner but with deadly seriousness and an equally deathly pallor on her face.
Helen shrugged the other woman's comment off. "My time is almost up. Soon I will go," she repeated her question, some of her usual colour returning to her cheeks.
The other woman frowned, her grip on English, and Helen's grip on her language confused further by the emotions flying. "Your time is up? You dying?!" she hissed, as she gripped Helen by both shoulders.
"No!" Helen hissed back, grateful that the children were still busy with the hyenas and not staring at the two of them. "But I am not like you and your people, I cannot stay here forever. I need to go to a different place."
"Why not?" the other woman insisted. "We are your people."
"No, you have your own people back from wherever you came from," Helen insisted. "They'll accept you back."
"No! I do not want to go there! I want to be your people! I want you!"
The last words were said too closely and too intently. Helen's eyes widened at the innuendo, and so did the other woman's – and then she blushed.
"Right," Helen said softly, trying to sort with this new development in her life. "You keep quiet for the evening, I be thinking for the evening. Got it?"
The other woman nodded, obviously also deeply shaken by this revelation for her own reasons. Still, this did not keep from looking in surprise at Helen, who walked over to her study area – carefully walled-off whenever Helen was out of the cave – got into it, and carried something out of the area deeper into the caverns, to their sleeping quarters.
And neither did she knew that Helen Cutter was thinking about the deal she had made with a metaphorical temporal devil a long time either before or after meeting her new room-mates.
However, Helen was, and all of her thoughts for the rest of the evening were about it. When she had stepped into her first anomaly when she was about 8 years younger than she was now, she figured out many things and learned many more, and understood well enough that in time she was going to... she was going to have enough. In fact, she probably had enough after she finished seeing the human biological evolution reveal itself through time and gather enough material for several doctorates on top of the one she already had. Then she learned what the human evolutionary future would be, and then she began to miss companionship of her peers for real, and then...
Then everything began to fall apart and things just did not begin to work out the way they supposed to, and even time travelling began to show its less attractive side after a while. More and more Helen began to lean towards the idea of leaving the time travelling (and manipulation) to others and settling down to lead a normal life instead. Then Nick tried to manipulate her back, and Stephen died, and she ended in the early Permian time period with that damned dimetrodon, and...
And now she was here, with a potential something that wasn't quite what she wanted or expected, but also with a potential something that had grown on her and gave her something that her investigations of anthropology just couldn't fill, and Helen Cutter wasn't the kind of a person that would back away from something that she cared about to any extent without a good fight...
Later tonight, when the children (and the hyenas) were sleeping (and she will probably have to fit them somehow in as well), she will be off to confront something, that no one of her enemies, theoretical friends or acquaintances had ever met.
...And so, later on that night, Helen Cutter took her female companion on a meeting with an entity that no Ice Age Cro-Magnon should have expected to meet, and what had come out of this meeting...
...but that is another story.
To be concluded.