Life #101: That time Harry and Tom lived during the last ice age
Ancient Europe, around 12000 BCE
Harry and Tom met during the summer mammoth hunt.
The fact that they now lived during a time when woolly mammoths still existed took them a moment to process once they got their memories back.
Tom's tribe joined up with Harry's tribe on the vast tundra somewhere in the east of ancient Europe. There were rituals to follow when two tribes met up, to ensure that everyone had good intentions and wanted to work for the common good of all people involved.
The elders of both tribes met around a campfire fuelled by dried mammoth manure while they ate freshly cooked trout baked on a flat stone that stood balanced over the flames. They exchanged elaborate greetings, and necklaces made with prized seashells and clay beads tied together on thin strips of leather, as tokens of good will. As everyone else busied themselves setting up their tents made of mammoth ribs and tusks, covered by mammoth skins, the elders talked about the conditions of the weather, the land and the available game.
The elders of Tom's tribe brought news that the mammoths had not arrived in their usual summer grazing grounds and that's why their tribe had looked further afield for an opportunity to hunt the enormous beasts. They all needed to catch at least a few mammoths to be able to survive the harsh winters.
Harry was sixteen springs old and this would be his first mammoth hunt where he was allowed to accompany the hunters. Their people did not count birthdays, as a modern calendar had not yet been invented, but they did count seasons. And every time someone survived a winter they were another spring old. Tom had just seen his eighteenth spring and was now considered a man grown, able to hunt all manner of big game.
And such big game there was out there!
Woolly rhinos and aurochs and Irish elk and tarpans and steppe bison. Even the enormous cave bears were occasionally hunted for their meat and fur, though they didn't taste very good. Their meat was very tough, stringy and gamey, but when there was nothing else to eat Harry was happy enough to use it to fill his hungry stomach. Their fur was fantastic as sleeping mats, to sleep on or under. It would keep you warm on even the coldest nights.
"My kingdom for a camera," Harry whispered in English once their camps were set up and he and Tom had a moment to talk in private away from everyone else. "Mammoths, Tom! Can you believe any of this?"
Tom gave Harry a very fond smile. "It was only a matter of time that we reincarnated this far into the past." Tom's skin and hair were dark, but he had the most amazing sky blue eyes. Harry's skin was dark, too, as were his eyes, but his hair was a chestnut brown that lightened in the summer.
"I suppose," Harry said, still barely able to believe that they were now living in the actual fucking ice age. They had lived primitive lives in ancient times before. Once they were part of a tribe that lived deep in the Amazon rainforest, and once they were part of the Cherokee tribe in North America, both times before the Americas were discovered by Europeans. They'd also lived in ancient Egypt and ancient Rome and ancient China. So they were familiar with primitive lives by now, but living during the actual ice age was still a rather unique experience. "How far back in time do you think we're living?"
"That's hard to say," Tom mumbled with a small frown. "Mammoths and woolly rhinos seem to be getting scarcer, so quite late in the ice age, I think. Probably no earlier than 15000 BCE."
Harry snorted and gave Tom an incredulous look. "We're eating them to extinction, is what you mean." Harry gestured at the camp a small distance away. "Every human alive today hunts and kills what they can, with no regard for conservation."
"It's the only way to survive," Tom said with a patient smile, though he looked a bit sad as well as he continued talking. "Humans need to consume a lot of meat to survive these harsh conditions. But I do believe climate change, the end of the ice age, also plays a significant part in the extinction of most of the megafauna still alive today."
"Yeah," Harry sighed, as he stared off into the distance. The tundra was vast and almost completely flat where they were camped. The skies were a deep blue, with not a cloud to be seen. Harry knew that losing all the megafauna was inevitable, but it was still a rather depressing thought that all the amazing animals still around during their time would soon all be gone forever.
"Just think," Tom said, giving Harry a nudge with his shoulder. He was dressed in clothes made completely from animal skins, as was Harry. Their boots and pants were made from caribou skin, their undershirts from soft deer leather and their coats from woolly rhino skins, which were incredibly warm. So warm in fact that Harry shrugged his off, leaving him in his sleeveless leather shirt. "This is the cleanest air we've ever breathed in, during any life." And as if to demonstrate, Tom inhaled a deep breath, held it in until he couldn't any longer and then blew it out in a big puff.
"There's no pollution," Harry said with a bright smile, understanding what Tom was getting at. The whole world was still absolutely pristine. There was no industry of any kind, no matter how primitive. Heck, agriculture had barely been invented yet in the cradle of civilisation, back in the middle east. There was nothing around that could pollute the air or water or land. "Let's go take a dip. There's a small river nearby."
They took long, sharpened sticks with them, for defence in case they came across some predators. There were all sort of beasts out there that wouldn't mind dining on a nice, juicy human. Cave lions and cave hyenas and cave wolves. And all were significantly bigger than their counterparts that were still alive in modern times. Lots of things hung around caves, apparently, but Harry's tribe and many other tribes didn't spend much time there. Bats lived in caves and carried both bat bugs, the ancestor of the bed bug, and rabies. Neither were things humans had much of a defence against in those days so they preferred to avoid it altogether unless they could find no other shelter in truly bad weather.
The small river was only a ten minute walk away. It meandered through the tundra and wasn't very deep for the most part. But there were a few bends in it, with steep banks, that offered water too deep to stand in. Harry quickly shoved his clothes off and jumped into the deep part with a loud splash. The second he came back up he cried out in shock. "Holy fuck, that's cold!"
Tom laughed at him while he got naked as well and he didn't let Harry's proclamation keep him from jumping in as well. "Cold or not," Tom said with chattering teeth as he held onto the bank beside Harry. "It's amazing to get clean again. We've been walking for weeks now without many chances to bathe."
The people during the ice age weren't necessarily unhygienic and quite liked being clean. There just weren't always many chances to bathe, especially during winter when everything was frozen and whatever water was available was freezing cold and would sooner kill you than get you clean.
"I'm so looking forwards to this life," Harry said with a bright grin, eyes alight with joy. "We're actually living in the fucking ice age, how cool is that?"
"It's bound to be more interesting than our last life," Tom quietly agreed with an amused smile while giving Harry a look full of warmth. Their previous life they'd been born in the Philippines, where they'd started a successful investment business. They'd taken an early retirement and then spent a decade sailing around the world in a luxurious catamaran. So the fact that Tom thought this life would be more interesting than that was saying something.
Harry splashed around a bit in the gently streaming water, ducking his head under a few times to wash his hair. In Harry's tribe they regularly cut their hair with stone knives to keep it manageable and easily untangled. Tom's hair was longer, though, and divided by a few thick braids that were all tied together in the back.
"Your eyes are amazing," Harry whispered as he moved closer to Tom to float beside him so he could stare in his light blue eyes. Then he laughed when Tom's face lit up. "How big is your anthropological boner right now?"
Tom had been an anthropologist once, quite a few lives in the past. "It's quite substantial," Tom said without a hint of shame. "I do believe humans here around this time are right in the middle of transitioning to a more Caucasian appearance. It's endlessly fascinating to see all the natural variations in the people around us."
Harry nodded in understanding. It was interesting to realize that these changes in mankind had happened in small increments within different tribes. In Harry's tribe there were two children with somewhat lighter skin born from parents with dark skin like almost everyone else. Harry and some of his direct family members had straight, brown hair instead of the deep black of others. And in Tom's tribe there were apparently a few people with blue eyes, Tom included, while most others had brown eyes.
A warm flush of lust stirred in Harry's belly as he stared at his soulmate. Hey, he was a teenager who'd just found the love of his many lives, so you could hardly blame him for that. He pushed himself a bit closer and quickly brushed a kiss across Tom's lips.
Tom got the idea at once and wrapped his arm around Harry's waist while he pulled them to a slightly shallower part of the small river, so they could stand up instead of treading water. Once they found their footing, Harry attacked Tom's mouth and soon they were locked together in a hungry kiss. Their hands disappeared beneath the water and closed around their hardening cocks and before long they were thrusting into each other's fists as they moaned in shared pleasure.
They climaxed very close together and gave each other a couple of lazy kisses while they smiled at each other.
Above them on the steep, grassy bank they heard giggling.
Harry looked up and saw his youngest brother and a few of their cousins and friends hanging over the ridge, spying on them. In the distance he saw his grandmother, Sila, standing there, leaning lightly on a wooden spear while she stared at them with raised eyebrows. "Are you making friends, Mala?" his grandmother called with a knowing little smile.
Harry's squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. Apparently, family never changed, even if you lived fifteen thousand years in the past.
"I'm Mala," Harry said in their native tongue while he studiously ignored his kin, including all the giggling children.
"I'm Kotar," Tom replied, looking thoroughly amused.
"Now they introduce themselves," Harry's little brother Mok said and then collapsed into giggles again. It was quite common for future partners to find each other while tribes met up. That was the most important way to avoid inbreeding. Harry and Tom were both male, so inbreeding wasn't a concern for them. But same-sex couples still fulfilled an important position in their tribal society.
"So Borta might have found a successor after all," Harry's grandmother mused while Harry and Tom crawled out of the river and put their fur clothing on again.
Borta was the Wise of Harry's tribe. The Wise were a kind of shaman and healer and councillor all wrapped into one. The Wise were always made up of same-sex couples, either men or women. Borta's partner had died a number of years back from a chest infection during a particularly harsh winter, and Borta was getting on in years as well.
"Yeah, you can tell the elders that Kotar and myself will be the next Wise of the tribe," Harry said with a cheeky grin as he met up with his grandmother. "I like him, so I'm keeping him."
Tom tied the strings of his heavy fur coat together. "Do I not get a say in this?"
"Too late," Harry's grandmother said with a laugh. "Mala's claimed you now. You will stay."
"You kissed," Mok all but shouted. "You now have to stay with Mala."
"Well, I guess I'm well and truly caught." Tom grinned at Harry, and Harry quickly snatched up his hand and held it all the way back to camp. The adults all seemed happy enough to let Harry and Tom indulge in their teenage relationship for the next few days as they got ready to hunt the approaching mammoths.
For the actual hunt the tribes split up again, after discussing tactics extensively. They would drive the beasts to a nearby cliff. The cliff wasn't all that high, no more than twenty feet, but if a heavy animal like a mammoth fell off it, they'd die instantly.
The scouts returned with news of the approaching herd of mammoths and Harry joined his father and his uncles and other adults from his tribe as they lay in wait to scare the herd into a stampede. This wasn't without risk, as mammoths were incredibly strong yet quite quick when they wanted to be. A human could not outrun a mammoth. All they had to defend themselves from the enormous beasts were spears with sharpened stone tips. That wasn't always enough, though, and from time to time one of their number would die as they were trampled by a herd of angry mammoths.
It was worth the risk, though. Without a mammoth kill, they wouldn't all survive the winter.
Seeing the woolly mammoth approach, a small herd of some ten animals, gave Harry butterflies in his stomach. How amazing was it that someone who spent most of his lives living in modern times now got to see these extinct animals with his own eyes? There was very little time to admire them, though, as they were soon up on their feet to start driving the beasts towards the cliffs. Mammoths weren't stupid, though, and the matriarch of the herd realized that following the path the humans laid out for them was a bad idea. She pushed her way through their line and most of the herd followed her. But three animals got split off. Two females and a younger male, all with dark red fur that danced through the air as the beasts stampeded towards the cliffs.
Harry and his kin chased them, spears held high. Tom's tribe met up with them from the other side, making sure the beasts couldn't go around the cliff.
It was soon all over as the three animals fell to their deaths with terrified cries.
While everyone else hurried towards the carcasses at the bottom of the cliff, Harry remained standing at the top, staring down at the dead animals while an uncomfortable stone settled in the pit of his stomach.
"We'll eat well this winter," Tom whispered as he stepped up beside Harry. "Come, let's join our kin in breaking down the beasts."
"Yeah," Harry sighed and then followed Tom down the hill.
Three mammoths meant plenty of meat and bones for both tribes to use. The skins were divided as well, as were the tusks. That night, and every night for almost a week, they all slept outside as their tents were used to preserve the thinly sliced strips of mammoth meat.
Poles were placed horizontally inside the tents, as many as would fit. They hung the strips of meat around them and then started a fire with wood they'd carefully transported across many miles, as there were very few trees on the tundra. A large stone was used to cap the fire, so lots of smoke would dry and preserve the meat. This way they could store it all the way through winter. Everyone in the tribe helped with the work, young and old, because they only had a small window of time to get all the meat preserved before it spoiled in the summer son.
Once the work was done, a week later, their tribes celebrated together with a large fire at the centre of their camp. People clapped their hands and sang songs and danced around the fire. Some even played small flutes carved from bones.
Tom wrinkled his nose as he heard that particular music. "That sounds worse than bagpipes."
"We're witnessing the birth of human culture in front of us," Harry whispered back, unable to hold back a grin. "And you're complaining about the sound? Some anthropologist you are."
Tom stuck his nose in the air and sniffed, but then he quickly smiled as someone handed him a few pieces of cracked open mammoth bones, the marrow cooked perfectly inside of it. Tom scooped some of it up with his fingers and ate it eagerly. As he offered the bone to Harry he said, "Could do with some salt but it's filling and nutritious."
Harry also ate some of the marrow. It was one of the smoother meals they had available to them. "At least it's something we don't have to chew for hours on end."
"Have you noticed how much more pronounced everyone's jaws are?" Tom whispered, apparently eager enough to slip into anthropologist mode once the subject was food instead of music.
"Yeah, because almost everything requires really vigorous chewing. I've never had such strong jaw muscles in any of our lives before." Harry frowned as leaned a bit closer to Tom. "I swear, sometimes what comes out of my arse looks more like horse manure than the regular shit I'm used to."
"That's all the fibre, darling," Tom said while looking thoroughly amused. "I doubt colon cancer is a problem for mankind in this day and age."
Harry's inner dentist had something to say about the situation as well. "Yeah, and while our teeth are quite healthy because we rarely eat any sugar, they still wear down quite quickly because of all that roughage in our diets."
Dental issues like tooth loss and infections were a common cause of death, as had been the case for mankind during every age before modern dentistry was invented.
Borta the Wise sat down beside Harry on the ground and gave him and Tom a considering look. "You two have grown close, haven't you?"
"Yeah," Harry said while giving Borta a reassuring smile. "We'll be happy to learn from you to become the next Wise, right, Kotar?"
Tom nodded in agreement. "I have decided to stay with your tribe, be with Mala."
Borta's entire face lit up in joy. "I am so very pleased to hear that. As soon as we travel, I shall begin to teach you."
Tom's tribe had two fairly young Wise, a couple of women no older than thirty. So it made sense for Tom to join Harry's tribe, even though Tom's family obviously mourned his decision. There was no knowing when their tribes might meet up again, since they were nomadic and they followed the game where it went. They might meet up next summer again, or they might not see each other for a decade. And a lot could change in a decade.
Tom embraced his parents and grandfather and his siblings for a long time when their tribes went their separate ways again. One of Harry's female cousins had decided to stay with Tom's tribe since she'd developed feelings for one of Tom's cousins. She, too, got an elaborate goodbye.
They got moving again, always searching for more food. They gathered lots of seeds from all types of plants, though a majority were grasses. These were the plants that would one day be domesticated and become wheat and barley and oats. Their seeds now were small and tough but nutritious. They were ground on a flat stone and then water was added to make something called gruel. This was left to thicken and then baked on a large stone that balanced over the fire to make a very primitive sort of coarse flatbread. It was bland, because it lacked salt, and it took a lot of chewing, but the flavour wasn't half bad.
Sometimes they dug up roots and tubers that they mixed in with the gruel, which gave the bread a different texture, though it made it no less chewy.
Since Tom and Harry were to become the new Wise, they were given the opportunity to start constructing a tent of their own. They were given the pick of the ribs and tusks that had been collected from the recent mammoth kill and they were given the hides to work and tan. The tanning was done with nothing but tree bark, which was rich in tannins. They spent weeks scraping the hides, removing any flesh and fat, with Harry's whole family helping out to get the job done. Then they reached a forest at the foot of a small mountain range. They used their stone axes to strip as much bark from oak trees as they could. They soaked both bark and hides in a nearby lake and rolled both up together to let the tannins do their job in turning the hide into leather.
The hides dried and cured as stiff as a board, so afterwards they had to resoak all of them and then work and scrape and twist them endlessly to make sure they became soft and pliable to use to cover their new tent.
But, after a few months, just in time for fall, Harry and Tom had their own, small tent. They tied the whole thing together on top of long poles that they pulled along as they moved across the wild.
"I can't believe how much effort that took," Harry whispered to Tom the first night they slept together in their new tent. "I don't think we ever realized how spoiled we were whenever we could pop over to the department store and buy a tent for fifty quid."
"Agriculture changes everything," Tom whispered back as he turned on his side to look at Harry in the darkness. "Before agriculture people spent all of their time just securing the most basic necessities for survival."
"Food, water, shelter," Harry summed up. "That's all we have time for now."
Tom made a soft noise of agreement. "Yeah. Once people learn to grow food and domesticate livestock they'll finally have time to use their minds to invent things that will make all of our lives easier."
"The wheel," Harry said with a chuckle.
Tom remained quiet for so long that Harry thought he'd fallen asleep, but then he said, "I think I'm going to come up with a few inventions that will help the people in this time."
"Tom," Harry said with a hint of a warning in his voice. "You cannot go and invent the printing press or the steam engine or something like that."
"Nothing advanced like that. Just wait and see," Tom said in a reassuring tone which did nothing to put Harry's mind at ease. He knew his soulmate was far too ambitious for his own good. But surprisingly, Tom didn't immediately go out to change the world. For a while, nothing out of the ordinary happened as they kept moving around the wilds of the ancient world.
Along the way they hunted what they could, keeping the smoked mammoth meat for the upcoming winter. They encountered more than one herd of aurochs, but they left them alone. No one in their right mind hunted aurochs with nothing but stone-tipped spears unless they were truly desperate for food. Aurochs were the ancestors of modern cattle. They stood seven feet at the shoulder, had long, sharp, forward pointing horns and they were perpetually pissed off. Aurochs regularly fought off cave lions, the biggest cats that had ever lived, so a few humans on foot with a pointy stick stood little chance.
While they camped near the lake they did hunt some Irish elk. They were neither Irish nor a real elk, but they were the largest species of deer that had ever lived. They were closely related to the red deer that were still around in modern times and they had the biggest antlers of any deer species, twice as large as those of the average moose.
They were very hard to catch in a chase, but you could trap them. Harry's whole tribe helped to dig a large hole near the lake where lots of wildlife came to drink. They used stone axes and large pieces of antler for it and after a few days they had a hole big enough to trap an Irish Elk in. They covered it up with branches and leaves and then they waited.
It took almost a week, but then they caught two. A female with her six month old fawn had both fallen in. Their alarmed cries drew the attention of a bunch of cave hyenas. They looked like their African spotted cousins, except that they were bigger. Honestly, everything was apparently bigger in the ice age. The hunters were able to drive them away from the pit with their spears, but that night they heard them move around the trees around their camp. They kept many fires lit to ward off the beasts. The deer meat was smoked the next day and would keep their tribe fed for weeks and weeks. The bones were used for tools and art. Carving bones with their stone knives was a fun way to spend what little free time they had during the evening.
While life was hard and people were kept busy from dawn until dusk, there was also time for more pleasant things. They bathed in streams and lakes, and Harry and Tom enjoyed spending time together during those sparse moments. They sang songs in the evening while they sewed hides together for clothing in the firelight. The adults loved sharing stories about previous hunts and about the animals and land around them.
The children had plenty of games to play in between the work they did around the camp. They made beads from clay they found in the river bank and let them dry in the sun before using them in similar games that modern children would play with marbles. Some of the more talented adults carved animal and people figures out of wood for the children to play with. There were also plenty of games of chase and hide-and-seek being played around the camp on any given day.
And as fall arrived, the children also loved collecting acorns and turning them into little puppets by giving them arms and legs of tiny sticks and hair and clothes made from bits of loose fur they found stuck in bramblebushes.
Borta took Harry and Tom into the forest often to teach them about which mushrooms could be eaten. Harry and Tom were expert mushroom hunters already, but they humoured Borta and listened to any wisdom he shared with them. On some level, people like Borta were incredibly limited in their knowledge of the world around them. But on another level, Borta was an absolute genius. They came across a riverbed full of rocks. It took Borta only a casual glance at each stone to know which one was suitable for turning into stone tools and weapons, which ones could be used to strike together to create a spark to light a fire with, and which ones were only good for chucking at birds in a tree to hopefully knock them out and catch them.
It took Harry and Tom quite a long time to learn that particular skill, but they did learn eventually.
They moved south for the winter, sticking close to the mountain ranges and their forests that offered some protection from the wind and was full of wood to use for fires. The tundra got bitterly cold in the winter and there was no dried mammoth manure to be found beneath the snow to burn in a fire.
They came across a large herd of caribou and the tribe was able to take down a number of them by driving them into a bottleneck of waiting hunters with their spears.
"I'm quite sure these are the Carpathian mountains," Tom said as they wandered through a forest just as the first snow began to fall. Tom was collecting all sorts of sticks and branches but for what, Harry had no idea.
"Could be," Harry said as he glanced up at the mountains, their tops hidden by the low clouds heavy with snow. A huffing noise behind them drew Harry's attention and he turned around to see an enormous bear staring at them from twenty feet away.
It was a cave bear, at least twice the size of the brown bear that lived in Europe in modern times. And it was rather thin, much thinner than it ought to be right before going into hibernation for the winter. The bear huffed and sniffed the air and right as Harry said, "Fuck," in perfect English, the bear charged.
It was scarily fast for its size and it was upon Harry before Tom had even turned around to see what was going on. Harry had only barely been able to set the foot of his speer solidly in the ground with the stone point aimed at the charging bear when the bear slammed into it with all its weight. It released a gurgling sound while swiping at Harry's leg with a huge paw. Harry's leather clothing protected him from the long claws, but the force of it still knocked him on his arse.
Then Tom was there and drove his spear into the bear between its ribs. The bear managed one last wheezy breath before it crashed to the ground, both Harry and Tom's spears sticking out of it.
"Well, looks like we got ourselves a really comfortable blanket for the winter," Harry said, his whole body trembling with shock as he tried to push himself to his feet but failing miserably.
"Are you okay?" Tom asked, yanking on Harry's arm to help him up. Harry managed to stay upright on his shaking legs while he gave Tom a tremulous smile.
"Never better. Babe, we killed a cave bear. With pointy sticks." Harry looked from the bear to Tom and back with wide eyes.
"A very old bear," Tom said, though he looked plenty proud of them both once the shock wore off. The bear was indeed old, its teeth worn down, which explained why it had tried to attack them. Like most modern bears, cave bears preferred not to bother people, but to eat mostly plant matter with the occasional spawning salmon or deer fawn to supplement their diet. This bear hadn't been able to put on enough weight to survive the winter and thus had been desperate enough for an attack.
Unfortunately, they couldn't let the bear meat go to waste, much to Harry's chagrin. He really did not like the taste of it. But they did get a nice, very warm blanket out of it once they got the hide tanned. And Tom made them both necklaces with the bear's teeth and claws as something to remember their awesome kill by. And they now had a really good story to tell around the campfire, much to their tribe's pleasure.
That winter, while holed up in their tent around a cosy fire, Tom made a few rudimentary hand bows and arrows. Now Harry understood why Tom had been collecting any feather he found along their travels. He fletched the wooden arrows as best as he could and then he tried out the weapon in the snow and came home with a few partridges and ptarmigans. The bows weren't powerful enough to use for hunting big game, but they were perfect for taking down birds and things like rabbits and hares from a fair distance.
Tom made Harry his own bow and together they practiced and practiced and became quite good at bringing home small game that helped to see them through the winter. The members of their tribe were very curious about this new invention and a few of Harry's kin were eager to try using a bow for themselves. Tom built more of them as quickly as he could get the materials and most people enjoyed the challenge of learning how to use them. Harry's little brother Mok quickly became rather good at shooting pigeons straight from the sky as they flew up to get themselves to safety.
Since the fall a particular pack of wolves had started following them, eager to eat whatever animal remains the tribe left behind from their hunts.
"They're primitive dogs," Harry insisted as he and Tom spotted them lurking nearby once again while they were out to shoot more birds.
"They're still wolves, darling," Tom said while rolling his eyes.
"This is how wolves were domesticated and became dogs," Harry said, ignoring Tom's negativity. "And thus this particular pack of animals has now become primitive dogs because they choose to follow us around instead of acting like true wolves and go out and hunt for themselves."
"Whatever you say," Tom said with a bit of a resigned sigh.
Throughout the winter the pack of wolves proved most useful in alerting anyone in the vicinity when other predators approached. One night they raised hell not that far away from the camp, with a whole range of growls and barks that echoed between the trees. The next morning they found the huge tracks of cave lions in the snow that had apparently been making their way towards their camp but had been cut off by the wolf pack and driven away.
"Just like dogs guarding their owners," Harry said with a deeply satisfied smile while he gave Tom a pointed look.
"Or just like any predator protecting their food source against other predators," Tom countered at once, the pessimist.
No matter the reason the wolves had driven the cave lions off, Harry started actively trying to make friends with the wolves. He carried bits of meat around and any offal of freshly hunted game they didn't eat themselves and offered it to those wolves who were brave enough to approach him.
There was one female, barely a year old by the looks of it, who seemed willing to trust Harry enough to approach him. She always kept a few feet of distance, never got close enough to touch, but she looked at Harry with intelligent eyes and patiently waited for whatever treat Harry brought along that day.
Harry called her Piltara, which meant white flower, since she had a very light coat.
Whenever Harry entered the woods to hunt, Piltara was never far behind and watched his back, letting him know at once if man or beast approached with nervous yips and barks.
At the end of winter, when they were deeper in the woods than usual with Borta to learn more about tracking game, Piltara sounded the alarm from a few yards away.
A huge woolly rhino came charging through the trees, barely looking where it was going since they had very poor eyesight. Harry, Tom and Borta were stuck in deep snow and couldn't move away quickly enough. Harry dove to the side as Tom did the same but Borta stood no chance and was hit head on by the enormous beast.
The rhino trampled right over Borta and it soon became clear why it was in such a panic. Three huge cave lions were chasing it down. Thankfully, the lions were so focused on their prey that they paid no attention to the puny humans buried in the snow along their paths.
Once the danger had passed and the quiet returned, Harry and Tom dug themselves out of the snow and went in search of Borta. They found him face down in the snow, his skull shattered and a huge amount of blood colouring the snow red.
"Oh no," Harry said, feeling for a pulse in his neck but already knowing Borta was dead. No one could survive such a wound.
"The rhino must have stepped right on top of his head," Tom said quietly as he examined Borta's body.
They made a makeshift stretcher with some saplings they cut down and they managed to haul Borta's body back to their camp.
People fell to the snow, overcome with grief, when they saw that Borta was dead. Borta the Wise had been a beloved member of their tribe who worked tirelessly for the betterment of their people.
That evening one of the elders approached Tom and Harry. "You have only spent a short time learning from Borta, but it is important that you now become the Wise. And for that, you must be made whole."
That was their tribe's term for what was essentially marriage. Usually people didn't get made whole quite as young as Harry was, who would see his seventeenth spring in a few months, but the elders were willing to make an exception for their Wise.
They were made whole on the night of the next full moon. Harry and Tom stood opposite each other under the moonlight while the elder gave them two tiny statues carved from bone that resembled them in a very basic way. Harry and Tom wrapped the statues up in a piece of fur and buried them deep into the snow, symbolizing that they would be together from that point on.
Afterwards there was some singing and dancing around a big fire, but since it was winter people did not stay outside for too long.
From that moment on, Harry and Tom officially became the Wise for their tribe. Although Borta hadn't been able to teach them all he wanted, Harry and Tom both had a wealth of knowledge and were more than qualified for the role.
"Where did it all go wrong?" Harry asked as they lay curled up together under their bear fur blanket that night. "Same-sex couples are appreciated and accepted in this culture. Because they cannot have children of their own, they are made to be the parents of the whole tribe, more or less."
Tom hummed thoughtfully. "Somewhere along the line some asshole decided that his imaginary god didn't appreciate the gays and all their butt sex."
Snorting with laughter, Harry buried his face against Tom's chest. That remark was particularly funny because there was no butt sex to be had for them at that time. No lube meant no anal penetration and they had yet to find a good substance that could function as lube.
Tom chuckled along with Harry. "But all joking aside, I think it was a reaction to primitive religions, who were accepting of same-sex relationships. They wanted their own religion to dominate the world and in order for it to do so they decided to disagree with most of what the primitive societies and their religions stood for."
"Imagine how nice the world might have turned out if they hadn't done that. If same-sex couples had been accepted all throughout history," Harry mused, a pang of regret rushing through his chest.
"I know," Tom said and pressed a kiss to Harry's head. "I know, darling. Let's just enjoy the opportunities we're getting in this life."
In the spring, as they were getting ready to move back to the tundra to eventually hunt more mammoths, tragedy struck again.
Harry and Tom were talking to some of the elders about which routes to take to their summer hunting grounds when a few children came screaming into the camp.
"A fox bit Sila," one of children cried as she rushed up to them. "A fox came out of nowhere and bit Sila really bad. Your wolf came, Mala, and killed the fox."
A wave of cold dread washed over Harry. Sila was Harry's beloved grandmother who often accompanied the children as they left the camp, to keep an eye on them. And a fox out in broad daylight attacking a human out of nowhere could only mean one thing.
"The Biting," one of the elders said with a worried look.
"Yes," Harry agreed in a emotionless voice. His grandmother had just been given a death sentence. And so had Piltara, most likely.
The Biting sickness, or simply The Biting was what their people called rabies. And rabies was lethal all of the time for those who didn't immediately got the vaccine after exposure. Once symptoms showed up you died a horrible death. Only a handful of people in modern times had ever survived once it became symptomatic, and then only with very specialized health care while suffering life-long disabilities from the virus.
None of those things were available during the ice age. Harry's grandmother was going to die a horrible death.
They found Sila sitting in the melting snow, hands covered in blood because of several deep gashes that the fox had left behind. Mok was with her but he stayed a careful distance away from her. Everyone knew about the Biting and how it spread.
"I did not touch her," Mok said at once when Harry and Tom arrived.
Harry nodded at him and then crouched down in front of his grandmother. "I am so sorry."
"As am I," his grandmother whispered as she held up her bleeding hands. "It came out of nowhere, that foul beast. It bit me from behind in my leg and when I turned around it jumped up and bit my hands." His grandmother got a sudden determined look on her face. "Better it bite me than one of the children."
"What do you want to do?" Harry asked, his voice thick with grief and his eyes shimmering.
"I would go into the woods by myself and seek my own end, but I know that is not possible," his grandmother said with clear regret. It wasn't uncommon for the older people to leave the tribe in times of hunger and famine, to give the younger generations a better chance of survival. But that wasn't an option when one was exposed to the Biting. If predators ate an infected human they would become infected themselves and continue the cycle. And no one wanted to come across a rabid cave lion or cave hyena. Harry shuddered at the thought.
"I shall no longer take food or water," his grandmother said with quiet determination in her eyes. "Keep me company, Mala, but let me die quickly. Then burn me."
"It shall be done," Tom said when Harry was suddenly unable to speak. Tom put an urgent hand on Harry's shoulder to help him up. He guided Harry a few yards away, where the dead fox lay in the slushy snow. In the treeline not far away stood Piltara, watching them closely. Her left leg was bleeding from a large gash.
"Oh no," Harry said, tears falling across his cheeks. This was more grief than he knew what to do with. "Not her, too."
"I will take care of it. I'll make it quick." Without waiting for a reply, Tom turned towards Mok. "Give me your bow and strongest arrow."
Harry whispered a quiet goodbye to Piltara and thanked her for protecting his tribe. Then he turned his back to her because he couldn't watch what Tom was about to do. Only a few breaths later Harry heard the swish of an arrow being released and the startled yelp before a body hit the ground.
"It's done," Tom said as he stepped up to Harry. "I'm so sorry. I'll burn the animals. You look after your grandmother."
Word had spread and more members of the tribe came rushing over. Harry had to hold his mother back as she desperately wanted to embrace her own mother.
"I will stay here," Harry's grandmother told anyone who suggested moving her. "I will die here. Keep me company if it pleases you, but this is where I meet my end."
People brought her food and water, which she ignored, and furs and blankets, which she refused.
"That is one strong woman," Tom whispered to Harry on the second day. Harry could hear the admiration in his voice. To passively commit suicide like that to save your family from infection took an enormous amount of strength.
It took Harry's grandmother four days to die, the last one of which she was no longer conscious. Harry and his family never left her side, staying with her until the end and telling her how much they loved her and how much they were going to miss her.
They built the pyre around her body that still leaned against a tree, no wanting to risk moving her and spreading her infectious blood. They lit it and sang songs of mourning as they watched their matriarch burn.
"I'm loving this life, loving how interesting it is to live such a primitive life," Harry whispered to Tom that night in their tent. "But then something like this happens and I'm reminded that life is ultimately brutal, especially without modern medicine."
"Yep," Tom mumbled in agreement. "And imagine how many people reject vaccines in modern times because they believe them to be unsafe. They have obviously never had to deal with rabies or smallpox or polio or any of the other countless infectious diseases that have killed millions over the years, and which vaccines protect against."
"Preaching to the choir," Harry said, a small smile tugging on his lips, no matter that he was still all sorts of heartbroken over their recent loss. One only needed to have lived one life in a time before modern medicine to understand how much of a fucking miracle cure vaccines truly were.
"I know," Tom said, pressing an apologetic kiss to Harry's temple. "It just pisses me off, how people can so carelessly discount the advances in modern medicine because of something unsubstantiated they read of Facebook." Tom inhaled a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself down. "No matter. We're living this life now, and we will make the best of it, like we always do."
"Yep." Harry cuddled closer to Tom while closing his eyes. As they had learned by then, every single life had its ups and downs, some more serious than others. As it turned out, though, life got infinitely more interesting when there were woolly mammoths and cave bears involved.