Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,78

the blood in his temples, he hears the footsteps of the two cavemen going past and strains to listen as they fade into the distance.

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

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

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

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

Twenty-Two Days Earlier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The creature was still young, that much was apparent. Not just the fact that it was only about five feet tall at the shoulder, but also that there was something ineffably youthful about its appearance, like how a puppy could easily be distinguished