dropped. So he smiled and shook his head in disagreement. “I’m just fine, Fanny Alice, and you can be assured that there was no magic involved. Only me being overwhelmed by the idea of reaching across millennia and touching flesh that could as easily have been alive only days before.” He walked away from her and from the corpse of the mammoth, stepping gingerly even though the pain had long since faded. “I’ll tell Ed he should get down here and take a picture for the paper. And maybe we should consider getting word out to some scientists somewhere.” Suddenly completely and mind-numbingly exhausted, Samuel raised his hand to bid them all farewell and shuffled back to town and to his cabin, fighting the urge the whole way to look back over his shoulder in case he was being followed.
No, not followed. Stalked.
*
The herd is in a panic, spread out across the open land, any hope of working together defensively gone, that hope scattered to the cold winds as effectively as each member of the herd. He runs, terror crushing his heart and his breathing ragged and punctuated by desperate pleas to his mother, to any of the aunties, but none of them answer.
He risks a turn of his head and sees that the two-legs are still after him, coming up the side of the hill. They raise their sticks, and some are thrown at him. He feels a horrible pain in his side and stumbles and bleats in fear and pain but regains his feet and continues running. But then one of the aunties comes to his rescue and heads off the creatures running hard on his heels. A toss of her head sends several of them flying through the air, and he is free of them, still running, still feeling that agonizing pain in his side but unwilling to stop while fear remains.
The ground gives way, and he first stumbles and then falls and falls some more. Pain returns, but after a few moments that fades away, as does everything else.
Weird dreams plagued Samuel’s night, and he awoke with the pain in his right side renewed. He lay there for a spell, unwilling to jump from his warm cocoon of a bed and dash for the stove to rekindle the fire before having to make an even madder and colder dash to the corner to piss in his bucket. Staring at the ceiling, though, all he could think of was that dead animal and the fact that he was likely the only one in town who knew just how significant and important it was.
Having an interest in things prehistoric, Samuel fancied himself as pretty knowledgeable about fossils and such. But he thought it pretty obvious that you didn’t need to have even a marginal interest to know that a find such as the frozen body of the baby mammoth would be of vital importance to scientists and to newsmen. Pretty obvious often didn’t cut through the fat up here, though, since you could never tell just how capable any one person was at recognizing what was required of them in a social situation.
And so with a strangled cry he threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, the cold floor clawing at him even through his woollen socks, the air working quickly to find its way to his skin through his undergarments. The embers were low, but some dry kindling and a few choice gusts from his lungs got the flames hopping again, and after adding a small log he ran to the corner and did his morning business, desperately happy to tuck things in when he was done and run back to the stove to put on a pot of two-day-old coffee and feel the tenuous curtain of heat reach slowly outward from the fire and find its way to the farthest corners of the cabin.
Once his fingers were warm enough and the jolt of tar-like coffee had re-ignited his brain, he gave the juvenile mammoth more thought. Obvious as it was to him, he knew he couldn’t rely on anyone else from town to do the right thing about the animal. He’d told Ed to go down and get a picture, but wasn’t sure if that would translate itself to an attempt to get the news out to the world at large. If anything, he feared that instead it would result in someone contacting some two-bit circus impresario, and there would go any chance for