Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,90

and he tries to pull her in with him, but she pulls harder, and he finds himself standing on the porch, spear point and molar from a long-dead mammoth in his right hand, a lady of the night at his side, and an advancing horde of primitive men and women coming down the street, prepared to kill him and probably to eat him as well. The absurdity of the situation, coupled with the absolute physical and mental exhaustion he feels right now, prompts him to giggle.

Fanny Alice stares at him for a second, then takes the molar and puts it down on the street. Then, with the cavemen less than one hundred feet away and their spears quite obviously being prepared for more deadly throws, she grabs Samuel’s hand and pulls him until he is standing over top of the tooth. She takes the spear point from him and once again cuts his hand with it, then shakes the resulting blood over top of the tooth; the blood that misses it stains the snow and ice it sits upon.

Samuel hears a strangled cry from the oncoming tribe, and although he never saw his face in his vision, he knows that this must be the shaman, and he also knows that the shaman is aware that what Fanny Alice is doing will have its desired effect. An effect the shaman probably doesn’t want, judging by what little Samuel can see of the look on his face and by the tone of his voice.

The others in the tribe react almost instantaneously, arms up and ready to throw their spears to finish this once and forever, but before they can do so the tooth is suddenly gone and Samuel realizes he can no longer see the cavemen. Instead, the only thing he can see is the large, smelly, hairy rear end of a very large mammoth.

No, scratch that. Several very large mammoths. Lots and lots of very large mammoths.

He jumps backward and would fall if not for tumbling right into the arms of Fanny Alice. The mammoths, every one of them, recognize the smell of the creatures who took away their young one all those millennia ago, and with trumpeting and a cataclysmic stamping of feet launch themselves toward them, bent on retribution. Samuel can’t see them, but he assumes that the entire tribe of cavemen turn and run. By the time the mammoths have disappeared from view, the streets are completely empty.

Samuel looks at Fanny Alice, and he can tell by the look on her face that she feels every bit as bewildered as he does. One, maybe, but an entire herd . . .! A question comes to his lips even as he knows she wonders the same thing: “What do we do now?”

*

Eight Weeks Later

Springtime in the north. Things still green up slower here than they do anywhere civilized, but Samuel wouldn’t have it any other way. The team sent from Edmonton arrived at the same time as the reporter from the Globe, having taken a train from Skagway after discovering that they needed to go through Vancouver. Time was wasted by both parties because of this, but knowledge of geography this far north is not the strong suit of most people who live in more temperate climes.

Of course they were all angry, even furious, when they arrived to discover what had been done to the body of the baby mammoth. The men who had been sent by the museum were especially furious at such a waste, while the reporter had gotten over his initial displeasure when he realized that there was a new and very different story in all this.

But moods changed when Samuel told them all that there was now a herd of woolly mammoths currently living only a few miles out of town, followed for the moment in their circuit by a freshly minted Paleolithic tribe of undetermined origin, some fifty strong. Very quickly more telegrams were sent out, and word came back that scientists and reporters were coming from all over the world, as well as Canadian Government officials who needed to deal with the situation of all these refugees from another time.

As for Samuel, he hopes that, once the caribou come through, the cavemen will abandon their attachment to the mammoths and move on to follow those much more plentiful and easy-to-kill animals. And then there’s their obsession with Samuel: twice now they’ve stalked him through the streets of Dawson, and twice now one of