Scan McMullen

Walk to the Full Moon

MEAT WAS BOUGHT AT A high price by the Middle Pleistocene hominids of the Iberian Peninsula. Large prey meant more meat, yet large prey was very dangerous. The pressure to hunt was unrelenting, for the hominids were almost entirely carnivorous, but the people lived well because their technology was the most advanced in the world.

It is unusual for a linguist to be called for in a murder investigation, especially an undergraduate linguist. Had my Uncle Arturo not been in charge, and had I not been staying at his house at the time, I would not have become involved at all. He told me little as he escorted me into the Puerto Real clinic and took me to a meeting room.

On a monitor screen was a girl in a walled garden. Crouching in a comer, she had a fearful, hunted look about her. I could see that she wore a blanket, that her skin was olive-brown, and that her features were bold and heavy, but not unattractive. Somehow, it took a while for me to notice the most remarkable thing about her: she had no forehead!

"Who -- I mean what is she?" I exclaimed.

"That's what a lot of people want to know," replied my uncle. "I think she is a feral girl with a deformed head. She was found this morning, on a farm a few kilometers north of here."

"Has she said anything?" I asked, then added, "Can she talk?"

"Carlos, why do you think I called you? This is a clinic where the staff are quite good at dealing with tourists who don't speak Spanish, but this girl's language stopped them cold."

"So she does speak?"

"She seems to use words, that is why you are here. Before you ask, she is locked in the walled garden at the center of the clinic because she can't stand being indoors. We need to communicate with her, but we also need discretion. Someone senior in the government is involved. DNA tests are being done."

I was about to commence my third year at university, studying linguistics. Being continually short of money, I would drive my wreck of a motor scooter down to Cádiz every summer, stay with my uncle, rent a board and go windsurfing. By now I owed Uncle Arturo for three such holidays, and this was the first favor he had asked in return. My mind worked quickly: love child of government minister, hit on the head, abandoned in the mountains, DNA tests being done to establish the parents' identities.

"There are better linguists than I," I said.

"But I know I can trust you. For now we need total discretion."

I shrugged. "Okay, what do I do?"

"She must be hungry. When a blackbird landed in the garden she caught it and ate it. Raw."

I swallowed. She sounded dangerous.

"Maybe you could help her build a fire, roast a joint of meat," my uncle suggested.

"Me?" I exclaimed. "Cook a roast? I've never even boiled an egg."

"Well then, time to learn." He laughed, without much mirth.

It turned out that I had three advantages over the clinic's staff and my uncle's police: long hair, a beard, and a calf-length coat. It made me look somehow reassuring to the girl, but days passed before I realized why.

I entered the garden with a bundle of wood and a leg of lamb. The girl's eyes followed me warily. I stopped five meters from her and sat down. I put a hand on my chest and said, "Carlos." She did not reply. I shrugged, then began to pile twigs together in front of me. The girl watched. I reached into a pocket, took out a cigarette lighter, and flicked it alight. The girl gasped and shrank back against the wall. To her it probably looked as if the flame was coming out of my fist. Calmly, I lit the twigs, slipped the lighter back into my pocket, and piled larger sticks onto the fire.

My original plan had been to roast the meat, then gain the girl's trust by offering her some. I placed the leg in the flames -- but almost immediately she scampered forward and snatched it out.

"Butt!" she snapped, leaving no doubt that the word meant something like fool.

I shrugged and sat back, then touched my chest again and said, "Carlos."

This time she returned the gesture and said, "Els."

Els stoked the fire until a bed of coals was established. Only now did she put the joint between two stones, just above the coals. Fat began to trickle down and feed the flames. We shared a meal of roast lamb around sunset and I collected about two dozen words on the dictaphone in my pocket, mostly about fire, meat, and sticks. Els began to look uneasy again. I had made a fire, I had provided meat, and it was fairly obvious what she expected next.

I stood up, said, "Carlos," then gestured to the gate and walked away. The perplexity on Els's face was almost comical as I watched the video replay a few minutes later.

"What have you learned so far?" asked my uncle as the debriefing began.

Two other people were present; they had been introduced as Dr. Tormes and Marella. The woman was in her thirties and quite pretty, while Tormes was about ten years older.

"Firstly, Els trusts me a little," I pointed out.

"I thought she was supposed to accept you as another prisoner," said my uncle.

"She doesn't understand the idea of being a prisoner," I replied. "She calls me Carr. Loss is her word for fire. For her Carlos seems to be Carr who makes fire."

"So, you made a fire after introducing yourself as a firemaker," said Tormes.

"Yes. All her words are single syllable, and she has not spoken a sentence more than five words long. Intonation and context seem important in her language, though."

"You say language," said Uncle Arturo. "Is it a genuine language?"

"It depends what you mean by genuine. Any linguist could invent a primitive language, but Els has a fluency that would only come with years of use. Do we know anything about her?"

My uncle glanced to Tormes and Marella.

"Els is just a feral girl with a severely deformed skull," said Tormes. "Perhaps she was abandoned in the mountains while very young, and animals reared her."

"Animals could never have taught her such a language," I replied. "Animals don't have fire, either."

They glanced uncomfortably at each other, but volunteered no more information.

We let Els spend the night by herself, then at dawn the three orderlies were sent in to seize her. Moments later I entered the garden, loaded with more firewood and meat, and armed with a sharpened curtain rod. I made a show of driving off the orderlies after an extended bout of shouting, and fortunately Els did not seem to have any concept of acting. I was treated like a genuine hero as we settled down to another day together. While we talked Els began to make stone knives and scrapers out of the garden's ornamental rocks. She even charred the end of my curtain rod in the fire and scraped it into a lethal-looking, fire-hardened point. Again I left her at sunset and went through a long debriefing with my uncle, Marella, and Tormes.

"If Els was raised by wild sheep or rabbits, how did she learn to make stone tools and fire-hardened spear points?" I asked with undisguised sarcasm.

"We are as puzzled as you," replied Tormes calmly.

On the morning of the third day I returned with a newly slaughtered sheep. Els skinned and butchered it with great skill, using her newly made stone knives and scrapers. It was only now that Els actually approached me. Coming around to my side of the fire, she rubbed mutton fat through my hair, then pinned it back with blackbird feathers. By now I had learned to say "Di," which seemed to cover both thanks and sorry. Over the next half hour, she made me understand that although I was skinny, she thought I was very brave to go hunting at night.

AT THE DEBRIEFING on the fifth day I had an audience of a dozen people, two of whom I recognized from the Department of Anthropology in the university in Madrid. It took only a minute to walk the tens of thousands of years from the garden to the committee room.

"I now have over a hundred words," I reported. "I can communicate with Els fairly well, and she has answered a few questions. She talks about a tribe. They call themselves the Rhuun, and they have always lived here."

"What?" exclaimed Tormes. "Impossible."

"I'm only telling you what Els said. They have a detailed calendar, and a counting system based on the number twenty."

"Ten fingers and ten toes," said Marella.

"Did she do your hair?" asked one of the new observers.

"Yes. Grooming seems to be a bonding ritual for the Rhuun, and possibly a precursor to sexual activity as well," I explained.

"So she made a pass at you," laughed my uncle. Nobody else laughed.

"She has been removed from her tribe for the first time in her life," I added.

"Then you are her new provider," said Tormes. "She may be feeling insecure because you are not mating with her."

This time a few snickers rippled around the table.

"Look, this was not in the job description," I said to my uncle, scowling.

"Besides, she might be disappointed," he replied, and this time everyone really did laugh.

"From now on you will return to her after a couple of hours each night, and pretend you were lucky with your hunting," Tormes hurriedly advised, seeing the expression on my face. "Just having you nearby at night should gain her trust."

"But seriously, stay on your own side of the fire," advised my uncle. "Technically she's a ward of the state, and probably a minor."

When the meeting broke up Marella and Tormes invited me to join them for a coffee before I returned to Els. Wearing my long coat over jeans and a T-shirt, but with my hair still greased and pinned back with feathers, I felt quite out of place. The café was across the road from the clinic, and was about as sterile. Most people think of Cádiz as a pretty little port with more history than some countries, but this was Puerto Real, the messy industrial fringe of the holiday city that visitors barely notice as they drive through. Whatever the setting, it was my first filtered coffee for many days and I was very grateful for it. I also ordered a large salad. A man named Garces joined us, but he said little at first.

"There's more to Els than you think," said Tormes after I ordered another cup.

"You underestimate me," I replied.

"What do you think?"

"Had they not been extinct for thirty thousand years, I'd say she was Neanderthal. Even her stone tools look very like what I've seen in museums."

"Not Neanderthal," said Marella.

"Sorry?"

"Els's tools are relatively primitive, more like those of the Neanderthals' ancestor species, Homo heidelbergensis," Tormes explained.

"I don't know much about paleoanthropology," I said, although I knew that half a dozen species of hominids have lived in Spain over the past two million years.

"The heidelbergensians were around for six hundred thousand years," said Tormes, as if he were speaking for a television documentary. "They were the first hominids to use advanced technology like clothing, artificial shelters, and probably language. There is a cave in the north called the Pit of Bones where they even ritually disposed of their dead. They lived in an ice-age environment that would have killed any hominid that did not use clothing. They were once the brightest people ever, and they had the most advanced technology on Earth for longer than Homo sapiens has existed. Their cranial capacity actually overlapped with the modem human average, but they were also phenomenally strong."

I had by now noticed that Els could break branches that were way beyond my strength. Perhaps there was more to this than a hoax.

"You talk as if Els is a real cave girl," I said casually.

"She is," said Garces.

At this point a waiter arrived with my second coffee. I took a few sips while the waiter cleaned up and removed some cups and dishes. My mind was screaming that Garces was mad, yet he lacked the manic enthusiasm of genuine nut cases. He almost looked unhappy. The waiter left, skillfully balancing a pile of plates and cups on one arm.

"The girl's DNA is not human," Garces continued. "Tree, it has more in common with human DNA than that of an ape, but there are not enough base pairs in common with human DNA for her to interbreed with, say, yourself."

"Take that back!" I snapped, already near my limit with this onslaught of weirdness.

"Sorry, sorry," he said at once. "I have been rather unsettled by all this, and .... "He scratched his head. "Look, what I have found is impossible, but I have done my tests in good faith. The base pair comparisons that I ran give Els's DNA more in common with that of Neanderthals than Homo sapiens, but examination of DNA mutation sites and rates suggests that she could be from the Neanderthals' ancestral species."

"There was also semen found on a vaginal swab," said Tormes.

"Indeed!" said Garces. "Its DNA was of the same species. Els's husband, lover, or whatever is another heidelbergensian. He is also a blood relative, from perhaps three generations back, but this is not unknown in small and isolated tribes."

There was silence as I sipped my coffee. Almost before I knew it, my cup was empty. Apparently, I was expected to say something.

"Genetic engineering was around in the early 1990s, when Els would have been born," I suggested, seriously out of my depth and well aware of it.

"Balls," replied Garces wearily, as if he had heard the suggestion too many times over the past few days. "That's like saying that Nazi Germany put men in space, just because they had primitive rockets. Even today we can't engineer genetic changes on the scale found in the subject's DNA."

"Her name is Els," I insisted.

"Yes, yes, Els. Whatever her name, she--"

"She's the victim of some cruel genetic hoax!" I began angrily.

"Haven't you been listening?" Garces demanded, banging his fists on the table.

"Yes, and to get back to your analogy, the Nazis flew at least two types of manned rocket, and they drew up designs for manned spacecraft as well. I saw a documentary on television, the Nazis put rockets into space big enough to carry a man --"

"All right, all right, Nazis in space is a bad analogy," he conceded, waving his hands. "The point is that we have never had the skills to make the massive changes to human DNA that I have observed in, er, Els. Yes, we could fool about with bits and pieces of the genome and clone the occasional sheep in the 1990s, but not create a new race -- or should I say re-create an old one."

"But Els is a fact," I insisted. "Genetics only proves --"

"This isn't just genetics!" said Garces sharply. "Els has stepped straight out of the Middle Pleistocene! She has practically no radioactive contaminants in her tissues from nuclear bomb tests or the Chernobyl fallout. Her levels of industrial contaminants like dioxin also suggest that she had been eating food grown in this century for only two weeks."

"I don't understand," I admitted.

"Els and her tribe are genuine," said Marella. "That girl in the clinic across the road is an ice age hominid, she is from the ice age."

That was a conversation stopper if ever there was one. For a time we sat staring at each other, saying nothing. The waiter returned. We all ordered more coffee.

"Are you willing to put that in a press release?" I asked once we were alone again.

"Young man, if I had been unfaithful to my husband I would not want it in a press release, whether it was true or not," interjected Marella, almost in a snarl. "Not unless it was a matter of life and death, anyway. Before we all go making fools of ourselves with public statements, we need to know Els's side of the story."

Tormes looked particularly uncomfortable, and Garces squirmed. Marella glared at me until I stared down at the table. She was clearly used to taking no nonsense from any man, whether plumber or prime minister.

"All their pelt cloaks are new sheepskin, and their scrapers are new," said Tormes. "Their spears have been cut from modern hawthorne stands."

"You mean you have evidence of a whole tribe?" I exclaimed.

Yet again there was silence. Tormes had said too much in the heat of the moment.

"I think we have said enough," suggested Marella coldly. "Carlos, what do you have to say about Els -- as a linguist?"

I was annoyed but cautious. The body language displayed by Tormes and Garces suggested that they were treating Marella very carefully. Her face was familiar, in a way that a face glimpsed countless times on television might be.

"Five days is not enough for a truly informed assessment," I explained first. "Els's language is primitive, yet highly functional. It's adequate to coordinate a hunting party, pass on tool-making skills, and so on. She actually has a word for ice, even though there is no naturally occurring ice in the area --"

"That's significant," exclaimed Marella. "She may remember an ice age. Did she talk about bright lights in the sky, or flying things? Strange men with godlike powers?"

"No. She has no concept of gods and spirits. She doesn't even have words to describe what she's seen here in Puerto Real over the past five days."

"We must teach her Spanish," said Marella.

"No!" cried Tormes firmly. "She is our only window on Middle Pleistocene culture. She must not be contaminated. She will be kept with you, Carlos, well away from the rest of us."

"My marriage and reputation are at stake!" exclaimed Marella.

"Marella, Els is bigger than --"

"And your position at the university is certainly at stake," Marella warned.

"What else do you have to tell us, Carlos?" asked Garces hurriedly.

"Well, nearly a third of Rhuun words are devoted to arithmetic, their calendar, the seasons and the passage of time. Els can understand and name numbers up to a hundred thousand, and she even understands the concept of zero."

"So?" asked Marella impatiently.

"Zero is a very advanced concept. It has only been around for a few centuries," I explained.

"On this world, anyway," said Marella. "The rest of you may be too frightened to talk about aliens, but I am not."

WITHIN MINUTES I was back in the Middle Pleistocene, dumping another dead sheep beside the fire. I had been bringing in the firewood wrapped in blankets belonging to the clinic, and I now found Els had made a simple, tent-like shelter from them. The heidelbergensians had invented artificial shelters, Tormes had said. I fed a few branches into the fire, then lay down beside it, wrapped in a spare blanket. Looking up at the stars, I recalled that I had not slept in the open since a school camp five years ago. Although I windsurfed and rode a scooter, I am not the outdoors type and I prefer to sleep under a roof.

I gave a start as a hand touched my shoulder. Els! She moved as silently as a cat on carpet. Settling beside me, she said, "Crrun." The word meant something like fellow hunter, tribesman, and family member all in one, but this time her intonation was softer, almost a purr. Perhaps the Rhuun also stretched it to cover sweetheart and lover.

Aware that a video camera was recording everything, I gestured to the space between me and the fire. Els lay down, staring anxiously at me. Perhaps she was terrified that I had not mated with her because I was planning to abandon her. Only a few meters away a dozen anthropologists were gathered around a video screen, and were probably laughing. Els began to draw up the hem of her cloak. I seized her hand hurriedly.

"Els, Carr, crrun," I assured her, then added that I was tired from a difficult hunt.

The words transformed her. Frightening and dangerous this place might be, yet a male had now declared crrun with her, whatever that really meant. I was also a good hunter, and I liked to talk. After staring up at the stars for a while and reciting something too fast for me to follow, she eventually pulled my arm over her, pressed my hand against her breast and went to sleep.

The next morning Els began to make me a cloak out of the sheepskins that had accumulated. This was apparently the only form of Rhuun dress, but it was immensely practical and versatile. In an ice age winter it would have also provided the wearer with a sort of mobile home as well as a sleeping bag. Instead of sewing the skins together, she pinned them with barbed and sharpened hawthorne twigs. I made a big show of being pleased with it.

Because Rhuun words were short, simple nouns and verbs, strung together with rudimentary grammar, we were able to communicate adequately after only days. Intonation was important too, but that was far harder to learn. My theory was that Rhuun words, which were generally gutteral, had developed to blend in with the snorts, grunts, and calls of the animals they hunted. The hunters might have stalked wild sheep under the cover of their pelt cloaks, smelling like sheep themselves and calling to each other with bleat-like words.

On the other hand, the mathematics of the Rhuun calendar was quite advanced for a nomadic, stone-age tribe. The Rhuun might have developed their own simple language, then come in contact with members of a very advanced society and copied ideas like counting and calendars. Els had no grasp of nations, laws, or even machines. To her all machines were animals. She knew nothing of tame animals, either. She treated all animals as either prey or predators.

That evening Marella was not at the debriefing meeting. Most of the discussion revolved around the way Els fastened the sheepskins of my cloak together, and how this might have been the birth of clothing. Tormes approached me later, as I sat alone in the clinic's cafeteria.

"Eating another salad?" he asked.

"Els is more of a carnivore than we humans," I replied, "but I can't get by on meat alone."

"She seems to be taking a shine to you."

"I like her too. She has a strangely powerful charisma."

"And pleasantly firm boobs?"

"That too. I appear to be her mate, even without consummation. Her, er, other mate abandoned her when she was still alive. In her tribe that appears to be grounds for divorce."

"The affection does not seem to be entirely one-sided. You kissed her last night."

"Ah, er, well, that was an experiment."

"And a highly successful experiment -- which leads into another matter. Would you consider staying with her, say for a trip to Madrid?"

"Madrid?"

"For her unveiling, so to speak. As her companion."

Images of myself on television in a sheepskin cloak flashed through my mind. It was not an appealing prospect, but I did not want to abandon Els.

"She is not ready," I began.

"But you can prepare her, she really trusts you. You would gain a lot of favor with some very powerful people. Some would even like you to screw her, to research Middle Pleistocene sexual practices."

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

"Look, this is grotesque!" I snapped. "Just who are you? Do you think you can--"

"I am a professor of anthropology, Carlos, and I recognize what Els represents. A genuine archaic hominid, straight out of the Pleistocene."

I shook my head.

"Apart from Els herself we have no other evidence."

"We do have other evidence, Carlos; we just don't understand it. Last year I made a strange find, in what had once been the bed of a shallow lake. It was a collection of stone scrapers, knives, and hand-axes."

"So ?"

"So similar sites have been found since then. It's as if a tribe of heidelbergensians just dropped everything they were carrying and vanished."

"They probably dropped everything and ran when something frightened them," I said. "A bear, maybe."

"Possibly, but that's not the point. The site I found was seven thousand years old, four times more recent than the last Neanderthal and a quarter of a million years later than Homo heidelbergensis was around."

Reality began to waver before my eyes. I was sitting at a table in a clinic, wearing a Middle Pleistocene hairstyle, eating a salad, and practically engaged to a heidelbergensian girl.

"There are some odd folk tales told in this area," Tormes continued. "Huge monkeys with spears, enormously strong wild men who kill cattle, that sort of thing."

"Are you serious?" I exclaimed. "A lost tribe of cave men in southern Spain? This is not even a wilderness area. There's little to hunt, apart from...well, okay, quite a lot of sheep and cattle."

"I said we have evidence, not an explanation."

I munched the last of my salad.

"I must get back to Els," I said as I stood up.

"Marella and I are -- were -- having an affair," Tormes suddenly but unashamedly confessed. "We were on a field trip, looking for excavation sites. When we found Els...well, our cover was compromised. Marella's husband is a minister in the government, and the government cannot afford scandals in the current political climate."

So there was no love child, but there was a sex scandal.

"Where do I fit in?" I asked.

"Els is to be made public. Very public."

"She will be terrified."

"You can make it easier for her by remaining her translator and companion. There will be a lot of money and fame in it for you as well. You need only do one questionable thing."

"And that is ?"

"Pretend to be Marella."

I agreed. The story was very simple, and the most important part was already on videotape. I had supposedly contacted Tormes about doing voluntary field work at a site called the Field of Devils, just north of Cadiz. We had met six days earlier at the farm of a man named Ramoz, and I had been videoing for two hours when Els first appeared.

"We are about to watch the most important part of the video that Marella shot," said Tormes as we sat with Marella and Uncle Arturo in the darkened committee room. "A version has been made without the sound track. We shall say that you were inexperienced with the camera and disconnected the microphone."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because my voice can be heard," said Marella icily.

The screen lit up, showing scrubby pasture and hills. It was fertile, windswept country and a bull was visible, grazing in the long grass. Suddenly Marella zoomed in on a group of people dressed in cloaks and carrying spears. They were stalking the bull. The scene might have been straight out of the Pleistocene had the bull not been wearing a yellow plastic ear tag.

The hunters worked as a team, three men and a girl. We watched as they stripped off their cloaks, then approached the bull naked. Their hair was drawn back and pinned with feathers. The men positioned themselves in long grass and crouched down. The girl collected some stones, then cautiously approached the bull. She flung a stone, which went wide. The bull ignored her. She hit it with her next stone. It looked up, then returned to cropping the grass. The next stone struck the bull just above the eye. It charged. The girl dropped her other stones and ran for the ambush site. The bull slowed, snorted, then returned to its grazing.

"They're reenacting a stone-age hunt," came Marella's voice.

"Why bother recording it?" replied Professor Tormes, disgust plain in his voice. "They're doing so much wrong, I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

"But it's a lot of fun," Marella said as she panned back to take in the overall scene. "They must be actors, practicing for a documentary."

"Maybe. Their consistency people can't be there, or they'd be screaming about the bull's plastic eartag."

"There are no camera crews yet. They must be practicing."

"Well as a re-creation of Neanderthal hunting it has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. I mean look at the girl trying to goad the bull into chasing her by throwing stones. It's all wrong."

"Why?"

"Neanderthals didn't have projectile weapons."

"But even monkeys throw stones."

"Bah, that's just behavior learned from watching us humans," scoffed Tormes. "Real Neanderthals would drive the bull to the hidden hunters, not let themselves be chased. As for the spears! Neanderthal spears had stone tips. Those are just pikes with fire-hardened points."

I turned to glance across at Tormes. He was squirming in his seat.

"I presume that they cleared this with the man who owns this land -- and the bull," said his voice from the speakers.

"Well, yes. Ramoz is a bit excitable," Marella agreed. "We should go down and warn them."

"Not with that bull running loose and no fences to stop it."

The bull looked up warily as the girl approached again, armed with another a handful of rocks. She shouted and waved. The bull stared at her. .She flung a rock, hitting it squarely on the nose. The bull bawled angrily and charged, and this time it did not break off the chase as the girl fled. Although she was fast and had a good start, the bull closed the gap between them quickly as she ran for the ambush site.

"Well now what?" Tormes's voice asked. "They can't kill the bull --"

Even as he spoke, the three naked men erupted out of the grass and drove their spears into the flanks of the bull as it charged past them. Far from defeated by the initial attack, the animal turned on the hunters. Now two boys who had been hiding nearby ran up with fresh spears, and the leader worried at the bull's face with his spear while the other two men attacked its flanks and hind legs. After suffering perhaps a dozen spear wounds the bull's hind legs gave way, and then the end came quickly.

"I don't believe this!" Tormes exclaimed. "That bull is part of a prize breeding herd."

"Was," said Marella.

We could now hear the tones of a cell phone as Tormes punched in the number for the police operations center. He described what had happened, there was a pause, then he reported to Marella that there were no reenactment groups or documentary crews in the area. On the screen, a hunter jumped onto the bull's carcass and waved a spear high in triumph.

"The police said there's a military helicopter in the area, and they're diverting it to these GPS coordinates. That group is definitely illegal."

"So Ramoz does not know that one of his stud bulls is the star of a documentary on Neanderthal hunting?" Marella asked.

"Apparently not. The police said to stay out of sight until they arrive."

"I'd better stay out of sight even after they arrive," said Marella.

"Yes, your husband might not react sympathetically."

"Pity. My tape could make the television news: the last Neanderthals, arrested for poaching and taken away in a helicopter."

"Your tape must vanish without trace, preferably into a fire."

With the bull dead, several women, girls, and children arrived at the kill. I could even see two babies being carried. The hunters put their cloaks back on and sat down to rest. Using what appeared to be stone knives and scrapers the group began to butcher the carcass. They were efficient and skilled, and it might have even made a convincing picture had it not been for a woman with the cigar and the bull's bright yellow eartag. The children started gathering wood, and presently the smoker used her cigar to start a fire. They began to roast cuts of the bull.

"I later found the cigar. It turned out to be a roll of leaves and grass used for starting fires," Tormes explained to me.

"Els has told me she is a 'hunt boy,' even though she's a girl," I explained. "Apparently boys began their apprenticeships as hunters by being decoys who lure dangerous game back to the tribe's ambush."

"That makes sense," said Tormes. "There were several children in the tribe, but the only teenagers were girls."

"Like in all societies, women could become honorary males in times of sufficient need," added Marella.

From the speakers I could now hear the sound of an engine. The tribe suddenly grew fearful and huddled together. The engine stopped.

"The police?" asked Marella's voice. "Already?"

"No, they were sending a military helicopter," explained Tormes. "Wait a minute! Someone might have called Ramoz to double-check if he knows about those fools."

There was a distant gunshot. The camera swept giddily up to the top of a ridge, where a figure was waving a gun and shouting.

"Ramoz," said Tormes.

The farmer worked the pump action of his shotgun, then fired into the air again. The camera swept back down to the carcass, but there was now nobody visible. Marella tracked Ramoz as he came running down, his shotgun held high. He reached the kill site, dropped his gun, waved his hands at the carcass, then at the fire, then at the sky. Finally he fell to his knees, clutching at his hair.

"He looks upset," commented Marella.

"I hope those idiots stay hidden," said Tormes's voice quietly.

"Real risk of a homicide here," agreed Marella. "Stay low. If he spots us he might think we were involved."

"If he kills someone we certainly will be involved. I can see the headlines now: MINISTER'S WIFE AND LOVER WITNESS MURDER. Stay silent, I'm calling the police again." There were more cell phone tones. "Cádiz, Tormes again. We have a dangerous situation. The farmer has arrived, armed with a shotgun. Yes, he's really distraught. No, he's hugging the head of the dead bull. The hunters have fled, but -- "

At the edge of the screen the decoy girl stood up and waved her arms. She was again naked. Ramoz snatched up his gun and shouted something incoherent. The girl presented her buttocks to him. This was too much for the farmer. He leveled the gun and fired. The girl went down.

"Cádiz, we have a fatality!" Tormes cried.

Ramoz ran through the grass to where the girl had fallen. Suddenly spear-wielding hunters boiled out of their cover and lunged at him. The shotgun boomed one more time, then there were screams. The men stood over the fallen Ramoz, and their spears seemed to rise and fall for a very long time. The women and children arrived and gathered around the girl's body, wailing.

"Cádiz, we have two down now, both presumed dead."

Now there was the sound of another engine and the whirr of rotor blades, just as Ramoz's head was lifted high on a spear point. The field of the camera suddenly gyrated crazily.

"Cádiz, tell the pilot to home on the plume of smoke from the campfire," Tormes called above the sound of Marella retching. "No, that's just the sound of my assistant being sick."

Marella had dropped the camera, and the screen just showed out-of-focus grass. The video was stopped, and my uncle stood up.

"Nothing more of interest was recorded by Marella's camera," he explained. "The helicopter landed, and the crew found the mutilated body of Ramoz lying beside a naked girl. Luckily for her, the shot missed, but she hit her head on a rock as she stumbled and was knocked unconscious. There was no sign of the tribesmen who killed Ramoz."

"I left the field at once, and drove back to Cadiz unseen," said Marella. "The trouble is that dozens of people have now heard replays of the phone call where you can hear me vomiting and Jose talking about his assistant."

"I was taken out on the helicopter," said Tormes. "Carlos, we can say that you panicked about being left alone with the killers still loose, so you fled the scene."

"Two guards were left there, but they were wearing camo gear and were not easy to see," said Marella.

"It is a lie, but no harm is being done," said Uncle Arturo.

I nodded, but said nothing. In a year or two he would suddenly be given some very significant promotion. It was the way of the world.

"Everything that the Rhuun used or wore on the videotape we have just seen was simply dumped," said Tormes. "They stripped naked and fled."

"Well, at least wearing jeans and T-shirts." My uncle laughed.

He started the tape again, and a scatter of stone axes, spears, scrapers, and pelt cloaks appeared on the screen, marked off by police cones and crime scene tape. The scene switched to an archeological dig, showing a very similar scatter of stone tools.

"This has happened before, here," concluded Tormes.

"What has?" I asked.

"I am open to suggestions," said Tormes.

The video ended with footage of Els waking up in the clinic, and of three burly orderlies having a great deal of trouble restraining her. The heidelbergensian girl was at least twice as strong as a modern man. She could win an Olympic medal for weightlifting, I thought, but would she be banned for not being human enough? The others now left, and I sat watching replays of the extraordinary video to fix the story in my mind. As my uncle had said, it was a lie without victims. I made a necklace of paperclips as I watched. Presently Marella came back.

"I have come for the tape," she announced. "Seen enough?"

"I have a good memory," I replied. "It's in the job description for a linguist."

She folded her arms beneath her breasts and strutted around the table, looking down at me haughtily. I knew what she was going to say.

"I should have had the credit for that video," she said.

"That credit comes with a very high price tag," I replied.

"True, but I have lived in my husband's shadow for too long. Being part of this discovery will bring me fame, and I will be part of it. The story will be that I came to the clinic with a headache, saw Els being restrained, and was told by staff that she was just a badly deformed girl. I noticed that she had a very strange language, so I contacted some experts at a university."

"Better than nothing," I said.

Suddenly Marella sat on my lap, put her hands behind my head and stared at me intently. There was neither affection nor lust in her expression, but in mine there was probably alarm. She jammed her lips against mine, then pushed her tongue between my teeth. After some moments she pointedly bit my lip, then stood up and walked back around the table again, her arms again folded.

"I can do anything to you, Carlos; remember that."

Els was strong. Marella was powerful. I had not taken Marella sufficiently seriously, but like Els, I had never met anyone like her. She removed the cassette from the video player.

"Try to cross me, try to rob me of my role in this discovery, and I shall produce this, the original tape, sound and all. Remember that."

She left. Like Samson, she was both powerful and vindictive enough to destroy everyone concerned with Els, including herself. Power is a product of our civilization, but one can have it without strength. Suddenly I felt a lot closer to Els.

I GOT NO SLEEP that night, which was taken up with learning my role as Tormes's supposed volunteer, and learning my lines. A press release about Els had been prepared and distributed by Marella, who was very good at publicity and knew all the right contacts. Just before dawn I looked through a clinic window, and was immediately caught by the beams of half a dozen spotlights. Security guards and police were already holding a line on the clinic's lawns. Tormes came up behind me.

"There is to be a press conference on the lawns," he said. "The Cadiz authorities want a share of Els before she is taken away."

"Professor, the very idea of a press conference is a quarter million years in her future!" I exclaimed. "What do they expect?"

"You can translate."

"No I can't. I can barely communicate --"

"Well, try! Els is a star. Already we're getting offers for movie contracts and marketing deals."

"Marketing? For what? Stone axes? Or maybe hide cloaks?"

"Carlos, use your imagination: She came a quarter of a million years for Moon Mist fragrances has been suggested --"

"Tell me you're joking!" I cried. "I can't permit this."

"You have no choice. You signed a sworn statement that you were my volunteer assistant, and that you shot the video of Els's tribe killing Ramoz and his bull. Now get her ready to be a media star."

"How?" I demanded. "She could -- she will -- get violent."

"So? Good television."

A pinpoint of hate blazed up within me. He was powerful, but he had no strength. He could hurt Els, and I was her only defense. I could hear the distant crowd like the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm as I stepped back into the walled garden. Els called to me, ran up and kissed me, then took my hands. She pressed them firmly against her breasts. I managed a smile. This was obviously a bonding gesture, meant to remind me of the pleasures of staying with her. She still did not trust the newfangled kisses I had taught her to get this message across. She was strong, yet powerless...and I had neither strength nor power. I presented my necklace of paperclips to her, but was not surprised that she was more perplexed than delighted. She had no concept of ornamentation at all. Her hairpin feathers were functional; they merely kept hair out of the way during the hunt. I put the necklace around her neck. She scratched her head.

"Har ese," I said, lacking any words for lucky or charm. Good hunt. To my surprise Els suddenly smiled broadly.

"Di," she replied, then added "Carr iyk har."

A couple more questions revealed that although har meant "good" and ese meant "fight or hunt," when said together and quickly they meant "luck in hunting or fighting." So, the Rhuun had a concept of good and bad fortune, yet there were many other things for which Els had no words. Metal, wheel, god, and press conference were all unknown concepts for her. I heard the approach of the helicopter that was to whisk us away to Madrid. There was certainly no heidelbergensian word for that. The sound made Els fearful, but I held her hand.

"Els, Cart rak," I explained. Els and Carr are going to flee. She immediately brightened at the prospect. "Hos," I added. Follow and pointed to the door.

"Thuk ong," she said fearfully. Death cave. To her the interior of the clinic was a dangerous cave.

I tried to explain that she was about to see frightening things, but that they would not hurt.

"Carr lan?" she asked.

Lan meant both help and protect.

"Carr lan," I replied, but I knew that I had a problem.

In the Middle Pleistocene, anything that was frightening was dangerous too. The idea of fear for a thrill did not exist. The idea of a thrill did not exist, either. To be frightened was to be in mortal danger. In the distance I could hear the sounds of sirens and an increasingly large crowd. Els was like some huge cat, a dangerous predator who was stronger and more of a carnivore than I, but for all that she was curiously vulnerable.

She followed me into the clinic's interior, holding my arm tightly and cowering against me. The lights had been dimmed and the corridors cleared. We walked briskly. Someone must have told the waiting crowd to be silent, but we could still hear the helicopter's engine. Els kept warning me about cave bears. We walked out through the front doors into daylight -- and the crowd roared.

Els panicked and tried to drag me back inside, but the doors had already been closed and locked behind us. Microphone booms, cameras, flashing lights, the helicopter, guards and police with batons, more people than Els had ever seen in her life, even a press helicopter approaching over the rooftops. Els began to drag me across the lawn. I tried to stop her but she was too strong. Guards broke ranks to block her path and journalists surged through the breach in the line.

"Carr! Tek orr brii!" she shouted.

I dodged around in front of her, pulled my hand free from Els and tried to wave the approaching mob back. There was a loud pop and Els ceased to exist. I turned to see her cloak collapsed on the grass, along with her feather hair pins scattered, an ankle beacon-circlet, and a paperclip necklace.

That turned out to be the beginning of a very long day. Garces, Tormes, and Uncle Arturo were near-hysterical, predictably enough. The police already had the area sealed off, but it did them no good. Els had simply been snatched into thin air. Several dozen video cameras had caught the disappearance and although the angles were different, the event remained the same. In one frame Els was there, in the next she was gone and her cloak and hair feathers were falling.

Of all people directly involved, Marella alone was willingly giving interviews. Aliens had snatched Els away, she declared in triumph. Her abduction had been caught on camera. Aliens had brought her to Twenty-first-century Spain, then snatched her away again. To Marella's astonishment, her theory was given no more credence than several others. A public survey favored a secret invisibility weapon being tested by the Americans, followed by a conspiracy by our own government, a divine vision, alien abduction, publicity for a new movie, and a student stunt.

For the rest of the week forensic teams studied the area in microscopic detail, scientists scanned the area for any trace of radiation, and the lawns became a place of pilgrimage for psychics, religious sects, and UFO experts. I viewed the videos hundreds of times, but there was nothing to learn from them. In one frame Els was in mid-stride; in the next she was gone and her cloak was being blown inward by air rushing to fill the vacuum where her body had been. Astronomers scoured the skies, observers on the space station scanned near-Earth space on every frequency that their equipment could monitor, and warplanes were almost continuously in the skies over Cádiz, but nothing was found.

A full two weeks later I was going through the folder of papers and statements that I had been given in those last hours before Els had vanished. There was a copy of the absurd marketing proposal for some perfume that Tormes had told me about. She came a quarter of a million years for Moon Mist fragrances -- and then I had it!

"Carr! Tek orr brii!" she had called to me. Cart. Walk to the full Moon.

The Rhuun could walk through time. Els had been telling me that she was going to walk through time to the next full Moon.

For a long time I barely moved a muscle, but I thought a great deal. There was massive development at the rear of Els's brain. Why? For control of movement ? For control of some subtle fabric in time itself? Step through time and escape your enemies. Escape famine, reach a time of plenty in the future. Why follow herds of wild cattle when you can wait for them to return by traveling through time? They skipped the long glacial epochs, they visited only warmer periods. The worst of the Saale and Weischel glaciations must have been no more than a series of walks through tens of thousands of years for them. If the hunting was bad, they walked a few decades. If there was too much competition from Neanderthal or human tribes, they walked to when they had left or died out.

They visited the Spain of the Neanderthals, saw the coming of humans, and saw the Neanderthals vanish. That might well have made them wary of humans. Three thousand years ago they might even have seen the Phoenicians build western Europe's first port city where Cádiz now stands, then watched as the Iberian Peninsula became part of the Roman Empire. With the development of farms came more trusting, placid cattle and sheep, although there were also farmers to guard them. However, all that the Rhuun had to do was walk a century or so into the future whenever farmers appeared with spears, swords, and crossbows. Perhaps Ramoz's shotgun was their first experience of a firearm, so they thought it would not be hard to defend their kill.

Homo sapiens evolved intelligence and had believed it to be the ultimate evolutionary advantage, but there are others. Mobility, for example. Birds can escape predators and find food by traveling through the third dimension. Homo rhuunis can do that by traveling into the fourth. Perhaps human brains are not suited to time walking, just as our hands and arms are better at making machines than flapping like wings. Could a time-walking machine be built? Would Els be vivisected by those wanting to find out?

What to do, how to do it? I felt a curiously strong bond with Els. I had a duty to protect her, and I owed no loyalty to Tormes, Marella or even my uncle. I was already outside the law, yet in a way that gave me a strangely powerful resolve. I was in love, and I cared nothing about losing everything to protect Els.

Nineteen days after Els vanished I was ready, waiting in a car beside the clinic's lawns. A borrowed police car. My uncle was at home, fast asleep thanks to a couple of his own sleeping tablets in his coffee. His uniform was a rather baggy fit, but I had no choice. Every so often I started the engine, keeping it warm. On the lawns, a dozen or so UFO seekers loitered about with video cameras, mingling with the religious pilgrims, souvenir sellers, security guards, and tourists. People always returned after an alien abduction, so the popular wisdom went, and so those who followed Marella's theory were ready. All but myself were concentrating on the skies, where the full Moon was high.

There was a loud pop, and Els was suddenly standing naked on the lawn. Before the echoes of her arrival had died away I set the car's lights flashing, then scrambled out and sprinted across the lawn calling "Els! Els! Carr lan! Carr lan!"

She turned to me. Everyone else merely turned their cameras on us, not willing to interfere with the police.

"Els, hos Carr!" I cried as I took her by the arm. She did not want to approach the police car with its flashing lights. "Els, Carr lan!" I shouted, not sure if my intonation meant help or protect. She put a hand over her eyes and let me lead her.

Els had never been in a car before, and she curled up on the seat with her hands over her face. I pulled away from the clinic, turned a corner, and switched off the flashing lights. Two blocks further on, I transferred us to a rented car, and after twenty minutes we were clear of Puerto Real and in open country. Using Ramoz's name I had located his farm in the municipal records, and by asking the locals in the area I had confirmed that the Field of Devils was indeed on the dead farmer's land. I knew it was a fifty-minute drive from the clinic. I had practiced the trip several times.

All along Els had just needed help to return to the Field of Devils, help to move through space to where she could walk through time and rejoin her tribe in our future...or had she stayed because of affection for me? Whatever the case, she had only resorted to time-walking in sheer terror, when the journalists and camera crews had charged.

My mind was racing as I drove. Glancing down, I could see Els by the gleam of the dashboard lights. In a strange sense, I longed to call Tormes on my cell phone, to tell him what had really happened in the middle Pleistocene. The heidelbergensians had spawned two new species, not just the Neanderthals. With the Saale Glacial's ice sheets approaching, the Neanderthals went down the tried and true path of increased intelligence, improved toolmaking skills, and a stockier build to cope with the growing cold. Homo rhuunis evolved mobility in the fourth dimension instead. This instantly removed the trait from the gene pool -- at least in normal time. Humanity had evolved later, but continued down the same path as the Neanderthals.

In the distance I could see a helicopter's searchlight. It was hovering where we were heading: the Field of Devils. I turned off the headlights, slowed, and drove on by moonlight, but the car had already been noticed. The light in the sky approached -- then passed by. The pilot was heading for where he had last seen my lights. It gave us perhaps another two minutes, Els could easily escape through time and rejoin her tribe. I would be arrested. I would lose everything for a girl of another species, and I would lose her as well. Only a modern, civilized man could manage stupidity on such a scale, but I still felt proud of myself.

We were only half a mile from the Field of Devils when the helicopter's searchlight caught the car. I braked hard, opened the door and pulled Els out after me.

"Els, tek var es bel!" I cried as we stood in the downwash of the rotor blades, imploring her to time-walk two thousand midsummers away.

"Carr, Els kek!" she pleaded, grasping my arm.

Kek was new to me, but this was no time to be improving my grasp of Rhuun. The helicopter was descending, an amplified voice was telling me to drop my weapons and raise my hands.

"Els, tek var es bel!" I shouted again.

Els stepped out of the twenty-first century.

To me it had all been so obvious. The Rhuun could travel forward in time but take nothing with them. Their skin cloaks and tents, their stone scrapers, axes and knives, and their wooden spears and pins, everything was left behind when they time-walked. Only the person time-walking could pass into the future. What I had forgotten was the babies visible on Marella's video. If babies could be carried through time, so could adults.

The brightness of the helicopter's spotlight vanished, replaced by the half-light of dawn. I was standing naked, in long grass, with Els still holding my hand. The air was chilly but there was no wind. Els whistled, and awaited a reply. None came. The rolling hills were luridly green, and dotted with dusky sheep and cattle. It was an arcadia for Pleistocene hunters, but it was not the Pleistocene. In the distance, great snow-capped towers loomed. The air was clear and pure, and there was silence such as I had never experienced. The towers looked derelict. We were in an ice-age Spain of the very distant future, there could be no doubt of that.

There was a series of distant pops, like a string of fireworks exploding, and a Rhuun group appeared a few hundred meters away. Els whistled, then waved. Another tribe materialized, then another. Some sort of temporal meeting place, I guessed. Els seemed unconcerned. There was plenty of game to hunt and nobody to defend it.

Taking my hand again, Els led me to the other Rhuun. At first I was in fear of some sort of fight to the death with her former mate, but there was no such problem. I had rescued Els when all the others had fled, and I was unattached. Within Rhuun society that gave her the right to take me as her partner, and she had no hesitation in exercising her right. In the years that followed, I became a great shaman, inventing a primitive type of writing, the bow, the bone flute, the tallow lamp, and even cave painting. When I die, however, I shall end nature's experiment with high intelligence -- once known as humanity. Humans have vanished, possibly wiped out by a genetically targeted plague, or some other doomsday weapon...victims of their ingenuity. Sheer intelligence has not proved to be a good survival trait in the long run, and through their fantastic mobility the Rhuun have inherited the Earth.