CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN – BEAR TRAILS

Aurora having to learn the complexities of primitive life....

Nine months of awkward learning elapsed before Mirumda was born, but more of that later.

Both Aurora and Umbaga learned, in that time, that cold winters are no times in which to start something as big and overwhelming as a family and that summer, when it starts to shine its first few rays on a planet waking up after a long rest can be the greatest time of all as well as a monumental relief.

At first Aurora had no idea that she might be pregnant. It seemed reasonable to assume that the genetic diversity between herself and Umbaga was such that pregnancy would be unlikely. But first, back to her early days with her primitive companion.

Once Aurora had realised that she had been stranded on a primitive world with only a small tribe of Neanderthal men and women for company she knew she had to make the best of it and that making the best of it would be no easy thing. There were things she would need if she was going to survive, and chief amongst them an easier way of making fire than rubbing sticks together.

“Me go to other ship,” she told Umbaga, and to his credit he understood enough of the hybrid language that Juju and Aurora had started to create that he knew what she meant.

“Umbaga come too,” he said seriously, and she nodded.

She was well aware of the dangers inherent on a world so new that fire had yet to be created and controlled, where simple machines like wheels lay so far in the future that they were unimaginable and where stone tools had yet to give way to the more advanced flint variety. So she would need someone with her when she ventured forth or risk all sorts of possibly fatal confrontations with a wide range of savage creatures lurking in the shadowy reaches of an apparently endless forest.

And that forest was a mystery to her. True, she could understand trees, but the menfolk went forth and found meat, often in copious quantities, and where they went to was a mystery. She knew absolutely nothing about the bare essentials to life in primitive times. But that was enough worrying for the moment. There were things she needed.

They set out and Umbaga automatically found himself urinating on the pissing stump when they reached it.

“Why do that?” asked Aurora curiously whilst simultaneously admiring his genitals as he sprayed his urine over the old stump, which was beginning to rot away and she thought would soon be little more than a mound of dust and fungus.

“All men do,” said Umbaga gravely, “it mark boundary. Not good to go further.”

“But we are,” pointed out Aurora.

He nodded. “We are,” he agreed as he tucked his teaser back into the rabbit-skin loincloth that he’d put on clean that day. Juju had washed it and when he touched it whilst dressing tears ran for a few moments down his face, for washing that loincloth was one of the last things she’d done for him, and that had been when he was away on the spacecraft and feeling very sick himself.

“Why?” asked Aurora, thinking she knew but wanting it confirmed.

“Always been the same,” replied Umbaga, vaguely, “all men say.”

“And nothing to do with mushrooms?” she asked.

Umbaga, though primitive, wasn’t stupid. “Umbaga believe so,” he replied shortly. “Mushrooms bad, though Juju collect some, put them on meat.”

“I’ll show you how to cook meat when we get back,” Aurora said with a smile, but she could tell by the puzzled expression on his face that he hadn’t understood her.

When they arrived at the other spacecraft, the one that Gornley and Stardust had arrived on, it was clear that something was awry, which probably explained why Melvin had taken their own vessel and its far more complex launching position, being almost stranded amongst trees, rather than this one. Something had been inside the control section. Something had battered it, and instruments lay smashed with long grey-brown hairs matted and blood-stained chunks of meat sticking to shards of glass. And that something had been injured as it had thrashed about, and had left the vessel trailing blood behind it.

“Blood,” sighed Umbaga, pointing, and “bear,” he added.

Aurora didn’t have the least idea what a bear was but worked out, there and then, that it was both large and clumsy and that she didn’t want to meet one, especially it it was injured and she was on her own.

But she wasn’t there to examine the trail left by a savage beast. She was there to take a few odds and ends that she was sure she’d need in the coming weeks and months or however long it took for a rescue party to find her, if one ever did. And that last point was doubtful.

She knew that she and Melvin, after their accidental diversion round a black hole, had accelerated to the point of warping space-time and had left the huge orbit considerably sooner, in time, than they had entered it. That much had already been made clear, if only by the DNA test she’d performed on Juju’s strands of hair. This was the home world and it was at a far more primitive stage of development than it would have been had they not slipped back in time.

At first she’d pondered on the possibility that humanity, left behind on a planet exhausted of all useful minerals, had regressed, but the DNA had shown nothing like that. Juju was, according to her own vessel’s data banks, pure Neanderthal, and that Neanderthal DNA was an exact match for the traces left over countless millennia in the building blocks of modern man. It was irrefutable. So this planet, with its fascinating inhabitants, was the home world that they’d been searching for and it would be mere chance if an attempted rescue found the time or the place that she now occupied. And that would only be if Melvin managed to get back to Terra at the exact time that they’d left it, and she had very little faith in his abilities to do anything so complex.

“Unlikely,” she had mused to herself, because Melvin was no genius and it had been she who had left the computer searching for an answer to the question of how they would get back home, not him. Maybe he didn’t even know that was what it was doing. She might have mentioned it to him, in fact she was sure she had, but she was less convinced that he had been listening.

Even if the computer found the answer the chances were he’d never understand it. And he’d blasted off in a mighty hurry, spurred on by his anger at seeing her being intimate with Umbaga.

The man was impulsive, but then so were most Terran men. It was a culture thing and she didn’t like it.

She bustled about the shattered control room of the vessel and picked up whatever was both portable and might prove useful. Then she turned to Umbaga.

“Broken,” she aid, pointing around her. “Let’s go back.”

“Go back,” he agreed. And: “No mushrooms!” he joked.

“No mushrooms,” she agreed, and laughed. It was good to laugh. There hadn’t been much to laugh at recently, being stranded on a planet she both liked and loathed in just about equal measure.

“Need meat,” said Umbaga when they were in sight of the home cave, “need meat bad or die.”

She nodded. “Umbaga get meat?” she suggested.

He grinned and nodded, and like a spirit he melted into the woodland and vanished completely from her sight. She felt a sudden tension when she realised she was alone even though home wasn’t so far off, and she half-ran back to the cave entrance.

Umbaga wouldn’t be long, but she suddenly realised how much she hated being on her own on a world that asked a huge number of questions and provided few answers. She found herself being assaulted with nameless fears and it was just as well that Umbaga returned, with a brace of rather skinny rabbits, very quickly.

“We’ll light a fire and cook these,” she said to him.

He grinned, but didn’t understand.

© Peter Rogerson 12.11.16