Chapter 62

Hugo and George—we get to first-name terms pretty quickly once George starts suspending his disbelief—spend half the night talking. At one point I ask George if he needs to call somebody, but he’s a bachelor with nobody at home expecting him. Ultimately, after he downs a second and then a third drink, I make up the guest bedroom for him, I don’t want him on the road.

Mostly I just sit around listening. A lot of what Hugo is saying I’ve heard before, but not all of it—he’d never told me the cave bear story, for instance—and anyhow I love hearing him. It’s a glimpse into a time I can only know through him.

George does get me to tell the story of how I found Hugo. Then he tries to press Hugo for his experience, but Hugo doesn’t have much to tell him.

“I’d just been struck in the chest very hard by an aurochs’ horn,” he points out. “I had the impression of passing through some sort of mist or fog, perhaps even a low-hanging cloud. Then I fell quite a long distance. Linda found me in a drift of newly fallen snow, which is quite soft, but the landing was enough to concuss me so the fall must have been considerable.”

“Where had you been hunting, in the same area? Could you tell?”

“I know it wasn’t the same area,” Hugo says. He describes where my cabin was. “I wasn’t in a mountainous region before, and besides it’s the wrong hemisphere, I am Nordic, as you see, not Amerind. Whatever happened translocated me geophysically as well as temporally.”

“Would you stop that!” George bursts out. “Dammit, it’s embarrassing when you speak better English than I do.” I hear him beginning to accept Hugo for what he is.

Hugo laughs. “I’m sorry, George. It has become my language now, I think in it as well. But my old world was a high plain, not mountains. Even the length of the seasons doesn’t help since I don’t know when it was in the glacial ebb and flow. I think most probably it was in the southern Caucasus somewhere, the steppe, but only because what I know of the topography and climate fits my mem­ory.”

“How would you end up in the U.S. mountains?” George wonders.

“I think it may have to do with the Earth’s rotation,” Hugo says. “This can be only speculation, but perhaps my body retained its position relative to the Earth’s surface while transition­ing through time. That would possibly explain the distance I fell, Linda’s cabin was at about twenty-five hundred feet elevation, which would mean the plain of my Cro-Magnon time was perhaps two or three hundred feet higher. But I only guess.”

George shakes his head. “If that’s so, my God you were lucky.”

“In very many ways,” Hugo agrees. “Lucky in the comparative altitude, I would not have survived a greater fall and the possibility that I might have emerged underground is too dreadful to contemplate. Lucky to find a snowdrift at the end of my fall. Lucky that the snowdrift was just outside an occupied dwelling. Lucky that the occupant was a woman courageous and caring enough to take in and nurse an injured stranger of rather ... unusual mindset. And on and on. I find it little wonder that no other cases are recorded, the luck piled atop luck must be be­yond rare.”

I guess I was pretty lucky, too. I think how much poorer my life would have been. I can’t imagine not being with Hugo.

Finally George gets around to the key question. “Why me?” he asks. “Why choose me for your, I don’t know, your coming-out party? I’m a long way from top of my field, I’m still young, there are a lot better qualified people.”

“It is because of your lecture that evening,” Hugo explains. “You were ... passionate. You cared. And you knew at least some, you had so much right, the basic concept of Cro-Mag­non as just early modern man. These ‘better qualified people, ‘ are they not the ones who developed that insulting display I saw at the museum, who have written some of the demeaning literature I’ve read, who design the ridiculous makeup for those television commercials?”

George laughs. “I don’t know about the makeup, but yes to the rest. I go a different way from the mainstream of my field.”

“And that is ‘why you, ‘“ Hugo tells him. “I’d like my people to be remembered, remembered as they were and not as some ... diminished caricature. You go off the track in some ways, but you’re at least going in the right direction and that’s what I found important.”

“‘Off the track?’ How?”

“‘Caveman’ to start,” Hugo says. I knew he’d get that in early. “Please remove that word from your vocabulary. Perhaps some few somewhere did live in caves, but none that I ever met even on my travels. Caves are dank, uncomfortable places even when one can find them, unsuitable for human habitation. In addition the entire notion suggests a people too incompetent, or too indolent, to construct even a rudimentary shelter. We were not that; my people built their dwellings just as you do now, simply on a smaller and less elaborate scale and of course with very much greater effort.”

“But there’s evidence in the archaeological record,” George protests. “And those marvelous paintings.”

“Evidence of presence, yes,” Hugo acknowledges. “I visited one people who would retreat occasionally, or some of them, to a nearby cave for communion with a spirit world they had devised in their minds. But the evidence is not of ongoing residence. Indeed, quite the opposite. I understand that some of that evidence is trash middens in the caves. Even animals don’t foul their own nests so; we had none such among my own people, I remember no caves nearby, but it is evident to me that the caves were at least partially used as garbage dumps, akin to modern landfills, rather than dwellings.

“It’s merely that this is the only evidence that’s survived all that time. The houses we built were of wood and mud and thatch and skins and other biodegradable materials. They have biodegraded. But that’s how we lived, not in caves like bats or hibernating bears or other such animals.”

George pumps him for a description of the kind of houses his people lived in, and he first repeats what he told Danny and then talks about airier summer dwellings, some like Indian teepees and others more open in design, lean-tos of a sort.

“And in good weather many would spend most of their time outdoors, even sleeping,” he says. “Shelter was there for rain or cold, but we had not the modern compulsion to close ourselves away. Even sex was not the private, behind-closed-doors act it is today, I can remember many nights punctuated by the sounds and even the sights of mating under the stars.”

Ugh. I think I vote for today on that one. I still don’t see sex as a spectator sport.

On the other hand, if it was the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of thing Hugo tried that first time when I thought he was raping me, it probably wouldn’t have been much of a spectacle anyway.

I’m still reflecting, a little erotically, on how drastically Hugo’s changed in that regard so that it’s a moment before I realize the conversation has shifted direction.

“ ... hunter-gatherers,” he’s saying. “My people weren’t hunter-gatherers. We were hunter-growers. Simple economics should tell you that much in this world that makes such a science of it.”

“Huh?” grunts George, a bit inelegantly.

“Take a walk in the woods one day,” Hugo says. “Or in an uncultivated clearing. There are plenty of both just out there, we back up on a national forest. See how much you find that’s edible, much less nutritious.”

“Well, in a couple of months we’ll be into berry season—”

“Yes, and tree fruits in summer and fall, and nuts later on,” Hugo interrupts him. “Of course we took those when we could. But they are seasonal, and limited.

“We lived in groups of about fifty or more, which was ordinarily the minimum needed to make up good hunting parties when you allow for women and children and older men who can no longer hunt. My people were perhaps seventy or eighty, but in my travels I visited others numbering as many as two hundred or so.”

“I still don’t see it,” George admits.

“Try to support that many with what you can gather of nature’s bounty near enough to reach it, pick and return in one day. We grew our food, we had to. We knew of seeds and how plants grew—simple observation made that easy to know—and we tilled, we planted, we weeded, we harvested, we farmed. Nothing like the standards, or the scale, of modern agriculture, of course.” He turns to me. “Linda, do you remember the first garden I made?”

I giggle. “Oh yes, dear.”

“I dug it out about thirty or forty feet square,” he tells George. “It was all by hand, but with modern hoes and spades and rakes the work seemed easy by comparison with what I was accustomed to. In my time such a plot would have yielded food for no more than a few hearths. Of course, with today’s hybrids and designed fertilizer and water continually available it produced a truly huge crop. I sold most of it to a local produce stand. I remember being very proud of being able to bring in what I didn’t then realize was a very meager income, to no longer be dependent on Linda for everything.”

They go on for a while and then Hugo comes to what I know is another point of annoyance for him.

“And the wheel, too,” he says. “To say we didn’t have the wheel is plain nonsense. Take a felled tree, cut a small cross-section—not easy with only flint axes, but nothing was easy for us—and what do you have? A wheel, of course, simply trim off the bark and any irregularities and drive a hole through the center for the axle. Grease instead of bearings for the axle, but that also works. Or you can use a larger cross-section as a roller. Were we so dull we could not see what was before our eyes? We had both, for what uses they could serve.”

“I beg your pardon?” George is surprised by the last.

“A wheel, even a roller, depends in large part for its utility on a uniform and unobstructed surface over which to travel. Nature offers few such for any significant distance. The potholes in today’s streets are as nothing compared to the irregularities of terrain that we dealt with. In fairly short order any wheel we might devise would be shattered or splintered, if it would turn at all.”

“Wheels worked pretty well on, for example, the American migration west across the great plains and even the mountains,” George points out.