Prologue

30,000 B.C.

Dac and Toug, two male Homo Sapiens hurriedly moved along the windswept ice sheet in an otherwise featureless landscape. They were dressed in crude garments made of animal skins; their hair was long and both their faces covered with heavy beards.

Both primitive men slowed momentarily and leaned forward bracing against the wind as they craned down to track the prints of their prey in the soft, newly fallen snow covering the hard-pack ice.

They turned to the right and quickly pressed on in pursuit of their quarry, then just as quickly they came to a halt finding, and very fortunate for them, their prey, a four point male elk which had gotten itself trapped inside a rocky crevice.

Removing crude weapons made of sharpened bone from under their thick fur garments, and with animal-like agility the predatory hunters vigilantly moved toward the elk.

Toug lunged forward with his four-foot long spear and thrust it into the chest of the trapped elk. However, he had made a fatal hunters mistake, the elk twisted yanking the spear and Toug sideways with a quick and unexpected maneuver. Toug's prey had unwittingly positioned Toug between itself and an ice shelf, thereby, eliminating any possibility of backward retreat for the man. The elk squealed wildly, bellowed in pain then twisting its head once again, and much quicker than Toug was able to sidestep, one of the elk's antlers slashed through Toug's throat, exposing flesh, blood and artery along its path and killing Toug almost instantly.

Dac looked down, not to see if his hunting mate had survived, but only to determine if he was still able to help in the pursuit of the kill.

Seeing that Toug would be of no further help, Dac stepped over his hunting mate, driving his bone weapon into the body of the creature, again and again, and dispatched the already wounded animal with the strong hard stabs of his weapon, one of which penetrated the elk's eye.

His chest still heaving from the fight, Dac dragged the dead elk a few feet into open and started the process of skinning the beast, eating parts of its liver and heart during the process.

After retrieving anything of value from his fallen clansman's body and bundling all the elk meat he could carry inside the elk skin Dac started the two-day trek south off the glassier and back to his clans' winter camp.

When Dac arrived at his clans' winter camp he saw that several of the animal skins covering the branch and mammoth bone framework of the "long hut" were missing and that the body's of Trage and Jod the only other two remaining male members of his small clan were laying on the ground. He could tell that Trage and Jod had been dead at least a day or more judging from the amount of flesh eaten by small predators.

One winter ago nine members of Dac's clan, six men, including their clan leader Jearet and three women had headed east on a bison hunt, Dac, Toug, Trage, Jod and two of the three remaining females Roya, Sheel had traveled west to hunt elk. The youngest female Treeya had remained in camp, someone always stayed behind to maintain fire coals. The Bison hunting party never returned.

Dropping his bundle and taking out his spear Dac cautiously looked inside what was left of the long hut. He saw Sheel and Roya covered with a small portion of hide ripped from the outside of the long hut huddled together.

"Sheel, Trage and Jod are dead. What happened?" His tone was one of a statement not one of concern.

"Men came," Sheel told him, "three days ago. They killed Trage and Jod then took away all the dried meats, gathered seeds, berries, roots and nuts. They also took all the softened sleeping leathers and furs and even as much of the hut coverings as they could carry. Then they went away to the east leaving nothing. Roya and I were returning from gathering and we saw everything from the rock face above."