The Last Neanderthal Read online

  But they were short on bodies. The family was so small that they both had to keep working. Girl had to warm Him’s hands the best she could, and quickly, because they couldn’t lose this bison meat. Girl took his hands in hers and pressed the palms together. She cupped them and huffed a breath of air on his skin. This didn’t have much practical application—in a cold climate, his skin could be warmed effectively only by bringing his core temperature up—but her hot breath did wonders for his mind. It sent a clear signal from one body to the next. She understood that he was cold. She understood that he was working hard. Where the mind goes, the body can follow.

  Girl parted his hands and brought them under her armpits. Armpits were the best way to warm hands, and her armpits were especially well suited to this task. Her broad rib cage made a great landing spot, and each hollow under the muscles could take in a large hand. A generous brush of hair provided insulation.

  Him was immediately grateful. He closed his eyes and rested his head on her shoulder, their knees touching, his hands warming. There were times that he would do the same for her. He breathed in her scent as she warmed him and it reminded him of all the other times that she had helped him. With his head on her shoulder, he opened his eyes. As she was squatting, the soft, pale skin of her parted thighs was visible against the muddy bank. He saw a streak of something on her inner thigh. After killing and slaughtering a bison, this was hardly surprising, but something about it caught his attention.

  He sniffed. It wasn’t from a bison. It came from her. She was in heat. The smells—wet soil and the crisp mint of first shoots of fresh grass—mixed with her warmth. He leaned into her, trying to get more. He put his mouth on her shoulder and bit into the round muscle. She twitched, as if flinching, but she didn’t pull back. She leaned in too. Their chests came together and he felt the strength of her arms around his neck.

  He lifted her hips so that her thighs spread over his. With a grunt, he pushed in. Unsure, unsteady for a moment, there was a wobble and then she wiggled. And that was right. He felt a glow like a hot ember move up from his groin and spread out. He was filled by the heat of her body and with the rhythm of how she moved and the smell of earth around them.

  The land came together inside them. Everything that his senses took in—the scents and patterns on the sand, the sound of the river water running close by, and the sway of the branches on the trees—turned inward toward her. Rather than scanning the land and listening to it, he was inside of it. Just then, just there, Girl became the land. She was what fed him and kept him alive. They moved together. It was warm, more than they ever knew.

  That’s what Girl kept feeling: I am the body. It was as though she were joined to the family in a way she had never been before. But she also felt full. The hunger that had been gnawing at her belly was finally sated. She found a way to satisfy the craving and there was no question that she would indulge it. She rocked and pushed in a way that was more like compulsion than choice. A year of restless chewing and pacing, and she had finally found a way to feed it. Her appetite, as always, was fierce.

  And after they were done, they stayed like that, Girl’s legs wrapped around Him’s waist. She breathed in and his lungs inflated and let go like an answer. A peacefulness settled around them. The land seemed to acknowledge what was going on. The pinecones vibrated, the birds started to chirp, the bear stirred and cracked open one eye, and the youngest badgers chattered with curiosity.

  Girl pulled back and she didn’t look at Him, not directly. She looked at his shoulder and it occurred to her that she wanted to bite it. Not just a little, but to sink her teeth in deep. And then she knew she was a glutton and soon she would want more. With a sorrowful feeling, she knew that it was a drive as strong as her hunger and that the real problem was its persistence. It was already coming back.

  Him held his palm up and toward her. She did the same and they pressed the skin of their hands together. It was an oddly formal gesture, given the moment.

  But Girl was unnerved. For that length of time, they hadn’t been watching their own backs. No upper lips had been raised to check the wind; no eyes had been scanning and no ears had been turned out. The strongest two of the family had let their guard down. They had left the others exposed. It was risky.

  The hard truth was that although nothing dangerous had happened in that moment, they weren’t safe. The leopard, the young male that had been slinking around the edge of their land, had climbed up to the perch he used as a lookout. He had been monitoring the crossing from there. The young leopard had taken note because he had left his mother during the spring melt. She had taught him to hunt as well as she could. She had tolerated him and his brother for an extra year to hone his skills, but when she became pregnant again, it was time for him to make his own way on the land.

  With bared teeth, his mother chased the brothers away again and again. The leopard hadn’t wanted to leave. Her care and scraps of meat were all he knew. For a young leopard, especially a male, the first year on his own was particularly precarious. A male had to find his own patch of land. The land had to be of a size that could sustain his body with a good source of meat. His needs were much like those of the family.

  In more usual times, a leopard his size would never think of taking on the family. The fear of primates who used rocks as claws and spears as teeth was bred into him. Once, when he was with his mother, they had sensed a family coming, and she had made sure they turned and went in the other direction long before an encounter. Going near them or encroaching on their territory often ended in death for his kind.

  In most species, those lower down in the hierarchy tend to be finely attuned to any shift in the upper levels. After coming across the family, he studied their habits. By that point in the spring melt, he was aware of their ways and strengths and especially their weakness. When he heard grunts and gasps from the two strongest of the bunch, he walked over to his perch to take a look.

  The leopard didn’t try to interpret the commotion. He only observed the scene with a cool eye and knew that they were not watching their own backs. For a young male leopard who needed to claim a territory large enough to sustain and grow his body so that he could mate, there lay a small chance.

  Archie Comics

  My grandpa was the first to tell me about Neanderthals. He had a log cabin on the hard slopes of the Laurentian Mountains. He and my grandma lived in Montreal but spent much of their time at the cabin. When Grandpa wanted to get my brother and me out of Terrible City (his favored name for Toronto), he asked us to visit him at the cabin.

  The winter he first told me about the Neanderthals was particularly cold. A groaning woodstove heated the cabin. Grandpa stirred the fire, arranged logs, and then went out to the shed for more wood. The back door opened with a swirl of snow to announce his reentrance. I pulled my scratchy wool sweater up tight, and it chafed my cheeks, still ruddy from tobogganing. My brother shivered beside me on the couch and read a comic book. Once the flame was strong in the stove, Grandpa sat down between us.

  “Do you know of these Neanderthals?” my grandpa asked in his deep rasp. His thick work shirt smelled of woodsmoke and pine. Delighted to hear that I didn’t, he raised a book to show me an illustration.

  My brother glanced up from his Archie comic just long enough to look disgusted. “Hairy like you, Rose.”

  Grandpa only lifted an eyebrow. “The book is by a gentleman named H. G. Wells. Listen to the description: ‘An extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance, over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature’—”

  “What does stature mean?” I asked.

  “It slumped over when it walked,” he answered. “Wells says that the idea for the ogre in folktales came from the Neanderthal.”

  “You mean it was like an ogre?”

  “Except it was real.”

  “A real monster?”

  “And maybe it ate the flesh of its own. A cannibal.
”

  “Robert, you’ll scare the daylights out of her,” my grandma called from the kitchen.

  “Not a chance.” My grandpa torqued his torso to address her. “She’s the brave one.”

  My brother chose that moment to pounce. He ducked around Grandpa and roared. I startled and screamed. One glare from Grandpa and my brother slunk back to his seat and hid behind his Archie comic.

  “They ate each other?” I asked Grandpa, eyes wide.

  “We don’t know exactly,” he said, backing off slightly, “but it had very primitive habits. We’ve come a long way since then.”

  “What part did they eat? Like a leg?”

  “That’s why we can look back on history with a sense of triumph. They were somewhere between the humans and the apes. An evolutionary middle point, if you will.” He tapped his head. “We got smart. That’s what makes us different. We control the world around us. It’s no longer necessary to stoop to such vile acts.”

  “The arms? Or the body?”

  “My point is, Rose, that the Neanderthal was driven by instinct alone.”

  “I hope I don’t get eaten. Do any live in this forest?”

  “They were animals. Not men.”

  “How about the female Neanderthals?” my grandma called from the kitchen. “Were they as fierce?”

  “No,” Grandpa called back. “And not nearly as good at the dishes, dear.”

  I heard my grandma’s light laugh as the drain sucked the dirty water from the sink.

  After Grandma tucked me into bed later that night, my eyes were still wide. Despite the cold, I hopped out from under the thick pile of blankets to press my nose against the glass and peer out into the dark. Outside, the snow-tipped trees lined the slope down to the icy river. Did the Neanderthals come out at night? In the distance, at the bottom of the hill where I’d been tobogganing earlier, something moved. It was a dark shape, furry, but it stood upright like a man. I strained my eyes to take it in. The figure stopped, as if he knew he had been seen. I’m sure I saw him turn toward the window. He must have spotted me. For a moment I was terrified, but then I remembered that Grandpa had said I was brave.

  I wasn’t scared of the Neanderthal. I wanted him to know that I didn’t fault him for eating anyone. I pressed my palm flat on the glass in greeting. I hoped he could see me. But I couldn’t see him anymore. He was gone. I watched for as long as I could keep my eyes open, but I never saw him again.

  I was thinking of my grandpa when I wrote an e-mail to Tim Spalding to let him know that I was pregnant and due in three months. I needed to be brave, but all I wanted was to curl up in Grandpa’s lap. I couldn’t articulate exactly why I was so nervous about breaking the news to Tim. I hadn’t hidden anything from him. It wasn’t wrong to wait until I knew the pregnancy was progressing smoothly. By then I was six months gone and showing.

  I didn’t think word of my pregnancy had traveled to the museum. By that point, six students and assistants worked alongside Andy at the site. I had hired locally and through colleagues. People came and went. A museum photographer based in France visited regularly to capture our progress. The museum’s shipping company brought in some things and took away others. To each person I explained that we needed to keep the project under wraps. I asked all of them not to speak of what they knew about the site. Maybe they thought my standard speech referred to my growing belly, and I dropped a few vague comments to imply this, but it was mostly about limiting the number of visitors to the site. More people brought more risk of contamination or improper procedure. I ran a tight ship.

  Still, the dig was going slower than I would have liked. This was partly because the logistics were difficult but more because the site held such a wealth of artifacts. It was good news, but I could see that we weren’t going to be finished by August. I had to send the e-mail now because it was clear that I would have the baby while the excavation was still under way.

  Tim didn’t get back to me that day, or the following week. It was late in the evening two weeks afterward when his reply slid into my in-box. I was exhausted from a hard day and had stayed up too late in an attempt to get caught up on the administrative tasks that were piling up. I was about to collapse into bed when Tim’s message came.

  What a nice surprise! Congratulations to you and your partner. Lucky kid to have a mother who is so bright and energetic.

  We are thrilled for you and have been arranging things on this end to make sure our project can continue without interruption. Great news! Do you remember Caitlin Alfonso, the committee member you met while you were here? She is going to be project manager for the site while you are on leave. She will arrive in a week so there’ll be a smooth transition.

  I stopped reading and immediately hit Reply. How could they make this decision without me? It was apparent that the intended transition was mine—off the site. Barely able to contain myself, I started to type. A primatologist would take over while I was away? How on earth would someone with training in another field ensure the excavation was done correctly? It defied any reasonable explanation.

  Guy clearly wanted one of his own in control of the project so that he could shape the announcement of the discovery in whatever flashy way he wanted. By then, I’d already seen warning signs. During my weekly Skype reports to the committee, there had been a few awkward conversations about the dig’s progress. I couldn’t keep every detail under wraps. Word about the find was filtering through the community. Some prominent people in the field were quietly questioning the evidence of a relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals. Guy wanted to lead with the image of the two skeletons and call them “the Lovers,” but the idea that our species had killed off the inferior Neanderthals was deeply embedded. As humans, we are drawn to the simple story about our species: that we evolved from primitive to become perfection. The messier truth was much less in line with Guy’s marketing plan.

  I knew it would be difficult to figure out the politics behind their decision to put Caitlin in charge. I was an outsider. Even if I took the time to fly to New York, I would only be given the party line, and I would be on their turf. I decided the best way forward was to avoid all the unpleasantness of a power struggle and skip to the end. I hastily wrote back with a few terse words and a reminder of New York law: “It is unlawful for an employer to compel an employee who is pregnant to take leave of absence, unless the employee is prevented by such pregnancy from performing the activities involved in the job or occupation in a reasonable manner.” I asked Tim to let me know if he felt that I wasn’t performing in some way. If that was not the case, then I would dictate the terms of my leave from my own project.

  I shut down my computer, stood up, and pushed aside the tent flap; by that time we had upgraded to the luxury of a wood platform with a large canvas over it. Andy was sitting nearby, staring into the campfire. I pulled up a lawn chair and lowered myself into it. I felt uneasy about the e-mail I had just sent. It was my usual habit to let an e-mail sit before sending, but in those final few months of my pregnancy, my blood was quick to boil. Though I had no interest in blaming hormones for my temper, my impulses had become harder to check.

  “Andy?”

  “Rose?”

  “Am I difficult to work with?”

  He stared into the fire. “My wife used to say that when she asked me a question like that, she wasn’t actually asking.”

  “But am I?”

  “She wanted me to smile and say no.” He let out a quiet laugh.

  “You haven’t told me much about her,” I said. “I’d love to hear more.”

  “But you’re not my wife. Do you want me to answer your question?”

  I nodded and poked a stick into the fire.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I gave him a light punch on the arm. “Wrong answer.”

  “It’s not a bad thing. You are trying to alter an entrenched way of thinking. People don’t change their minds without a push.”

  “I don’t want to be di
fficult.”

  “Rose, I’m saying I think you’re brave.”

  10.

  They buried Bent at dusk. That was the best time to transition to the other side of the dirt. Him dug a shallow hole, as deep as the frost would allow. Girl folded Bent’s knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. They placed him in the hole in the ground. His head was lowered down so that his eye sockets touched his knees. His toes were tucked in. They folded his body into the fetal shape in which he was born. They kissed Bent’s cheeks and smoothed his hair. They all closed their eyes, held hands, and let their minds sink. Deadwood. Each body thought of moments with Bent and so the others also felt those moments. In this way, the family shared Bent.

  The rare times that they questioned or feared death—for even such a formidable family was prone to moments of doubt about the hardship of living—a message lay in this shape. If decomposition and renewal felt too hard to grasp, if a body ever worried over what might happen to it after death, Big Mother made a shadow to show this fetal shape. Think back to that time before you were born. Did you suffer? Were you hungry? Were you cold? You were none of those things, she reminded them, casting the shape of a baby on the wall. Your body was of a different form then, as it will be again.