The Grandson - Preface

When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau. Then his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob. Genesis 25:19-28:9

But my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am smooth-skinned. Genesis 25:19-28:9

PREFACE


Jennifer’s Notes: Patrick read my original draft outline, and he warned me that he would not contribute any information if I left out Asu.

“You have included your own family’s story, you talk about me, and you added a bit about my adoptive parents, but I want to include something about my real origins. I want to tell the people who read this something about the people I came from.”

Well, I would do anything for Patrick, but as Asu is Patrick’s story, I told him that he would have to write it down himself. Though Patrick has many gifts, but he does not like to write. I assured him that if he would compose a draft, then I would go over it with him, to make sure people would get the most out of his story.

“After all, you are our only real witness,” I said. “If you like, we can record you as you tell us about Asu, and then I will transcribe the story in my word processor.”

“I get to approve what you write?” Patrick asked. He mostly trusts me, but Patrick has learned that when dealing with most modern people, it is wise to make sure that bargains are clear. It isn’t that Patrick is slow at all, but just that he thinks differently than most people I know. Unless you’ve been out of touch for the last six months or so, you have probably already guessed who Patrick is. He is, of course, the famed cloned Neanderthal Man.

Of course, Patrick did not just sprout up full grown into the mid twenty-first century. No, he had been born and raised for over two decades in total secrecy. Everybody wonders how that can be. How could he have moved around Houston for this long without being noticed? The thing is, Patrick may belong to a distinct subspecies, but he is fully human. Patrick is a little different, but that is all. Most of the people I know well could have the same description applied to them, but they are not aliens from Mars or extinct hominids. Besides, he had the full resources of World Tech, plus his adoptive parents, bent on keeping his existence a secret.

“Of course,” I told him. “I will write it town, and then we will sit down together and make sure you like it.” So Patrick nodded his large head and agreed.

Now Patrick has a gift that he believes was once common to his people. He retains memories from his ancestors. He assured me that the quality of these memories far exceeds our memories of, say, what we had for lunch or what the cake looked like at our sixth birthday. He says that, from what he can understand, most people remember snippets of conversations, along with some fuzzy images. For him, memory is more like scenes from a high tech three dimensional video that has the ability to zap the viewer with smells, sounds, and even, emotional impressions. However, even Patrick will admit that his ability to interpret his little memory videos may be flawed. He believes that many millennium ago, when his people had a culture, children were trained to use their gift of storing ancestral and personal memories, much like we train children to read as a way to preserve our memories and knowledge. As the first of his race, Homo neanderthalis, to walk the earth for, perhaps, twenty to thirty thousand years, Patrick has had to learn how to use his unique gifts almost all on his own.

For one thing, Asu and the other ancestors, think in a language that Patrick has never learned. Patrick has had to make sense of a mélange of feelings and visual impressions, without many verbal cues; though he believes he has interpreted some of the words and hand gestures. He compares understanding his racial memories to making sense of a newspaper when one has never even seen a primer, or of learning to understand speech with no feedback from another speaker.

“You mean like a foreign film without subtitles?” Eli had asked with one of his rare, thin smiles.

“Worse.” Patrick said. He returned my brother’s thin smile with a warm grin. “It would be like one of those Fellini movies that jumps around a lot, and where the people act in very unpredictable ways. And then, all of a sudden, you get a sudden hit of joy, anticipation, or grief, though you weren’t always sure where those feelings came from.”

“Then how can you be sure you’re interpreting anything correctly?” Eli asked.

Patrick shrugged and frowned. “Well, I have told you that the further back the ancestral memories go, the less distinct they are. Asu is not my parent, but in some ways he is even more closely related because he was the donor of the cells that cloned me. We are identical twins, except for the separation of thirty millennia.”

“So,” I said, “your close relationships help you, but the distance in time and frames of reference hurt you.”


That said, Patrick is nothing if not perceptive, honest, and as stable and solid a man as I have ever met. Anybody, even the worst skeptics, can see that Patrick is, what I would call, a man in full. If he believes that he has put together an account of Asu, one that passes his own strict test of believability, then I accept it.

“Patrick, I believe that your account is as true as any account that a person tells or writes from memories that may be a little stale. I believe that the story you tell me is certainly as true, if not truer than anything I’ve heard from anybody else. Of course, it’s all colored by your own perceptions which cannot be exactly the same as a man who lived 30,000 years ago.”

Patrick smiled at me then, but he looked a little disappointed. “Well, if you don’t believe me, then nobody else will. Do you think the rest of this story, the parts you tell from your memory, or the parts you’ve gathered from the others, are all exactly true?” He paused for a moment like he does sometimes, as if it is a great effort to communicate complicated thoughts in words than we can understand. Nobody who knows Patrick would mistake this trait for any sort of stupidity. In fact, it might be a virtue that many should adopt. Furthermore, it seems as if Patrick’s original people, the ones that scientists called Neanderthal Man, spoke with a combination of simple words and complex sign language. Though Patrick has taken the time to learn American Sign Language, Eli and I have not, so he must speak as we do.

“Jennifer,” he continued after a moment, “are you so conceited that you believe you know exactly how your sister felt when she first began to trust her bosses, or when you accused her of having something to do with Eli’s first disappearance? At first I agreed with you, and believed she was so incredibly shallow and ambitious that she rationalized Eli’s loss as acceptable losses. I thought that she felt he deserved his problems because he had brought them on himself.”

“And you don’t now? I asked.

Patrick shrugged his big head again, and his red curls bounced from one shoulder to another.

“I think we all knew that Julia was more complex than that,” he said. “She valued her work, but she had not escaped life with the Ollinkoff family without any morals. You liked to call her Dr. Frankenstein, but it was my adoptive parents that messed around cloning people. Julia worked on hardier strains of grain to feed people. I think that Julia believed that she could do more to help Eli, if she ever got word of him, from the inside. Maybe she was just afraid to express that to anybody, and she probably felt as if her message might get spread around and misinterpreted if she did confide in us. Through most of this whole thing, Julia worked alone.”

“Julia’s apologist,” Eli said with a nod towards Patrick. Then my brother, Eli, turned his dark, fine featured head towards me and said, “I choose to live in Patrick’s world, and I am happier forgiving Julia. That is enough logic for me.”

I shook my head and shrugged. Patrick has that way, you know, of pointing out inconsistencies. Sometimes he reminds me a lot of my brother, Eli, but since this is still Patrick’s part of the story, I’ll talk more about the rest of my family later.

Of course, I have to make one more comment before I let Patrick begin. Patrick has become rather fascinated with the Torah, especially the Old Testament story of Jacob and Esau. In fact, Patrick has even begun learning Hebrew, which he actually finds a more natural written script to read than English. Somehow, reading from right to left, with supporting vowels under or over the consonants suit his brain structure better than the structure and many ambiguities in English.

When you put that observation together with the fact that red haired Esau and red haired Asu sound very much alike, it makes for very interesting conversations. As I discussed this with Patrick, I asked him, “Do you believe this bible story is true? Do you believe this is a very ancient tale, far older than the Israelites, and perhaps a parable, for the relationship between your people and mine? Were the red headed hunter Esau and the tricky favorite, Jacob, representatives of their races, of course from the Homo sapiens viewpoint?”

He laughed at me then, a sweet, musical sound which always sounded so incongruous coming from a man that looked carved from a giant slab of hard muscle. Then in that curt, understated way he has, he shot down any feelings I may have ever had about the superiority of my race over his.

With gentle mocking, rephrasing my own words, Patrick said, “I believe the account is as true as any account that a person tells or writes from memories that may be a little stale. Of course, it’s all colored by the writer’s perceptions, which cannot be the same as those of a person who live now, or even that of all of the people alive at that time.”

That said, let us begin.

Patrick: Forgive me if I break syntax rules and mix past and present tense. As all of my tutors can tell you, I never excelled at written language, though I did become competent through hard work and excellent teachers. The people around me, Homo sapiens, think in a very verbal way, but my thought process seems to mix language, emotions, images, and flashes of deeper memories from my ancestors. Sometimes I can even taste and smell my memories, and this mix makes tense difficult for me on a first pass.

While my non-verbal IQ tests always came out in the genius range, and my mathematical ability was above average, my verbal scores were disappointing to my gifted teachers. In that way, I am not so different from a gifted autistic like Eli, except for the fact that I seem to carry my range of advantages and disadvantages better than he does. He is more talented at pure mathematics then I am, but he has no ancestral memories. Furthermore, I also do not suffer from the sensory issues and anxiety he suffers from, and in fact, I am very active and robust. I am generally cheerful. My brain and body appear designed to work this way, and Eli’s has to accommodate the way his brain works. I have no idea if the similarity is coincidental, or if some random Neanderthal genes worked their way, by mistake, into people like Eli. Could those genes have always been dormant, but perhaps got activated through some genetic combination or environmental factor? The scientists seem to be able to read our genes like lines in a book, but surprisingly, are still much divided on this issue.

Of course this all begs the question that most people really want to know. Am I a human, or some other kind of creature? Do we belong to the same species like two breeds of dogs, or are we as distinct as chimps and gorillas. I know that the people I’ve always had around me, Raj, Emily, Jennifer, and Eli, consider me a human. I consider myself a man. Of course, my mother Emily Guntha, the woman who raised me, had a pet poodle who considered herself the grand dame of our home.

I am not a poodle, but then, I am not a gorilla either. It seems important for many people to consider themselves – as a species – superior to my kind. After all, Homo sapiens thrived while homo neanderthalis dwindled into extinction. But remember, my kind was very successful for a very long time. The Hero Men – as we called ourselves thrived longer than your kind has walked the earth. I believe it is important for people to believe they are superior, that their race deserves to survive, and so they can comfort themselves with the belief that they will not become extinct.

Writing tires me quickly, so let me speak of Asu and his people. I believe he was one of the last of the people who called themselves the Hero Men. Your culture calls these people the Neanderthal, though the remains that you have found leave you very misinformed about the height of Neanderthal culture. The bones and artifacts you find buried in caves are children of the lean cycles. During the cold cycles, when Hero Men flourished, they grew tall on the meat of big game like aurochs and giant dear. They carved crystal palaces from ice and snow, and centered their craft on organic materials that they coaxed, rather than crafted, into suitable uses for their industry. Hunting became a high art, and was a very physical profession, but in that way the Hero Men husbanded the game, always leaving plenty around to feed them in the future. As your scientists have determined, the Hero Men did not roam much, and countless generations used the same grounds. So it was always one center tenant of their culture, to use that which could be recycled back into the earth. A culture like that would leave few remains for future generations.

During the cold cycles, true Heroes would be cremated, so their remains were mostly reduced to dust and ashes. Only a torpid, lean time Hero would have buried its dead in a cave. During the warmer, down cycles of Hero culture, the crystal palaces, built and carved over generations, would melt. And during the cold cycles, your ancestors, the few archaic Homo sapiens who ventured into Hero grounds, were just skinny, yapping scavengers. They were tolerated as a sort of annoying, but not very threatening, pest. They were obviously human though, and the honorable Hero Men did not drive them off or murder them. Neither in the height of the cold cycles, or the depths of the warm, lean cycles when the big game was scarce, were the Skinnies competent to do much damage.

Instead the Hero Men allowed the roaming Skinnies to trade with them. Skinny networks would pass herbs and green food from the south, and in return the Hero men gave them furs from big animals, cuts of meat, and some tools that the Skinnies could understand. Sometimes they used the Skinnies for manual labor, and sometimes they might take in an abandoned child as a sort of pet. I believe that when these pets became adolescents, they were considered too much trouble, and they were returned to their people with gifts so that the young adult would be accepted into a Skinny clan.

Only a renegade Hero Man would take a Skinny woman to bed. It would be as taboo as mating with an auroch, and such unions were seldom fruitful. The few children that were ever produced, were neither one thing nor the other, and seldom ever had their own sons and daughters. There were a few exceptions, of course, and in the old days large Hero clans would house one or two Halflings. Bands of Skinnys would tolerate them as well, because if they were not too disabled, their memory powers aided a people who barely had a verbal language, and certainly no written one. Of course, it was unheard of for a Hero Woman to mate with a Skinny man. She would consider them beneath her, land since even the Hero Women had considerable physical strength, it would be impossible for a lone assailant to force her. To a Skinny man, mating with a Hero woman would be like attempting to make love to a cave bear.

Now let me get to Asu. His memories are the strongest in me because even though he was not my father, he was my donor. It was from his ancient cells, that Dr. and Dr. Guntha constructed my basic pattern. I know he called himself Asu, and that was a name that had been his grandfather’s, and had probably been born by other ancestors before them. I am unclear on the name’s meaning because that doesn’t seem to be something that Asu thought about. Poignant ancestral memories, just like stronger normal memories, are what seemed to be stored. However I do know that It seemed to be the way of Hero Men to name their children after respected ancestors, as it is in many Homo sapiens cultures. I am sure that I remember this fact because that would be something that Asu thought about when he anticipated the birth of his sons.

I see Asu as a strong, sturdy man, though perhaps he was a little short by today’s standards. Remember, Asu was mostly a child of the lean times, and not the cold heights of Hero civilization. At this point in time, Asu’s brilliant red hair carried a few grey streaks and his face was well weathered. A couple of teeth were missing, though I’m not clear if he lost them to age or accident. The rest of his teeth seem strong and broad like mine are. It seems as if he took some care to clean them, at least once a day, with a sliver of wood and a good rinse of salt water. Even though Asu was a child and adult in the lazier, warm times, he had been born into the last of a cold time, and kept basic habits of hygiene.

Just now, as I saw him in this last memory, he stood behind a rocky outcropping on a foot hill that overlooked a Skinny village. He wrinkled his nose at a mélange of orders from the men and dogs. Asu did not like the dogs, and it would seem that the Hero Men did not befriend canines like the Skinny’s did, and that may have been one of their huge disadvantages. No, Asu definitely did not like the clicking, rapid chatter of the Skinny village, or the shaggy, yapping curs that roamed between their shacks.

But Asu had been alone for more than a year. He had endured an entire of cycle of seasons without any company. Apparently his mate, the mother of his two sons, became ill, and shortly afterwards his two half-grown sons had left to join the Skinny village. I can look back to the time of her illness and see Asu asking for medicine from the Skinnys, so maybe it is something she caught from them, a disease contracted in the south and passed up the trading routes. He traded three valuable, large furs for the medicine, but she died anyway. As a precaution, the Skinnys instructed Asu and his sons to take the medicine as well, and they did not contract the illness. I cannot tell if this was chance, or if the cure did have some effectiveness.

But after their mother died, the almost grown sons pined for women. The Hero Men were social creatures, and women made up an integral part of the life of their hearth. As long as their mother lived, the boys would not abandon her, but without her, they spoke of joining the Skinnies. Asu argued that they must wait with him. Other Heroes would be sure to meet up with them in the spring, and then the boys could find themselves wives. If they were not ready for their own wives, a good hunter like Asu, though past his youth, could certainly bring in another mother for them. During these lean times, Hero clans always towed along widows, some with children. One woman would be glad to find a hunter who would give her a hearth of her own. Some hunter would be happy to assent to the match, certain that his niece or sister, and her children, would be fed..

But the boys had not grown up in a clan as Asu had. He had been born during the last days of the cold cycle, and as a child a clan surrounded him. Now, during the cycle of the warmer lean times when the big game moved on, the clan had to spread out to find enough to eat. They rarely saw another family of Hero Men, but Asu was certain that they could follow the river in the spring, and find where groups had gone to spread their nets, splash in cool water, spear fish, and collect mussels.

See, Asu still remembered the last of the crystal palaces, carved from solid ice. It was a personal memory for him. And he remembered the days when hunters grew tall, like giants, on meat from giant aurochs, game that was taken by bold hunters. But to the boys, these memories were only ancestral memories. As powerful as the ancestral memories were, they could not replace the reality of their need for the companionship of others.

The ice palaces had all melted, and the Neanderthal had retrenched back into their caves. Children grew smaller than their parents. Asu was shorter than his own father had been, and the boys were smaller yet. Fewer children were born, and in the warm weather, the Hero Men fell into a sort of torpor. They subsisted on small game, fish, and wild herbs, retreated into their family memories to maintain their will, and waited for the next cold cycle.

But this time, more Skinnies migrated up from the south, and this breed seemed to be a different kind. They were quicker, better hunters, and certainly more aggressive and less respectful of the balance the archaic people had held with the Hero Men. Still, that balance may have been maintained, except these Skinnies plundered game, bred like rodents, and then tended to abandon their nasty little huts and move on. In addition to their numbers and wasteful ways, the Skinnies brought their dogs.

The Skinnies were still fairly week, and seemed to lack instinct for coping with their harsh world. But the shaggy brutes who joined them filled in a sort of gap. The guarded their pitiful shacks, chased down game, and when necessary, sacrificed their lives so a Skinny family could feed it’s family. As a generation passed, the Skinny population increased, along with that of their dogs, and the Neanderthals retrenched more. The spring had come, and though Asu spent many uncomfortable weeks walking the river, he could not find a sign of his people.

So now Asu found he was alone. While Asu searched for Hero clans, the boys had run off to join the Skinnies. And though Asu was a solid, stubborn individual, even for his kind, even he could not bear his lack of community. He held on through four seasons in his cave, a few hours’ walk from the Skinny village, hoping the boys would tire of the nasty place and return to him. Then they would pack up and journey, no matter how far they had to follow the river, until they found another clan. Sometimes Asu considered leaving without the boys, but he missed his children, and also could not bare the thought of making a long, uncomfortable journey all alone. He knew that without is boys to educate and provide for, he might get so frustrated that he would just let himself sit down by the water and starve to death.

So now it was spring again, and poor, lonely Asu stood up on the foothill, hidden behind an outcropping, and upwind from the village. He hoped to spy his sons, and then determine how he might ask them to join him. Perhaps they were so afraid they had made him angry that they thought he might beat them if they returned. He had to reassure them that he understood their pain and would never hurt them. As the small and ragged Skinny community emerged from their shacks to prepare morning meals, Asu spied a bushy red head among the darker ones. It was Esu, his oldest son. Asu sucked in his breath with joy at seeing the boy had survived and even grown a few inches in the Skinny village.

But his son, Esu was no true Hero man. He proved that by grabbing the breast of the little, dark haired skinny woman who tended a fire. The gesture was welcome and playful. Esu was a strong hunter, but no brute. The woman laughed and pulled at him, and went back to tending a fire. Asu groaned. The skinnies did not hold his son captive, but welcomed his strength, and even let him take one of their daughters as his mate. If Asu only had to fight a dozen of the skinny warriors to reclaim his son, he would do so. But Asu recognized that fighting the allure of a woman, even if it was just a Skinny woman, might be a battle he could not win.

When Esu’s mother had died of some Skinny born illness, it had driven Asu into months of despair. Of course, Esu, and the younger boy, could not bear to live with him, isolated without any women, not even their mother. Asu blamed himself because his children had had drifted down into the Skinny village, desperate for human contact, even that of the little shrill men with their rapid speech and noisy dogs.

“No,” Asu thought, “the cycle will continue.” He put his large, square fingered hand on the outcropping, feeling the smooth, cool stone beneath his palm.

But Asu knew that this time, the Warm Times, were different. More Skinnies moved up from the south, and this time they brought their awful curs. The dogs worked with the skinnies, filled in the gaps where Skinnies lacked talent, gave them their speed, strength, and acute hearing, and shifted the balance. The Skinnies, as was their wont, plundered the scarcer resources, made a place filthy and empty of food, and then moved on. The Heroes, a people who stayed planted, found streams empty, game vanquished, and trees burnt or cut. The Heroes, in a natural torpor because of the warmer weather and lack of big game, could not compete.

Asu knew this, because even for his people, he had strong memories. In the height of the cold times, a man like him may have been sought for a kind of function that was sort of a combination of priest and teacher. He knew that this lean cycle was worse than any lean cycle he could glean from hundreds of generations, and that no Heroes had gone for years without seeing more families. Perhaps, they existed somewhere, but it was unlikely that Asu would know where, in the whole wide world, to look for them.

Now Asu was not a stupid man, and he had another thought. He knew that the Skinny people traded and roamed as his people did no.

“Perhaps I could go down to this village and talk to my sons. If they will not go with me, maybe the traders will have heard of another Hero family. I can go seek them. Maybe if my sons know my mission, they will even go with me. I will let them bring their Skinny wives and babies, and I will even treat them as if they were Hero women.”

Now Asu saw that his son squatted down beside a basket and gently lifted up a baby. The baby sported red fuzz around his head. So Asu had lain with this skinny woman and produced a son or daughter. That was a rare thing, but not unheard of. Well, Asu thought, I will tell him he can even take this baby and this woman, and I will condescend to treat them as my own. Then Asu saw the shabby dog run up and rub himself agains Esu’s legs.

“No,” Asu moaned, “he even befriends the dogs!” Asu shook his head. No Hero Man could tolerate the presence of these beasts. Merging with these beasts was a Skinny trait, and one left out of his own makeup. “This is the line I cannot cross,” Asu said to himself. And then he realized that the battle was already lost. He had a choice of descending down into the village and asking to be taken in as the father of the warrior Asu or of just ascending up into the hills to try and seek more of his decimated people. He could still make a sort of compromise, and go greet his sons, let them know he was will, and ask them for word of his people.

But as the day brightened, the warm air made Asu groggy. His solid body only felt truly refreshed on a cooler day. Swept crept down from his thick hair onto his thick brow. He just could not decide how he wanted to approach the Skinny village, or his sons, and maybe he was even a little afraid that the people would attack him because his sons would be scared. Asu’s thoughts and feelings seem to lose coherence for me, and I believe he might have been clinically depressed. After all, the man had lived alone for an entire year, and had very little hope of finding his people. Asu shook his red mane and decided that today he would ascend up into the mountains where snow still clung to the peaks, and up there in the rarified air, he could clear his head. Maybe he would feel better in a day or two, and then he could approach the Skinny village.

Asu glanced at his older son one more time, and did feel disappointed because he had not seen the younger boy. Then he moved quietly, up beyond the rock outcropping. Even though his slightly bowed, sturdy legs were not good for the long runs and marches of the Skinnies, his strength adapted him well to climbing. On the way, he stooped to gather up some of the reddish berries and willow bark. Mixed together, and taken in moderation, the coarse brew was mildly intoxicating, and Asu thought that a small draught might help him relax enough to enjoy a refreshing nap. He had enough dried meat for a couple of days, could gather roots and herbs just below the peaks. He knew of a good stream for fishing should he need to supplement his diet.

It took Asu the better part of the day to make the cold peaks, and by the time he did, his body felt drained and rubbery. He did smile a little when he felt cold slush under his feet, and splashed a little in a stream that was still ringed with ice. If he could just find a remnant of his people, he thought, maybe he could just get them to live up here in the sky land until the cold times returned them to greatness again. In that way, Asu might have become a visionary. Or if tales of Yeti are true, perhaps other clans tried just that, and it did not work out so well.
Just now, Asu only wanted to sleep so he unpacked his little travel tent, really nothing more than a lean to with three stakes and a light skin as a cover. He spread a second light fur over the ground, and then unpacked a small stuffed bag to be used as a pillow. His other fur, the heavy one he wrapped around his shoulders during the winter, would make him a luxurious blanket. He flung that blanket over a tree to freshen it while he ate a little.

His housekeeping done, Asu chewed upon a ration of his dried meet while he took out his wooden bowl and stone pestle to ground the bark into the berries. He would allow himself just a bit of the numbing brew to soothe his aching muscles and allow him a restful nap.

He thought about making a fire, as the peaks would get cold at night, but in his earlier despair, he had neglected to gather fuel on the way up. Maybe after just a draught or two of the berry and bark drink, he would climb back down a little ways to search for some solid branches. Then Asu squatted within his little tent and grimaced as he sipped the berry and bark mixture. Warmth crept down his throat, into his belly. Asu took a second sip, and all thoughts of gathering wood left his tired mind. He took one more drink, and had trouble keeping his eyes open. He did not worry about his sons’ betrayal, and even wished the boys well. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day, he would climb down to the village, brave the awful yapping dogs, and ask to see his grandson. He did not believe that Esu would refuse to see him.

Then Asu considered chewing on a little more of his meat, but he did not feel any real hunger. The brew seemed to melt his muscles and desires. The Hero Man, tired after his days exertions, and more than a little drunk, lifted the bowl for one more sip of the bitter draught. Of its own accord, his lips pursed to suck in the coarse liquid. Some thought seemed to intrude, that maybe he had drunk too much. For a moment, his head reeled, he felt dizzy, but then he took one more sip, lay back against his pillow, and sweetness engulfed him.

Asu had left his fur outside, hanging on a low branch, and thought he should rouse himself to get it, but the thought seemed to get stuck there in his brain, and he could not rouse his muscles. Oh well, with any luck, the night will be calm, he thought. I will just rest here for awhile, and then get up to fetch my fur.

He thought of his boys when they were young, little stocky, red haired toddlers tumbling about the warm cave he had claimed for them. He thought of their sold, sturdy mother, laughing and scolding her active children. He wished he had sired a daughter. A girl would stay to care for her aging father, and not run off to find a Skinny mate. No, a girl would wait until her father found a suitable Hero Man to care for her. If he had a daughter to provide for, then Asu would never let himself climb into the peaks to get drunk. No, he was aging, but still strong, and would make sure she had a safe, warm cave to make her bed in.

Asu must have dozed, because when he woke, it was dark, and a cold drizzle fell outside. His light furs still held the moisture out, and he totally forgot that his big fur, the one that could keep him warm, was outside getting sodden. Asu rolled, scraped the last of the berry and bark mixture from the bottom of the bowl. In between wakefulness and sleep, he thought he heard his own mate, Esu’s mother, calling to him.

Even though it was spring in the valley down below, up here the cold drizzle turned to snow. But Asu did not ever know it because his tired body and intoxicating brew dragged him into a deep sleep. Of course, this is not an ancestral memory of mine, because Asu did not really experience it. However, this is my conjecture, and the only sense I can make of how Asu could have died. The snow settled over the sides of the tent, and finally crept up to cover Asu’s feet. By morning, Asu had been buried in an icy crypt. Only the large fur was visible, hanging from the low branch as if to flag the place where Asu lay.