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The avalanche was perhaps only the second worst thing to have happened on this expedition, thought Michael Wagner as he laid on a pile of snow which had torn his rappelling gear from the side of a cliff, tossed most of his supplies into the howling wind, and left him with a leg snapped at the ankle. Even without that specific turn of events, the mission–meant to be the final of seven trips into the Siberian mountain range–had still been shaping up to be an absolute disaster. A week and a half ago, he had nearly been mauled by a pack of wolves while camping in a valley, having only saved himself by burning through most of the few bullets he carried for his hunting rifle. Before that, there had been several close calls with the creeping sting of hypothermia and the yowl of the winds that tore through the valleys day and night. Michael slowly raised himself up with a pained grunt, ignoring the sharp ache in his leg until he sat upright. The wind, an undeterred constant, made the icicles attached to his beard and hair clink together slowly. He reached towards his heavy backpack and pulled it closer to him, taking items out and returning them in a practiced, repeated fashion, making an inventory of what he still had and what had been thrown into the mountains by the avalanche. Hunting rifle? Gone. First-aid kit? Still there. Survival axe? Present. Compass, flares, ferro-rod, packs of food, blanket, extra gloves and hat, radio? Check, check, check, missing, check, check, and check. He had both everything he needed and none of the things which would keep him alive. With a slight groan, Michael retrieved his kit of emergency medical supplies, careful not to disturb his leg. Checking the thermometer, he saw that it read negative-twenty degrees–warm, for a spring afternoon in Siberia. It was mid-April, but the snow and ice held tight their grip on the mountains all year round. Around him, the sky was gradually shifting from afternoon-gray to the sunless glint of twilight. A plan, even one that was rather desperate and deeply unsatisfying, began to come into shape. Before the trip, Michael and his longtime pilot, David, had prepared several rendezvous spots where they could quickly mount an extraction if Michael were to be in any serious trouble. The next one was just over the short peaks on the other side of the valley he had fallen into. If he could just get across to the next seam of mountains, he could radio David for extraction, and be in the air on the way back to Ulaanbaatar and the States by tomorrow evening. To do that, however, he needed to walk, and he needed to walk fast. And yet, a small part of him, the part which had driven him on six different expeditions into the screaming mountains and the cold, knew that this would mean failure, would mean giving up. He wouldn’t get another chance after this. He had already been removed from several universities for his unorthodox beliefs, and repeatedly failing to find any evidence for his admittedly rather unlikely claims hadn’t helped his reputation. In the past he had been stubborn and adamant, and now he was desperate. He was right. He had to be. They were out there–creatures everyone else in the world thought were ghosts, lost in the Paleolithic like the rest of humanity’s evolutionary brethren. This was the last place in the world they could possibly be–the only spot on the earth isolated enough to hide a living population of Homo neanderthalensis. There was only one way to truly cement his claims: come back with a real, living specimen, decipher their language–his specialty–and, in rather crude terms, convince them to open themselves up for study. Michael knew that this would be his last chance to bring back live evidence, and now, after twenty years of scientific ridicule, he would have done anything to prove he was right.
From the medical kit Michael pulled gauze, painkillers, and a military surplus field splint. With careful fingers he reached under his thick mountaineering boots and three pairs of thermal socks, searching for where his leg had hit a rock outcropping and snapped inside the boot. He had gotten lucky–the break was clean, and the tight fit of his clothes had kept it from snapping entirely–it was wrenched at an odd angle, twisted nearly sideways, but the bone hadn’t been forced through the skin. Michael slid off the boot, sharp breaths of unmitigated pain escaping his lips. Frostbite or gangrene might set in, if he wasn’t careful. Without medical attention–that is, without medical attention that wasn’t basic first aid remembered from his time in the Boy Scouts–he could lose the leg. It would be alright in Ulaanbaatar, but he had to actually get there first, which involved quite a bit of hiking, and quickly. The temperature had hit negative twenty-nine and descending. Keeping the leg uncovered would be dangerous, but the procedure itself was rather simple–apply gauze, put leg in splint, tighten. Moving fast enough to avoid having blackened toes but not too fast as to entirely abandon caution, Michael wrapped the gauze around his injured leg, fighting through the shocks of pain when he went over the break point, just above his ankle. He arranged the splint and slowly lowered his foot onto the plastic board, crossing the straps around his ankle, his foreleg, his knee. Tightening them one by one, until the angle of his foot was more in line than it had been, pulled taut so as to not snap more with movement. Above him, the sky grew darker, and the wind whimpered and groaned through the mountains, slowly grinding them into dust.
Michael loosened his boot and slipped his broken foot back inside it, wincing as the snapped ankle scraped against the thick leather. The boots had been custom-made for his expeditions, steel spikes fastened to the soles and toes as to adhere with the icy face of a cliff. Steadily, at an almost tired, leisurely pace, he raised himself by his hands onto his unbroken left foot, moving from a kneeling position to standing with his right in the air. He set it down, careful not to lean too heavily onto it, and shook in an uncontrollable spasm as the ache and the encroaching cold washed over him. Michael leaned down to throw his pack over his shoulder, and took a careful, limping step. It was forty seconds before he took another.
A crack sounded through the air, a slow rumble moving into the valley like the sound of a statue tumbling over or a massive colossus tearing itself from the rock. Michael raised his head, turned, gaped at the oncoming rush of a hundred tons of snow peaking over the cliff he had fallen from half an hour ago and ripping towards him with all the speed of gravity. He let out an almost careless laugh, realized he couldn’t exactly run on a broken leg, and began limping as quickly as he could into the valley. The straps hold his bone inside his leg strained and flexed as he moved, stabs of cold agony overcome by sheer adrenaline. Michael made it about twenty feet limping on unsteady feet before the wave of white slammed into the ground and crested towards him. The force swept his legs out from underneath him, sent him lurching forward and falling face-first into an outcropping of ice. Half-submerged, Michael felt his head crack into the cold blue, and the dark that was slowly overtaking the sky burrowed behind his eyes, reached into his brain, and snapped him into unconsciousness.
To say that Michael woke up would be inaccurate. Rather, a series of events which denied simultaneity kept him both conscious and not until the sled his body had been draped over hit a particularly large rock and knocked the darkness from his vision. Hanging above him, an untouched and vast sky glowered down, a hundred thousand stars twinkling like the eyes of some great, forgotten beast, daring him into hubris.
Michael groaned from no one specific pain out of many and raised his head as highly as he could, trying to take stock of where he was, what he was doing, and why, in the name of God or the windswept mountains, he was somehow moving. Blinking the snow off of his eyelids, he saw that he was part of some sort of sled train being carried by a figure mostly obscured by the blowing snow. On its back he could make out the fuzzy shapes of a fur backpack and a long, wooden musket. The back of its head was obscured by a hood, which was rimmed in fur. The sled in front of Michael’s carried the wrapped carcass of a wild deer, nine-pointed antlers making gentle, curving trails in the slow. The figure held a wooden torch in one hand and the rough-hewn rope that attached the sleds to one another in the other. Michael himself was braced against his pack, slumped on top of a toboggan carved from native wood, bone, and hide. Its construction was simple but sturdy and practical. Etched into its struts were small designs, the impressions filled in by snow and frost.
Michael let his head fall against his backpack and considered the data as if he was back in his old laboratory at Harvard, analyzing mass-spectrometry readouts. Someone had found him buried in the snow, left all his belongings where they were, and was now carrying his body to presumed safety–though he couldn’t exactly be certain of that. Maybe they thought he was dead, and were going to eat him, or try to put him on some sort of pyre. They could, in all possibility, be altruistic. Cannibalism was rare even in dire circumstances, and if his rescuer had somehow concluded that he was alive enough to put on a sled, it was likelier that human connection had won out. Plus, the person had hunted successfully, and in most cases people didn’t eat each other unless they had absolutely nothing else. Worst case scenario mentally averted, he considered that this development may be working in his favor. Looking up again, he could see that they were significantly closer to the other side of the valley–just a peak away from an open area where David could safely land a helicopter. If his rescuer spoke Russian, they could even talk! Once the initial shock of being met with a scientist from New Jersey had worn off, Michael could politely request shelter for a day or two and aid over the mountain, probably in exchange for some supplies, and even if Michael was a failure, at least he would still be alive. He still had a doctorate–maybe he could teach. The ghosts he had been chasing his entire life were slowly slipping from his fingers, and for years he had clung to them like life itself, kept them in a taut stalemate as he fought through expedition after expedition with no results every time, save for wasted money and an increasingly unfriendly and uncharitable relationship with the rest of his scientific community. A part of his mind had always whispered failure into his ear, each time he marked off a gridded section on his map of the mountain range, each time David carried him back to Mongolia. He was running out of squares to search. He refused to admit that they were really gone, that the people he had spent his life hunting for were never there. The previous expedition, he had found a ritual grave with bones that shouldn’t have looked as young as they did just a hundred and fifty miles away from where he was now. He had packed them away, elated, and then lost them in a storm a week before his scheduled extraction. The bones were gone, but something had nagged at him ever since. Barely weathered, unfossilized, nearly fully articulated, they had looked like they were buried a few years ago, carefully laid inside a clay-lined, prepared pit with bone jewelry, stone tools, and metal artifacts that looked like 1940s military refuse. The bones weren’t human, weren’t Homo sapiens. There had been no skull, but the post-crania was enough. It would have been everything he needed. But he had lost the evidence packages, and now he had nothing. This time, he carried a camera to document everything he could. And now he was going to have to beg a Siberian pastoralist for aid and go home with nothing to show for his life but twenty years of work and one disastrous, monumental failure after the other.
Michael’s spiral of self-deprecation stopped when the sled he laid on top lurched to a halt, the sudden loss of momentum nearly throwing him off the hide surface. Realizing the figure probably wasn’t aware that he was awake, Michael slumped back onto his pack and did his best to feign unconsciousness, keeping one eye a slit open, trying to make out as much of the environment as possible. He didn’t want to surprise the figure, didn’t know what they wanted, what they were doing, or who they really were. They might react poorly if they thought Michael had been watching them.
The figure had stopped about fifty feet from the cliff wall on the other side of the valley. Visible through the blowing snow was a building constructed from earth, stone, and mortar, jutting out from the mountain. Its roof was covered in a foot or so of white powder, and stretching across the stone outcropping which covered it were hundreds of carvings, filled in with what might have been paint or ochre pigment. Some were geometric–whorls and triangular shapes resembling peaks and valleys. Others were pictographic, stunningly skillful depictions of deer and wolves and human figures. Even others seemed like inscriptions, lines of small, carefully carved characters in bracketed sections next to each larger painting. The door to the building, lit by small fires on spokes, had a line of characters with artful flourish. More torches punched into the rock in a semi-circular arrangement on the outcropping face made flickers of light dance on the edges of the carvings, the flames flowing in the blizzard winds. Michael squinted hard, trying to make out the symbols. Characters? There were many of them, regular sizes and dimensions, very few repeating signs across any of the different segments. It was almost like writing. No, it was writing, writing in a script he had never seen before. Having studied ancient, modernly deciphered languages his entire life, the ochre-marked symbols on the rock were entirely unfamiliar. Perhaps logographic, Michael thought, the haze of the avalanche and the ice now wiped from his mind, entirely focused. Isolated languages weren’t unheard of, written ones rare, maybe, but certainly not impossible. But the symbols didn’t look similar to anything else from the area, even reaching into antiquity. Well. An undeciphered script, maybe in association with a previously uncontacted sedentary people-group, that’s not nothing. Michael was thinking faster than his eyes could process now. This was probably more believable than living Neanderthals, and, he realized, he still had his camera. He didn’t have the supplies for rubbings, that wasn’t part of the preparation, but he did have a logbook, which meant paper. He could replicate the symbols, take some photos, show up to Harvard with something that was likely better for his long-term career survival than anything he had found his previous six expeditions. Almost anything, he thought bitterly, but it wasn’t worth dwelling on now.
Michael snapped out of his linguistically stunned state and snapped his eyes shut when he realized that the figure had stored the first sled and the deer carcass in a small adjoining mound structure that must have been some sort of shed and was walking towards him. He felt the sled being pulled forward once again, heard the sound of the inscribed door creaking open, and then he was being jostled and lifted with shocking ease–Michael was forty-five and not especially light–onto a stone bench lined with soft fur blankets. He heard the figure step away and pull the sled fully inside the stone structure, and, only when he was sure the figure had their back turned, did he let his eyes open.
He was not inside a simple house–instead, the shelter was the opening chamber to a spacious cave interior. Lit by several lamps which hung from hooks embedded into the stone ceiling or the constructed wooden rafters, the inside of the structure was warm, cozy, and reminded Michael of the medieval recreations at renaissance fairs. This first chamber was circular in shape, rough wooden rafter struts arching toward a point from which a lamp hung in the center. The bench he had been set on like a sack was hewn from a softer, quarried stone than the cliffs, the quilts covering it a combination of fur and homespun plant textiles. Several packs sat next to each other in an organized manner, and leaning against the wall were several walking sticks, a spear with a complex point that seemed to be made out of unalloyed iron, and an old, nineteenth-century rifle with a corresponding pack attached to its sling. For a moment, Michael questioned how such a device could have been hand-fashioned. They were too deep into the mountains for this to have been the site of a battle, but Russia had fought several wars on its Asian borders over the past few centuries, and a regiment or two losing their way in the wilderness during mobilization or a hasty retreat would have left all of their belongings with their bodies. Still, some of the metal was clearly, unequivocally, not foreign-made.
Carefully looking away from the gun, remembering his own tranquilizer rifle stuffed into the pack, Michael surveyed the rest of the building, which was terrifically domestic. Much of the first chamber was taken up by a set of cluttered shelves, lined with an assortment of boxes, ceramic jars, hide and textile bags, sets of clothes, candles, tools, both stone and metal, and one little square segment which contained ten or twelve whittled and colored figures of animals. Each section of shelf had an inscription, and so did many of the separate vessels and wooden boxes. The circle of the first chamber came together in a doorway, leading to the stone-lined cave, the entrance of which had been covered up by the rest of the building and the rockshelter. Whereas this room was clearly taken up by storage and crafting, the deeper chamber was what an archaeologist would call a living space. It was oddly oval-shaped, and, though Michael could see only a sliver of it through the doorway, it seemed like it had been carved smooth for more convenient habitation. At its center was a fireplace, a pit carved into the stone floor and surrounded by small, irregular bricks. Covering it was a stone plate that might have been a grill, on which rested several metal pans. There was no fire–all of the light came from the overhead lamps. There were three raised beds, one of which was larger and more supported than the other two. On the back wall, framing the beds, was a mural depicting a small child walking with both arms in the air, each hand held by a figure at their side.
Feeling as if he was somehow intruding on something, Michael turned his head back towards the shelves and nearly jumped out of his skin, the figure standing upright a few feet away, staring directly at him. It was a man, around his own age. His clothes were clearly made for winter, hide and fur, but embroidered with colored thread in swooping whorl designs. He had removed his gloves and his hood, giving Michael a clear view of his features. The man’s hair, clearly well taken care of, was thick and braided, small metal and bone pins woven into the locks. He had a beard that was similarly braided and decorated. His brow ridge wasn’t especially thick, but was more pronounced than Michael’s own. His forehead, covered by thick hair, was low and sloping. He had no chin. His body was compact and sturdy, slightly shorter than Michael, with long, thick limbs. His eyes were astonishingly human. He was the most wonderful thing Michael Wagner had ever seen in his life. He was, in long and in short, textbook-perfect Homo neanderthalensis.
Michael, unable to contain himself, burst into joyful tears. This was monumental, spectacular, even. The first time in thirty thousand years two different human species had looked each other in the eyes and found recognition. First contact might have been an inaccurate descriptor, but it didn’t feel any different than Michael imagined meeting an alien would. Realizing what he was doing, Michael collected himself through slowing sobs and held out his gloved hand to the man, who had a confused and slightly concerned expression on his face. He reached for Michael’s hand timidly, seemingly surprised when he began shaking it.
“Hello,” Michael said, still brushing stray tears out of his eyes. “My name is Michael. I study you. You folks are awfully difficult to find.”
The man looked struck dumb, apparently as astounded to find language in an odd, previously uncontacted stranger as Michael had been. He said a few words in an unfamiliar language which Michael guessed corresponded to the written symbols carved into the rockshelter. He tried to catalog the sounds: a mix of things he’d heard in reconstructed archaic languages and things he wasn’t entirely sure how to replicate. The last one, however, was spoken slowly and with considerable enunciation, like someone trying to express a name to an unfamiliar person.
“Aach-tun,” the man said, drawing out each syllable and sound into something that perhaps he hoped Michael would understand.
“Aachtun,” Michael repeated, almost instinctively. The middle sound was guttural, and probably would have required hours to practice for someone who hadn’t studied thousand-year-old languages for several decades. “Michael,” he said back, careful to make every sound obvious. “Mi-chael.”
“Michael,” Aachtun said. In English, his accent was rather unusual, which Michael supposed wasn’t surprising. Considering the brief snippet of spoken language he had heard, what he spoke probably wasn’t related to any extant family. Language isolates existed, but until now, Neanderthal language isolates, to the wider world, had not. This was wholly unprecedented in the entire history of linguistics and anthropology–perhaps the only thing even somewhat close was the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, one of Michael’s specialties, in the mid-nineteenth century. Good god, he needed photos, records of the glyphs, everything. In a flurry of motion that had Aachtun taking several steps back, Michael twisted around and rummaged through his pack, retrieving his expedition log as fast as he could, setting it open on his lap with a pencil. Looking around for a simple object they would both have words for, he settled on one of the ceramic jars, pointing at it.
“What’s that?” he said, and gestured nonspecifically at it, trying to prompt Aachtun to provide a translation. He seemed confused for a moment, trying to find the object of Michael’s interest. Staring at the paper and pencil for a moment, he seemed to identify it as an object for writing. He moved his head in a fashion that was somewhat similar to a nod, and said two short words. Michael gestured again, scribbling fanatically. Aachtun repeated them, and Michael tried to transcribe each sound phonetically, adding notes for each part that didn’t have an easy notational equivalent.
“Jar,” he said, pointing to it. “Jar.” Aachtun seemed to understand, or, if he didn’t understand, he must have comprehended the principle behind it. He repeated the two words again, slower, as if trying to make sure Michael got it right.
The two of them repeated the process for several hours: identifying an object they both recognized, providing both of their words for it, Aachtun then waiting for Michael to record the translation before moving on. By the time Michael was sure it was deep into the night, they had formed a shared vocabulary which consisted of words for nearly every object in the house, both of their names, and equivalents for connective or descriptive words like “that”. reading through his notes–almost a hundred pages of phonetically transcribed Neanderthal words and translations and frantic notes on word prioritization, grammatical order, and sound systems, Michael realized just how tremendously unique this was. Linguists, for the most part, had run out of new languages to catalog and add to their collections. In his lap, he held what was not only an entirely new language, possibly even a new language family, but a language developed by an entirely different human species. He could write a paper about this, and if he had enough data, he could have it plastered on the front page of Science. He could write a hundred papers, and they would probably all be worth the front page. At this point, the bones seemed almost inconsequential–he had entirely forgotten about them through the process. But this? This was the most important scientific discovery in centuries.
Aachtun waved at him, drawing his attention. The man seemed tired, possibly by the ordeal of meeting a member of another species and being interrogated for hours about minute vocabulary details. He gestured to the inner chamber, back to himself. He gestured to Michael’s center mass, pointed at the bench. Said “sleep” in his language–or, in more specifics, a phrase which Michael was fairly certain meant “place to sleep”, referring both to the action and the actor. An interesting system, which he had written perhaps ten pages of notes on. Aachtun got up, walked into the second chamber, and came back with a pillow made of fur, which he set on the bench, and said “place to sleep” again. Michael nodded, which he guessed Aachtun understood was a corresponding movement to his own version. Aachtun smiled–a human smile, Michael noted. Most apes bared their teeth as a threat, a trait neither of them shared. He let Michael arrange the blankets covering the stone bench in a way that was conducive to comfort, and then began wicking out the lanterns, until only a small light in the corner of the first chamber remained on. He walked into the second chamber, left the interior door half-closed, and did not return.
Michael sat awake for about an hour before he realized what an opportunity he had, and shuffled upward so that he could reach into his bag to retrieve his flashlight, one of his several kodiak film cameras, and his survival hatchet. Moving quietly, putting weight only on his left foot to avoid sounds of pain. As slowly as he could, freezing whenever he heard even the slightest creak or sound of movement, Michael began documenting everything he could. He photographed every artifact from multiple angles, placing several next to one another to get good perspectives of their relative shapes and sizes. He took what was perhaps a hundred photos of the different inscriptions, trying to capture all of the letters, anything which would provide tiny scraps of syntax or grammar that he couldn’t otherwise get without long-form written text. He recorded all of the paintings, the metal artifacts both foreign and seemingly handmade, tools, lamps, and scraps of clothing. He opened several jars and photographed their contents, trying to find any organization or pattern. Eventually, he realized that the inscriptions on the shelves probably corresponded to the materials stored within the different sections, which might mean that so did the writing on the individual containers. Michael went back to his notebook and frantically scribbled even more notes, looking through the translations to try to connect the inscriptions with the jars and the supplies stored within them. Satisfied and entirely unsure of what any of it meant, he carefully stored the logbook, and began to move inch by inch into the second, deeper chamber. Pointing his flashlight at the wall, he took several pictures of the mural, the fireplace, and the beds. He stepped into the room, moving a foot for each minute so as not to make sudden noise and possibly wake Aachtun. His camera laid on the man who had saved him, and Michael took as many close-ups as he could, trying to record the man’s face from every angle. As he looked the photos over, he realized that they might appear doctored, that anyone who knew him was likely to think so if he was to present them. And, while something like an entirely language, writing system, and vocabulary would certainly be difficult to fake, it was also something an expert like him might be able to construct in a day or two, with enough effort. It wouldn’t be enough, he thought. He needed real, solid empirical evidence, something that couldn’t be discounted. Something that could be tested multiple times, and produce the same, incontrovertible result each time. Something, perhaps, like living genetic material.
Michael stepped closer to the sleeping form of Aachtun and unclipped his survival hatchet from its place at his belt. With slow, almost imperceptibly gentle hands, he took the end of one of Aachtun’s braids into his fingers. Gripping the hatchet close to the blade as one might with a kitchen knife, he set it against the hair. For a moment, he paused, and thought about what he might be doing to this man, who had saved him, offered him a place to sleep, taught him parts of his language. It was… an uncomfortable side effect of their field that interaction with scientific researchers could fuel unintended cultural change and conflict, especially with uncontacted, often materially impoverished groups. Anthropology, admittedly, didn’t have the most pristine record, and all of that was between Homo sapiens and other Homo sapiens. Michael, at this moment, was the only person of his species in the entire world, in tens of thousands of years, to know that their closest cousins, whose genes still existed within his own DNA, were not extinct. He wondered how Prometheus might have felt, to hold the fate of an entire species literally in his own hands. If he had material like this analyzed in a lab, brought it to a journal, there would not be an option for retraction. There would be no second chance. He wasn’t sure if he was even representative of a larger population–for all Michael knew, he could be subjecting an endling to the insatiable scrutiny of every single scientist in the world. Perhaps revealing him would cause a geopolitical incident, nations fighting over who got the last remnants of a second human species under their jurisdiction. Perhaps they would simply have him killed. Michael’s hands shook on the axe, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped it tighter. What a cruel thing he was doing. What a cruel thing he had to do, even if he didn’t have to do it, really. Michael let out a shaky, unsteady breath.
He felt the axe shear through the hair as easily as parting water, the braid falling into his palm. He clutched it tightly, bruisingly, as if it was the most precious thing in the world, which, he thought, it probably was.
Michael stepped out of the room, trying to ignore the tears gathering behind his eyes. He pulled his radio out of his pack, storing the hair in an evidence bag and tucking it into a pocket in the interior of his coat, fastened it shut.
“Hailing,” he whispered into his radio. “Michael Wagner, hailing David Piers.”
It took four minutes for a signal to come back, or, more likely, for David to wake up from the noise and grab his radio. It was three-fifty in the morning.
“God, Michael, couldn’t it wait until morning?”
Michael fidgeted with the axe, trying to calm how fast his heart rate had grown.
“It really couldn’t have–David, I got one, I got one.”
“Are you sure?” David sounded like he didn’t entirely believe him, which Michael supposed was warranted, even if he didn’t really have the patience for it. “I mean, it could just be-”
“It’s real, I swear. It’s like–David, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“So–so what are you asking me?”
“David, I need you here, as soon as you can be. Over the peak west of rendezvous four, in the valley directly next to it. I’ll provide coordinates. I’m being serious–get out of bed right now. I don’t care how many road laws you break–just get here, as quickly as possible.”
“I can, I can, it’s just–you’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Alright, alright, roger.”
David waited for Michael to relay his coordinates, then shut off the transmission. For several minutes, Michael simply sat there, not knowing what reaction would possibly be appropriate for his situation. He admitted that some part of him expected this last expedition to be a failure. It was the scientific part of him, the part that knew overwhelming data tended not to lie. But, as science knows, it can be wrong. And, after it all, it had been. They had been out there, waiting for him. In all probability, he never should have found them. He probably should have died in the avalanche, and some strange quirk in the laws of nature had saved him, had delivered him to this discovery, had broken history and anthropology in half and handed him the pieces. What he was obligated to do, then, was bring them out of extinction. Bring them back into a world which had told itself they were dead for the past thirty thousand years. Bring them back to life.
Michael resigned himself to this, sat back, and began to wait.
At nine-fifty in the morning, ten minutes before David had told him he would arrive, Michael gathered his things into his pack, checked that the braid was still there, and stepped out of the dwelling into the valley and the mountains and the domain of the cold, screaming winds. It was a clear day–the blizzard of the previous night had passed and filled in much of the tracks that they had left. Over the horizon, he saw a dark spot, high above the peaks, flying in his direction. It would be a few minutes, but soon he, and the evidence for the most important discovery in centuries, would be back in the hands of the Homo sapiens world. The helicopter–the same one for every mission, sturdy and with extensive fuel tanks–grew closer and closer with each passing second. Michael could almost imagine it covering the sky, blotting out the sun in metal and whirling blades. Within a few minutes, it was only a few hundred feet over the treeline.
Michael jogged fifty feet from the rockshelter, turned his head away from the whipping air of the blades, stopped in his tracks. Over the hills, deeper into the valley, two figures–one much taller than the other, wrapped in fur and cloth–walked slowly and steadily towards the landing point, not even a quarter mile away. The taller one, the woman, looked up, met Michael’s eyes in confusion, and froze. She jolted her arm out, stopping the child, and merely looked at him, waiting. David touched down, the blades beating the surrounding snow into a small whirlwind. Michael could see him in the cockpit, eyes darting between him and the two figures, and then behind him, gesturing.
Michael turned around, saw Aachtun stepping out of the home, clutching the sides of his head at the noise. He didn’t know how to interpret the expression on his face. Confusion, fear, something like concern, something like betrayal. After all, Michael was betraying them, wasn’t he? He was selling them out, wasn’t he? Was going to subject them to the highest bidder, the slow dissection of their existence and culture by the scalpels that they called research expeditions? He was caught in the middle of all three, staring Aachtun straight in the eyes, unable to move. Michael’s hand’s trembled, he began taking unsteady, pained steps backwards towards the helicopter. The woman’s eyes darted between him and Aachtun and the helicopter, the child trying to get closer, trying to get free of her grasp. Behind them Michael could make out the shapes of more buildings, disguised by trees and arranged around cliff walls. A city, maybe full of people like Aachtun. More than just him being sent to the butcher’s block. Michael was getting closer now, just a few steps away. He turned away from his savior, trying to ignore the one thing he had seen in his eyes as he swiveled: hurt. Michael climbed inside the hull of the helicopter, waving to David wildly.
“Go,” he said, breathing heavily. “Go!”
David stared at him, back down at the figures, back at him. He shook his head, took a few moments to remember what he was doing. Suddenly frantic, he began flipping switches and levers, the blades speeding up until they began lifting off the ground.
Michael reached into his coat, felt the braid in the interior pocket. The hair was soft, alive, precious. Arguably there was no object more valuable in scientific history. David began pulling away, the bay doors of the helicopter sliding shut as they climbed over the trees.
In three days, Michael Vagner will land in Boston after flights from Ulaanbaatar to Hong Kong to Los Angeles. In four, he will walk into a Harvard genetics laboratory to have the braid subjected to genomic sequencing at considerable cost. In three weeks, he will be on the front page of Science and every large magazine and newspaper in the world. In a month, the first cross-species ethnographic expeditions in history will leave for Siberia. Michael will be respected again, revered. Will have all the scientific prestige the world has to offer. Will be offered his Harvard professorship back. But, at night, when he has no voice to listen to but the monologue in his head, he will feel Aachtun’s eyes on him and remember that he has destroyed their world.
Michael Wagner sits buckled into the helicopter, braid clutched in his hand, and watches the objects of his life’s greatest ambition disappear against the mountains and the howling, immortal wind.