Primitive Instinct: The Journey Home

As I thought, night was miserable, though I didn’t last long enough to see actual night before falling asleep. Diesel complained a bit at first, but as the temperatures continued to plummet, he stopped complaining and just took the extra heat. By the time I woke up and noticed the soft light brightening the sky slowly, I’m sure only one of us got any real sleep and it wasn’t me.

I blew warm air on my fingers inside the socks I had worn and tried to wake myself up a little more as I waited for more light in the sky while I ate the other half of my protein bar from last night and gave Diesel a bit of his kibble. After about an hour, I frowned and got up with my compass in hand.

“Something isn’t right, Dies,” I muttered. “It’s well past dawn so what’s happened to the sunlight? It’s cloudy, but not that much.”

I flipped the right lens up and located the sun, frowning harder when it was very close to the horizon. In the north, but that wasn’t my biggest concern.

“Something is very wrong here,” I muttered, closing the compass and tapping the cover thoughtfully. “It has to be close to eight in the morning by now and the sun... It’s way too close to the horizon. It’s like... It’s like it’s barely dawn. That’s almost two hours difference.”

I ran through all of my survival knowledge and useless facts, trying to come up with something that would explain what was going on here. Daylight savings wouldn’t be this drastic and it was the wrong season for it. Unless I slept longer than I thought, but Diesel would have woken me before now. I had clearly witnessed the semi-darkness turn into less darkness as the sun rose.

“Oh no,” I breathed out and quickly turned to stuff the chewy toy and blanket back into the bag as the only logical answer remained. “How in the hell did we go from spitting distance to the equator to sniffing at the backdoor of one of the poles?”

Diesel barked and jogged out of the hollow that was no longer a viable shelter with this new information. I’d wager we were closer to the northern pole, based on the presence of the spruce trees and solid land mass. Not that it really mattered that much because winter near either pole was a death sentence with my meager gear. What I had was the bare minimum for summer this far north. The nearly two feet of snow that was coating the ground as I stepped out of the hollow to follow Diesel south was a warning of what was to come. The sun? Probably not going to get much higher and it wouldn’t be long before it wouldn’t rise at all for several months.

I needed real shelter. Something sturdy enough to withstand a northern storm. I needed wood, food, hide or fur to keep warm... There was a million things I needed to make it through winter, because people? Few and very far between in the upper reaches of the north where the day cycles weren’t based on the sun’s progress through the sky.

“What the actual hell happened to us, buddy?” I asked Diesel as we started out at a brisk pace compared to yesterday.

I didn’t try to stop for longer than it took to calm my heart rate a little, so I drank while I walked and resisted the urge to take a sample of trail mix about when I felt like it was noon. The light and position of the sun when I checked it again made me very worried, as the small bit of light was already fading again.

We crested a rise in the land and Diesel barked once and waited for me to come stand beside him.

“What. The. Hell?” I breathed out, staring at something that... Well, I knew it existed. Once. Not anymore, though. Not for a very, very long time.

A herd of hairy elephants. Woolly fucking mammoths. We were at the top of a short cliff that would hurt like hell if I fell from it, but I wouldn’t die. Not that any intelligent survivalist would take that kind of risk without knowing where they are. But from here, I could see the whole herd and my heart stuttered and skipped at the implications of what these behemoths meant. There was easily two or three dozen adults. This wasn’t a small amount of giants and Diesel growled softly beside me and took a small step backwards.

“For the record,” I looked down at him as he looked up at me. “I blame you for this.”

I figured following the very large animals from a distance would maybe lead to a water source or feeding ground. I’d settle for either right now. I could follow a river because there’s always people near rivers if you follow them long enough. And feeding grounds... Well, I wasn’t about to eat grass or leaves, but feeding grounds usually meant there were other grazers, preferably smaller ones, that I could maybe snare or trap.

Hell, with the right stick and a good rock, I could break ice and go spear fishing.

“Spear fishing might not be a terrible idea right now, actually,” I muttered through heavy breathing as I walked down the steep slope not too far from the cliff where I spotted the mammoths. The trees had thinned out before stopping completely, leaving a large, open grassland, if it were any season other than winter, that the mammoths were using as a highway to get to wherever they were going. “Sushi is a thing, but... I prefer my food cooked.”

I stayed far away from the mammoths so I didn’t spook them or trigger the males territorial natures, but I was still close enough to notice a few things about them.

The first and most obvious was that they weren’t brown like all of the specimens in the museums. These were more like mottled gray, which was perfect camouflage in a snowy world. The next thing I noticed was that, unlike the elephants I knew, I could very easily tell which were male. Not by peeking at the undercarriage, since the thick fur made that a moot point, but by the tusks.

Elephants had one set of tusks. Two individual toothy growths on either side of their mouths, male and females both. Straight and simple. Not these big boys. No, that would be too plain. These things, I would describe at antler teeth. They looked like normal tusks for about a foot or two coming out of the mammoths face, then they got hit with the Bambi stick and branched into multiple points. As if that wasn’t bad enough, some of them had obviously broken, leaving them jagged and serrated looking.

I had followed the mammoths for a few hours before I heard them trumpeting and felt the ground shaking and Diesel growled, his significant hackles raising as he stood ready to defend me against whatever was going on ahead of us.

“Easy, Dies. No need for heroics. If it comes to it, live to fight another day and make tracks towards the trees,” I said, knowing he knew next to nothing of what I said, but also knowing he’d follow me anywhere I went.

The land rose slightly and as I reached the peak of the hill, I stopped and nearly cried. Not because of the gruesome nature of a couple of dead mammoths and the herd stampeding away. I mean, Yes, it was heart-wrenching to see such large creatures laid out like that, but that wasn’t what had my eyes stinging with unshed tears.

“Look, Diesel,” I said with intense relief as I watched the scene before me. “It’s people.”