Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

With this thought, Noxon looked at Deborah’s uncle, to see what he was making of her attitude.

Wheaton seemed to take Noxon’s glance as a cue to speak. “I’m glad you’re treating this scientific expedition so seriously,” he said. Sarcastically, of course, but also affectionately, or so it seemed to Noxon.

“They’re children,” said Ram. “Let them play.”

So Deborah passed most of the trans-Atlantic flight invisible, and Noxon made the time flow around them very quickly, so that the whole voyage only took a few dozen steps. But he returned her to regular time as the airport approach began, or the attendant would have noticed that she wasn’t there for the landing.

Once they were out of the airport and checked into a hotel, the first order of business was to figure out where their leap into the past should take place. Noxon’s pathfinding should allow them to pick exactly the spot they wanted—but there was a lot of Europe to search through. No point in going to all this trouble just to watch a Neanderthal take a long hike.

“I don’t know what a pathfinder can see,” said Wheaton. “But what I need is a time and place where Neanderthals were hunting bulls. Aurochs, probably, the giant Ice Age bovine.”

“But they weren’t entirely prehistoric,” said Deborah. “The last of them died in Poland in 1627. They seem to be ancestral to modern cattle. Both Asian zebus and Western taurines.”

“A fount of knowledge,” said Wheaton.

“I’m telling him that we’re not looking for cows,” said Deborah. “We’re looking for this.” She held out a tablet with a photo of an aurochs skeleton. “Note that the horns bend forward. That’s what led Father to guess that—”

“Hypothesize,” said Wheaton.

“Take a wild stab-in-the-dark guess,” Deborah recorrected him, “that the ancient Cretan depictions of bull-leaping show a sport that would have made far more sense with aurochsen rather than taurine bulls. You need to have those forward-­reaching horns if you’re going to grab them and leap onto the creature’s back.”

“The real source of the hypothesis,” said Wheaton, “is the fact that Neanderthals seem to have made no projectile ­weapons. Their spears were useful only for stabbing. And the terrain they lived in didn’t lend itself to open running, the way Erectus hunted. I don’t care how stealthy you are, you can’t sneak close enough to an aurochs to jab it between the ribs. The last distance has to be crossed in a run, and then the Neanderthal had to jump on its back and sta

b it at the base of the skull, severing the spinal column.”

“And the aurochs held still for this,” said Ram.

“It bucked and ran like a son-of-a-bitch,” said Wheaton. “But Neanderthals are strong. They gripped with their thighs long enough to ram that spear into the spine and bring the beast crashing down.”

“Though Father’s guesswork,” said Deborah, “doesn’t explain how you jump onto a bull’s back over the horns and somehow end up facing forward.”

“They were very agile,” said Wheaton.

“Let’s go find out,” said Noxon. “Perhaps you can get me to a place where you know that aurochses were hunted.”

“Not aurochses,” said Deborah. “ ‘Aurochs’ is singular and plural.”

“But Deborah uses the pseudo-Germanic plural ‘aurochsen’ when she wants to show off,” said Wheaton.

“Like ‘ox’ and ‘oxen,’” she said.

“A place where you know they were eating aurochsoto,” said Noxon, using a plural from the trade language of the Stashi riverlands. “Then I can hunt for paths with a reasonable hope of success.”

The place turned out to be in Slovenia, a tiny nation. But it had one of the better Neanderthal settlement sites, occupied for thousands of years. What Noxon quickly realized was that it was actually occupied six times for a single season each. But there was no way the anthropologists could have seen the discontinuities.

Noxon found paths that seemed to be hunters returning from a large kill—their arrival was followed by a feast and then a lot of meat-smoking—and then sensed where they had acquired their kill. That first attempt was a dead end, though—the hunters had found a dead aurochs, brought down by a combination of dire wolves and disease.

But his second try brought the hunters back to the path of a living aurochs, and Noxon could sense that one Neanderthal’s path did indeed take him onto the aurochs’s back while it was still alive. Then he looked over the map, fitting the paths onto it as best he could. “No roads take us any closer than we already are,” he said. “So we’ve got about ten kilometers of walking to do.”

“How old is the event?” asked Wheaton.

“It’s the oldest group that spent a season here,” said Noxon. “Isn’t there already a date? Carbon 14, at least?”

“The oldest fire built here dates from ninety thousand years ago,” said Wheaton.

“That sounds about right,” said Noxon. “My view of the paths doesn’t come with a calendar. But that ninety-thousand-year figure gives me a benchmark.”

“Ten kilometers,” said Ram wearily.