Driven to Extinction

Recent studies indicate that the decision to allow females to join hunting expeditions may have contributed to Neanderthal man’s extinction.

               The Boston Globe

It was a fine, crisp day, and I had been looking forward to getting out of the cave all week long. Just me and my friends in the fresh air, away from the tool bench. I wanted to help some poor ibex or bison contribute to his species’ extinction.

I took my stone-pointed stick down from the weapon rack and cleaned it. It was basic, a wood-grained piece of wood for the stick, a rock-hard piece of stone for the stone. Nothing fancy.

I was about to step outside when who should come around the corner but Mary Ugg, my wife. If I were capable of a written language, I’d say this spelled trouble with a capital “T.”

“I’m all set!” she said in her most cheerful Neanderthal Mom voice.

“For what?” I asked, playing dumb.

“To go hunting with you!” she said with a big smile on her face.

A few months ago we went to a marriage counselor who said we should try to do more things together if we wanted to get beyond the hunter-gatherer relationship of our youth and settle down to sustainable agriculture for our growing brood. Do I need to tell you that the person who said this was a woman?

“You can’t go dressed like that,” I said to her.

“Why not?”

“You’re not wearing any orange.”

“I can’t wear orange with this.”

She was wearing a pink jacket with a fur collar, something that would be appropriate at oral culture night or maybe a K-12 rite of passage, but not for trapping a saber-toothed tiger in a dead-end canyon. “You don’t pick hunting clothes for fashion,” I told her.

“Then what’s the point?” she said as she brushed past me, stopping only to apply some red pigment to her cheekbones before heading out the mouth of the cave.

“Hey, Mary Ugg, how’s it going?” It was my huntin’ buddy Zlug. “Is the Creature”—that’s my nickname—“about ready?”

“He’s bringing up the rear, as usual,” she said with a sarcastic tone.

“As if,” I said as I came out of the cave. “If I added up all the time I’ve spent waiting for you to get dressed it’d be longer than the Paleozoic era.”

“You comin’ with us?” Zlug asked her, a guano-eating grin on his face.

“Yep,” said Mary Ugg. “I’m tired of letting you guys have all the fun.”

“Okay by me,” Zlug said with a shrug of his shoulders. He gave me a look that said “You’re whipped.”

We headed out to the woods and found a narrow pass between two boulders. “Let’s dig a pit here,” Zlug said. “It’ll be like shooting pterodactyls in a barrel.”

We set to work and—surprise, surprise—Mary Ugg didn’t exactly break an arm rolling up her coat sleeves to help.

“Aren’t you going to pitch in?” I asked her.

“Looks yucky,” she said. “Isn’t there something—um, nicer—I could work on?”

Zlug looked at me, and I looked at him.

“Uh, I guess you could arrange some bushes in front of the pass so the stupid prehistoric animals won’t see the pit,” Zlug said.

“Okey-dokey,” Mary Ugg said as she went to work. A half-hour later she had created a floral arrangement to hide our hole, complete with topiary trees trimmed in the shape of the Earth Mother Goddess. Sheesh.

“Voila!” she said with pride. “Now what do we do?”

“We sit and drink mead and wait for an animal to fall in,” Zlug said with anticipation.

“Bo-ring!” she replied. “I’m going to work on a primitive article of clothing,” she said as she took some sewing out of her bag.

Zlug and I sat there, sipping from time to time, waiting for something to kill—no luck.

“Maybe they smell us,” I said after a while.

“You’re right,” Zlug said. “I brought something for that,” he said as he scooped a handful of last year’s gazelle guts out of a bag and smeared it over his body. “This stuff is a mastodon-magnet.”

“What’s that smell?” Mary Ugg said, looking up from her rudimentary needlework.

“It covers our scent,” I said.

“I didn’t think anything could smell worse than you do,” she said as she held her nose, “but I guess I was wrong.”

Zlug shushed her, and we turned our attention to the gap between the rocks. It was a giant bear, walking on all fours, nosing around the plants.

“Neat—let me go first!” Mary Ugg said as she grabbed the stick out of my hand. She crawled out on one of the rocks, drew a bead on the bear, raised the stick over her head, wound up and—smashed Zlug in the head, killing him instantly.

“Oops,” she said sheepishly as the bear ran off. “I kinda missed, didn’t I?”

“You killed him, you dingbat!” I yelled at her. “What am I going to tell his wife?”

“Uh—he died doing what he loved?”

 

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Let’s Get Primitive.”