Winter Keeps Us Warm

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

--T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Eurasia, 8685 B.C. The hunter-gatherer known as Ber awoke with a start. The first slivers of morning light had begun to crack the frigid darkness and he was aware, first, of his empty stomach, and then, his feet. They were painfully cold. Somehow, as he slept, he had kicked off the furs he had carefully arranged the night before, and he was irritated. He knew he had done this himself because there was, at present, no female companion to blame for the chaos of his bed. He grew annoyed at the thought. With some stiffness he pushed himself erect and headed toward the near-extinguished fire at the center of his dwelling. With a stick he jabbed the fading embers. Ber quickly saw he needed something to burn if he was to enjoy warmth again, not to mention a full stomach. This meant leaving the safety of his dwelling and his annoyance flared again.

As Ber walked out into the growing glare of the sun his feet began to tingle. Now that it was early fall his thoughts turned to how he had passed much of the previous winter, alone and nearly starved, walking as many miles each day as light and stamina afforded just to find shelter and food. He had traveled a very great distance. It had been his good fortune finally to have come across a small settlement of fellow humans—-a clan—-who, despite not speaking his language, had given him meat and a warm place to sleep. They seemed pleased to have him in their midst but Ber preferred nonetheless to sleep with his flints and arrows within easy reach and even plainer sight. The village had obliged him by keeping a safe distance. With the arrival of spring, Ber made it clear he would move on, and while the clan offered him what provisions they could, they did not press him to stay.

Ber searched for dry kindling and thought of the one thing that might have persuaded him. A female: young, rotund, with a pleasing face and piercing eyes. It had been a long time since Ber had mated; his last female succumbed three winters ago to cold and starvation. During his first days in the village the female had approached him cautiously at first but with growing assertiveness. She expressed curiosity about his quiver of arrows, indicating through limited channels of communication that she wanted to know where he had found stone so different from that of her own people. He had proudly shown her his collection of flints and she had demonstrated an unusual interest in such matters for a female, examining his handiwork with a sharp eye. In return she showed Ber where in the vicinity he could find fish and berries. She even managed to communicate the location of a hive of bees, which, when the thaw came, would produce a thick amber liquid--the taste of which, through very amusing nonverbal gestures, the female was able to characterize as nothing short of intoxicating.

As weeks passed his desire to lie with the female grew overwhelming. He had not mated physically since his last female had died, and this female obviously wanted him to lie with her, as much as Ber’s limited knowledge of such things allowed him to understand. She gazed at him often and intently, even when others were present; when they were close she brushed parts of her body against his; she lingered in his presence when they were alone, as if hoping for an invitation of some kind or another. In the end Ber did not lie with her. He wasn’t sure why. The image had generated a vague sense of fear in him, as though mating with her guaranteed he would one day be alone again. But try as he might he simply could not think his way through this particular paradox.

By now Ber had gathered a sparse collection of kindling and made his way back to his dwelling. Thinking about the female had somehow sharpened the annoyance he had felt since dawn, an annoyance which he seemed incapable of shaking despite the rapidly warming air. He did not understand why he should feel irritated when she remained both in and out of his thoughts. He also did not understand why, when the time came, he could not bring himself to leave the area entirely. He had found a remarkably dry cave in the nearby hills, protected from wind and rain and predators, yet within a day’s journey of the village. He convinced himself that such a find was rare and he would be foolish to pass it up, especially since food and water were abundant in the valley. Such thoughts always left him feeling uneasy, but again, he found it difficult to determine exactly why. At times he could see in the distance the smoke from the clan’s fires and felt secure in the knowledge that they were there. But approach he did not.

After Ber had built his own fire he gathered his quivers and flints and went to hunt for food. Ber enjoyed hunting. It made him feel sharp, keen, in synchrony with everything he saw. It was the stalking he especially enjoyed, and he was expert. He reveled in the euphoria of being skilled and knowing that he was skilled, as if he were watching himself from some privileged perch and being very impressed with what he saw. He knew almost in the very marrow of his bones when to stop, move, lunge, breathe, attack . . . or when to lie impossibly still and wait.

Ber did not enjoy killing. The harmony he felt while stalking his prey was always shattered the instant flint pierced flesh. It was not that he felt sorry for the creature—-he needed to eat like any other animal, after all-—it simply seemed to Ber that there should be some other, more fitting ending, something more in keeping with the intense pleasure he experienced right up to the moment he dealt the death blow. It was another paradox he could not resolve and thus another source of irritation, just like the female from the village. He knew enough to recognize that the source of both problems originated somewhere inside his mind, in vague images and fleeting impressions, which sometimes caused other sensations in lower parts of his body. He felt these sensations wash over him now, from head to stomach, as he trudged back to his cave with a small, black squirrel impaled on his short spear, body still quivering. His love of hunting and his distaste for killing were manifest in the manner he treated the flints he always kept in a pouch strung across his body. He kept his flints in exquisite condition, sharpened and ready. But when the time came he was always loathe to employ them. The thought struck Ber that he would now have to re-sharpen the flint upon whose accompanying spear the squirrel had now ceased to squirm. Ber absently shook his head, as if to dislodge the unwelcome and intruding thought, but to no avail. He grunted aloud in annoyance.

While hunting the next day Ber found himself somewhat farther from his dwelling than usual. He had been stalking a roe deer. The deer was magnificently antlered, quick and agile. It had also been exceptionally difficult to track. The deer had led Ber far from his cave in the hills, and he had lost all awareness of time and place. He found himself now half-hidden behind a large grey boulder, which was atop an even larger but more gradual, grassy slope. Ber was completely absorbed in watching his prey graze in front of him. Suddenly, an unfamiliar noise from somewhere behind him assaulted his ears, jarring his concentration and frightening the deer, who bounded off into nearby brush. Stunned, Ber whipped around without standing up.

Mid-day had brought with it rapidly advancing clouds, and the resulting cover permitted sound to travel long distances but prevented a clear view of the scene. Ber saw afar off, by the edge of a stream, what appeared to be two figures, one male and the other female. The female was being pursued by the male, and she emitted loud, high-pitched squeals whenever her companion made glancing contact with her with his huge, outstretched hands. Ber watched, fascinated, what he assumed was some kind of intimate ritual known only to the two. The male was clearly larger, stronger, and faster, but the female was much cleverer, and she managed to elude capture several times by heading one way and darting in the opposite direction at the last possible moment. Somehow the male did not ever anticipate her properly, and his frustration mounted as she taunted his clumsy, lumbering movements. He was persistent, however, and knew that she would tire eventually. She did. As soon as her timing was off a fraction of a second the male grabbed hold of her left arm, snapped it sharply, and pushed her roughly to the ground. Ber looked away. He didn’t care to watch further, even if he could see that far. He gathered his flints, crossed over the small hill, and began his journey home without having bagged the spectacular roe deer. A familiar feeling of annoyance flooded over him.

After several moments his senses were jolted by a piercing scream. He turned and ran back to the crest of the small hill he had just abandoned. Crouching down to conceal himself, he watched with a mixture of shock and disbelief as the male pounded his right fist repeatedly into the female’s body and face, his left hand holding her firmly by the hair. For variety, he kicked her in the side, hard; her only means of defense seemed to be chilling screams and her right hand, which she threw up or down too late to protect either her face or body from her attacker’s enormous fist. Ber watched for several suspended seconds, impotent and transfixed, before he was capable of reacting to the scene. Suddenly he stood erect and bellowed loudly—an instinctive, primal yell—that carried halfway across the valley. The male jerked around, fist in midair, and glared at Ber through squinting eyes. At length he let go of the female’s hair, as if bored with the sudden turn of events, and finally jogged off.

The female crumpled to the ground, and after making a feeble, one-armed attempt to crawl, soon collapsed. Ber assumed she had fallen unconscious. He began to size up the situation, trying to decide if it was worth his energy and time to see to her. In the midst of his deliberations the clouds parted, and Ber suddenly realized with horror that the female lying on the ground in front of him was the same female he had met over the winter. Without thinking he scrambled down the side of the hill as fast as he could. As he approached, he could see she was bloodied but still breathing. Her clothing was torn, her legs scratched and bruised, and her left arm was savagely twisted and likely broken. It took the remainder of the afternoon but Ber finally managed to get her back to his dwelling in the hills.

In the ensuing days Ber cared for her diligently. She healed well but retained a small scar on her right cheek that she sometimes ran her fingers over when she grew thoughtful. There was very little communication between them, not just because they did not speak the same language, but because neither seemed inclined to define their current situation. Ber did not ask her about the circumstances under which he had found her and she did not volunteer any information. She did not ask him to let her stay and he did not ask her to leave. As late fall blossomed into winter the two simply began to forge an unspoken alliance against the cold and the hunger and the solitude.

Weeks grew into months. Ber noticed small changes in her body and manner, as well as a gradual swelling in her stomach that seemed to shift even her very center of gravity. She said nothing although she was acutely aware of his eyes resting more frequently on her middle. Ber saw this and it angered him that she did not acknowledge his blatantly inquisitive stares. One morning she awoke to find Ber lying on his side, looking intently at her. He patted her middle, a bit more roughly than intended, and emitted an angry sound. He was satisfied these gestures adequately conveyed his annoyance. Her middle, after all, had continued to expand and he wanted an explanation. She met his scowl with wide eyes but did not move or make a sound. Finally, she blinked. He softened slightly, frowned, and shook his head. He rubbed her belly more gently, and grunted. Suddenly, with a yelp, he withdrew his hand and sat bolt upright. He looked at her with shock and concern. He snorted loudly, and nodded toward her stomach. Something beneath her skin had shifted disturbingly.

To his utter amazement she rolled onto her back and burst into uproarious laughter. He snapped and then growled at her and she abruptly stopped. She gazed at him with a curious mixture of profound pity and deep affection. She reached up and gently stroked his chest and he relaxed somewhat. With one hand now resting on his chest, she moved the other hand down to her stomach, lifted the edge of her tunic, and began to rub her belly in a circular fashion, slowly. He followed her hand and watched in fascination as round blips and bubbles erupted randomly under the surface of her skin, as if a small, frantic animal were trapped in a pouch and trying desperately to escape. She eyed him, hopefully. He was too enraptured by the motions of her body to notice she was looking at him expectantly. With uncharacteristic hesitance, he laid a hand where he last saw movement—-to the left and slightly south of her belly button—-and gasped as something small and hard grazed his palm. Suddenly her entire stomach jerked wildly with the force of a shifting presence, and Ber looked at her, stupefied.

Trying bravely but unsuccessfully to contain her amusement, she nodded. With gestures and small noises she confirmed what now began to dawn on Ber: she was with child. Since his last female had not borne a child, and since he lived alone, it was not something he had considered, not in a thousand years. He had not always lived alone, however, and thus had a rudimentary understanding of the pains and risks of childbirth. Strange images and sensations flooded, uncontrollably, over Ber: knowledge of what she would go through in bearing the child; fear she would die, like his last female. A deep sense of frustration washed over him then, a feeling which entirely gripped him and which rendered him impotent by its unrelenting assault, it seemed, on his very being. His frustration soon turned to rage as he confronted the truth about whose child it was. In all the months of living in the same dwelling and sharing the same bed he still had not been capable of mating with her. But it was not this painful fact that had struck a deep chord of betrayal now sounding through him. He sensed instead that the universe had shifted, irreversibly, in a way that wrested control from him and left him in the hands of forces beyond his grasp. He felt nothing but endless waves of the same sick, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach he experienced when killing an animal he had stalked all afternoon. It was more than he could bear. In confusion and pain and anger he jumped up, turned, and ran out into the morning mist.

*********************************************

She had watched him undergo these various transformations with mounting disconsolation. When he finally bolted her disconsolation turned to utter dismay. She replayed in her mind all that had occurred in the last few months, seeking to understand Ber’s behavior and what she had done wrong.

When Ber had brought her to his dwelling months before, she had floated in and out of consciousness, her body pinned under furs and skins, for the better part of two days. When she finally came to she was aware, first, of intense pain in her left arm and then a general ache throughout her entire body, and she had been frightened. Unable to emit more than a series of low groans, the sounds nonetheless brought Ber, who had been tending to his flints and to the fire, to her side. He crouched down and searched her bruised face for telltale signs. Of what, he had only a vague notion. Her eyes began to flutter as she struggled to adjust to the shifting, flickering half-light of the cave. She knew only that she was not alone and that she was in terrible agony. She was terrified. With mounting dread she had sensed the presence of another being hovering over her. Covered with furs all she could manage was to turn her head frantically from side to side and utter soft moans of pain. It was then that Ber reached out, grasped both sides of her face, and made her look directly into his eyes. She immediately froze. Tears of relief had trickled down her battered and swollen face.

Not long after she had regained her strength she knew she was with child. Almost simultaneously she knew she had to lie with Ber, although this impulse was best described as instinctual. Not that she was not drawn to Ber for other reasons, and would have mated with him anyway. And the gratitude she felt because he had saved her life was immense. That he had rescued her was not the primary reason she wanted to mate with him, however. Something else pressed hard on her, something she urgently felt in her very cells, intangible but real, that told her if she did not lie with him the safety and security she now enjoyed would be in jeopardy. To her it was a simple but unyielding matter of her own and her unborn child’s survival. Now that she was to care for another life, she needed Ber to claim her in that way, and soon.

She tried everything she could think of to encourage him. She knew that if she looked at him in a certain way, with a particular intensity, she could draw him to her; it was all that was required with many males. She put aside the distracting thought that it had not worked with Ber before. It did not work now either, but she did not let rejection deter her. And rejection it was: she was painfully aware that he had noticed her gazing at him but chose not to respond. She touched him, frequently. He moved away. Her belly began to protrude and she became even more desperate. Several times, while lying in bed, she pressed herself against his back and nuzzled her face into the base of his neck, pretending to be cold. He ignored her. Worse, with every attempt she became more convinced of his increasing discomfort. She believed he even began to genuinely dislike her. He became sharp with her; he was constantly irritated and annoyed. He spent more time hunting than before. She told herself that this was only because the days were growing longer and warmer, and food was becoming more plentiful, but the lie did not satisfy her. She saw that his eyes began to rest more frequently on her stomach. In one final attempt to persuade him to lie with her she walked right up to him and placed her mouth directly on his. She groped for his hand and brought it to her breast. It shocked him at first, and he had backed into the wall of the cave. It seemed to her that for a moment he relaxed his body and began to respond to her, but the moment soon vanished. He broke her grip. Shaking his head he had gruffly pushed her away and avoided her eyes for the remainder of the day. She did not try to entice him again after that, and a palpable feeling of despondency had settled over her.

This morning when Ber had manifested genuine confusion at the movement of the baby in her womb, a spark of hope arose within her and she had laughed for the first time in a very long while. But hope quickly evaporated as she had watched understanding cross his face, then fear, then frustration, then rage. After he had fled she had wept inconsolably.

He did not return until after night had fallen. To Ber’s immense relief, she was asleep. He gathered his flints and quivers and a few provisions, and escaped out into the dark.

In the morning, she awoke with a palpable feeling of dread. She knew intuitively that Ber had gone, even before she noticed the missing quivers and flints. She was saddened to note that this turn of events did not surprise her. She quickly and pragmatically assessed that she would not long survive on her own, and that she was fast approaching the time of her delivery. She looked out across the valley and judged the distance from the dwelling to her clan’s village. She looked down at her stomach and absentmindedly ran her fingers across the scar on her cheek. She was grateful that it was spring, and that the weather had finally turned warm.

*****************************************************

North Yorkshire, England, 2008. In late August, a doctoral student in archeology from the University of Manchester, digging at a brief distance from the Star Carr site near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, made a startling discovery: fantastically preserved human remains from the Mesolithic era. His professor, Dr. Grace Connolly, along with her graduate students, had been invited to supervise the dig after a local farmer had literally stumbled across a skull while draining a ditch earlier that spring. What made this find even more exciting was that the remains were of a female, and she had apparently been pregnant at the time of her death. The graduate student slowly and methodically peeled away thousands of years of earth to reveal the female lying peacefully on her side, as if she had simply laid down for a nap and never revived. Peering down now, he examined her thoughtfully, bones resting unperturbed in the fully-excavated site. He pondered all of the unanswered questions buzzing around in his head. Why had she ventured out alone and so far from the settlement, especially when she had been that close to giving birth? How did she die? How is it she came to be so miraculously preserved?

A ruckus from a second site several hundred yards to the north snapped him back to the present. A fellow student was waving her arms frantically and calling for his attention. He waved his own arm in brief acknowledgement and jogged briskly over to her. Several other students were kneeling and working feverishly over a patch of ground, but what it contained he could not see.

“You’re not going to believe this, Kevin.”

“What’s that?”

“Another set of remains. Looks like a male.”

“You’re kidding!”

Kevin slid into the circle of students hunched over what was certainly a phenomenally preserved specimen. The emerging remains clearly demonstrated a large skeletal structure and skull, with what they could tell of the pelvic bones indicating that it was indeed a male. There was something about the figure’s position—-its posture-—that interested Kevin more than anything else. It looked as though he had died, intriguingly, in the act of reaching toward something in the distance. He was lying on his stomach, right leg extended and left knee drawn up. His left elbow was bent at a ninety-degree angle as if crawling or clawing his way forward. His right arm remained extended, palm down, fingers almost taut. What he had been crawling so earnestly after, Kevin could not possibly imagine. Several days later, when Kevin was alone at the site and carefully brushing away the dirt from around the figure’s right index finger, he instinctively looked up and followed the line indicated by the outstretched arm. It led directly to her.

Forensic science at the beginning of the twenty-first century provided Dr. Connolly and her students with a number of important facts about their stunning find. First, both the male and the female’s remains dated from approximately the same time. Second, the skin that had been so miraculously preserved around their toes and fingers revealed the pair had suffered from severe frostbite immediately preceding death. Dr. Connolly believed she would not be crossing into the realm of the fantastic to suggest that both had died during a freak spring snowstorm, the occurrence of which was not uncharacteristic for either the geography or the time period. To be exposed to such a storm without finding immediate shelter or possessing adequate clothing would certainly have led to hypothermia and death. Extensive study of the female’s remains also confirmed she had been pregnant, possibly as late as 34 weeks along. It was also curious to note that her left arm had once been broken, and that it had somehow been crudely set. Dr. Connolly reminded her students that Margaret Mead had once postulated the start of any civilization can be traced to its members' skill in setting bones, not to the emergence of tools. It's empathy, she remarked, that organizes humans.

The male’s remains yielded fewer tantalizing details than those of the female. He appeared to have been a simple hunter, caught without warning in the storm, probably while hunting, if the flints he was carrying were any indication. The flints were the only interesting thing about him: they were in excellent condition, artifacts that revealed a level of skill for the time period that, to the trained eye of the archeologist, was exceedingly rare indeed.

The most puzzling thing about the male was that no trace of clothing could be found on him, although fragments of animal skins, like ultra-aged leather, had long ago fused to the skeletal remains of the female. It was while Kevin was researching hypothermia in a medical textbook that he learned of a very curious phenomenon: it occasionally happens that those unfortunate enough to suffer death from exposure, in their last moments, paradoxically strip themselves of all their clothing. Kevin wondered if the male had not given in to this primal but ultimately destructive urge in his final extremity. In the end Kevin believed it too fanciful a notion, one impossible to conclusively determine anyway, and thus dismissed it as a decidedly unscientific hypothesis.

Ironically no one could ever verify what Kevin had intuitively grasped, if only fleetingly, about the pair of Mesolithic remains found in the farmer’s ditch.

Science could not tell Dr. Connolly and her students, for example, that the female had left the safety of her cave early on the morning of her death, prepared to walk thirty miles to the village beyond the far hills, near the shores of the eastern sea. Nor could it reveal that she had noticed at first light the grey skies that were rolling in from the north. She had furtively hoped it would not snow until she reached her destination. After fourteen miles—-nearly as much distance behind her as in front—-snow began to fall, and fall hard. It was a blinding snowstorm, the kind that falls silently, thick and fast, quickly covering everything in sight with a disorienting blanket of white. After several hours, trudging circuitously through the blizzard and slowed by her condition, an overwhelming fatigue had descended upon her. She experienced alternating periods of numbness and pain in her feet. he started to leave bloody footprints in her tracks, traces of an increasingly tenuous existence which were rapidly erased by the new-fallen snow. It became impossible for her to orient herself; all familiar landmarks were eradicated by a sheer and impenetrable screen of white. Hours passed. It began to grow dark and she had no idea where she was. She yearned desperately for shelter, to rest, to lie down, to sleep. She thought, I must rest now and when the sun rises I will be able to see again. She did not know that to give in to the urge to sleep would surely kill her. Finally, she had knelt in the cold, damp, spring snow. She gently cradled her stomach, leaned on one elbow and slowly lowered herself to the ground. Resting comfortably on her side, she placed one frostbitten hand under her head. Shaking uncontrollably she drew her knees up as far as she could. She slowly rubbed her belly until a blissful silence overtook her.

Neither had Dr. Connolly and her students any way of knowing that after Ber had retrieved his flints he spent all the next day hunting, and when night fell, he had slept fitfully under the stars. He did not really intend to stay away from her long, he just needed time. For what, he did not know. But he was, after all, an exceedingly patient man. He trusted his instincts to tell him when to return, and it was as simple as that. The next morning he awoke and sniffed the air. He smelled snow. His first thought was of her. She was alone and without much food, and he was at least a half day’s journey from the cave. For the first and only time in his existence Ber experienced the singular and expansive sensation granted only to creatures capable of empathy, of imaginatively figuring themselves in the position of another. By the time he reached his dwelling it had been snowing hard for at least an hour. She was nowhere to be found. He hoped she had gone to gather food. After a cursory jog past all of the areas in which he knew she foraged, she was still missing. His concern mounted as he frantically considered all the places where she might have gone. Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks. He knew exactly where she was. He set off after her in a full run, completely ignoring the part of himself that warned he should first wrap his feet in warmer skins and prepare additional provisions. All he had on his person was the small pouch of flints he always carried, safely wound around his middle under his tunic. He wandered the valley for hours searching for her. In the end the wind and the cold and the relentless blizzard proved too much for Ber. First frostbite and then hypothermia set in. Toward the end, and in his deranged and deluded state, he began pulling off his tunic, kicking it behind him as he inched forward against the driving snow. The only thing he did not remove was the pouch of flints he clutched to his side. Naturally, being unclothed only hastened his already inevitable demise. In the shadow of death he thought he spied her far off in the distance. He imagined himself calling to her and waving his arm in a desperate attempt to part the curtain of snow that eternally separated them. But in reality he did not move or make a sound. He died thinking, she is just ahead, she is there.

When the sun arose the next morning, the day was crisp and clear. A white blanket covered everything for miles, and the world was once again pristine and pure.