Jones and the Mammoths

  ~~~

  About six and a half months later...

  The surf lapped gently along the white sand as Jones watched the sun slowly rising. As he did every day. To his left he could see the fading moon; hanging like a mysterious silver ghost against the first blue of the morning. Soon this day could be very warm indeed. Although by now he was well used to the days of summer heat, he still enjoyed the cooling inshore breeze of dawn.

  The days were at last slowly growing shorter, the slow unwinding of the year. He was unused to the pattern of the seasons and tried to remember when he had last spent so long on ground-side; on a planet and, of course, he couldn't recall. Perhaps he had never spent this long on a planet, at least not a planet like this one, at this time. It was pleasant and he felt he could get used to it; breathing the un-recycled air and feeling the fresh salted breeze on his face. He wondered about the coming onset of autumn, and how much longer he might have to live here alone.

  Loneliness had never brought fear to him; for much of his life he had been alone and most relationships with others had been fleeting and shallow, partly through choice and partly through circumstance. It was not that he disliked or feared others but any closeness he saw as an encumbrance; a superficial complication he could do without. He had yet to meet anyone who could convince him otherwise. Life for him worked better alone.

  He climbed out of his wooden shelter and stretched before walking down across the sand to stoke the remains of the fire smouldering in the pit. Then he checked his salt-still, the berry baskets and that he had enough water in the metal bucket he had fashioned from the wreckage of the ship. He took a strip of dried, salted meat from a pole hanging near the fire and began to chew; its musky smoked flavour filling his mouth. It was boring to eat the same things everyday but needs must and he knew he was getting enough nutrients.

  The camp was simple; a small wooden tent-like hut with fronds and leaves to protect him, nowadays mainly from the sun, and the nearby fire pit with a crude log bench next to it. Jones slept on a bed of fur skins he had stripped from a particularly hairy specimen of mammoth. No longer did he sleep on the tree platform; he had encountered no real threats in his time here and he hadn't seen a mammoth for at least two or three months. Besides, they had rarely ever ventured onto the beach. As long as he kept the fire going, he felt safe enough. He wore just simple undershorts in the summer heat; his skin tanned and taut. Throwing another log onto the fire he noted to himself that he needed to fell another tree soon to replenish his supply.

  Just down the slope of the beach he could see the crude but intricately designed signal he had made on the flat expanse of sand above the tide mark. He had used several tusks and large bones from the mammoths that he had slaughtered, as well as branches and sections of tree trunk from the nearby forest. Huge jaw bones lined with the teeth of giants nestled with tusks, ribs and femurs of inordinate size. Using these bones he had spelled the word 'drone', amongst others, along the beach.

  The message was written in Floomish; the language of the mothership's makers. The tusks and bones spelt the words and the wood filled in gaps and gave accents to the language. The words were easily large enough to be seen from space on a clear day and even with cloud cover the drone scanners would spot it; their algorithms programmed to easily distinguish natural patterns from unnatural ones. Once the message was spotted, sub infra-red and powerful automated resonance scanning systems would easily locate his ship lying at the bottom of the sea, where it was rusting slowly on the sea bed.

  He was just contemplating whether to have a swim before he began hunting and scavenging for the day when a faint bleep sounded from the shelter. He retrieved the remote scanner and read the de-coded green message on its screen. It told him that the rescue drone pod had entered orbit and this meant it would probably arrive in minutes; once it had spotted his crude message.

  With a sigh he stood up and headed back to the shelter to begin retrieving his suit and belongings. As he did, he could just hear the faint distant hypersonic scream of the pod skimming the atmosphere in search of the crash site.

  An hour or so later he sat in the anti-g seat of the pod and began checking the HUD and controls. There were three messages, two with high priority. The first was a warning that he needed to decontaminate the area he had been living in and eradicate evidence of his presence; science comps on the mothership were very insistent about not leaving evidence of pre-civilisation insertions. Indeed the mothership was very picky about leaving any kind of evidence behind whenever travel back in time occurred. His was a life of secrecy and stealth.

  This time however he allowed himself to smile at how fussy the mothership was; he hadn't exactly seen any evidence of higher intelligence in his time here. He had explored the surrounding areas and the most sophisticated life forms he had encountered were simple quadrupeds, like the hairy tusked mammoths he had hunted and used to survive. This version of Earth, and he was fairly sure it was Earth, was still a long way off from civilisation. Surely a few bits of rusty metal and the sunken ship couldn't affect the future?

  Jones was still learning about the vagaries of time travel and wasn't sure he really understood it all. It suited him to leave all that to his employer and the mothership.

  The second message was from Erica, and this made him lose the smile. He missed her for sure but he couldn't think about his rival assassin right now, despite how much he wanted her. Emotion was only useful if you could put it to your own advantage. With harsh self discipline he put her out of his mind and looked at the third message.

  This was the most disturbing. The mothership was going to leave its location very soon; it had just calculated a possible, if unlikely, detection of its location, and that was something that neither he nor the mothership could allow to happen. The mothership had standing orders to never allow itself to be detected, even if that meant leaving Jones behind. Jones himself had been detected when he had been shot down, and such situations were unacceptable, unexplained and unnerving. Jones didn't like it and it meant he needed to leave right now and any clean up of his presence here would have to wait.

  He let out another sigh and looked one last time at the beach that had been his home for all these solitary months, making a mental note to explain to the mothership that he would have to return later for the cleanup, better equipped and with a full shuttle of decontamination gear.

  Jones closed the auto-hatch with a flick of a virtual button and instructed the drone to take the fastest stealth route back to the mothership.

  At that moment a small family of the hairy beasts appeared at the very edge of the forest, returning at last; weary from their northward summer migration. They lifted their trunks and looked over in the direction of the unnatural whine of the drone pod's engine powering up. The mammoth's trunks curled and sniffed towards the beach, almost as if they were waving him goodbye.

  In the marshy reeds near the stream, where it joined the beach, a small man crouched, naked except for several braided twines tied around his dark-skinned body; small sharpened sticks, arrowheads and daggers of wood attached to the twines in various places. His long matted hair tied back with the same twine. A finely worked willow spear lay on the ground next to him. He scratched his sparse beard; keen eyes peering through the reeds at the pod as it began its ascent. Slowly at first, the machine rose from the white sand before accelerating exponentially. The man stood warily and shaded his eyes as his gaze followed the drone's vapour trail until it disappeared high into the blue sky. He turned when the drone was gone, picked a suitable reed and began chewing it. Licking his finger, just like Jones had done when he was hunting, the man checked the wind; it was gently blowing out to sea, a perfect sign. He scanned the beach and the forest and then let out a quiet whispering 'whoop' noise and the twelve strong hunting party appeared out of the reeds and began to fan out silently towards the mammoth family quietly feeding near the trees. They raised their spears as they crept low through the undergrowth.