20,000 BC, Foothills of the Mammoth Mountains.
Frodo sat in the alcove of the cave, staring at his own hands.
In another life these hands had drafted blueprints for turbines. They had calibrated CNC machines down to the micro-millimeter.
He had been a senior mechanical engineer, a master of alloys, thermodynamics, and rational physics.
Now? He was a twelve-year-old boy sitting on a bed of rotting moss, turning a piece of flint over in his palm.
He still didn’t know how he had died.
A factory accident? A car crash on a highway? The memory was a blank wall.
The only thing that mattered was the present. This was the Stone Age.
At first, when he had woken up in this body, he had thought it was a hallucination. But the pain in his stomach and the sharp cut on his thumb from testing the flint were too real.
The technology tree of his new people was primitive: bone needles, sinew thread, stone hand-axes that were chipped rather than ground.
Fire was a precious, communal resource, guarded by the elders at the center of the cave network.
The pelt covering the entrance to his family’s small alcove was suddenly shoved aside.
A woman hurried inside. She was thin, her cheekbones sharp and prominent against hollowed cheeks.
This was his mother. In this life, her name was Kaelen.
She dropped to her knees beside him. Her hands were trembling as she grasped his shoulders.
"Frodo," she whispered. "They are leaving. The hunters are gathering in the main cavern."
Frodo frowned. "Leaving? Now? The sun is barely at its peak, and the deep frost is setting in. The deer herds haven’t returned to the valley."
"That is why," Kaelen choked out, a single tear carving a line down her cheek. "There are no deer, Frodo. The scouts returned empty-handed again. We have no dried meat left in the caches. The elders spoke with the master hunters this morning." She swallowed hard. "Your father... your father is going with them. They are going after the Great Tusk."
Frodo’s breath hitched in his throat. The Great Tusk?
It didn’t take a genius to know exactly what she meant.
He had seen the rounded tracks by the riverbed two days ago. He had seen the tufts of hair caught in the thorny brush near the water line.
A mammoth.
A full-grown woolly mammoth weighed anywhere from six to eight tons. It had a layer of subcutaneous fat, covered by a dense undercoat and long guard hairs.
His tribe, a group of perhaps twenty able-bodied men, were armed with wooden spears tipped with fire-hardened points or, at best, chipped flint.
"He can’t," Frodo said, his voice surprisingly steady. "He will die, Mother. The spears will break. The beast will crush them."
"They have to try!" she sobbed, pulling him against her chest. "If they don’t, the whole tribe starves before the next moon. But he is a fool! The beasts are angry right now. They are aggressive, protecting their young from the wolves."
Before Frodo could formulate a response, the hide flap was ripped aside once more.
The shadow of a massive man filled the entryway, blocking out the light.
It was his father, Tor.
Tor held a two-handed thrusting spear.
"Tor, please," Kaelen begged, refusing to let go of Frodo. "Wait for the snows to melt just a little more. The deer will come back to the salt licks."
"And we will be frozen bones for the scavengers by then!" Tor snarled. "The elders have spoken. The scouts spotted a lone bull separated from the main herd near the frozen lake. It is our only chance to secure enough meat and fat to survive the deep freeze."
Tor’s gaze snapped down to Frodo. The boy hadn’t cowered or flinched at the noise. He was sitting perfectly straight.
It unnerved the older man. For the past three days, ever since the boy’s fever had broken, his son had looked at the world with the piercing eyes of a strange elder.
"Get up, boy," Tor commanded. "You are twelve winters old. Soon you will bleed as a hunter of the tribe. Come to the ridge. You will watch how the blood is drawn."
"Tor, no! He is too young to watch a slaughter!" Kaelen cried out, reaching for her husband’s ankle.
"He comes!" Tor roared. He turned his broad back. "We march in a breath. Do not linger, Frodo."
The walk up the icy path to the western ridge was excruciating. Frodo’s bare feet, wrapped only in thin scraps of leather, were numb within minutes. But he didn’t complain.
Around him, the men of the tribe moved in silence. There were no battle cries, no boastful hunting songs to appease the spirits.
They understood this encounter as well as Frodo did; they knew that at least a third of them wouldn’t return from this mountain alive.
Tor stopped at the edge of the cliff and pointed down with a finger. "There."
Standing near the edge of a half-frozen glacial lake, pawing at the permafrost to reach the sparse moss beneath, was the mammoth.
Looking at it, the extreme curvature of the canines, and the distinctive sloping back, the picture finally became clear.
Mammuthus primigenius. The Woolly Mammoth.
Based on the climate, the rudimentary tool usage he’d observed in the cave, and the presence of this specific species in this density, he wasn’t just in some generic ’Stone Age.’
He was in the Upper Paleolithic. Roughly twenty to thirty thousand years before the common era.
Right in the heart of the Last Glacial Maximum.
He watched in silence as the hunters began to fan out, descending into the valley.
Tor looked back at him one last time before disappearing into the snow-dusted brush.
They were going to try to surround it.
Frodo stood alone on the hilltop. At that moment, he could do nothing to save him. All he could do was watch from above and pray that the trap the hunters had set would somehow overcome the beast’s power.
But as he watched the creature raise its snout and roar, rattling the snow falling from the distant pines, a resolve settled in Frodo’s mind.
If they survived today, if Tor somehow managed to climb back up that mountain, Frodo swore he would change everything.
He had to find a way to kill the beast next time without spilling a single drop of their own blood.