Title: THE MASTODON DIARIES
Author: aka "Jake" 

x-x-x-x-x-x

CHAPTER SEVEN 

"It's not here," Mulder said, his fingers searching for the 
old, familiar scar on his shoulder.

"Where did it go?" Scully sat up on the sleeping skins. 

The fire had burned down to a few cherry-red coals, making it 
difficult to see in the dark hut. 

Mulder crawled from the bed, located his jacket, and dug into 
the pocket for his flashlight. Light in hand, he aimed its beam 
at his chest, high and to the left, where Scully's gunshot had 
marked him -- presumably for life.

Not a trace of his scar remained.

"What happened to it?" she asked.

Shaking his head, he shined the light on his left thigh, where 
Lucas Henry's bullet had pierced him four years ago. A quarter-
sized scar still puckered his skin. "That one's there." He 
crooked his knee and inspected the exit wound. "Front and 
back."

Scully crawled closer and ran her fingers over his now 
unblemished shoulder. "This is impossible."

"Maybe not." 

His paranormal radar was picking up a signal the way it always 
did when they encountered an X-File. He reached around Scully 
and probed the back of her neck, feeling for the telltale bump 
of her implanted chip. 

It was there. Strange. He'd expected it to be missing. Okay, so 
maybe his radar was off today.

Then again... 

"Turn around," he ordered.

"Why? What's the matter?" She did as he asked and presented him 
with her bare back. 

He lifted her hair and ran his light over the tiny scar on her 
nape, then down her spine to her tattoo. "Um...Scully? Your 
tattoo..."

"What about it?" She craned to see over her shoulder. "It's 
there, isn't it?"

"It's there." He traced it with his finger. "Sort of."

"What the hell does that mean?" 

"It appears to be..."  -- he leaned in for a closer look -- 
"faded."

"Faded?"

"Mm hm."

She pivoted to face him and he found himself unexpectedly 
spotlighting her bare breasts. He clicked off his light.

"Sorry."

She drew a sleeping skin over her lap to cover herself. 
"Mulder, any number of factors can cause a tattoo to lose 
pigment: substandard inking practices, improper follow-up care, 
overexposure to the sun--"

"Have you been sunbathing in the nude, Scully?"

Her frown told him she was in no mood for jokes. "Skin types 
vary. Some don't hold ink. The fact that my tattoo is fading 
means nothing in and of itself. It certainly doesn't mean we 
were physically altered by the...the...time travel thing."

"Thing?"

"Event, phenomenon, whatever."

"Then how do you explain the disappearance of my scar?" 

"Scar tissue can lighten with age."

"Scully, it's completely gone!" He turned the flashlight on it 
again. Satisfied it truly wasn't there, he said, "I've got a 
theory, if you'd like to hear it."

She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself. "I'm 
listening." 

"I think we're regressing."

"Regressing?" 

"Growing younger." He held up a palm to stall her certain 
objection. "My scar and your tattoo are the most recent marks 
on us respectively. Now they're gone -- or almost gone in your 
case -- suggesting a shift to an earlier version of ourselves." 

She raised an eyebrow. "One missing scar and a faded tattoo are 
your proof that we're growing younger?"

"Suppose time travel isn't like stepping through a door, where 
you're either on one side or the other."

"Then where are we?"

"In the broadest sense, we may still be *in* the door. In 
what's known as Flux Space."

"Flux...? Mulder, my undergrad work was in physics. Yet I've 
never heard of Flux Space."

"It's a bit...mystical."

"Ahh." Her expression told him she was translating that to mean 
"paranormal bunk." 

"Flux Space isn't a portal, per se, but is thought to be an 
inter-dimension that could serve as one. It doesn't conform to 
conventional physics."

"Why am I not surprised?"

"Believers in the phenomenon claim it can be reached by way of 
technologically-created dimensional portals, or through 
naturally occurring sub-space anomalies like worm holes."

"And what do these believers say is inside 'Flux Space'?"

"That's just it...nobody knows for sure. But proponents of the 
theory hypothesize that it's not a physical 3-D space or even a 
4-D space-time."

Her tongue skated across her lower lip as she considered such a 
possibility. "Fifth dimensional." 

"Exactly. But here's the 64-thousand dollar question: Is the 
fifth dimension a spatial dimension or a time-related 
dimension?"

"Time has only one dimension." 

"Does it? A second dimension might explain how we could have 
traveled here to the Pleistocene where we're moving forward in 
time while concurrently experiencing a secondary physical 
regression, which is out of sync with the first." 

"You're saying we traveled backward 12,000 years...and are now 
moving simultaneously forward and backward in time?"

"That's what I'm saying. We're traveling along two time 
continuums at once."

Although she continued to frown, he could tell she was 
evaluating his premise, picking through it for reasonable 
details while casting aside those that would contradict logic. 

"All right. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Flux 
Space exists and is responsible for putting us here in the 
Pleistocene, where we are moving forward in time, interacting 
with the locals, while also regressing, going back to younger 
versions of ourselves..." She looked into his eyes. 
"Regression? Really?"

"Kinda makes your head ache to think about it, huh?"

She didn't smile. If anything, her expression became more 
serious. "Where will it stop, Mulder? Will we regress to 
infancy? Conception? Past lives?"

He was certain there was a Shirley MacLaine joke in there 
somewhere, but at the moment he was drawing a blank. "I don't 
know. You shot me in '95. Lucas Henry shot me in '94. If we're 
growing younger, the scar on my leg should be the next to go. 
The amount of time it takes for that to happen should tell us 
when to expect additional changes." 

Like the disappearance of his fillings and his vaccination 
scar, or the reappearance of his tonsils and his... He glanced 
down between his legs at his circumcised penis.

"Hopefully, we'll find a way back home before the process goes 
too far," he said.

He noticed Scully was staring at his penis, too, with an odd 
expression on her face. 

"What?" he asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious.

"I was just thinking about my...um...infertility."

Now his eyes fell to her lap. 

If his Flux Space theory proved correct, then at some point 
she'd regain her ability to bear children. 

He wasn't sure how he felt about that. 

Back in their own time, he'd have been happy for her -- 
especially after what had happened to Emily -- but here in the 
Ice Age... Panic fluttered in his gut at the idea of getting 
her pregnant. He didn't want to have children...anywhere. Here 
it would be a mistake of gargantuan proportions. Giant snakes, 
saber-toothed cats, killer cavemen -- danger seemed to be 
lurking behind every damn Pleistocene tree. How the hell do you 
keep a kid safe in a place like this? 

Add to the mix the threat of regression...well, it would be 
downright irresponsible to bring a child into this world. 

They'd have to be careful. Watch for signs that Scully might be 
regressing back to a time when she was still fertile. The chip 
in her neck -- when it disappeared, then no more sex...it was 
as simple as that.

Christ, who the hell was he kidding? No more sex? Fuck. 

This had to be the cruelest cosmic joke of all time. Make love 
once and God tosses a ticking time bomb into their laps. 
Literally. Hope you're having yourself a mastodon-sized laugh 
up there, Big Guy. 

For the first time ever, Mulder began hoping Scully would prove 
him wrong.

Noticing his stare, Scully hugged the sleeping skin to her 
body. "Mulder, there's an aspect of your theory that doesn't 
track."

Yes! Argue me down, Scully! "Only one?" 

Her wry smile told him she believed his theory was in fact 
riddled with holes but she was willing to limit herself to just 
one for now. "My tattoo is only a little over a year old, much 
more recent than the scar on your shoulder. Yet it's still 
visible, whereas your scar has completely vanished."

Good point. "Maybe we're regressing at different rates. Some 
people age faster than others. Doesn't it make sense we might 
regress differently, too?"

"It doesn't make sense that we would regress at all." Her brow 
furrowed. "Mulder, you do remember being shot by me, don't 
you?"

"How could I forget?" 

"If you're growing younger, shouldn't your mind be regressing 
along with your body?"

"Losing memories at the same rate as years." Another good 
point. "I dunno, Scully, but there's some relief in knowing we 
won't be acting like children, even if we end up looking like 
them."

She cocked an eyebrow.

"Okay, so *you* won't," he said with a chuckle. "Maybe I'm 
already there."

She reached across the furs to retrieve her clothes. "Let's 
continue this conversation after we have something definitive 
to go on. Right now, I'd like to clean up. You could use a 
bath, too." 

He looked down at himself, at his thighs, his penis, the 
fingers on his right hand, all smeared with traces of her 
menstrual blood. It made him feel marked by her and he almost 
hated to wash off this tangible proof of their intimate act so 
soon.

Patting the furs, he waggled his brows. "How 'bout a quickie 
before we get dressed?"

"No, thank you." She was already pulling her camisole over her 
head. "I'll make breakfast when we get back." 

Food? Several days of unplanned fasting, followed by an equally 
unplanned but considerably more appreciated sexual encounter, 
had left him feeling famished. "You're going to cook?"

"Yes, I'm going to cook."

He scrambled to his knees and began rummaging through the furs 
for his boxers. "Which way to the bath house?"

*   *   *

Pretending to busy herself with the knot on her fur skirt, 
Scully surreptitiously watched Mulder dress. No two ways about 
it, he was a good-looking man. Long-limbed and graceful, body 
fleeced with a smattering of springy dark hair, muscles toned 
from miles of running. Whether dressed in a suit or buck-naked 
like now, he was tempting. 

She remembered once describing him as "cute" to one of her 
girlfriends. An understatement, to say the least. She'd ended 
the conversation by bemoaning the fact that Mulder was 
excessively devoted to his work and all his good looks were 
going to waste.

In truth, she didn't know that they were wasted. She really had 
no idea what Mulder did in his off hours. It was entirely 
possible, even plausible, that some other woman, or several 
women, enjoyed his company when he wasn't chasing mutants and 
EBEs with her. Just because he didn't come on to her in any 
serious way didn't mean he was living the life of a monk.

To assume he was having no sex because she was having no sex 
was projecting. She was the one who had made a conscious 
decision to devote her life to their work and ultimately to 
him, not the other way around.

His love life -- past and present -- remained as mysterious as 
Flux Space to her.

Not that she'd shared any intimate details of her past 
romances. He knew only a little about Jack, and nothing at all 
about Daniel. He'd made some assumptions about Ed Jerse.

The fact of the matter was she and Mulder rarely talked about 
their personal lives.

She hoped that might change after this morning. Making love 
with him had been wonderful, satisfying on both a physical and 
emotional level. Lying beneath him, having him inside her, had 
felt--

"Santa must be in town," Mulder said, nodding toward two 
bulging backpacks that sat just inside the hut's closed 
entrance. 

His legs disappeared into his jeans. When he zipped his fly, 
Scully found herself suppressing a sigh. God, he was clueless 
about his effect on her.  

Next to the two packs was an odd stack of fist-sized stones, 
piled one on top of the other, looking like a small, granite 
snowman.

Scully went to examine the packs while Mulder scrounged through 
the furs for his shirt.

"Klizzie must have left these." She pulled a carved comb from 
the first container and recognized it as the one Klizzie had 
used two nights ago at the lake.

Mulder located and sniffed his shirt. Wrinkling his nose in 
disgust, he discarded it and searched for his jacket instead. 
"Did she leave any food?"

There was a basket of strawberries in the second pack. Scully 
still associated their smell with Mulder's near-death 
experience, so she gladly passed them on to him. "Help 
yourself."

He showed no similar distaste and ate greedily while she 
explored the contents of the packs.

As she removed each item, she held it up for him to see. 
"Flint, presumably for starting fires. Several razor-like 
tools..." These appeared very sharp. She touched a finger to 
one, testing its edge. "You might be able to shave with it."

"I'm willing if you're willing," he said, talking around a 
mouthful of berries.

The idea of unshaved legs and underarms didn't thrill her, but 
these Pleistocene razors looked a little too risky. She set 
them aside, deciding they must have some purpose other than 
hair removal. "What do you suppose this is for?" She held up 
what appeared to be the bladder of a rather large animal.

"Wine skin?"

"Or water bag." She set it aside. "Three bone hooks, two fur 
blankets--"

"And a partridge in a pear tree," Mulder sang. When she frowned 
at him, he shrugged and said, "We're opening presents."

She uncoiled a roll of stiff twine. "Catgut...I think." She dug 
deeper. "A couple of spear points. And two soap roots--"

"Those things are soap?"

"Yep. Oh, look!" She held up a buttery- soft piece of deerskin. 
"A change of clothes for you."

He inspected the garment through squinted eyes. "I'm supposed 
to wear that?"

"It's the latest in Pleistocene fashion." She tossed him the 
loincloth before unpacking a wad of cattails.

"What are those for?" Finished with the last of the berries, he 
passed back the empty basket. "You didn't want any of those, 
did you?"

"No, thank you." She took the basket and ignored his cattail 
question. Sex partner or not, she didn't feel like discussing 
the finer points of feminine hygiene with him. Instead she 
listed the contents of the second pack: "Dried meat, nuts...and 
four dead squirrels."

Using his best Homer Simpson impersonation, he hummed, "Mmmmm, 
squirrel." Then he indicated the odd stack of stones with a 
wave. "What do you suppose those are for? Pass the nuts, 
please."

She slid the nuts his way and studied the stones. Their 
presence was clearly no accident. Somebody -- most likely 
Klizzie -- had placed them there on purpose. Although their 
meaning was unclear, it was obvious Klizzie wanted to help 
them, and her generosity was touching.

"Let's get cleaned up," she said, collecting the soap roots and 
comb, planning to take with them with her to the lake. Almost 
as an afterthought, she grabbed the water bag.

Mulder tossed one last nut into his mouth, wiped his hands on 
his pants and rose to follow her out of the shelter.

Outside, they were surprised to find the village was completely 
deserted. All that remained were half a dozen large semi-
circles of mastodon bones -- jawbones from the look of them, 
interlocked and stacked to form the underlying supports for the 
abandoned huts. Stripped of their hides, the shelters were now 
roofless. Not a spear or basket or fur blanket remained in any 
of them.

The campsite must be seasonal, she realized. Hunter-gatherers 
were nomadic people who pursued migrating game. They followed 
their food source, rather than staying put and raising their 
own stock and crops. Agricultural societies wouldn't evolve 
until much later in history.

She pivoted, wondering which direction the tribe had taken. 
"How are we going to find them?"

"Who says we should?" 

"Mulder, we need this group's help. They know how to survive 
here; we don't."

Concern creased his brow and she guessed he was thinking about 
how close he'd come to dying a few days ago.

"Look at that." He pointed to another pile of fist-sized stones 
on the far side of the clearing. "Someone left us a trail of 
bread crumbs."

God bless Klizzie, she was showing them the way.

*   *   *

Hiking through a foggy, lowland swale, Klizzie and Gini 
followed the Clan northeast toward the next range of hills. The 
group moved slowly, every member laden with heavy packs. The 
ground smelled pungent and peaty, and countless irises dotted 
the surrounding marshland with bright, purple flowers. 
Dragonflies the size of Klizzie's hand darted around the 
travelers' heads. When the Clan passed too close to a flock of 
nesting geese, the birds rose up from the reeds in a frenzy of 
flapping wings and raucous calls. 

Klizzie stopped to collect several fist-sized stones, which she 
stacked one on top of the other. Then she placed three more in 
a line upon the ground, pointing in the direction of Tabaha 
Lodge.

Gini watched her arrange the stones. "Will Muhl-dar and Day-nuh 
find us?"

"You have asked me that question more times than a goose hen 
hides her eggs. My answer is still the same: I 
do...not...know." Although Klizzie loved Gini like a daughter, 
the girl's constant pestering was beginning to exhaust her 
patience. "If Muhl-dar and Day-nuh are meant to find us, then 
the Spirits will guide them."

"With the help of your stones." Gini grinned at her.

Klizzie returned the girl's smile. "Yes, with the help of my 
stones."

Turkey Lake was several days hike from Toh-ta Lodge, and it 
would be lucky indeed if the newcomers could find their way, 
even with the help of Spirits and stone markers.

"They might return to their own clan, you know," Klizzie said.

Gini frowned at the idea, her young brow puckering with worry. 
She looked so much like her brother Dzeh that Klizzie's 
impatience melted at the sight of her.

"They will miss the Mastodon Feast," Gini said, clearly 
disappointed.

"Perhaps Eel Clan has a Mastodon Feast of its own."

"With food and gifts and competitions?"

"Why not? Owl Clan is not the only clan to have feasts with 
races and dances and--"

"Blanket toss!" 

The girl's eyes shone with excitement. Blanket toss was the 
highlight of most Mastodon Feasts. To play, thirty or more 
Clan members took their places in a circle, grasping the 
rolled edges of a large blanket made from the skins of 
mastodons. The object of the game was to use the blanket to 
toss a person as high into the air as possible, while the 
player tried to keep his balance. Skilled players did flips 
and, while in the air, they threw out trinkets of ivory, 
tobacco and other gifts to the onlookers. As soon as a player 
lost his footing, another would climb onto the blanket to take 
his place until everyone -- men, women and all but the 
youngest children -- had had a chance to participate.

Blanket toss was not the only fun to be had at a Feast. There 
were cord pulling contests, spear-throwing competitions, long 
distance races, sprints, betting games, storytelling, jokes, 
songs...

And lots of food! 

Last spring, Turtle Clan had hosted an impressive event. This 
year, Klizzie's kin from Badger Clan were waiting at Turkey 
Lake to host the Feast. 

Klizzie felt enthusiasm blossoming in her breast at the thought 
of the upcoming celebration. She was eager to see her Aunt Ho-
Ya and her many cousins. Oh, there would be hugs and happy-
crying and plenty of opportunities to talk.

She rose to her feet, retrieved her pack, and began walking 
again. 

Gini hurried after her. "Klizzie, what is it like to lay with a 
man?" she asked.

Where in the Spirit World had *that* question come from? 
Evidently, Gini was growing up faster than Klizzie realized; 
she tended to think of her as the little four-year-old girl 
she'd met soon after becoming Dzeh's mate. But in truth, the 
child was nearly old enough to have a mate of her own. In just 
two or three summers, Gini would be Joined and move away from 
Owl Clan. Her going was sure to leave an aching emptiness in 
Klizzie's chest. She had taken care of this small orphan ever 
since Gini and Dzeh's mother had died. Saying goodbye to the 
girl would bring many tears. 

"If you love a man, there is nothing better than to lay with 
him on his sleeping skins," Klizzie explained, giving Gini a 
mother's advice. "He can fill you in a way that is hard to 
imagine. It is very pleasant." 

Gini didn't appear convinced. "You love my brother this way?"

Klizzie glanced ahead to where Dzeh was walking and joking with 
several of his cousins. He carried an enormous pack on his back 
and a long spear in his fist. He was muscular and confident. It 
made Klizzie's heart feel light to look upon him. "Yes, Gini, I 
love him. I love him very much."

*   *   *

Trailing Scully through the woods, Mulder suddenly burst into 
song. "Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine with 
all the chicks?" 

"Shaft?" she asked, playing along but not going so far as to 
actually sing. She picked her way between tree trunks and 
giant ferns toward the lake, while he hung back and watched 
her hips sway.

That cute ass is mine, he thought. "Can you dig it?"

"You're in a good mood." 

Yes, he was in a good mood. Correction -- he was in a *great* 
mood. Sex in general had a positive effect on his disposition, 
but sex with Scully had turned out to be the ultimate attitude 
adjuster. The memory of their joining displaced any and all 
concerns about time travel, congested lungs or fading tattoos.

At the moment, the one and only question that nagged him was 
"When are we gonna do it again?"

"So, Scully, when are we gonna do it again?" he asked, cutting 
to the chase.

She glanced over her shoulder at him. "You might want to give 
yourself a little time to recover, G-Man. Your respiratory 
system is compromised. Having sex after an injury like 
yours...well, you're lucky the parasympathetic and sympathetic 
outpouring didn't kill you this morning."

*Kill* him? He tagged her shoulder. "Can you think of a better 
way to die?"

She humored him with a tiny smile before continuing along the 
path. 

He smiled, too, as his eyes drifted once again to her curvy 
backside. Her hips were wrapped in animal fur and her gun was 
tucked into her skirt at the small of her back. On top she 
wore her clingy, black camisole. Her legs and feet were bare 
and, sweet Jesus, she looked sexy!

"They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother. Shut your mouth! 
Talkin' 'bout Shaft."

Scully led them to the lake shore and stopped at a sun-
bleached log, spiky with long-armed branches, where she set 
down her things -- two soap roots, Klizzie's comb, and the odd 
water bag.

Mulder had brought his dirty turtleneck with him, intending to 
soak it clean in the lake along with his other clothes while 
he bathed. He also carried the loincloth Klizzie had left, to 
wear while his clothes dried. Dropping his shirt on the 
ground, he draped the loincloth over the tree, and then began 
to strip out of his clothes. He hung his jacket and belt with 
holster and gun on the branch next to the loincloth, then 
added his pants and boxers to his pile of dirty clothes. He 
decided to keep Dzeh's necklace on. It looked manly, he 
thought, and made him want to beat his chest like a gorilla.

Must be the sex that had him so puffed with pride today.

"Shaft! Right on." 

He turned to face the lake, naked, hands on hips, feeling like 
the king of the jungle as he surveyed his territory.

Off to his left, a heron high-stepped cautiously along the 
shore, eyes trained on the water as it hunted for fish. A 
bullfrog hid in the nearby reeds, harrumphing the hollow notes 
of a bass cello. Crickets whined and peepers chirped. Birds 
squawked, cackled, and trilled from every tree branch.

To his right, an enormous beaver lodge created a spiky island 
in the lake about thirty yards out. Lily pads clotted the cove 
in front of it, where dragonflies the size of hummingbirds 
hovered like helicopters. The sun was just beginning to peek 
above the treetops.

The sky was clear, the air smelled sweet, and life was damn 
good.

Particularly since Scully was undressing right in front of 
him. His eyes slid to watch her carefully remove her clothes, 
taking her good ol' sweet time like she was performing a slow 
motion strip-tease.

She caught him looking. "Don't you have clothes to wash?"

Reluctantly, he gathered his laundry, palmed one of the soap 
roots and strode to the water's edge, where he waded in up to 
his ankles.

"Bomb's away!" he said, releasing the clothes. They landed 
with a slap in the lake beside his feet, and then inch-by-inch 
sank beneath the surface as air burbled through the fabric. He 
gave the pile a quick swish with his left foot before 
abandoning it and splashing into the water up to his thighs. 

"Shee-it!" he hissed, surprised by the lake's cold 
temperature. Goosebumps sprouted across his shoulders and 
arms. Wasting no time, he dove headfirst beneath the surface.

He'd always loved swimming in the ocean off Martha's Vineyard. 
He and Sam often spent entire afternoons in the water, there 
or at Quonochontaug, practicing underwater handstands and 
somersaults, competing in breath-holding contests, or just 
letting the waves carry them along, their laughter lost in the 
sound of surf. Their mom lovingly called them "my two sea 
monsters" when they returned home, pruney and sun-kissed from 
their day at the beach. By September their lean bodies were as 
brown as pennies.

Mulder surfaced for air and rolled onto his back to float. His 
muscles relaxed as the water buoyed him. The lake was chilly, 
but felt silky smooth, and the morning sun beat down on him, 
warming his face and chest.

Through half-closed eyes, he watched Scully bathe near the 
shore. Sitting waist deep in the water, she soaped her hands 
and then lathered her chest, neck and arms. Foam floated away 
from her in lazy spirals as she rinsed, and her wet skin 
gleamed in the early morning sun, confounding his eyes and 
overwhelming his heart with its shimmery beauty. 

Jesus. Just yesterday, she'd been Scully, his partner and 
friend; today she was Scully, his lover...her body no longer 
off limits.

Halle-fucking-lujah.

All too soon she was finished with her bath and rose from the 
water, naked and dripping. The sight kindled a fire in his 
veins and awakened his slumbering penis. As she waded from the 
shore to the log, he let his legs sink below the lake's 
surface to hide his growing erection. Treading water, he 
watched while she combed her wet hair.

When are we gonna do it again, Scully?

"I'll fix breakfast while you soak," she called out to him. She 
quickly put on and adjusted the odd belt Klizzie had given her 
for her menstrual flow, and then wrapped her fur skirt around 
her hips.

"More strawberries?" he asked, hopeful.

She pulled her camisole over her head. "Sure. More 
strawberries," she said before tucking her gun at the small of 
her back and leaving him to finish his bath.   

*   *   *

"They are splitting up," Klesh said, watching Red Hair and her 
companion from the far shore. Tse-e stood beside him in the 
shadows of a shagbark tree. "You follow Li-chi Tse-Gah and 
bring her back; I will take care of her mate."

"No, she is a Spirit, Klesh. I am not going after her." Tse-e 
tucked his wounded hand beneath his arm. Fear burned as 
brightly as fever in his eyes and he shivered like a frightened 
rabbit at the sight of the red-haired woman.

"Then *I* will go after her. You take care of her chindi 
companion," Klesh sneered. "Do you think you can handle him?"

"Y-yes." Tse-e nodded with uncertainty. "Do...do you want me to 
kill him?"

"Yes!" Klesh hissed. "Of course I want you to kill him. Bring 
his head to me. I want to see for myself that he is dead." A 
nasty smile deepened the scar on his left cheek. "Then Li-chi 
Tse-Gah will be my mate and tend my hearth."

*   *   *

Mulder's heart thrummed in his water-filled ears. He closed 
his eyes and let himself drift in the lake, feeling much the 
way he had earlier this morning after making love.
God, he had wanted to lay with Scully forever...

Basking. 

He had never "basked" with anyone before, not even when he'd 
been married to Diana. Their pre- and post-coital activities 
had consisted primarily of rushing off to find the next 
paranormal anomaly. Sex was a wham-bam-I-heard-there-was-a-UFO-
sighting-in-Phoenix-let's-go kind of activity. It was performed 
in hotel rooms and rental cars, while they waited for lab 
results, autopsy reports or returned phone calls. Who had time 
to bask when there were cow mutilations or Bigfoot sightings to 
investigate? 

Not that the sex hadn't been passionate. It had. Sex with Diana 
had relieved the stress of the job, and for a while, it 
relieved Mulder's loneliness, too. She was warm and beautiful 
and it was pleasant to have her in his bed, fending off his 
insomnia and his nightmares. With Diana in his arms, he found 
he could sleep without dreaming...for a while, at least. 

He had believed he was in love at the time because he had 
wanted to be in love.

As it turned out, she had loved the idea of love, too, albeit 
for different reasons than his own. She was hoping for a normal 
kind of life -- a house, kids, dog -- none of which meshed with 
their endless pursuit of the truth. It took him a while to 
figure out that their quest had actually been only his and not 
hers. And although procreation topped her wish list, having 
kids never made it onto his at all. He believed he possessed 
neither the skill nor the fortitude to raise children. Not 
after what had happened to Sam.

When Diana began pressing him to start a family, he balked, 
which made her dig in her heels. At an impasse, she finally 
left him. 

THWACK! The slap of a beaver's tail startled him from his 
reverie. He righted himself and glanced around. Nothing 
appeared out of the ordinary...except the beaver, which was 
about three times the size of its modern day descendants. 
Fortunately, it was swimming away.

Deciding to wash up, Mulder headed to shallower water where he 
stood knee deep and began rubbing the soap root between his 
palms.

"Whaddaya know? This stuff actually works." 

Lather overflowed his hands and he used it to slather his 
chest, neck, and arms. It felt good to scrub away several days 
worth of sweat and grime. Scully's blood vanished from the 
creases of his knuckles as he dug black dirt from beneath his 
caked fingernails. Jesus, how had she been able to stand him? 
He must've smelled funkier than a three-day stakeout. 

Wanting to remedy the situation, he went to work, scouring his 
scalp, his face, his armpits. Lather corkscrewed down his 
limbs, dripped into the water where it drifted in foamy 
mountains around his knees. When he was finished sudsing, he 
squatted and ducked his head beneath the surface to rinse his 
hair.

He was underwater when the attack occurred. Out of nowhere, it 
seemed, someone leapt onto his back and tightened a brawny arm 
around his neck. Startled, he rose up, lifting his assailant 
with him. He tried to dislodge the man by falling backward, 
sinking them both to the bottom.

The maneuver worked and the other man released his hold. 
Mulder turned on him and grabbed his wrist. The man struggled 
to get free, thrashing his arms and legs, churning the weeds. 
Bubbles jetted from his nose as he managed to loosen himself 
from Mulder's grip. He surged to the surface. Mulder popped up 
beside him. Both men filled their lungs with air.

Mulder recognized the small man. He was one of the two 
Neanderthals who had abducted Scully back in the ravine.

"Son of a b--" Mulder's fist shot out and connected with 
Little Big Man's jaw.

The caveman's teeth clacked together and blood spurted from 
his lips. Mulder struck again, this time a left that clipped 
the Neanderthal's nose.

More blood darkened the lake. Little Big Man howled, then 
torpedoed into Mulder, ramming the top of his skull at 
Mulder's throat. Mulder gasped for air and sank. He back-
peddled underwater, fighting his way toward the shallows, 
where he managed to get his feet under him and stand. Little 
Big Man bulldozed him again and caught him in a crushing bear 
hug. Both men grappled for an advantage. Unable to free 
himself, Mulder rolled to his left, dragging the cave man down 
with him.

In retaliation, the determined Cro-Magnon sank his teeth into 
Mulder's right shoulder.

A well-placed elbow dislodged him, but not without a price. 
Mulder's skin tore painfully from the bite. "Motherfucker!" he 
shouted. He seized the caveman by the wrist, twisted his arm 
into a hammerlock, and pressed his thumb hard into the gunshot 
wound in his palm.

Little Big Man shrieked and his knees buckled. Mulder pressed 
harder, hauling him out of the water and up the beach. He kept 
the man's arm twisted behind his back and continued to squeeze 
his injured hand until they reached the driftwood log. Blood 
poured from the Neanderthal's open mouth as he yammered and 
bawled.

Mulder dug his handcuffs from his jacket pocket and hooked one 
of the bracelets around Little Big Man's wrist. Then he hauled 
him to a nearby tree, where he twisted his arms behind the 
trunk and locked him in place with the other half of the 
cuffs.

"Where's your fucking buddy?" Mulder growled, not really 
expecting an answer and already guessing Conan had gone after 
Scully.

The small man spat a mouthful of blood at him.

"Suit yourself." Mulder quickly gathered his gun and abandoned 
the blubbering caveman to find Scully. 

*   *   *

The strawberry field stretched from the lake and its fringe of 
forest all the way up to the top of the western hills where 
Scully and Mulder had spent the night of the fire. The slope 
was long and gradual and dotted with stone outcroppings that 
rose like islands from a sea of windblown grass. Sweet-smelling 
clover perfumed the air, while butterflies fought the breeze in 
search of nectar, their wings winking shut whenever they 
managed to grab hold of a bobbing flower blossom. 

About a third of the way up the slope, a herd of fifty or more 
mastodons were gathered around a brand new baby. They formed a 
living bastion as solid as any stone fortress, their brawn 
belying their familial instincts and gentle sense of community.

One enormous female watched over them. Ten feet tall from 
shoulder to ground, she appeared insuperable. It seemed beyond 
possibility that a human hunter could bring down such a beast 
with little more than a stone spear and his cunning.

Only the leader seemed interested as Scully stepped cautiously 
out from under the trees into the field. It kept an eye turned 
her way, but didn't stray from the herd.

Watching to be sure the mastodons remained undisturbed, Scully 
hiked slowly uphill until she came to a patch of strawberries, 
where she knelt and began to fill her pack. After several 
minutes, she relaxed a little. Bees buzzed lazily around her. 
Plump, ripe berries stained her fingers as she picked. The 
mastodons seemed unconcerned by her presence and her mind soon 
wandered to other concerns.

Like her tattoo. 

Although she wasn't ready yet to concede to Mulder's theory of 
Flux Space, she did find the disappearance of her tattoo 
apropos, since her reason for getting it in the first place was 
fading, too. She no longer saw herself as the same person she'd 
once been -- the rebellious woman, trying to assert her 
autonomy...to the point of foolhardiness.

Ironic she'd been so eager to defy Mulder back then, given the 
current state of their relationship. Only a year ago, she'd 
felt stifled by him, and fearful she might lose her direction 
while blinded by his passion for the truth. Resistance had 
seemed the only option at the time.

The Ourobourus once symbolized her desire to move forward with 
her life. Now, the image struck her as absurdly self-absorbed, 
arrogant in its overt exclusiveness. What she once perceived as 
a representation of continual progression, now gave her the 
impression of being unattached to anything or anyone, self-
contained and intersecting with nothing but itself.

Fingers blood-red and her pack weighted with fresh fruit, she 
turned her efforts to picking greens. The only type she could 
identify as safely edible were dandelions. The others didn't 
look a thing like the variety Klizzie had brought to them while 
Mulder was recovering.

Scully missed Klizzie's expertise. The tribe obviously 
possessed extensive knowledge about their environment: food, 
medicinal herbs, predators...both animal and human. She and 
Mulder would need the group's collective wisdom if they were to 
survive for any length of time here. Without their generosity 
and the medicine man's competence, Mulder would surely be dead.

The memory of Mulder's near-death brought a lump to Scully's 
throat and tears to her eyes. Finding Klizzie and the others 
had been a godsend and it was paramount she and Mulder rejoin 
them as soon as he was strong enough to travel.

A sudden trumpet from one of the mastodons startled her and she 
looked up to see the females closing ranks around the baby. The 
leader tossed her enormous head and delivered a second loud 
warning.

Scully reached behind her back for her gun, in case they headed 
her way. She was stopped by the grip of strong fingers on her 
wrist and a menacing growl in her ear.

"Li-chi Tse-Gah," a man's voice rasped, before he yanked her to 
her feet. He twisted her arm and forced her to face him.

It was the scarred man.

She glared up at him. Had his weasely companion gone after 
Mulder?

He wrestled the gun from her hand. She responded by punching 
him hard in the groin.

When he howled and doubled over, she struck him again, this 
time in the face. The blow knocked him sideways and sent her 
gun spinning from his fist. It landed with a thud several yards 
away in the weeds.

She lunged for it, but found herself falling when he latched 
onto her leg. His grip held and she hit the ground hard. The 
gun remained just beyond her reach. She kicked at him, inched 
closer to the gun and managed to snag it with outstretched 
fingers.

Scarface crawled on top of her and pinned her in place. His 
giant hand clamped over hers and tore the gun from her grasp. 
He sat up, straddling her and weighting her to the ground. She 
lashed out, caught hold of the gun, struggled to pull it from 
his hands.

The gun discharged, firing at the sky and missing his right ear 
by millimeters. He jumped, astonished. Still holding the gun, 
he stared at it in disbelief. His expression transformed into 
one of panic. Eyes bulging, he hurled the weapon into the 
woods.

"Dammit!" she shouted, watching the gun vanish into the nearby 
trees.

She was trapped beneath him, pinned by his muscular thighs. He 
was panting; unconstrained fury darkened his face.

"Chindi!" he barked at her, then grabbed her by the hair. He 
bent over her until their noses almost touched. "Chindiiiii!!" 
he roared, spraying her with his spit.  

Struggling to free herself, she felt the ground start to 
vibrate beneath her. Scarface sat bolt upright, evidently 
feeling it, too. Silence hung in the air for one empty second 
before the thunderous crash of stampeding mastodons brought 
them both scrambling to their feet.

The enormous female was charging straight at them. Several more 
followed, heads bowed, tusks thrust forward. Their speed was 
astonishing.

Scully's legs went numb at the sight. Should she run? Stand 
still? Every instinct urged her to get out of their way, but 
her feet seemed to have rooted themselves to the ground.

Scarface bolted for the woods. The mastodons kept on coming. 
The ground shook, rattling Scully's teeth. God, she was going 
to be trampled.

She began to recite the Lord's Prayer.

"Our Father, who art in heaven..."

The air churned with dust and panic.   

"Hallowed be thy name."

She could smell them, musty and fierce and hell-bent on 
protecting their own.

"Thy kingdom come..."

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, they were right on her, around her, a 
thundering wall of reddish-brown, broken only by a blur of 
polished ivory and the ferocious glares of a dozen protective 
mothers. Their running jolted her spine, quaked the ground, 
shook her faith...

"Thy will be done..." Thy will... Thy will be...

The noise was deafening! Warning trumpets, pounding feet, the 
crash of underbrush as mastodons bulldozed around her, heading 
into the forest. Vegetation exploded, branches cracked, whole 
trees fell. The animals razed an alley several yards wide as 
they continued their forward charge.

Scully stood staring after them for several minutes, too 
astonished to move, even after they were no longer in sight. 

"Thy will be done..."

She looked behind her, upland across the field. The herd and 
the baby were gone. Only zigzagging trails and the tart smell 
of trampled grass remained.

"Sculleee!" It was Mulder, calling to her from the woods. 

She turned toward his voice, but couldn't find her own to cry 
out to him.

It didn't matter. He was walking out of the forest, completely 
naked, one muscled arm hooked around the scarred man's neck. 

Scully's legs finally gave way and she dropped to her knees.

*   *   *

"I say we leave them right where they are." Mulder picked a 
hunk of squirrel meat from between his teeth before grabbing 
another diminutive drumstick. The food tasted good, but four 
itsy-bitsy squirrels were not going to fill him. He sucked the 
tiny bone clean.

Conan and Little Big Man sat sullen and silent a few yards 
away. They were handcuffed to an enormous mastodon skull and to 
each other. Mulder had looped the cuffs through one of its eye 
sockets, using the skull as a sort of Pleistocene ball and 
chain.

Conan sported a nasty looking shiner where Mulder had walloped 
him "just because." Little Big Man was in worse shape, although 
his mouth was no longer bleeding. Mulder was pretty sure he'd 
broken the bastard's nose, as well as his teeth, since both his 
eyes were swelling shut and he whistled whenever he inhaled.

Scully removed the last squirrel from its spit, trying not to 
singe her fingers. "They could die if we leave them like that."

"So? What do you think they intended to do to us?" He tossed a 
bone into the fire and reached for a third helping of 
strawberries. "Besides, if they work at it, they can break 
free...eventually."

"That could take them days. They'll need food and water."

"Awww. Let 'em drag their sorry asses down to the lake when 
they get thirsty. Any greens left?"

She passed him the pack.

"Mulder, I just don't think--"

"Scully, a few days ago they tried to rape you," he reminded 
her. The memory made him want to blacken Conan's other eye. 
"They've tried to kill me twice." 

"So...we should do the same? We're living by the law of the 
jungle now, is that it? Kill or be killed? Since when did we 
turn into them?"

"When they held you to the ground and--" He stopped himself. 
His anger was meant for them, not her. He lowered his tone. 
"There's no due process here. What do you want to do?"

"If you're well enough, I'd like to go after Klizzie and the 
others."

"I'm good to go right now. And unless you let me kill these 
two, I have no intention of staying another day here." Seeing 
her shocked expression, he added, "That was a joke. Sort of."

She split the last squirrel in two and gave him the bigger 
half. "You really think they can free themselves?"

"If they're resourceful. It'll take them some time, but that'll 
give us a head start." He could tell she didn't like the idea. 
Finished with his meal, he wiped his hands on his bare thighs. 
"It's not like we have a lot of options."

"No, I guess not." 

"Come on then. I'll help you pack."

"Where are your clothes?"

"Still in the lake. I have to go back to fill the water bag 
anyway."

Mulder rose stiffly and walked over to the two prisoners. 

He bent low enough to smell Conan's sour breath. Keeping his 
voice dead calm, he whispered, "If you ever touch her again," -
- he paused to stare directly into the scarred man's eyes -- 
"I'll rip your fuckin' head off."   

*   *   *

Klizzie settled beside Dzeh on the sleeping skins. They were 
camped in the open under a clear, starry sky. She loved this 
time of night, hearing the sounds of the Clan all around her, 
some already snoring, others talking in low voices or singing 
lullabies to their children. She felt safe when surrounded by 
her family, especially with Dzeh by her side.

He was lying on his back, his muscled arm pillowing her head.

"The stars are bright tonight," he said, studying the sky. 

She looked up, too, content to watch the stars as he lightly 
stroked her bare shoulder.

"Gini asked me earlier today what it is like to lay with a 
man," she said.

Dzeh turned to look at her with surprise. "She did?"

"Mm hm."

"What did you tell her?"

Klizzie laughed. "My answer was for women's ears only," she 
teased.

"Women? Gini is only eight Mastodon Feasts old. She is no 
woman. Not yet."

"She will be soon, Dzeh. Some girls begin their Moon Time as 
early as nine."

He grunted, pretending to be offended. "I do not want to hear 
such talk. That is for 'women's ears only.'"

Again Klizzie laughed and then poked him gently in the ribs. 
"Seriously, it is time for you to start inquiries about a mate 
for her."

"No, my sister is still a little girl...a baby."

"She is not. Not if she is asking questions about laying with 
men."

Now he chuckled, a gravelly sound deep within his chest that 
loosened the muscles in Klizzie's legs and filled her abdomen 
with fire. 

"Fine," he said, "I will make inquiries at the Feast. I think 
your Aunt 'A-Chin' might have a son about Gini's age."

She slapped his arm. "My Aunt's name is not 'Nose.' It is 'Ho-
Ya' -- 'Smart.'"

He shrugged. "Well, she has a big nose. And she is not so very 
smart, as I recall."

It was true. Ho-Ya seemed to have no common sense whatsoever. 
She could get turned around in her own lodge. And she had made 
Badger Clan ill on more than one occasion when she added bad 
mushrooms to the evening meal. But she did have a good spirit 
and several sons with more sense than their mother. Perhaps one 
of them would be suitable for Gini.

Klizzie scanned the starry sky, as if she might find a mate for 
Gini there. "Tell me the story of Ant Clan," she asked, never 
tired of hearing about the Spirits and their heavenly world.

"Ant Clan? Klizzie, I have told you that story more times than 
I can count."

"Please, Dzeh? The Mastodon's Eye is visible tonight."

The Mastodon's hazy eye was little more than a faint smudge in 
the sky, visible only on the clearest nights. 

"So it is." 

"Tell the story," she urged.

Keeping his voice low so as not to disturb the others, he 
began. "Long before the days of Owl Clan, Badger Clan, Beaver 
Clan and all the other clans we know today, there was only one 
clan and it had no name because its people did not worship 
animal spirits. They killed and ate whichever beasts they 
desired without asking permission or sending up prayers of 
thanks. One day they speared and butchered a baby mastodon, and 
after eating their fill, these wasteful people fell asleep, 
leaving the remainder of the carcass for the buzzards." Dzeh 
traced a lazy circle around Klizzie's right breast, bringing 
her nipple to a point. He whispered into her ear, "I can think 
of better ways to pass this night than the telling of old 
tales." 

"Finish the story," she said, her voice made faint by his 
caress.

He drew a second circle around her left breast. "The Mastodon 
Spirit became angry at the clan for their carelessness. So, 
first taking the form of a mortal man, he sneaked into their 
camp while they slept and lay with the mate of the clan's 
leader. After planting a child in her womb, he returned to his 
place in the heavens. Nine moons later, the woman gave birth to 
a son who eventually grew up to be a powerful shaman." Dzeh 
tickled her inner thigh. "Are you sure you want me to continue 
the story?"

"Yes." 

He edged his hand up under her skirt. "One night, the powerful 
shaman had a dream, and in his dream his real father, the 
Mastodon Spirit, took him up to heaven and showed him the world 
of Spirits. He told his earthly son, 'Teach the clan to respect 
the Spirits. If not, they will be forever cursed.' So the 
shaman did as he was told and returned to the clan the next 
morning to tell them they must pray and give thanks to the 
spirits. The clan was lazy and refused to do as they were 
asked. Again they killed a mastodon and left its carcass for 
the buzzards, making the Mastodon Spirit angry. Sssoooo..." 
Dzeh's thumb brushed the curls at her groin.

She felt wetness flow from her womanhood. "Dzeehhh..."

"The Mastodon Spirit turned the people of the clan into ants 
and his son, the shaman, into a giant armadillo and he put them 
all in the sky where he could keep his eye on them." 

Much to Klizzie's disappointment, Dzeh removed his hand from 
between her thighs and pointed at the sky. 

"And there they are still," he said, "in the northeastern sky. 
To the east of the Steadfast Star, the Mastodon Spirit waits 
for the clearest nights to open his eye and watch the cursed 
Ant Clan crawl like a white river across the heavens while his 
armadillo son waits to devour them."

The legend was a warning. The ways of the Spirits must be 
followed or there would be a price to pay.

Klizzie had heard gossips in Owl Clan say that she was barren 
because angry Spirits willed it. They claimed her childlessness 
was a reprisal for her role in Dzeh and Klesh's falling out 
four summers ago.

In the years before Klizzie became Dzeh's mate, Dzeh had been 
Trading Partners with her cousin Klesh. The men's partnership 
created a necessary alliance between Owl Clan and Badger Clan, 
which had been enemies for many generations.

Unlike Hunting Partners, who were almost always kin, and Joking 
Partners, who were usually cross-cousins, Trading Partners were 
not related by blood. The purpose of their partnership was to 
create a bond between two clans that had no family ties, 
ensuring inter-clan cooperation during periods of peace, and 
tempering the amount of killing in times of war. A clan's 
survival often depended on the benevolence of its non-kin 
partners. 

To reinforce such affiliations, Trading Partners exchanged 
protection, food, goods and even their mates. Everybody agreed 
the tradition of exchange -- mate-exchange in particular -- 
was essential to the alliance, ensuring an intimate bond 
nearly as strong as blood between partners, their co-mates, 
and their respective clans. Ritual mate-exchange and the 
security it offered to clans benefited everyone. 

The waters had been muddied, however, when Klizzie and Dzeh 
became mates because she was Klesh's first cousin. Yes, it was 
custom for Trading Partners to exchange mates, but it was also 
taboo for Klizzie to be co-mate to her own kin. So of course 
Dzeh had to insist his partnership with Klesh be dissolved.
 
Klesh had become angry and refused to recognize the breaking of 
the partnership. He went so far as to demand Klizzie lay as his 
co-mate during the Mastodon Feast, ignoring the fact that she 
was his cousin. 

She had been only fourteen at the time, but that was no excuse. 
She knew she shared responsibility for what happened. Shame 
burned her cheeks at the memory of her transgressions against 
Owl and Badger Clans, against Dzeh.

Lying beside Dzeh now, looking up at the stars, Klizzie 
reminded herself it was pointless to relive those old days in 
her head. They were "fish down the river," as the elders would 
say. Klesh had been banished and his partnership with Dzeh 
ended. All Klizzie could do now was pray to the Spirits for the 
same forgiveness she had received from Dzeh and Owl Clan. 

"Were you marking our trail today, Klizzie?" Dzeh asked, 
returning his hand to her leg.

She nodded. "Yes." 

"For Muhl-dar and Day-nuh?"

Would he chastise her for her actions? Her eyes went to the 
strange bracelet he wore on his wrist, Muhl-dar's bracelet. She 
wanted to touch it, but kept her hands still for now.

"Yes, I left the markers for them."

"Klizzie..." He leaned over to kiss her nose. "You are a kind 
woman and I am hopeful the Spirits will reward you for it with 
a child this season. Then perhaps you will no longer feel the 
need to take care of orphans."

His words stung her, despite his good intentions. One of the 
orphans he was referring to was his own sister. "I pray every 
day," she said.

"Good." He cupped her cheek in his palm. "Maybe tonight the 
Spirits will listen," he said, before lowering his lips to her 
mouth. 

He rolled on top of her and she accepted his kiss. Parting her 
knees, she offered a silent prayer to the Spirits: Please keep 
Owl Clan safe; help the newcomers, Day-nuh and Muhl-dar, find 
their way to Turkey Lake; and please, please, bless me with a 
child.   

*   *   *

Somewhere in the distance a mastodon trumpeted, waking Mulder 
from a nightmare about Scully and a four-toed Cro-Magnon. He 
cocked an ear to listen. Crickets. Frogs. Owls. Nothing 
treacherous, yet he curled protectively around Scully, who was 
lying beside him on a fur blanket under the open sky. 

They were camped on a grassy hill next to one of Klizzie's 
stone markers. This was the fifth such marker they'd found 
before he had become too tired to go further. He'd fallen 
asleep almost immediately after finishing their evening meal 
and had slept soundly until just moments ago. 

"Scully. Scully, are you awake?" he whispered into her ear.

"M'now. Whassamatter?"

"I heard a noise."

This roused her. "What noise?"

"A voice. It said, 'Wake Scully up.'"

Laughter chuffed from her nose. "And why would this voice tell 
you a crazy thing like that?"

"Musta been feelin' lonely." He gave her hip an inviting 
caress.

She rolled onto her back within the circle of his arms and 
kissed him tenderly on the lips.

He wanted to make love to her again. Oh, God, how he wanted to 
make love to her.

She disappointed him by breaking their kiss to stare up at the 
midnight sky. "The stars are beautiful here."

"Mmm. No city lights to spoil the view." 

"Look, you can see the Andromeda Nebula." She pointed to a hazy 
spot east of the Pole Star.

It was true. The faint smudge that marked Andromeda's knee was 
visible tonight. "That galaxy is the most distant object that 
can be seen by the unaided human eye," he said, rolling onto 
his back, too. He kept one arm tucked beneath her, cushioning 
her head. "It contains more than one hundred billion stars that 
are more than two million light years away from here. Did you 
know that?"

"I did."

"You did?"

"Don't sound so surprised." A smile quirked her lips. "I 
studied astronomy as an undergrad, you know."

"Astronomy, anthropology, physics...wow. Frohike was right -- 
you are hot."

Her tiny smile widened into an all-out grin. "I know Greek, 
too."

"Then you know the myth?"

"Of Andromeda? Sure. Cassiopeia and Cepheus had a daughter--"

"See them there? Cassiopeia and Cepheus? Between Andromeda and 
the Little Dipper?"

"I see them. Cassiopeia boasted about Andromeda's beauty, so 
much so, she angered the sea nymphs who prevailed upon the god 
Poseidon to dispatch a sea monster--"

"A whale."

"Right, a whale, to ravage the coast of Ethiopia. To appease 
the whale, Cepheus chained Andromeda to a rock to be devoured 
by the monster."

Awful thing to do to your own daughter, Mulder thought. An 
image of Sam and his dad intruded on his thoughts, making him 
wince. Back-peddling from the unwelcome association, he focused 
instead on Scully's voice. 

"Fortunately Perseus happened by and killed the whale," Scully 
continued. "He liberated and married Andromeda, and the two of 
them rode off on Perseus' winged horse, Pegasus."

"To live happily ever after?"

"Presumably."

God, did life ever actually turn out that way? 

His eyes scoured the heavens while his imagination fleshed out 
the constellations. Pegasus, Hercules, Ophiuchus holding the 
two ends of the Serpent. That image seemed more representative 
of life than Andromeda and Perseus riding off into the sunset. 
It also reminded Mulder in a free association sort of way of 
the mark Scully wore on her back.

"Scully, why the Ourobourus?"

"Excuse me?"

"Your tattoo."

"Oh, Mulder, I don't... Why is that important now?"

"Wasn't it always important? I mean, a tattoo is forever...at 
least, it's supposed to be. It must have meant something to 
you when you chose it."

"Yes, but I'm not sure I can explain it. I was in a different 
frame of mind at the time."

"Different how?" He honestly wanted to know.

"I was feeling like my life was at a standstill. I guess I saw 
the Ourobourus as a symbol of movement."

And what about Ed Jerse? What had he symbolized? 

Mulder flushed with unexpected jealousy at the thought of that 
man's hands on Scully. Inappropriate and irrational, he knew. 
He and Scully hadn't been romantically involved at the time, 
although, admittedly, he'd always felt a tad territorial about 
her, long before her sojourn in Philadelphia. Truth be told, 
he'd assumed an air of proprietorship the day she walked into 
his office, considering her part and parcel of the X-Files, 
and therefore "his." 

God, he could be such an ass sometimes. 

"Did you sleep with Jerse?" he asked, surprising himself. It 
was none of his damn business and he hadn't meant to say the 
words out loud, despite the fact that he'd been wondering if 
she had or hadn't ever since he'd been called to St. John's 
Hospital to bring her back from Philadelphia. Christ, it had 
scared the hell out of him to discover she'd exposed herself 
to both ergot and a homicidal maniac. Seeing her in that 
hospital room, pale as the bed linens...fear and jealousy had 
sucker-punched him. Then when she couldn't even look him in 
the eye, he'd been convinced she'd done it, gone to bed with 
the cold-blooded killer.

It had taken every ounce of his strength to hide his fury. 
Hell, he was having a hard time controlling it right now.

Scully frowned. "Is it relevant anymore?"

"No. I just wondered what it was about him that you found so 
alluring."

She didn't even hesitate before replying. "He listened to me, 
Mulder. Never underestimate the charm of a man who truly 
listens."

"I don't listen?" 

Of course he knew he didn't, not always anyway. Shit, if 
anyone was to blame for Scully's rebellious romp in 
Philadelphia, he was. He'd practically pushed her into Jerse's 
tattooed arms.

"Mulder, I got my tattoo as a reminder to move forward with my 
life."

He took a deep breath, trying to cool his unwarranted pique. 
It was water under the bridge and shouldn't bother him like 
this. "Have you?" he asked, his voice calm, belying his true 
resentment. "Since then, I mean? Moved forward with your 
life?"

"I think so." Her gentle smile helped mollify his jealousy. 
She snaked her arms around his neck. 

He tightened his hold on her. "So..." He murmured into her 
ear, "when are we gonna, you know, do it again?"

She surprised him by rolling on top of him. "Right now, 
Mulder," she said, her voice muddled with longing. 
"Right...now."

x-x-x-x-x-x
 
CHAPTER EIGHT 

Mulder keeps his eyes closed, enjoying the silky warmth of 
Scully beside him on the furs. They are spooned together, her 
naked back against his bare chest, his bent knees fitted 
behind hers, his nose buried in her hair. He inhales, deeply, 
fully, and feels himself grow hard from the unadulterated 
scent of her. Wanting to make love, he tries to wake her with 
a gentle brush of his fingers along her bare arm.

She stirs, sighs with contentment, nestles more firmly into 
his lap, which causes a delightful friction there.

"Sculleeee...," he groans. His lips caress the curve of her 
ear; his tongue searches for the lobe, finds it, sucks. She 
moans, too, and the sound flows molten in his veins, making 
him desperate to be inside her. They've made love only twice, 
yet he has already become addicted to the act, to her. Now he 
wants to make love to her everyday for the rest of his life.

He positions himself so he can enter her from behind. They 
haven't tried it this way and he's eager. He nudges between 
her thighs.

"Is this okay?" he asks, his voice almost nonexistent.

In response, she grinds against him. Oh, God, she feels good. 
His hands grope her in the dark. Hip, waist... 

His exploration stops when his fingers encounter the swollen 
expanse of her belly. She is...

Enormously pregnant.

No, this can't be. What the hell is going on? 

"Scully?" Explain this. We never agreed to it.

He sits up, rolls her onto her back only to find she isn't 
Scully. She is Diana.

His erection goes soft.

Smiling, Diana sweeps her dark hair away from her face, which 
is flushed with satisfaction. She reaches up to cup Mulder's 
cheek with her palm. "It's wonderful, isn't it? We're having a 
baby. You're going to be a father."

"No, Diana, I don't want this."

"Of course you do."

"No, I--"

"Mulder, don't question it. It's a miracle."

Diana transforms back into Scully, who is still pregnant. 

Oh, shit...shit...that son-of-a-bitch caveman is lying on the 
other side of her, his scarred hand placed on her distended 
abdomen. He sneers at Mulder, arrogant, seemingly victorious. 
In his free hand he grasps a long snake and the snake's tail 
rattles, sounding like laughter. 

Jealousy, anger, and confusion swirl through Mulder in equal 
measure. Is the caveman the father of Scully's baby? 

This isn't a miracle. It's a fucking nightmare--

*   *   *

"Mulder, wake up. You're having a bad dream." Scully stroked 
Mulder's cheek, trying to bring him out of his nightmare as 
gently as possible. 

"Scully!" he gasped. His eyes flew open; a look of panic paled 
his face. Sitting up, he groped the air between them. His hand 
stopped dead on her stomach, his fingers clutching the fabric 
of her shirt. "You're dressed."

"Yes, so are you. We wore our clothes to bed, remember? It was 
cold last night."

He appeared confused and not entirely awake. "You're not 
pregnant?"

Where the hell had that come from? "No, I'm not pregnant."

He released his hold on her shirt, collapsed onto his back and 
wiped sweat from his face. "Thank God. Wow...that was a *hell* 
of a night--"

His mouth clamped shut so quickly she heard his teeth clack. 

"You dreamt I was pregnant?"

"Uh...the details are kinda fuzzy..." His voice petered out 
and his eyes looked everywhere but at her.

"Which parts do you remember?"

"It was just a dream, Scully. It didn't mean anything." He 
closed his eyes and drew the furs up to his chin as if 
intending to go back to sleep. 

She remained sitting up. The pre-dawn sky was crimson above 
the mountain peaks. They were camped next to one of Klizzie's 
markers on a hill overlooking a marsh, where weed-choked 
waters reflected the bloody glow of daybreak.

"Mulder, you were the one who once told me a dream is an 
answer to a question we haven't learned how to ask. What 
question do you think you need answered?"

His eyes opened reluctantly, filled with worry. "I..." Again 
he stopped.

"You what?"

He took a breath and made a face that looked as if he were 
preparing to go sewer diving for flukemen. "I don't think it 
would be a good idea for you to get pregnant right now."

A flare of annoyance heated her cheeks. "I shouldn't have to 
remind you, Mulder, I can't get pregnant." 

She threw back the animal skins, intending to rise from the 
bed. 

He stopped her with a tug on her shirtsleeve. "We don't know 
that."

"Yes, we do. I don't believe in your regression theory. Your 
missing scar and my fading tattoo are not proof of anything. 
We aren't growing younger. Even if we were, it wouldn't 
necessarily mean I'd become fertile again."  

Wanting to forego any further discussion about her defunct 
reproductive system, she rose from the bed.

"Where are you going?" he asked, sounding conciliatory and a 
little nervous.

"To the marsh. I want to wash up," she said, tugging her boots 
on.

She located her jacket, then his, in the semi-dark and 
searched his pockets for the flashlight. Her hand closed 
around his jackknife. Better take it, too, since she no longer 
had her gun.

The loss of the gun still rankled. They'd spent nearly two 
hours searching for it, leaving Scarface and his sidekick 
handcuffed to the mastodon skull while they combed the woods.

"Are you *sure* he threw it this way?" Mulder had asked at 
least half a dozen times.

She grew increasingly irritated each time she answered him. 
"Yes, I'm sure." 

They both understood the importance of finding the weapon -- 
for protection and food -- but it had seemingly vanished in 
the mastodons' chaotic wake as if into Mulder's alleged Flux 
Space. Downed trees, shredded vegetation and muddy prints 
stymied their efforts, and eventually forced them to abandon 
their search.

There was some small consolation in the fact that it had been 
her gun and not his that was lost, since she'd been down three 
rounds, while his clip remained full. 

"Take my gun," he suggested when she tucked his knife into her 
pocket. "Please."

She flicked on his flashlight. "I'll be fine."

"Maybe I should come with you." He started to get up.

"Mulder, I'd prefer a little privacy, if you don't mind." 

That stopped him, as she knew it would. With a hesitant nod he 
lay back down on the skins. "Yell if you need me."

"I'll only be a few minutes."

The marsh was located approximately 600 yards downhill from 
their camp, where the land formed a shallow V between two 
sparsely treed slopes. The depression served as a catch basin 
for rainwater and snowmelt. Cattails and duckweed clogged its 
outer rim, making access to the water a challenge. 

Scully picked her way down-slope through thigh-high weeds. 
Mulder's waking words continued to nag at her as she tried to 
find solid footing in the spongy soil. It seemed muddier this 
morning than last night when she'd come down to fill the 
waterbag. She began to wonder if she'd taken the wrong path.

Mulder was right -- this wouldn't be the most opportune time 
for her to get pregnant. But if a miracle occurred and it 
happened, she would embrace the prospect of becoming a mother. 
Wouldn't he be equally pleased? He knew she wanted children; 
he'd helped her petition for the adoption of Emily. And 
although he'd never said anything outright about wanting kids 
himself, he'd been so supportive throughout Emily's illness, 
Scully had just assumed he wanted children...someday...not 
necessarily with her, but in a general sense. Had she misread 
him?

She'd also assumed their personal relationship was moving to a 
more serious level now that they'd slept together. To her, 
making love meant...well...she wasn't sure exactly what it 
meant...but it was more than being friends. 

In light of his behavior this morning, however, she could see 
they had opposing views about their intimate act. Apparently 
Mulder wasn't imagining 2.3 kids, a white picket fence, and 
"happily ever after."

It figured her dream-come-true would be his worst nightmare. 
They disagreed on so many things, why should this be 
different?

Two ducks squabbled for territory several yards to her left. 
The less dominant flew off, wings thumping the air, 
indignation nattering from its throat. She panned the reeds 
with her light. A snake slithered away from her beam.
 
She took a few careful steps forward, inching closer to the 
water. 

Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Mulder had never said 
that getting her pregnant was his worst nightmare. He'd said 
now was not a good time. 

It was possible he'd been having second thoughts about his 
regression theory. If that were the case, he might be trying 
to spare her feelings, knowing her fertility was not going to 
return. Perhaps he was worried he'd gotten her hopes up over 
nothing. He'd seen her dreams dashed once already, when she 
lost Emily.

Leaping onto a slippery stone at the water's edge, she nearly 
skidded off. Arms flailing, she caught her balance and 
steadied herself.  

Mulder had stood by her when Emily lay dying, until she pushed 
him away herself, preferring to go through her heartache 
alone. She'd been afraid to accept his support at the time, 
fearful his strength would invite her own weakness. And she 
felt certain if she let herself lose control, she would never, 
ever recover.

In the months following Emily's death, she shrank from the 
truth, unwilling to confront the fact that she'd lost her one 
and only child and could never have another. She found it 
increasingly painful to be around Mulder, knowing he had 
accepted her infertility a long time ago. Then she noticed she 
was starting to resent him because he still retained the 
ability to have children, whereas she no longer had the 
option, and she felt ashamed of her resentment.

Hunkering down on the stone, she blinked away tears, surprised 
at how angry the inequity still made her feel. She didn't 
blame Mulder, either directly or indirectly, then or now, for 
the things that had been done to her. The theft of her ova, 
her inability to conceive and bear children, Emily's death -- 
none of these had been his fault. 

He'd been a victim, too, his family whittled down to almost 
nothing. 

Bending forward for a drink, she sank her fingers into the 
mud. For just a second, she felt as if she were going to be 
pulled in. She sat up quickly, withdrawing her hands. Murky 
water quickly filled the indentations she left behind.

Sometimes she worried that no man would want her, a barren 
woman. Ridiculous, she knew. An old-fashioned idea. She could 
name dozens of women without children who lived happy, 
satisfied lives, who accomplished remarkable things and 
bettered the world.

But the desire to reproduce was strong. And without the hope 
of having a family of her own, she often felt incomplete.

The sunrise shone upside-down in the water, tinting it copper. 
An iris floated just beyond her reach, broken from its stem. A 
frantic insect ran round and round its sodden petals, 
searching for an escape. The blossom would eventually become 
waterlogged and sink, brown with rot. The insect would drown.

Hugging her knees, watching the dawn break, Scully felt 
isolated, cut off from creation the same way the lost insect 
was cut off from shore. Bullfrogs hummed on all sides, 
ballyhooing their territories. Ducks quacked, protecting their 
nests. The water smelled fecund, milky with fish eggs, teeming 
with the promise of life. Scully didn't share their future. 

She was a genetic dead end.

She turned off Mulder's flashlight. The sun had risen high 
enough to see the silhouette of the surrounding hills, the 
ducks on the pond, the fluttering rushes. Somewhere up the 
slope, still in shadow, Mulder waited for her. She had no 
doubt he was awake, alert, listening intently in the event she 
cried out for his help.

As always, he was watching her back.

They had made love twice since coming to this place. She 
wanted desperately to make love again, but now she didn't know 
if it was reasonable to encourage him. She loved him with all 
her heart, and yet in so many ways she hardly knew him. She 
was unsure how he felt about her, if he had any hope for a 
future with her, or what his real feelings were on the subject 
of children. 

One thing was certain: if he wanted children, the two of them 
had no future together. He deserved an opportunity to become a 
father. He deserved a woman who could give him sons and 
daughters. She would never ask him to forgo a family because 
of her defect.

She ran a finger through the water, causing a ripple. They 
never should have made love in the first place, not until 
they'd talked all this out. She'd been caught in a selfish 
moment, overwhelmed to have him back after coming so close to 
losing him. 

And now there was no undoing it.   

*   *   * 

Mulder hefted Conan's spear while gauging the distance to his 
target. Approximately 100 feet across the weedy meadow, 
Klizzie's stone marker mocked him. Three throws, three misses. 
To be fair, he was closing in; his last attempt had sailed 
mere inches over the top.

"Any last words?" he asked the pile of rocks. "No? Then 
prepare to be annihilated." 

Three long strides...he hurled the spear, lobbing it like a 
baseball, high and straight, and with every ounce of power he 
could put behind it. The shaft wobbled only a little this 
time. His aim was true. The point made contact, crashed 
through the stones and toppled the pile with a satisfying 
clatter.

"Yes!" Mulder's fist jabbed the air. 

"Nice shot, Tarzan." Scully approached carrying a small basket 
and two skewered, roasted lizards. Big lizards. Two-foot-long 
lizards, if you counted their charred tails.

"Where'd you get those?" he asked, relieved to see her with or 
without food. When she left their bed this morning, she'd said 
she needed a few minutes to herself. A "few minutes" had 
stretched into an hour -- as far as he could tell without his 
watch -- and he'd become worried. 

Wanting to go look for her, but not wanting to invade her 
privacy -- or answer any more questions about his nightmare -- 
he decided to burn off his nervous energy by practicing with 
the spear.

Scully set the basket on the ground beside her feet and 
extended one of the skewered lizards like an olive branch. He 
accepted it, feeling unworthy after this morning's foul up. 
She was wearing her "I'm fine" expression, but he knew she 
must have been dissecting and analyzing what he'd said -- and 
not said. Concern showed in the tightness of her mouth, in the 
gloss of her eyes.

As much as he hated to see her worried, he couldn't tell her 
the truth: he didn't want children, not now, not ever. Not 
even with her. Or maybe especially with her. Any kid of his 
was doomed and he'd be dooming her, too, to a lifetime of 
disappointment and heartache if she became pregnant by him. 

He was simply not father material, any more than he was big 
brother or husband material. 

For that matter, most of the time he wasn't even good FBI 
partner material.

Best case scenario, their kid would be in therapy for the rest 
of its life, assuming it wasn't abducted or killed first. And 
Scully would grow to hate him, assuming she wasn't 
abducted...again...or killed, too.

Then she'd leave him, just as Diana had. 

Scully was holding her lizard like an ear of corn and nibbling 
daintily on a hind leg. Humidity from the marsh had curled her 
hair today and the morning sun was shining through the frizz, 
giving it the appearance of a coppery halo. A scrap of meat 
clung to the corner of her mouth. She looked so beautiful he 
could barely breathe.

He reached over to wipe the food from her lips. When she 
didn't duck away from his hand, he decided to kiss her, 
wanting...*needing*...the intimacy. Bowing his head, he leaned 
in and gently pressed his lips to hers. Was it fair to 
encourage this, knowing she wanted kids and he didn't? Her 
fertility would return...probably soon. Wouldn't it be better 
to end things now before that happened?

Otherwise, he would end up hurting her...hurting them both.

She was responding to his kiss with such tenderness. He hated 
himself for it. He was leading her on, giving her false hope.

He pulled back, uncertain what to do. The idea of losing her 
scared the hell out of him. 

Then again, so did fathering a child.

"You were going to tell me where you found breakfast," he 
said, knowing this wasn't the subject they needed to discuss.

She waved the lizard. The tension seemed to lessen around her 
mouth and eyes. "There were dozens of these sunning themselves 
on the rocks by the marsh."

"How'd you catch them?" 

Digging into her pocket, she produced his jackknife. "With 
this."

"The lizards just sat there while you sliced and diced?" 

"Hardly." She handed him her half-eaten lizard and then opened 
his knife to demonstrate. Pointing its blade at an orangey 
toadstool growing in the damp soil about ten feet away, she 
said, "See that mushroom?"

"Uh-huh."

"Watch." 

The knife pinwheeled through the air and landed dead center in 
the cap of the toadstool, halving it.            

"That's pretty fancy knife-throwing, Jane of the Jungle."

"You're no slouch with that spear of yours either, Tarzan." 

"Are you speaking metaphorically?" He let himself smile.

She smiled, too, which pleased him even more than usual 
because it wasn't one of her typical barely-there smiles, but 
a rare teeth-and-gums grin that made up for all of his failed 
attempts to make her laugh. Especially now, given the way 
their morning had started.

"Metaphors aside, Mulder, keep practicing. Without my gun, we 
need all the survival skills we can muster."

It was true. Three days of traveling had exhausted their food 
supply. And although the snapping turtle they'd managed to 
catch and stone to death last night had filled their stomachs, 
there'd been no leftovers for breakfast. 

Procuring food in the Ice Age was evidently going to be a 
constant struggle since they didn't know which plants were 
edible and which were lethal. With no way to safely supplement 
their paltry meat diet, Mulder was finding himself 
persistently hungry; he'd already lost an inch or two around 
his waist, enough to make him cinch his belt a couple of 
holes. 

Scully walked away to retrieve the knife. He felt a flutter of 
panic as he watched her retreating back.

"Where'd you learn to throw like that?" he asked, needing to 
connect with her, if only by the sound of her voice.

"My dad. He taught Bill, Charlie and me after giving us Swiss 
Army knives for Christmas one year." She returned with the 
knife, wiping bits of toadstool from the blade and folding it 
closed. She traded it to him for her breakfast.

Mulder's knife had once belonged to his father. Bill Mulder 
had acquired it while in the military soon after Mulder was 
born and had carried it for years. The grip was worn smooth by 
constant handling. Whether pacing the shore at Quonochontaug 
or the floor of his study in Chilmark, Bill Mulder kept a hand 
thrust into his pocket, turning the knife round and round. He 
occasionally drew it out to slice an apple or open a letter, 
but most of the time it remained hidden away...like so much of 
his life. 

A few months after his father had been killed Mulder was 
packing his belongings in West Tisbury when he found the knife 
in a packet from the funeral home. He decided to keep it, 
hoping the weight of it in his pocket and the feel of it 
against his palm might somehow bring his dad closer, even if 
posthumously. While holding it, Mulder could almost believe 
that under different circumstances he and his father might 
have been Indian Guides for real.  

"Melissa didn't get a knife, too?" he asked.

"Yes, but as a self-proclaimed pacifist, she declined to use 
it." 

Scully's brows pinched together and Mulder guessed she was 
thinking about the violent way Melissa had died.

He quickly steered the subject in what he hoped would be a 
less painful direction. "Didn't your mom object to giving you 
kids knives as Christmas gifts?"

"Not at all. Mom's a practical woman. And in the days before 
cell phones, a Swiss Army knife was probably the most 
practical thing we could carry. She did insist Dad instruct us 
on proper handling. Besides, we weren't *that* young. And 
Swiss Army knives were an improvement over the BB guns."

Her mention of the BB guns brought to mind that unspeakable 
afternoon when he'd accompanied her mother to the monument 
shop to pick up Scully's headstone...which reminded him of 
Duane Barry and Scully's abduction...which reminded him--

"You were gone a long time this morning," he said. "I thought 
we decided you weren't going to go off on your own."

She stopped chewing. Downcast eyes hid her emotions. "I wasn't 
very far."

"I called to you." The fear he'd felt at that moment returned 
to him now full force. Could he demand she never leave his 
sight? "You didn't answer." 

"Mulder, nothing happened. I'm fine."

He nodded, not wanting to argue. Right now all he wanted to do 
was get back to the way things had been the day they first 
made love, when he'd felt on top of the world. He didn't want 
to lose the closeness they'd had at that moment, the happiness 
he'd felt. 

He pointed to the basket she'd set on the ground earlier. 
"What's in your basket, Little Red?" 

His question brought a smug grin to her face. She picked up 
the container and lifted the lid so he could see inside. 
"Fresh duck eggs."

Three large eggs sat nestled in the bottom of the basket. His 
mouth began to water. 

"Scully, I love you." 

The words just popped out -- heartfelt and meaning so much 
more than "thanks for bringing eggs." 

She seemed to miss his greater meaning, however. Or was 
purposely ignoring it. "Hope you don't mind eating them raw."

"Not at all." 

He fished an egg from the basket. Using his knife, he chiseled 
a dime-sized a hole into the top of the shell. He handed her 
the knife and raised the egg to his lips. "Down the hatch." 

He sucked out the contents as if drinking from a cup. Yolk and 
white slid into his mouth and he bit down on it, breaking the 
yolk with his tongue. God, it tasted wonderful-- 

"Oh..." Scully's gasp drew his attention. 

She was staring at the egg she held, a look of revulsion on 
her face. Tears suddenly swamped her eyes, overflowed her 
lashes and plummeted in two straight lines past the lowered 
corners of her mouth.

"What is it, Scully?"

She handed him the egg. Curled inside was the gray, sticky 
embryo of an unhatched baby duck. The bird was dead. 

*   *   *

Tsa-ond was a sacred place, a mountain cave where men had come 
for generations to express their devotion to the Spirits, to 
make offerings, and to pray for good hunting, good health, and 
peace among the clans. 

This afternoon a central fire warmed the cave with a 
flickering golden glow. Dzeh crouched in front of the Prayer 
Wall, his hands cupping a small bone idol, an offering to Hare 
Spirit. Behind him, the men of Owl Clan chanted individual 
prayers. Group prayers would come later, after the Shaman led 
them in a Telling Ceremony, an exchange of stories about 
personal spiritual encounters. Each man's supernatural 
experience would be held up for scrutiny by the group, 
evaluated and accepted or rejected as a true spiritual sign.

Today Dzeh had a story to tell -- a dream vision he'd had 
three nights ago. He was not eager to tell his dream; it was 
full of mystery and foreboding.

Dzeh reverently placed his offering, a small fertility idol, 
on the ground in front of the Prayer Wall. He'd carved the 
figurine from the jawbone of a hare hoping the dead rabbit 
would speak to Hare Spirit on his behalf. Because rabbits 
mated year-round, producing many offspring, Dzeh was appealing 
to Hare, hoping the Spirit would bless Klizzie with a child 
this season.

The bone idol had been meticulously crafted. Smaller than 
Dzeh's thumb, it represented a woman ripe with child, her 
breasts swollen with milk. She had wide hips, to ensure an 
easy birth. Too many women were lost during their labor -- 
like Dzeh's mother and his oldest sister, Ne-zhoni. He did not 
want to lose Klizzie this way, too. He would rather she had no 
child at all than to see her fly off with the Spirits as she 
struggled to give birth.

The idea of losing Klizzie made Dzeh feel panicked and queasy. 
He loved her so much. Too much perhaps. Whenever he looked at 
her, lay with her, even talked with her about trivial matters, 
such as the gathering of pine nuts or the cleaning of deer 
skins, his heart beat like skull drummers at a Mastodon Feast. 
He had been very fond of his previous mate, but his affection 
for Klizzie outshone that older love as the sun to the moon. 

Dzeh's tiny idol had a nearly blank face, as was custom; only 
a few shallow notches hinted at features. Its hair, however, 
was crosshatched to represent braids similar to Klizzie's. 
Dzeh had spent many winter evenings incising each precise 
line. The hands and feet were simple points with no toes or 
fingers; the fertility Spirits cared little for these parts of 
the body, attentive only to the reproductive aspects of the 
offering, which were exaggerated and detailed. Dzeh had 
polished the entire figure by rubbing it with sand and then 
bear fat until its breasts and belly glistened. 

He murmured placating words to Hare Spirit before leaving the 
idol and rising to his feet to add a picture to the Prayer 
Wall.   

Several other men stood at the Wall painting images. Small 
bowls of pigment and binder dotted the cave floor. The binder 
had been made from a mix of albumen and pinyon gum. The 
pigments ranged in color from black to blue to red to white. 
Charcoal, azurite, hematite, and white clay had been ground 
into powders. Brushes had been prepared by chewing the tips of 
twigs to remove the pulp, leaving fibers for painting small 
solid areas, clear lines and fine details. Dots were applied 
with fingertips.

Dzeh selected a tortoiseshell bowl filled with binder. He 
added a pinch of charcoal to it and, using his brush, mixed 
the materials together, creating a viscous black paint. He 
wasn't much of an artist -- not nearly as accomplished as his 
Uncle Lin -- but it was the act of painting itself, not the 
quality of the image, that mattered. Painting a picture on a 
Prayer Wall was akin to singing a song to the Spirits during 
Feast Days or wearing a totem all year round. It was an act of 
respect, faith, and obedience. It focused a man's thoughts, 
opening a path of communication to the Spirit World. 

The Wall already held countless drawings made over many 
generations. Finding an unmarked area wasn't easy. If a man 
wanted to paint a large picture, he must draw atop an older 
one. Feeling humbled by his communication with Hare Spirit, 
Dzeh decided to paint only a small picture this year. He found 
a blank space the size of a newborn's palm between the tusks 
of a bull mastodon and the outstretched arm of Serpent Holder, 
a Spirit who held a large snake. 

The image of the Serpent Holder was intimidating, almost life-
size, and reminded Dzeh of his dream vision. He wondered again 
if the elders would deem his vision a true spiritual 
encounter. 

In many respects, he hoped not.

Using careful strokes, he sketched the delicate outline of a 
jackrabbit. Additional paint was needed to color the rabbit 
reddish-brown and give him white eyes that could see their way 
between this world and the Spirit World.

When Dzeh was satisfied with his picture, he put down his 
brushes and paints, and joined the other men in a circle 
around the fire pit. 

Fifteen men and nine boys waited eagerly, yet quietly, for the 
Shaman to lead them in the Telling Ceremony. Only the smallest 
children and infants were excluded from this ritual. And 
women, too, of course, who were busy taking care of the young 
ones and preparing tonight's Spirit Feast.

The Shaman walked a circle around the men. He wore a helmet 
made from the skullcap of a musk ox, its great horns curled 
low over his ears. White clay painted his face in hopes the 
Spirits would mistake him for a ghost and allow him access to 
their world. A silvery wolf-skin cape, trimmed with owl 
feathers and bone beads, hung from his broad shoulders, open 
at the front to expose his Owl Clan tattoos - circular 
designs that represented owl's eyes and superior vision. 
Bracelets of snail shells jangled at his wrists and ankles. 
Around his neck he wore an impressive amulet made from 
iridescent heron feathers, clattering muscle shells and the 
gleaming tusks of a saber-toothed cat. 

A fog of burning sage, tangy and pleasant smelling, filled the 
cave as the Shaman paced, holding a smudge-stick aloft in his 
outstretched hand. In his other hand he carried a 
tortoiseshell rattle, which he shook to the cadence of his 
deep-throated chant. The men joined his chant, lifting their 
collective voices to the Spirit World. Dzeh's heart began to 
beat faster as the chanting progressed. He felt as if the 
Spirits sat with him at the hearth fire. This both frightened 
and made him glad.

When the Shaman had gone four times around the circle, 
cleansing the cave with his trail of smoke and calling to the 
Spirits with his singing, he took his place among the men, 
sitting to the right of Lin, the eldest. 

Now it was time for the Telling Ceremony.

Foreboding caused Dzeh's hands to quake and he stilled them by 
grasping the pouch he wore around his neck. The future held 
many secrets. Was his dream a premonition or just a simple 
nightmare?  

The men proceeded to tell their stories, going in the order of 
their ages, starting with Lin. Dzeh listened and waited his 
turn. Several of the stories were deemed true visions, their 
ramifications were discussed and appropriate prayers were 
offered.

The moment finally came for Dzeh to begin telling his story. 

"Three nights ago, I had a sleeping vision," he said before 
dread seized his throat and stole the force from his voice. 
The men nodded, encouraging him to go on. He squeezed his 
totem pouch. Took a full breath. Speaking in a hushed tone, 
like a mourning dove separated from its mate, he continued, 
"In my dream, the newcomer named Muhl-dar captured a snake, 
which he placed in a bone cage. When Snake Spirit discovered 
the caged snake, he became angry. Snake Spirit released the 
snake and turned it into a man, then sent this snake-man to 
seek revenge. After much searching, the snake-man found Muhl-
dar living with his red-haired mate at the camp of Owl Clan."

This brought nervous looks to the other men's faces. He knew 
they were thinking it had been risky to welcome the strangers 
in the first place. 

"Muhl-dar fought with snake-man," he continued, "and defeated 
him by breaking him into two halves."

Dzeh glanced over at the Prayer Wall with its enormous 
painting of the Serpent Holder. For a heartbeat, it looked as 
if the snake might be severed in two. A spear of panic slashed 
into Dzeh's belly.  

"Snake Spirit became enraged by the death of snake-man, so he 
disguised himself as a lightning bolt and traveled to earth in 
the belly of a giant storm, intending to kill Muhl-dar. The 
night sky was turned inside out. The stars and the moon were 
moved from their customary positions as the lightning bolt 
grew to an enormous size. Cottonwood seeds fell like snow, 
even though it was not the season for them. Clansmen ran in 
every direction, afraid for their lives." Dzeh closed his 
eyes, recalling the fear he felt when he discovered Klizzie 
was not by his side. "Those who remained behind heard the 
chirping of a bird." Dzeh opened his eyes. "It was followed by 
the voice of a far-off female Spirit, who spoke to Muhl-dar, 
and although we could not understand her words, he was able to 
speak to her in her own strange language, and he became quite 
excited and happy to talk with her. She took a deep breath and 
blew the cottonwood seeds back to the Spirit World. Then she 
swallowed up Muhl-dar and his mate. The people of Owl Clan 
were sad to see them go."

That was the end of the dream. He hoped the elders would 
decide it was not a prophecy, but only a silly nightmare.

Several moments passed while the men considered what they'd 
heard. Finally Dzeh's Uncle Lin spoke.

"I accept Dzeh's vision as a true spiritual sign."

"I agree," said his cousin Wol-la-chee, "but what does it 
mean?"

"It is clearly a bad omen," said another man. "Clan members 
were lost and the man named Muhl-dar was at fault for their 
hardship."

"If that is true, then why does the female Spirit help Muhl-
dar and why is the Clan sad to see him go?" Lin asked.

"It makes no sense," said Wol-la-chee.

"Who is this female Spirit?"

"Who is the snake-man?" asked another.

"Prophecies are often unclear when they are first revealed," 
said the Shaman. "Interpreting them is like hunting in fog. 
Sometimes we must wait until events reveal themselves before 
we can know whether it is best to charge or run."

"But it is never desirable to lose Clan members," argued a man 
who had recently lost his son to dysentery and fever. 

"Maybe someone should return to Toh-ta Lodge to kill Muhl-dar 
before he cages the snake," suggested a boy barely into his 
thirteenth year.

"It might already be too late for that," said Uncle Lin.

"Then we should send Muhl-dar away when he comes," said the 
boy's father. 

"No." Dzeh shook his head. The dream frightened him, 
particularly the part about Klizzie. Even so, he was left with 
the feeling that Muhl-dar was the Clan's only hope against the 
vengeful Snake Spirit. Dzeh believed the snake-man intended to 
cause trouble for all of Owl Clan. He couldn't explain how he 
knew such a thing, only that he felt it like the chill of 
winter across his back. "Muhl-dar is my Trading Partner. He is 
Clan now and has given us no reason to either banish or kill 
him." Dzeh glared at the 13-year-old.

The boy lowered his eyes, looking ashamed.

"All aspects of the partnership have not been fulfilled," the 
boy's father reminded Dzeh. "You have made only a single 
trade."

"We will make more," Dzeh said.

"You will exchange mates with the stranger?"

"Yes, of course," Dzeh said, knowing the ritual would earn the 
Clan's trust. Mate-exchange was the ultimate demonstration of 
a man's loyalty -- to the Trading Partner and to the Clan. 

"Until Dzeh or Muhl-dar choose to sever their partnership, or 
Muhl-dar breaks a Clan custom, the newcomer and his mate will 
be treated as members of Owl Clan," Lin said. He looked at 
each man in turn. "We have accepted Dzeh's vision. We will 
watch for additional omens."

Before moving on to the next man's vision, the Shaman urged, 
"We must continue to offer prayers to the Spirits for the 
protection of Owl Clan. I fear difficult times ahead."

Dzeh silently agreed. Again he glanced at the painting of the 
Serpent Holder on the Prayer Wall and again he felt the chill 
of winter run down his spine.     

*   *   *

While the men were praying in the cave and the women were 
preparing the evening's ceremonial meal, Gini and her best 
friend Jeha hiked down a gravely trail to the stream to fill 
waterbags for tomorrow's journey. Twins Do and Ehdo followed 
several paces behind, more interested in playing with their 
dolls than in fetching water. The twins were a couple of years 
younger than Gini. Jeha was older -- two Mastodon Feasts older 
-- and was full of talk about this year's Feast and her 
imminent Joining Ceremony. Jeha had been promised by an uncle 
to Moasi, a young man in Badger Clan, one of several clans 
that would be participating in this year's Feast. Although 
Jeha had never met Moasi, she'd heard from a cousin that her 
future mate was a good hunter and very handsome.

"Moasi has already killed his first bear, you know," Jeha 
bragged.

"So you have told me." 

Moasi, Moasi, Moasi. Could Jeha think of nothing else? All 
this talk about mates and Joining Ceremonies was making Gini's 
stomach hurt. She had learned from Dzeh only this morning that 
he was going to inquire about a mate for her at the upcoming 
Feast.

"You are growing up, Gini," he had said after finishing his 
breakfast. "It is time for you to be mated. I will make 
arrangements." 

And that was that; he said nothing more and walked away 
leaving her too stunned to speak. Which was just as well; it 
would have been inappropriate for her to object in any case.

Gini had gone immediately to find Klizzie, hoping to talk to 
her about Dzeh's decision, and the bumblebees it had put in 
her stomach, but Klizzie was too busy preparing the day's 
Spirit Feast to answer her questions. 

"We can talk tomorrow. On our way to Turkey Lake." Klizzie 
kissed her on the head and hurried away to add pine nuts to 
the Offerings.

Gini was as nervous as a trapped goose about the idea of 
taking a mate, moving away to a strange clan, leaving the only 
family she had ever known. It seemed so unfair. Why did girls 
have to leave their clans to be mated and not boys?

"My mother is sewing ivory beads and blue jay feathers to my 
Joining Skirt," Jeha prattled as they neared the stream. The 
woods thinned here and the twins ran ahead, wanting to be 
first to the water. "Ma-ma made the skirt from doe skins as 
white as new-fallen snow. And soft! You have never felt such 
soft hides."

Jeha would look pretty in her Joining Day skins, Gini had to 
admit. Long hair done up in braids with beads and feathers and 
a crown of flower blossoms, her perfect skin oiled and 
perfumed. Jeha stood half a head taller than Gini. Her waist 
curved in and her hips curved out, and her breasts had begun 
to swell. Gini's chest remained as flat as any boy's and her 
narrow hips led straight down into her skinny legs, knobby 
knees and big feet. Sometimes she felt as ugly as a 
grasshopper next to her older friend.

It struck her this might be a good thing. Maybe Dzeh would not 
be able to find a boy who would want an ugly girl like her. 
Then she could stay with Owl Clan and Klizzie.
 
It was sad losing her best friend. Gini and Jeha had been like 
sisters all their lives. Now they would never again have the 
opportunity to play string games or dolls or Find Me. Jeha 
would become a member of Badger Clan. She would be expected to 
tend her mate's hearth, raise lots of children. She would 
leave Turkey Lake in the autumn and it would be many seasons 
before Gini would see her again. 

If ever. 

The twins stripped out of their fur skirts and waded into the 
shallow brook, while Jeha and Gini settled side-by-side on a 
low moss-covered rock where they could dangle their feet in 
the cold, clear water. They sat near one of Klizzie's stone 
markers, set out for the newcomers to follow.

Gini wondered if Muhl-dar and Day-nuh had left Toh-ta Lodge 
yet and if they were following Klizzie's trail. Or had they 
decided to return to Eel Clan instead? Gini liked the 
strangers, especially Muhl-dar, and hoped to see them both 
again soon.

Maybe Dzeh could find her a mate like Muhl-dar. Gini guessed 
he was a good hunter and she knew he was handsome -- in a 
foreign sort of way. Although she had never met Jeha's future 
mate, she was quite sure the boy from Badger Clan could not be 
as good looking as Muhl-dar. 

"Does it not scare you a little?" Gini asked, watching the 
twins splash and chase each other in circles. They looked so 
much alike, it was easy to lose track of who was who. 

"What are you talking about?" Jeha asked.

"Being mated to a man you have not met." Gini could not 
imagine it. Klizzie had told her that laying with a man was a 
pleasant thing, and Gini believed her, but she also wondered 
why women sometimes cried out in the night as if in pain when 
they laid with their mates. 

Klizzie herself had cried out just last night.

Jeha put on the expression of a grownup. "It is the Clan way. 
There is no point in being frightened." 

Gini was not so sure. Last fall she had seen a stallion mount 
a mare. He had climbed onto her back while she whinnied, the 
whites of her eyes showing all around. Clearly, she didn't 
like it. When the stallion finally got off her, his male part 
hung long and wet-looking.

Did that happen to men? 

"Besides," Jeha said, while drawing shapes in the water with 
her toe, "it is a worse life to have no mate at all."

That was true. A woman without a mate had no status and was 
always last to get her share of meat or skins. If there was 
not enough to go around, she went without. A woman alone must 
rely on the charity of the Clan for all things.

"And don't forget, you must lie with a man if you want 
babies," Jeha said matter-of-factly. "You want babies, don't 
you?"

She supposed she did. "What does laying with a man have to do 
with getting babies?" 

Jeha laughed. "You are still a baby yourself if you do not 
know the answer to that."

Gini flushed with embarrassment, although she was uncertain 
what it was that made Jeha laugh at her. Klizzie prayed to the 
Spirits to bring her babies; she had never mentioned any other 
way of getting them. "If you are so smart, tell me where 
babies come from."

Do and Ehdo had stopped their running and now sat in the brook 
playing a clapping game.  Jeha watched them while she 
explained. "You know that a man puts his be-zonz inside a 
woman when they lay together, don't you?"

"Yes. Of course." Again she pictured the stallion.

"Well, the baby crawls through the man's be-zonz into the 
woman. Ma-ma told me so."

Was that true? It didn't seem possible. It didn't even make 
sense. 

"Where does the man keep the baby before he puts it in the 
woman and how does it fit through his be-zonz?" 

"The baby is very small, silly. It grows to normal size 
*after* it gets inside the woman."

Well, that made sense at least. Pregnant women were not large, 
not at first. They grew bigger only as their time drew near. 
Animals were like that, too. The horses mated in the autumn. 
By spring, the mares were heavy with foals. 

A man's be-zonz might grow large during mating to allow for 
the baby's passage, Gini supposed.

Still, why did people pray to Spirits for babies if they came 
from men? 

Jeha turned away from the twins and lowered her voice to a 
whisper. "Watch them sometime. See for yourself."

"Watch what?"

"Our aunts and uncles when they are in their sleeping skins."

"Jeha, that is not polite!" Gini said, wanting suddenly to be 
playing games with Do and Ehdo rather than continuing this 
conversation. Jeha's talk was making her stomach hurt worse 
than before. "Let's swim." 

"If you want." Jeha laughed again. She stood to remove her fur 
skirt. "But one day you will see I am telling you the truth." 

Again Gini pictured the stallion's enormous male part and the 
bumblebees in her stomach began to buzz more violently than 
ever.  

*   *   *

Mulder carried the larger pack and the spears, occasionally 
using one of the spears as a walking stick. Scully lugged the 
waterbag and the smaller pack, which was intended for storing 
food but was currently empty. It was late afternoon and they 
were climbing yet another forested hill. They'd been following 
Klizzie's markers and traveling northeast for seven days. 
Mulder guessed they were covering fifteen to twenty miles a 
day now that he was feeling stronger.

"There." Mulder pointed to a stack of fist-sized stones 
balanced atop a mossy boulder twenty yards upstream.

"Camp now?" Scully asked. She had begun talking 
epigrammatically around mid-morning and had said almost 
nothing at all since noon. 

Mulder assumed her terseness was the result of fatigue and 
hunger. Or a reaction to his own irritability. He felt 
snappier than A.D. Skinner at an OPR meeting.

"We still have several hours of daylight left. Let's keep 
going. Maybe we can crest the next ridge before dark." 

They couldn't stop now -- they had nothing to eat. 

"Fine." Scully switched the waterbag to her other hand and 
continued hiking. 

The path was steep here, zigzagging uphill between ghostly 
aspens and sparse evergreens, following a channel carved by the 
stream. Loose stones lined the trail. Granite cobbles and tree 
roots served as irregular steps. Aspens shivered in the chilly 
breeze, their papery leaves chattering like teeth. 

The air smelled like pinesap and last year's fermenting 
chokecherries.  The skies were overcast again today. Last 
night had been downright frigid. He and Scully had huddled 
together for warmth, fully dressed beneath the sleeping skins. 

Their all-night embrace had been for practical purposes only. 

They'd made love only once since Mulder's nightmare, and it 
had not been particularly satisfying for either one of them. 
They couldn't seem to get out of each other's way, fumbling 
with their clothes, bumping noses, elbowing and pinching. It 
was all over in less than ten minutes, which was probably for 
the best. 

Mulder was still embarrassed to think about the welt he'd 
raised on Scully's chin when he accidentally clipped her with 
his knuckles. He'd meant to caress her, but was distracted by 
a biting deerfly and wound up walloping her instead. 

They'd both been in sour moods ever since.

Although unwilling to take the lead in their intimate life -- 
at least for the time being -- Mulder did volunteer to occupy 
the forward position on the trail. He set a strenuous pace, 
hoping to burn off some of his unrequited sexual energy. He 
wanted to be bone-tired before falling into bed with Scully at 
the end of each day. That way, he was sure to keep his hands 
off her and avoid making an ass of himself...again.  

Something moved in the woods up ahead, just beyond Klizzie's 
marker. Mulder caught a glimpse of shaggy, reddish-brown fur 
between the tree trunks. He stopped and held up a cautionary 
finger to Scully. 

She came to a standstill a step or two behind him.

"See it?" he whispered, never taking his eyes off the animal. 
It was shuffling slowly downhill, partially obscured by 
vegetation as it grazed on leaves. Was it a bear? A gorilla? 

"Megalonyx," Scully whispered, when it came into full view.

"Megalo-what?"

"Giant Ground Sloth." 

Jesus, it looked like some sort of mutant hamster. A ten-foot-
tall mutant hamster.

The bizarre animal rose up on its hind legs, reaching a long-
clawed paw into the upper limbs of an aspen. It tore off a 
leafy branch and stuffed it into its mouth. Its arms were 
massive. Each paw sported six-inch curved claws. Its head was 
undersized for its brawny body, with a wide face, a flat 
snout, short, rounded ears, and pig-like eyes set far back on 
its skull.

"Carnivorous?" Mulder asked.

"No, but dangerous from the look of those claws."

The sloth hooked another branch and brought it crashing to the 
ground. It turned an inquisitive eye toward Mulder and Scully 
and sniffed the air. Seemingly unconcerned, it continued to 
lazily munch leaves.

God, the thing must weigh three tons. 

Three tons of fresh meat. 

Thick flank steaks. Tenderloins the size of a man's arm. T-
bones to die for. Mulder's empty stomach rumbled. He quickly 
set everything he carried down on the ground...except his most 
durable spear.

"Mulder, what are you doing?"

"I'm gonna bag us dinner, Scully." 

He hefted the spear, gauged the distance.

"Mulder, use your gun," Scully urged through clenched teeth.

And waste a bullet? Nnnaaah, the sloth was moving very slowly. 

"Mulder--"

Ignoring her warning, he charged the beast, spear raised 
shoulder high. The sloth stopped eating when it heard him 
stampeding up the hill. It turned to face him. Rearing up on 
its hind legs, it honked a warning that sounded like a cross 
between a grizzly bear and a Mack Truck.

Mulder bellowed right back at him, racing forward, sending a 
mini avalanche of gravel downhill behind him. He targeted the 
animal's heart, gripped the spear, and prepared for impact. 

Twenty feet...fifteen...ten... 

The sloth swiped the air with an enormous paw as the spear 
punctured its chest. A thick, curving claw raked Mulder's face 
and pain exploded along his left cheek. Blood spurted from the 
wound.

Ignoring his injury, Mulder thrust the spear more deeply into 
the animal's breast.

The sloth roared and pivoted, lifting Mulder to his toes. He 
clung to the weapon, while the beast flailed an enormous arm, 
trying to bat him off. He dodged the blow, released the spear 
and dropped to his knees. Quickly, he scrambled back a step or 
two.

The injured sloth attempted a charge but staggered sideways 
instead. It lashed out again and missed Mulder by mere inches 
before it lost its balance, tottered, and finally collapsed 
onto its back.
 
Mulder wasted no time. He clambered up onto the giant's 
mountainous belly. Using all his weight, he drove the spear as 
deep into the animal as it would go.

The sloth gasped, its head lolled, and its limbs went limp. 

Balanced on its chest, Mulder let out a victorious whoop.

"Mulder!" Scully rushed forward, fear in her eyes. "You're 
hurt!"

"I'm okay." He jumped to the ground and circled the sloth, 
practically dancing with excitement. "Do you prefer your 
steaks medium or well done?"

"You're not okay. You're bleeding." She slowed his restless 
pacing by grabbing his sleeve. "Hold still. Let me see." She 
reached out to probe the wound on his cheek.

"Ow!" He ducked away from her hand, but she was as tenacious 
as a fat-sucking mutant and was on him again in an instant. 
"It's nothing," he protested, arm extended to keep her at a 
distance. "We have meat to cut up. Sirloins to grill."

"You need stitches."

"Too bad we're twelve thousand *years* from the nearest 
hospital." He tried again to get around her, but she body-
blocked him. He settled for inspecting the carcass over the 
top of her head.

"Look at those drumsticks, Scully. And that rump roast." He 
pictured a couple of super-sized sloth-burgers, with a side 
order of onion rings and a large frosty milkshake.

"I have needle and thread."

"Hm?" Mulder glanced down. Scully was holding one of those 
cheapo hotel sewing kits in her hand. 

Oh. Crap. He'd forgotten she had that.

She steered him to the boulder that held Klizzie's marker and, 
with the point of a finger, ordered him to sit. Then she laid 
out her needle, thread and a pair of miniature scissors that 
came with the kit. "I'm going to wash and stitch that wound. 
Give me your handkerchief."

He obliged her with the handkerchief but refused to sit. "I 
killed it, Scully," he said, grinning. "Did you see me?"

"Yes, I saw." She washed her hands and soaked the handkerchief 
in the stream. The minute her attention left him, he returned 
to the sloth.

"Mulder, I told you to sit." She went to him and guided him by 
the arm back to the rock. "What you did was foolhardy." 

Foolhardy? He shook his arm loose. "Tell that to the sloth." 
He was hoping she'd be impressed by his success. Not to 
mention the gazillion pounds of fresh meat. "Still got all my 
bullets," he bragged.

"And one nasty cut." 

"How sanitary is that needle?" he asked when she cornered him 
beside the boulder. "Won't I get an infection?"

"That'd be preferable to bleeding to death. *Sit*."

He did as she asked and eyeballed her needle, while she 
inspected his wound. Gently, she swabbed his bloody cheek with 
the wet handkerchief. 

"This would be easier without all the whiskers."

It had been a week and a half since he'd last shaved and he 
guessed he must look pretty scruffy.

Scully used the waterbag to rinse his cheek.

"Hey, you're getting my clothes wet." 

She continued to pour.

"That hurts!" He winced more for effect than from pain. 

She raised an eyebrow and handed him the waterbag and the 
blood-soaked handkerchief. "Hold these." 

"Shouldn't you use some of that soap root or something?"

"It isn't antibacterial, Mulder. Your own blood will do a 
better job of cleansing the wound than that root." She 
threaded her needle.

"Can't you just kiss it and make it better?"

"I'm a doctor, Mulder, not your mother."

"You're a pathologist." Her needle stung when it pierced his 
skin. "Ow! Don't forget, I'm not a corpse."

"Shhh."

"Do I get a reward if I don't cry?"

"We'll see."

She worked fast, quickly closing his wound with careful 
stitches. The cut was just below his eye. An inch or two 
higher--

He didn't want to think about it. He also didn't want to watch 
her needle popping in and out of his skin, so he avoided 
looking at her hands and focused on her eyes instead.

In them he saw determination, self-control and compassion.

She leaned close to tie off the final knots. "Almost finished," 
she murmured, and tears filled his eyes -- not from the pain 
she was causing, but from the devotion in her voice.

He held perfectly still, waiting...

"There," she said at last. "How does that feel?"

He pouted. "It hurts."

She tucked the scissors and needle back into her kit, and gave 
him a sympathetic smile. "Sorry."

"I didn't cry. You owe me a reward."

She gave him a quick kiss on the nose, then took the bloody 
handkerchief from his hand. "How about we cut up that carcass 
now? I'm pretty handy with a knife."

"That wasn't much of a kiss." Taking a chance, he wrapped his 
arms around her. Still seated, he had to look up to give her 
his best puppy-eyed stare. He knew she was more apt to indulge 
him after he was recently injured. "Kiss me and make me better, 
Doctor Scully."

She smiled, and he felt the tide of tension between them ebb a 
bit. An apology hung on his lips, but he was afraid to speak of 
their recent rift for fear he might reopen the gulf between 
them.

"Close your eyes," she said.

"I can't watch?" His tone turned petulant but he did as he was 
told.

From behind closed lids he felt her place a feather-light kiss 
on the lashes of his left eye, just above the wound on his 
cheek.

He tightened his arms around her and mumbled into her neck, 
"What do you know, it worked."

She kissed the crown of his head. "Better?"

"Yes, thank you. Much."

*   *   *

Klizzie shivered as she looked up through the evergreen boughs 
at the overcast sky. Clouds marched like mastodons overhead 
and a bitter wind was blowing in from the north. The air 
smelled like snow, which wasn't unusual at these altitudes, 
even in mid-summer. She followed the Clan up the southwestern 
slopes of Sleeping Wolf Mountain. Spruce and white pine grew 
tall here. A dense layer of rust-colored needles blanketed the 
ground, muting their footfalls.     

"Are we almost there?" Gini asked, whining like a mosquito. 
She dragged her feet with exaggerated exhaustion.

"We will make camp soon. Tomorrow we will be at Turkey Lake," 
Klizzie said, trying to cheer the girl. Gini had been in a 
somber mood for the past two days, ever since the Clan had 
left Tsa-ond Cave. 

Dzeh had been subdued, too. When Klizzie asked him to share 
his troubles, he refused to discuss them, saying his head was 
full of men's business and she was not to worry, which made 
her worry even more.

"I'm hungry," Gini complained.

"You are welcome to the pine nuts in my pouch." Klizzie nodded 
her chin at the bag tied to the belt of her skirt.

"I do not want pine nuts."

"Well, that is all there is." 

That wasn't true; Klizzie carried an assortment of berries, 
burdock root and dried meat, but they were packed away and she 
didn't feel like stopping to dig them out.

"Uncle Lin has a honeycomb," Gini said, looking hopeful.

"That is for the Mastodon Feast and you know it."

The Clan had brought many gifts for the celebration. Furs, 
spear points, bone beads, but the most prized was the large 
comb of honey, stored in a hollowed gourd and wrapped tightly 
with fresh cattail leaves to keep out insects...and hungry 
children.

"Ask Jeha if she has any more spruce gum," Klizzie suggested.

Looking ahead to where Jeha walked with her mother and aunt, 
Gini frowned. "She is busy."

"She is just talking."

"Yeah, about Moasi. I have heard enough about him." 

"You will have a mate of your own soon enough. Then you will 
talk about nothing but him, too, just as Jeha talks about 
Moasi."

"I will not." Gini's frown deepened. 

Klizzie was about to ask her to explain her angry face, but 
the Clan was stopping. The men and boys were circling around 
something in the path up ahead.

"Are we camping here?" Gini asked, curiosity replacing her 
storm-cloud expression.

It was too early to set camp. Something else was going on. 

"Let's go see," Klizzie said, and she and Gini broke into a 
trot. 

They found everyone had gone as quiet as stone while they 
gaped at something on the ground. Klizzie shouldered her way 
through the circle to see what it was they were looking at.

Mother Earth, it was a baby owl and it mewled pitifully, its 
wings too underdeveloped to fly. 

"It must have fallen from up there," Uncle Lin said, his 
finger aimed skyward.

Klizzie lifted her eyes to a notch high in the hemlock that 
towered over the trail. The mother owl was nowhere to be seen. 
The baby would not last long. A predator would take it as soon 
as the Clan moved on.

This was a bad omen. The owl was the symbol of the Clan. Its 
fall from the nest portended a tragedy.

Klizzie felt Gini take her hand. "Can we put it back?" the 
girl asked.

"Its mother will not accept it." 

"Maybe we can take it with us."

"It would die just as surely, Gini."

"But if we care for it and feed--"

The Shaman glared at Gini, silencing her. Turning his 
attention to the owl, he knelt and spoke loud enough for all 
the Clan to hear. "The Spirits have thrown this bird here for 
us to see, and only they can save it."

Klizzie glanced at Dzeh, who had gone pale. The young owl 
squealed and Klizzie felt the soft tread of Spirits passing 
across her flesh.

*   *   *

"We should start cutting up that carcass, Tarzan," Scully 
said, still locked in his embrace. 

He was looking past her at something on the hill. Saying 
nothing, his arms dropped away and he rose to his feet.

She turned and tried to make out what it was that caught his 
attention. " Another sloth?"

"Uh-uh. A cave." He walked away from her, heading uphill.

She hurried after him, following him between trees and around 
boulders. He moved faster the higher he climbed and she 
scrambled to keep pace. 

Sure enough, a cave came into view. She was amazed he'd been 
able to spot it from below. Camouflaged by shadows, the 
entrance was nearly invisible.

When they reached it, they found the opening was actually 
quite large, approximately six feet across and equally tall. 
It had a wide stone landing, which was flat and offered a 
spectacular view of the valley below.

Mulder paused at the entrance to dig his flashlight from his 
pocket.

"Don't wanna trip on any bears," he said, aiming the beam into 
the dark. 

He stepped inside and she followed. His roving flashlight 
spotlighted bats the size of lab rats hanging by the dozens in 
clumps overhead. Annoyed by the unexpected visitors, they 
squeaked and wriggled, but stayed put.

The cave was too deep for the flash light to penetrate all the 
way to the back. "Anybody home?" he yelled, his voice 
ricocheting off the rock. "What's that smell?"

The tangy aroma of burnt herbs and woodsmoke blended with the 
syrupy odor of the bats. 

"Sage, I think," Scully said. "Somebody must have been in here 
recently." 

"Klizzie's people?" Mulder moved further into the cave. 

"Probably. Her marker is just down the hill."

Mulder's beam revealed a large fire pit in the middle of the 
rock floor. Scully walked over to it and crouched. 

"Still a little warm," she announced, fingers testing the ash.

Mulder swiveled, painting the cave with his light as he 
explored their surroundings.

"What's that?" she asked when his beam reflected off a small 
white object lying on the ground by the far wall. 

She crossed the cave and picked it up. 

"It's female," Mulder stated the obvious, spotlighting her 
palm. "Looks like a fertility idol -- like the Venus of 
Willendorf, found in Austria. Pendulous breasts, pregnant 
belly, no facial features to speak of. Similar figurines have 
been found all over the world."

"They date as far back as 30,000 years."

She turned it over in her hand, impressed by its smoothness. 
It felt strangely warm, almost alive, as if imbued with the 
faith of its careful carver. She stroked its roundness with 
her thumb. For just a moment, she thought she detected a 
heartbeat there.

"Powerful magic." Mulder turned away, taking his light with 
him, his attention already focused elsewhere. 

"Why do you say that?"

"The 20th Century is full of people, isn't it?" 

She gripped the idol and was startled when she felt what she 
could only describe as hope tickle her palm. Damn it, she was 
being foolish, letting this place get to her. The carving was 
nothing more than a lucky charm, like a four-leaf clover or a 
rabbit's foot.

"Wow, look at this, Scully." 

Mulder was examining a painting on the rock wall. He stepped 
back, broadening the circle of his beam, revealing a stone 
canvas covered with pictograms. 

"Jesus, there're hundreds of them," he said, as his light 
crawled across the wall. Mastodons, bison, men with spears, 
horses, rabbits, owls...lots of owls. He stopped when he came 
to a nearly life-size image of a man holding a snake. 

"Ophiuchus."

"Who?" She joined him at the wall for a closer look.

"The Serpent Holder." He ran the light along the length of the 
snake. "You know, in the sky. The constellation."

Of course. He'd pointed it out only a few nights ago when they 
were admiring the Andromeda Nebula. 

Ophiuchus had been a Healer who was struck dead by a 
thunderbolt from Zeus at the request of Hades, God of the Dead, 
because he had brought Orion back to life. Gods' work.

"The myth of Ophiuchus is years in the future, Mulder," she 
reminded him.

He nodded absently. "Yeah. Maybe." He was using his I'm-
agreeing-with-you-without-really-agreeing-with-you tone, which 
meant that he was formulating some new theory he wasn't yet 
ready to share.  

The Serpent Holder loomed over them, staring out of blank eyes. 
It was unnerving. The way Mulder's light played across the rock 
made the snake look as if it were undulating in the Serpent 
Holder's hands. A tiny reddish-brown jackrabbit with frightened 
white eyes huddled next to the snake, looking powerless and 
vulnerable. 

The carved idol seemed to throb in Scully's palm. She felt 
suddenly lightheaded, queasy. Doubling over, she cried out as a 
slash of pain seared her abdomen.

"Scully?" Mulder was instantly by her side, arms thrown around 
her to keep her from falling. "What is it? What's the matter?"

"I don't...I don't know..." Oh God, the pain was awful. "It 
hurts..."

"Where?" Mulder's expression was frantic.

"Here...ooohhhh!" She clutched her stomach, just above her 
navel. 

He aimed his light at her, tugged her shirt up to reveal her 
bare skin.

"I don't see anything. What is it?"

She gasped for breath. "I feel...I think...ooohhhh, Mulderrr." 
Sinking to her knees, she tried to breathe through the pain.

"Talk to me, Scully. What can I...how can I help?"

"I feel like...I think I've been...shot." But there had been no 
gun, no bullet. There was no blood. Just pain, terrible pain, 
burning a straight line through her stomach and out her back. 

She reached for Mulder, grabbed him around the neck. Oh God, oh 
God. The idol slipped from her fingers and fell soundlessly to 
the ground.   

*   *   *

CHAPTER NINE

Scully closes her eyes against the pain that is slicing 
through her abdomen. Searing white light flashes behind her 
closed lids. The cave disappears; Mulder's embrace 
disintegrates.

A vast Pleistocene plateau separates them. He is almost 
indiscernible on the distant horizon, but only for an instant. 
Just as suddenly, he is back with her...in their basement 
office.

Splashes of light and dark mottle the wall. Mulder is showing 
slides, crime scene photos of baby killers, murderers posing 
as Santa Claus and insurance salesmen. Image after image fills 
Scully's field of vision in a seemingly endless progression. 
None of the cases look familiar.

"Focus, please," Scully tells Mulder, her voice strident. This 
close-up view of nothing is getting on her nerves.

"Can't. Seems to be broken." He fiddles with the lens. Jiggles 
the carousel. The picture becomes blurrier, if that's 
possible. He hisses, surrenders by turning off the projector.

She sighs with relief when the fan stops spinning. 

Blinking, she finds they are no longer in the basement; 
they're riding in a rental car. The light from the projector 
has been replaced by twin highbeams piercing the desert night. 
She feels disoriented by the sudden change of scene.

Mulder appears unconcerned as he concentrates on acres of 
emptiness beyond the windshield. He's driving, as usual. "What 
is your point?" he asks, tone curious, with no trace of 
judgment.

Although she has no idea what her point was or is, she hears 
herself ask, "Don't you ever just want to stop?" Her tone is 
petulant, almost whiny. "Get out of the damn car? Settle down 
and live something approaching a normal life?" She realizes 
she's wanted to ask him this for a long time, ever since 
Emily.

She also wants to roll down her window and let the night air 
blast her hair away from her face, but she doesn't. 

Where are they and why are they here? The car's AC has brought 
the aroma of sage and sand into the vehicle, and she is 
reminded of the desert that surrounds Hills Air Force Base in 
Box Elder County, Utah. 

Another wild goose chase that led nowhere.    

Still looking out a window, she is no longer in the car, but 
in Mulder's apartment. It's night outside and snow is falling 
in ghostly clumps. She wonders how life can turn on a dime 
when you're standing still. 

"You didn't want to be there?" Mulder asks. She doesn't know 
to what he's referring. His brow furrows as he considers his 
own question, and he appears disappointed, conciliatory. "Oh, 
that's, um...that's self-righteous and narcissistic of me to 
say, isn't it?"

Is it? She doesn't understand what he means; she can't make 
sense of any of this, but hears herself reply, "No, I 
mean...maybe I did want to be out there with you."

Confused, she gapes at him for a moment without speaking. She 
has no idea where they've been, or why she would or wouldn't 
want to be there, or even how they got into Mulder's 
apartment. 

But she is glad to be with him, not because he is giving her a 
brightly wrapped Christmas gift but because he's smiling 
shyly, like he has a secret to share but doesn't quite know 
where to start. He's speaking in his most gentle voice, the 
one he reserves for the rare occasions when he's being 
extraordinarily tender with her, like the time she woke up in 
a hospital after being abducted by Duane Barry.

She has a gift for Mulder, too, and his eyes light up as he 
takes it from her. His eyelashes look so soft; she wants to 
reach out, feel their tickle against the pad of her index 
finger.

But that's impossible because he is no longer in the room, 
which is a doctor's examination room now, not Mulder's 
apartment. The doctor stands a few feet away beside a sink and 
removes his latex gloves. Scully sits with her back to a wall, 
wearing a paper gown, feeling exposed, skin crawling with 
irritation.

"It'll take at least two more sessions to get all the pigment 
out," the doctor says. A sympathetic smile warms his face.

"Getting rid of it hurts more than getting it in the first 
place," she says, knowing from the sting on her back she must 
be referring to her tattoo.

"A lot of patients tell me that. You can get dressed now." He 
tosses his gloves into the medical waste bin before leaving 
the room.

Why is she having her tattoo removed? 

She's beginning to suspect this is a dream, but doesn't 
remember falling asleep. Wasn't she in a cave? With Mulder? 
Perhaps this is a hallucination.

Rising from the exam table, she casts off her paper gown and 
dresses in business clothes, planning to return to the office 
for another hour or two. Mulder wanted to go over a case 
about...about...

She can't remember. It seems the mutants are all beginning to 
look alike, running one into another, countless genetic freaks 
strung like mismatched beads on a necklace of abnormal DNA.

Emily was such a mutation, she remembers. A miracle that was 
never meant to be. 

Mulder is once again with her in his apartment and he's crying 
over the loss of someone close to him. Her heart goes out to 
him; she understands bereavement, has felt its miserable ache.

Somehow she knows his mother has died of Paget's Carcinoma. 
She can picture Teena Mulder, split open on an autopsy table, 
her insides exposed. Heart, lungs...the womb that once cradled 
Mulder and his sister. 

She tries to embrace Mulder, but her arms close around 
nothing. It's night. She is standing on the doorstep of a 
house she's never seen before; a man she doesn't recognize 
stands to her left. Mulder waits back at the car. Scully is 
facing a screen door and an elderly woman is on the other side 
looking out at her, curious.

Scully asks her, "Are you the same Arbutus Ray who worked as a 
nurse at the Dominic Savio Memorial Hospital in 1979?" 

"Yes, I am she."

Gooseflesh dots Scully's arms. Mulder's sister is dead. She 
died at age fourteen. 

God, can that be true? Can any of this be true?

Mulder stands beside her, looking up at the stars.

"You know, I never stop to think that the light is billions of 
years old by the time we see it. From the beginning of time 
right past us into the future," he says. "Nothing is ancient 
in the universe."

She follows his line of vision only to find she's now in an 
unfamiliar apartment where there are cameras on every shelf. 
The room smells of chemicals, like a darkroom. A stranger is 
loading film.

He tells her "You're very lucky, you know that?"

He barely finishes speaking when a bullet pierces her abdomen. 
The pain is a shock, buckling her knees, sliding her to the 
floor.

Mulder! Help me, please! 

What the hell is going on? This is all too much. She feels 
queasy from the shifts in place and time. She looks down at 
her hurting stomach and sees blood staining her blouse. 

Pain rips through her abdomen. Oh, God, oh, God!

The apartment vanishes. The blood disappears. Scully is once 
again in the cave with Mulder. Everything is back at the 
beginning. And everything hurts. 

"Mulder..." she groans. "Help me."

*   *   *

"Scully...?" Not knowing what else to do, Mulder sat on the 
ground and embraced her, petted her hair, repeated her name. 
She clung to him, her nails drawing blood as they dug at the 
nape of his neck. She moaned and he thought he had never heard 
such a godawful sound. It stripped him of reason, set him on 
the edge of panic. "Fuck!" he finally shouted, at wit's end.

She didn't respond. A bad sign in itself.

So he rocked her, waiting, helpless, biting his lip against 
another outburst. She didn't need his fear. She was battling 
her own demons, trying to ride out her pain, probably trying 
to diagnose it even as it overwhelmed her.

What the hell was happening to her? Food poisoning? Could last 
night's miserable meal have made her sick? It seemed unlikely 
-- he'd eaten twice as many of those awful snail-things as she 
had and he felt fine. Maybe she'd contracted a disease...or 
was bitten by a poisonous insect. It couldn't be her cancer, 
could it? 

When her nails finally relaxed their grip in his neck and her 
trembling eased, he continued to soothe her by rubbing her 
back and whispering, "Shhh, it's okay, it's okay," trying to 
persuade himself as much as her. 

She'd been talking through gritted teeth for the last ten or 
fifteen minutes -- an eternity under the circumstances. Her 
conversation was disjointed. One-sided. She didn't respond to 
any of his questions, but seemed to be speaking with someone 
else. She mentioned several familiar names -- his mother, 
Emily, Duane Barry. And a name he didn't recognize: Arbutus 
Ray. Who the hell was that?

"Scully?" He tried to look at her face, but she buried her 
nose deeply into the crease of his neck. "Are you still in 
pain?"

She tightened her grip and shook her head.

"What happened?" he persisted. "Come on, Scully. Say 
something."

Air shuddered audibly from her lungs as she slid out of his 
arms and rose to her feet. She stood with shoulders hunched 
and head hanging so that her hair veiled her eyes.

He stood, too, and she stepped away from him, putting several 
feet between them. Her eyes roamed the cave; she looked 
everywhere but at him.

"Scully, talk to me."

"I... It felt like I'd been shot." Her hand moved to shield 
her stomach. "I saw things."

"What things?"

"Images. Just flashes really."

"Can you remember any of them?"

Again she avoided looking at him. "Nothing made any sense," 
she insisted. "It was just a bunch of jumbled, unconnected 
pictures." 

"Caused by what?"

She shrugged, turned away, shielding her eyes and her 
expression. "A perceptual disturbance of some kind, like 
hypnagogic or hypnopompic imagery. It's not uncommon for 
people to see strange images, or find themselves temporarily 
unable to move or speak, while in a state between sleep and 
wakefulness."

"Scully, this happened while you were wide awake." He took a 
step forward and tagged her hand. "You were talking the entire 
time."

"Was I?" Worry creased her brow.

"You mentioned Duane Barry. Do you remember that?"

Her eyes searched the ground and finally came to rest on the 
tiny carved idol. He followed her gaze and focused on it, too. 
His paranormal radar was picking up a signal, loud and clear. 
The idol was connected in some way to her sudden collapse, to 
the images she was refusing to discuss. He could feel it as 
surely as a tap on his shoulder.

"Scully, who is Arbutus Ray?"

"I don't know. The name isn't familiar." She straightened and 
finally looked him in the eyes. "We should cut up that sloth."

Shouldering past him and out of the cave, she gave him little 
choice but to follow.

*   *   *

Klizzie stood on the uppermost ridge of Crouching Cat 
Mountain, overlooking a broad valley that cradled Turkey Lake. 
Gray as stone beneath the low overcast, the big lake stretched 
all the way to the Traveling Camels, a range of hills named 
for their rounded, evenly spaced peaks. Dense forest bordered 
the lake to the northeast, grassland to the southwest. On the 
nearest shore were the domed shelters of Badger Clan. 

Klizzie's heart felt lighter than dandelion seeds on a summer 
breeze. She squeezed the pouch that hung between her breasts 
and offered a quick prayer of thanks to the Spirits for 
delivering Owl Clan safely to their destination.

The hike down to Tabaha Lodge would be easy, the slope gradual 
across open meadow.  The sky appeared unwilling to release its 
rain just yet. And although the wind was cool, it wasn't 
biting.

Already a group of children were running ahead, laughing, 
wanting to be first to reach the lakeside village. The men 
followed behind them, gathered in knots according to kinships, 
discussing upcoming events. Dzeh walked with his Uncle Lin and 
the Shaman, his head bent as he listened to the older men. 
Klizzie guessed they were reviewing the many upcoming 
ceremonies and scheduling the rituals.

The women brought up the rear, traveling in clusters of three 
or four. They chatted while they lugged infants and supplies. 
Occasionally one would shout to the older children whenever 
they ran too far ahead. Everyone appeared happy and relaxed 
despite their long trip.   

Klizzie smiled, too. Tonight she would be sitting at the 
hearth of her first family. She would embrace her aunts and 
her cousins. The clans would trade gifts, food and stories. 
She would learn who had died and who had been born since her 
last visit. 

Additional shelters would be constructed tomorrow. She and 
Dzeh would once again sleep beneath a roof shared by his 
closest kin. She would miss the stars, but not the chill and 
the damp and the mosquitoes.

In a few days, Turtle Clan would arrive from the south and 
Otter Clan from the east, and then the Mastodon Feast would 
officially begin.

Klizzie gathered several fist-sized stones and stacked them 
one on top of the other. This would be her last marker. If 
Day-nuh and Muhl-dar traveled this far, they could not miss 
the summer camp below.

Stones set in place, Klizzie hurried to catch up with her 
family.

*   *   *

Jogging with an awkward sidestep down the steep mountain path, 
arms held wide for balance, Mulder kept his eyes glued to 
Scully's retreating back. Her hair bounced with a determined 
rhythm as she hurried down the slope. He sped up to catch her.

More than a decade as a professional profiler and he still 
found it impossible to figure out what was on her mind. She 
had him feeling clueless. Which just made him want to try 
harder to ferret out her secrets. If history repeated itself 
she would remain inscrutable, an enigma despite his best 
efforts.

Scully was Mulder's blind spot. There was no seeing into her 
unless she let him. 

She was nearing the stream where they'd left the sloth when 
she suddenly stopped and held up a cautionary hand. He slowed, 
drew his gun, and stepped carefully, quietly to her side.

At first he couldn't see them hidden behind the sloth's bulky 
carcass. But he could hear them growling, tearing at flesh. 

Then a pair of silvery heads appeared over the top of the 
sloth's rounded belly. Pointed ears, blue-white eyes, fangs, 
muzzles dripping with fresh blood. 

Wolves. 

Eating *his* sloth. Fuck. 

He brushed past Scully and strode downhill, arms waving. "Get 
the hell outta here! Goddammit!"

A third wolf peered over the carcass. Then a fourth and fifth.

Shit. 

Mulder slowed his steps.  

The first wolf barred its teeth and growled. Mulder's stomach 
growled back. He was hungry. He hadn't eaten since last night 
and that was only a handful of berries and a bunch of bitter 
slug-things. No way was he going to let a bunch of mangy 
wolves steal his hard-earned supper.

"Sorry, boys, no cutting the line. We were here first." He 
aimed his gun into the trees and fired. The blast startled and 
scattered the wolves. It also unsettled a bunch of buzzards 
that had been skulking in the branches overhead, waiting their 
turn for leftovers. The wolves disappeared into the woods.

"That was a waste of a bullet." Scully frowned and marched 
past Mulder toward the sloth. She examined the dead animal 
from several angles, fists on her hips.

"They didn't look like the sharing types, Scully."

"We agreed to use the gun only in life-and-death situations."

"I don't know about you, but I happen to be starving to 
death."

"We could have tried chasing them off first."

He opened his mouth to argue, but then gave up the idea. He 
was tired of fighting with her, of being at odds this way. 

He dug his knife from his pocket and held it out to her. "Why 
don't you cut up the meat while I build a fire. We can camp in 
the cave tonight."

She took the knife.

"Take this, too." He offered his gun.

"Mulder, I didn't mean..." She shook her head. "I trust your 
judgment. Really, I do."

"I'm glad. But the wolves might come back and I'll be up in 
the cave." He resisted saying, "Of course, you could try 
chasing them off." Instead, he placed the gun in her palm. 
"Take it."

Before she could object, he grabbed the pack with the flint in 
it and headed back up the hill.  

*   *   * 

Gini searched for colorful snail shells at the water's edge. 
Wading ankle deep into the lake, she closed her ears to the 
laughter and talk coming from the camp behind her. So many 
people! And all of them saying, "How big you have grown!" and 
"This cannot be little Gini, can it?" Her poor scalp ached 
from all the yanking on her braids. 

"They are just being friendly," Klizzie had said before 
falling into the arms of another cousin.

Maybe so, but their tugs hurt just the same.

Of course, Jeha and her aunts went immediately to visit the 
hearth of Moasi's uncle. They were eager to catch a glimpse of 
Jeha's mate-to-be before the upcoming ceremony. Jeha and Moasi 
would be officially introduced at tonight's First Night Feast. 
A few days from now, four clans would celebrate their Joining 
Ceremony.

And sometime during the next several moons, Dzeh would make 
arrangements for Gini's future mating. She gripped her aching 
stomach; it hurt almost as much as her scalp.

"Who are you?" asked a voice behind her.

She peered over her shoulder. A boy stood several paces away, 
fists on his hips. He appeared to be about eleven or twelve 
Mastodon Feasts old and he wore his hair in the style of 
Badger Clan -- cut short along the part and then greased with 
bear fat to make it stand up like porcupine quills. He wore a 
fringed loincloth with a knife tucked into his belt. A pair of 
bear claws hung from his pierced ears and he sported a new 
tattoo on his right shoulder -- a prickly Badger Clan design. 
His freshly scabbed skin looked red and sore.

"My name is Gini. Who are you?"

"Chal," he said, swaggering closer. "Why are you not with the 
others?"

She crouched to pick up a snail and pretended to examine it. 
"My head hurts."

A bored expression settled over the boy's features. He had 
almond-shaped eyes the color of hazelnuts and his skin was a 
shade darker than Gini's. He was long-legged and big-nosed, 
reminding her of a stork. "Are all Owl Clan girls as ugly as 
you are?" he asked.

She glared at him. "Are all Badger Clan boys so rude?"

His eyes rounded and he laughed out loud. "You are calling 
*me* rude?"

It was a mean thing for her to say and she was usually not so 
impolite. "Sorry," she mumbled, hunching over her knees. She 
wished he would go away and leave her alone.

Instead he walked closer and squatted beside her. He looked at 
her face and proclaimed, "You are Dzeh's sister."

"How did you know that?"

"You look as he does. Your mouth and eyes."

She didn't like him staring so hard at her.

He went on, "Klizzie is my cousin. My mother is her aunt."

"Almost everyone here is Klizzie's cousin or aunt."

"My mother is Ho-Ya. You will be eating at our hearth 
tonight."

Oh great, she would not be rid of him soon.

"You frown too much," he said, rising to his feet. "I think 
you might be prettier if you smiled."

Tears sprang to her eyes. He apparently didn't see them or was 
ignoring them because he ambled slowly away, heading for a 
group of boys who played wrestling games in the field beyond 
the camp. She waited until he was all the way to the field 
before letting her tears fall.

*   *   *

"Mulder, come to bed," Scully urged. She lay on the furs, 
stripped down to her camisole and panties. She and Mulder were 
back in the cave. Sunset had been hours ago and she was eager 
to go to sleep and forget her earlier nightmare... 
hallucination...vision -- whatever the hell it'd been. She 
felt sated from their supper of roasted sloth meat, but sleep 
was proving impossible with Mulder wide awake and jabbing at 
the fire only a few feet away. 

He was frustrated, she knew, by her reluctance to talk about 
what had happened earlier. But what was there to say? The 
images she'd seen were confusing and probably meaningless, and 
she had no explanation for them. 

Crouched by the fire, Mulder prodded the coals with a stick, 
sending sparks into the air. He was shirtless and the blaze 
painted his chest gold while casting his back in shadow; dark 
and light stumbled over the muscles of his arms, wrestled 
across his face.

"I'm not tired," he mumbled.

"Just come and lay with me then."

His back stiffened. He gave the embers a final poke before 
tossing his stick into the flames. Rising to his feet, he 
glanced at her, uncertainty shading his eyes. The stitches on 
his cheek bristled like barbed wire above the dark line of his 
whiskers.

He crossed to the furs and sat down. A sigh -- weighted with 
fatigue, worry, and frustration -- chuffed from his lungs as 
he slowly untied his boots. He tugged them from his feet, 
exposing inflamed skin and broken blisters.

"Mulder...your feet..." Scully sat up for a closer look. 
Grasping his ankle, she held him immobile while she examined 
the lesions by firelight. "You should wash these."

"Tomorrow." 
 
"They're becoming infected."

"They've been like this for days. A few more hours won't 
matter."

Days? Why hadn't she noticed? Guilt flushed her face. She'd 
been too immersed in her own worries to see that he'd been 
suffering.  

He set his boots aside and lay down on his back on top of the 
furs, keeping his pants on and taking care not to touch her. 
Just an inch or two separated them, but the space felt 
impossibly wide to Scully. 

Pillowing his head in his hands, he stared at the painted rock 
wall, eyes focused on the Serpent Holder. 

"It looks alien, don't you think?" he asked.

She had to admit it did. Two horns curled antennae-like out of 
the top of its head. Round, hollow objects that resembled 
spaceships floated near its shoulders. It had enormous, blank 
eyes, and no mouth or nose.

"Yes, it does."

Her answer evidently surprised him because he twisted to look 
at her. The distance between them seemed to shrink a little.

He was right there, close enough to embrace if she let 
herself. She breathed him in -- musky, male, edgy. His scent 
aroused in her an almost crushing desire to take him into her 
body, give herself over to him while he filled her, spilled 
into her, bathed her with caresses and sighs. He hadn't 
touched her in days, other than to comfort her earlier when 
she'd been gripped by pain, and now she longed to turn the 
clock back... before today, before Mulder's nightmare a week 
ago, before their silent arguments. She wanted to go back to 
the night they'd slept together in the tribe's skin hut, 
surrounded by the aroma of mint and the scent of their 
passion, when he had brought her to orgasm and then rode out 
his own. That night she had been free of all doubts. That 
night, for the first time in her life, the act of joining with 
another person had felt unequivocally right.  

Mulder propped himself on one elbow and searched her face. 
"Scully, what was it like...your first time?"

There were moments, like this one, when he seemed able to see 
straight into her. 

Or perhaps she'd tipped her hand, revealing her lust through 
body language, dilated pupils, a rush of pheromones. 

"My first time? You mean--?"

"Sex. What was it like?" He leaned closer.

She recognized his invasive posture for what it was -- a 
technique he'd perfected over their years together. He was 
corralling her without making any actual physical contact. 
Early on, his crowding had irritated her, made her feel 
awkward and nervous; she'd interpreted it as aggressive, 
purposefully intimidating. Then when she figured out he wasn't 
bullying her but was in fact trying to connect with her, get 
her to focus, dig deeper for her answers, she no longer 
objected to his looming. She grew to expect it...and even to 
appreciate it.

"What was it like?" she repeated, thinking back. "Predictably 
dismal, I guess." Age eighteen. First year at college. Jimmy 
Pendleton, upper classmen. A molecular biology major with 
grades so high he was already being recruited by Merck Frosst, 
Nanogen *and* the U.S. Department of Energy. "Well, not 
dismal, really, but not great either. A little painful." And 
scary, disappointing, exciting, mysterious, over too soon but 
not soon enough. "You?"

He took a moment before answering, thoughtfully gnawing at the 
inside of his lower lip. Then a grin nudged his cheek and his 
eyes sparkled with the golden light of the fire. "It 
was...intense. Beautiful." His tone made her curious, and a 
little jealous. "Don't laugh, Scully, but I felt like crying 
when it was over. I desperately wanted to be back inside her. 
I guess I was afraid the opportunity wasn't going to present 
itself again."

"Did it present itself again? With her, I mean?" she blurted, 
not certain she wanted to know the details of his earliest 
sexual encounters.

He smiled, looking both shy and smug. "Yeah. It did. But..." 
His smile faded. "As sublime as it was, the act of separating 
always educed a feeling of unspeakable loss. It terrified me 
to think I might never experience that closeness again."

His unexpected candor left her with additional questions. Was 
sex that way for him still -- a few blissful moments of human 
contact in an otherwise solitary existence? How alone did he 
feel? 

He stared directly into her eyes, evidently trying to tell her 
something she wasn't hearing, not about his past, but about 
the present, about her.

"Scully, what's your greatest regret?"

Jesus, he was in a peculiar mood. He never talked this way. 
Neither of them did.

He moved his hand toward her, bumping the tips of her fingers 
with his. A light touch, seemingly accidental, but she'd 
learned a long time ago that nothing was unintentional with 
Mulder.

"Losing Emily," she said without needing to think.

He frowned and shook his head. "Doesn't count. You didn't 
cause Emily's death."

That was debatable. Scully knew she wouldn't have treated her 
daughter even if she'd known how, and that made Emily's death 
a calculated choice in her book. "I could have done more for 
her."

"No. Pick something else -- something for which you were 
wholly responsible. What would you most like to go back and 
undo if you could?" 

Where was he going with these questions? 

"I regret a lot of things," she said, hedging. "The loss of my 
gun, for instance."

His hand slid away from hers, breaking their hard-won contact. 
He said nothing.

"Mulder, I don't know what you want to hear."

"The truth, Scully. Only the truth."

"I don't have any life-altering regrets. I really don't."

"None?" He sounded incredulous. "You've never made a decision 
you wanted to reverse?"

"No, not really." Her eyes searched the cave as if her wily 
regrets were hidden somewhere in its crevices. 

She focused on the Serpent Holder, which glared back at her 
through its empty eyes. The way it gripped its twisted snake 
appeared threatening. Scully suddenly missed her apartment 
with its tidy rooms, everything in its place. She wanted to be 
there, not here, preparing for bed, soaking in her tub, 
sipping wine while reading the latest edition of the NEJM. The 
steam from her bath would smell like jasmine and the radio 
would be playing Bach.

The fire snapped, sending a flare of sparks toward the cave's 
roof. Scully felt out of control here, vulnerable, and she 
hated the way her blood was pulsing too loudly in her ears. 

"What about you, Mulder? What do you most regret?"

Sadness welled in his eyes. "Lots of things, but the one that 
tops my list happened years ago..."

"What was it?"

"I broke Samantha's trust."

Samantha's trust? This wasn't at all what Scully was expecting 
him to say. An image of Arbutus Ray returned to her, along 
with an inexplicable certainty that Mulder's sister had died 
at age fourteen.

She tried to blink it away. "What happened?"

Mulder rolled onto his back and spoke to the shadows in the 
cave's roof, his voice tight and subdued, as muted as wind in 
a bottle. "We were playing Hide and Seek. Her idea. I hadn't 
really wanted to -- I felt much too mature to be playing games 
with my kid sister. But she pleaded and I relented. I hid 
first, in an obvious spot -- I wanted to hurry the game along. 
She quickly found me, just as I knew she would, and then it 
was her turn to hide. As soon as she was out of sight, I took 
off to spend the afternoon at a friend's house. I figured Sam 
would wait a few minutes, get bored and give up the game. I 
should have known better." He paused, grief glittering in his 
eyes. His lower lip trembled when he began to speak again. 
"When I came home for supper that night, Mom was livid. She 
told me she'd found Sam hiding in the garage behind the 
lawnmower, where she'd been waiting for more than three hours 
for me to find her. Three hours! When Sam learned I wasn't 
even looking for her--" Again he stopped, tried to control the 
emotion in his voice. The fire crackled and hissed. "Sam cried 
herself to sleep...inconsolable. She gave me the silent 
treatment for days -- which I deserved. I tried everything to 
make it up to her. Let her use my telescope. Told her to punch 
me in the nose. Finally I won her over with a trip to the 
movies. But things weren't the same and I felt like such a 
stupid--"

"Mulder, you were just a kid. It was a childish lapse of 
judgment. That's all. You can't blame yourself for that."

"She was abducted three weeks later." 

Oh God. No wonder he refused to give up on her now. 

//"Are you the same Arbutus Ray who worked as a nurse at the 
Dominic Savio Memorial Hospital in 1979?"//

Sam was dead. Scully felt it as surely as she felt her own 
heartbeat.  

Mulder continued speaking. "After she went missing, I kept 
thinking...I *keep* thinking still, she's out there somewhere, 
believing I've given up on her.

"Mulder..." Scully reached for him and wrapped her arms around 
him. He slid into her embrace, silken-skinned and over-heated, 
his whiskers scouring her shoulder as his fingers pressed hard 
into her back.

His weight softened her, unknotted her muscles, and tempered 
her worries while thawing her resolve. She felt foolish for 
the times she kept him at arm's length. None of her carefully 
considered reasons made sense right now. 

It was impossible to keep her perspective when he caused such 
desire to blossom in her. 

She snaked an arm between them, intending to end this 
conversation, put aside her doubts, and ignore their 
individual and collective heartaches, if only for the time 
being. But when she tried to unfasten his fly, he stopped her 
by loosely securing her wrist in the circle of his fingers. 

He drew back to look into her eyes and she lost herself in his 
glistening pupils, bottomless wells of patience grown large 
with passion.

"Tell me what you want, Scully," he murmured.

"I'd rather show you." Again she tried for his zipper. 

And again he stopped her, grasping her more firmly this time. 

"Tell me...what you want."

She wanted to make love, not conversation. "Mulder...not now." 
Her voice escalated to a weak, desperate whimper.

"*Tell*...me," he insisted. Clearly he wasn't going to let her 
off the hook.

 "I want a kiss."

He nodded but didn't move, so she leaned in and gently kissed 
him on the mouth. His lips felt warm and pliant beneath hers, 
but he didn't deepen the kiss and he didn't allow her access 
to his mouth when she tried to slide her tongue between his 
teeth.

Stymied, she retreated.

"What else?" he asked.

She took his hand and placed it on her breast.

He removed it. "Tell me." 

"Damn it, Mulder, what is this about?"

"I want you to talk to me."

"Talking dirty turns you on?"

"I didn't say that."

What then? Did they really have to play this game? "I want you 
to put your hand on my breast."

He returned his hand to her breast, gently cupped her, but 
didn't stroke or squeeze her. Even so, the warm weight of his 
fingers caused her nipple to harden. 

There was no way for him to miss the transformation, yet his 
hand remained motionless.

"Mulder, why are you acting this way?"

"If you don't talk to me, Scully, I can't know what you want."

Ah, so that was it. As usual, Mulder was taking the long way 
to his point. This holding back, his questions about her first 
time and greatest regrets -- these were strategies intended to 
open her up. Like his looming. Well, she didn't feel like 
having a heart-to-heart. She found introspection and 
revelation difficult in the best of times and this was 
definitely not the best of times. Right now she needed him to 
love her without explanations, without reason. 

"Scully, you hold all the cards here."

"Do I?" He was lying to himself if he believed that. The 
recent wedge of unease between them had begun with his 
nightmare, not hers. "Are you sure there isn't something you 
need to say to me?"

His mouth opened and then closed. He gave a single nod, 
conceding her point without argument, and then met her 
halfway, his lips pressing into hers as fervently as hers 
pressed his. This time, he allowed her to explore his mouth 
with her tongue. This time he didn't stop her when she reached 
between them to unfasten his pants. He leaned into her, onto 
her, pushed her camisole up, bared her right breast and 
clutched it in his left fist. 

We are both in denial, she thought. We are co-conspirators 
dodging the truths in our hearts. There is no blame for it, 
beyond our cowardice and false hopes. You want to believe, 
Mulder, and so do I -- in a future that allows for your 
devotion and my love, a future in which neither of us must 
forfeit our happiness.

She unzipped his pants, burrowed into his boxers and grabbed 
hold of him, semi-erect and growing more rigid as his ardor 
overtook him. She liked the firmness of him in her palm, his 
heat, his smoothness; she curled her fingers around him, 
squeezed him, tugged him closer to the V of her legs.  
He needed no coaxing, and scrambled on top of her, sliding his 
pants down past his hips as he settled between her spread 
thighs.

Only when he tried to enter her did he discover she was still 
wearing her panties.

"Shit," he said, rising to his knees. 

With his help, she wriggled out of her underwear. He tossed 
the silky, black garment aside and repositioned himself 
between her legs. 

His erection, fully engorged now, pressed hard against her 
pubic bone. He kissed her neck, her lips, her brow. His hands 
traveled up her sides, over her shoulders. He plowed his 
fingers into her hair; plunged his tongue into her mouth. Oh, 
God, she loved the weight of him on her. And although she was 
only able to take in half-breaths, it was him, not air, that 
she craved. She wanted to inhale him, swallow him, draw him 
into her. She wanted to feel his pulse vibrate in her veins, 
invade her bones, renew her soul. She wanted him whole -- to 
make her whole.  

"Mulder, I want--"

Her words stalled when he lifted his hips and pushed into her. 
She spread her knees wide to accommodate him. 

When he filled her, she cried out.

"Shhh, it's okay," he breathed into her ear.

She shut her eyes against the sudden tide of emotion and tears 
his soft words inspired. She felt an extraordinary mix of want 
and satisfaction. Remarkable, perplexing.

He rocked against her, fitting his body more tightly into 
hers. The pressure both alleviated and increased her restless 
yearning. Her juices slicked her inner thighs with each of his 
thrusts, allowing him to glide smoothly, lovingly in and out 
of her.

Hugging him to her, she felt his heartbeat. Rapid. Earnest. It 
rattled her ribs. Set her own heart pounding.    

She began to meet his thrusts with raised hips. Her timing 
encouraged him to pick up his pace and she liked the new 
rhythm. Relentless, forceful. He was breathing more rapidly 
now. Sweat slicked his neck and chest, dripped from his chin 
onto her cheek. Each pounding down-stroke drove the air from 
her lungs. 

She dug her nails into his back as she felt her orgasm 
approach. Heat radiated out from her center. Pressure 
blossomed in her abdomen, making her feel swollen, explosive. 
Tingly. Warm. Chest, arms, nipples, fingers, thighs...gone 
numb. Face flushed. She would come in four strokes, three, 
two--

When it hit, the world seemed to vanish. She heard nothing but 
a crash of blood in her ears. She felt nothing but the hammer 
of her heart. No breath, no voice, no strength, no memory or 
thought. Only now, only him. Mulder. Filling her, pushing her 
over an edge. Out of herself. Into bliss.

She floated in that place of euphoria, beyond sensation, 
swaddled in cottony nothingness. Safe. Sated.

And then she gasped, drawing air and reality back into her 
lungs. She felt Mulder's solid weight on her, heard his 
labored breathing. Sensation returned to her fingers and toes. 
She gripped his back and whispered, "Now, Mulder. Come inside 
me."

That was all it took. He pressed as far into her as he could 
go and roared with his pleasure. She embraced him as he 
emptied into her. The intimacy awed her, brought tears to her 
eyes.

This was their most perfect moment. 

Waiting for his muscles to relax, she lay unhurried and 
unmoving beneath him, allowing him time to catch his breath, 
return to reality, just as she had done moments ago. Although 
the press of him inside her was already diminishing, he 
remained where he was, spent but evidently unwilling to 
withdraw just yet.

She drew lazy circles on his back with her fingertips. His 
heart slowed. He sighed. 

Then he heaved himself off her, slowly, as if reluctant to 
leave her. Before he could turn away, she glimpsed the look of 
fear and loss in his eyes.

"The opportunity will present itself again," she promised.

"Will it, Scully? Are we going to be alright?"

Was there any way to know the future? "I'm not ready to give 
up. Are you?"

He shook his head, took her into his arms and hugged her 
fiercely. "You know me better than that."

*   *   *

Klizzie woke to find Gini crawling into her bed. Dzeh had not 
yet returned from the Prayer Lodge where he and the other men 
were planning the Mastodon ceremonies, smoking their pipes and 
drinking wo-chi. It was possible they would spend the entire 
night there. 

Tonight Klizzie and Gini were staying at the hearth of her 
Aunt Ho-Ya. Soft snores came from the skins of her cousin's 
sleeping sons, worn out from their afternoon games. A fire 
burned low in the center of the hut and eight beds surrounded 
it, filled with the sons, some uncles and aunts, a cousin or 
two. Ho-Ya slept by herself, an arm's length from Klizzie. Her 
mate was at the Prayer Lodge, too. 

Klizzie made room for Gini, who snuggled beneath the furs.

"What are you doing in my bed, Little Chick?"

"I cannot sleep."

"What keeps you awake?" Klizzie pulled the furs over the 
girl's shoulders and tucked her in.

"My stomach hurts."

"Still? Did you not drink the tea the Shaman gave you?"

"Yes. But there are bees buzzing in me." Gini buried her face 
against Klizzie's shoulder.

Klizzie stroked her hair. "What is causing these bees to 
buzz?" 

Gini shrugged.

Evidently, she needed some coaxing. Kissing the top of the 
girl's head, Klizzie whispered into her hair, "Usually bees 
buzz in my stomach when I am afraid."

"What makes you afraid?"

"Oh, the usual things. Saber-toothed cats. Winters without 
food. Being left alone while Dzeh travels to faraway clans for 
supplies." This had happened last winter when Owl Clan had run 
dangerously low on meat. Dzeh and two cousins set out for Bear 
Clan. They were gone many days and returned frostbitten and 
tired, but with enough dried meat, mastodon fat and pine nuts 
to last until the spring migrations. "What is frightening 
you?"

Gini clutched Klizzie around the waist and hugged her tightly. 
"Do I...must I be mated?"

Ahh, so that was it. Gini was not so grownup after all.

"No, but I told you how pleasant it is. And you know how hard 
life can be for a woman without a mate."

"I know."

"But...?"

"I am scared."

Klizzie pulled back to look Gini in the eyes. The light from 
the fire showed the girl's face was swollen from crying and 
dried tears had left tracks on her cheeks. "Tell me what 
scares you." 

Gini frowned. Her eyes became more serious. "Jeha told me 
babies come from men. That they crawl through his be-zonz when 
he mates. Is that true?"

Klizzie could not stop her smile. "Yes, that is true."

"Then why do you pray to the Spirits for a baby?"

"Because the Spirits control all things. Even the crawling of 
small babies from men into women."

"These babies must be very, very small, right?" Worry peaked 
Gini's soft brows, which curved so exactly like Dzeh's. 

Klizzie loved this young sister of her mate. She hugged the 
girl and said, "Yes, they are very, very small."

"And they do not hurt when they are put in you?"

"No, they do not hurt."

"Then why...?" Gini blushed as pink as a stalk of fireweed.

"Why what?"

The girl lowered her voice to a whisper. "Why do women 
sometimes cry out when they lay with their mates?"

Klizzie smiled again and pinched Gini's blushing cheek. "It is 
not a cry of pain. It is a cry of passion."

Now Gini blushed even more. Her cheeks looked like two plump 
strawberries.

"Do you have more questions?" Klizzie asked.

Gini shook her head, then nodded.

"Is that a no or a yes?"

"A yes." Gini burrowed into Klizzie's embrace, hiding her face 
beneath the furs. When she spoke, her voice was muffled by the 
skins. "Does a man's be-zonz grow as big as a stallion's when 
he mates?"

This made Klizzie laugh out loud. "No, my Chick, not that big. 
It is no wonder you have had bees buzzing in your stomach if 
you are thinking such a thing. Rest assured, a man grows only 
big enough to fill a woman and no more. You have no reason to 
fear this."

"Klizzie, can we go home? I do not like it here."

"I thought you were looking forward to the Mastodon Feast and 
the games and music and dancing."

"I am. But...can I sleep in your bed with you tonight?"

"You are welcome to stay in my bed, at least until Dzeh 
returns. Then you will have to be a big girl and return to 
your own bed. Agreed?"

"Agreed." Gini kissed Klizzie on the cheek. "I love you, 
Klizzie."

"I love you, too, Little Chick. Now go to sleep. We have much 
to do tomorrow."

*   *   *

Mulder sat at the mouth of the cave, elbows propped on his 
knees, eyes aimed at the stars. It was a little after midnight 
and the sky was velvety black and cloudless. The Milky Way 
flowed overhead like a river of cut diamonds. The tilted moon 
inched closer to the western horizon and from somewhere in the 
valley below, a wolf howled. The sound raised goosebumps on 
his bare arms. Rubbing them away with his palms, he scanned 
the heavens for communication satellites and, finding none, 
wondered how he and Scully were ever going to get back home. 
When a comet suddenly plummeted earthward, he followed its 
fiery trail until it fizzled and vanished. Would wishing on a 
falling star help?  

God, he felt restless. Instead of alleviating his insomnia, 
making love with Scully had had the exact opposite effect, 
leaving him wide awake and apprehensive. They shouldn't have 
done it, not without checking for her chip first. But in the 
heat of the moment he hadn't thought. Foolish. If he got her 
pregnant-- 

"Mulder?" Scully's voice came from behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder to look up at her. She hugged one 
of the sleeping skins around her naked shoulders. Concern 
creased her brow.

"Sorry, did I wake you?" he asked.

She sat down beside him. "No. I thought I heard wolves." 

He nodded. They listened to the crickets whine for a few 
minutes. The air smelled like pine and woodsmoke, reminding 
Mulder of Memorial Day weekends at Quonochontaug when the 
foggy ocean breeze would blow in across the bay through the 
evergreens, making it chilly enough to light a fire in the 
fireplace. Sam would beg for s'mores and his mom indulged 
them, as long as he helped his sister toast the marshmallows. 

Mulder's eyes returned to the stars. 

"They're ancient, you know. The stars, I mean. Their light is 
billions of years old by the time we see it."

Scully shivered. Wrapping the fur more tightly around her 
shoulders, she asked, "What made you say that?"

"I don't know. Just thinking about time travel, I guess. Why?"

She bit her lip, shook her head.

"What's wrong?" His gut clenched at the thought of her earlier 
seizure.

"You said something very similar in my...vision."

So she was calling it a vision now, not a "perceptual 
disturbance." And the details evidently weren't as vague as 
she'd led him to believe.

"Did I?"

"Mmm." She busied herself readjusting the blanket. "I've been 
thinking about your Flux Space theory."

"What about it?"

"Suppose..." She stopped, cleared her throat, stared straight 
into the black night. "Suppose time isn't two-dimensional, the 
way you described it, but is...three-dimensional."

3-D? Like space? Where was she going with this? "Based on...?"

"It fits the current evidence."

He wasn't sure what evidence she was referring to, but guessed 
it had something to do with her "visions."

"You're saying time doesn't exist linearly?"

"I'm suggesting it might extend in more than two directions."

Forward, backward and... "Go on."

"Imagine time not as a line but as a sphere on which we can 
move forward, backward, sideward, in a line, an arch, a loop."

He pictured two ants crawling across a baseball, their paths 
meandering, occasionally intersecting. Then he pictured the 
baseball as a bowling ball with its three holes. One of his 
imaginary ants teetered on the edge of a hole and fell in. 
"Hm. It might be even more complicated than that."

"Right. We may be able to travel into the sphere, maybe pass 
all the way through it."

He nodded, thinking of the unfortunate ant.

"Mulder, it gets worse."

One ant is inside the ball, while the other is still crawling 
on the surface. "You and I aren't necessarily in the same time 
at the same place, so to speak."

"Exactly. If time is three-dimensional and we're moving around 
on and through it independently of one another, you might wake 
up tomorrow as a teenager, while I might be an old woman."

Jesus, no wonder she looked so worried. "Does this theory of 
yours have anything to do with the...uh...visions you had 
earlier?"

She took a deep breath. "In part. I saw some things that felt 
very real, although I know they haven't happened...yet."

"What things?"

"I was shot in the stomach."

This startled him. "By who?"

"Another FBI agent, as far as I could tell. I didn't recognize 
the man or the location."

"Couldn't it have just been a very, very realistic dream?"

"That sounds like something I would argue." She gave him a 
rueful smile. "There were other things, too, things that jibe 
with our experience here. I saw myself having my tattoo 
removed."

"You think that explains why it's fading now?" 

"It might." 

Was she moving forward into her future while he traveled 
backward into his past?

Then it struck him. If her future included events in the 20th 
Century that hadn't occurred yet, that must mean they make it 
back to their own time. And it was possible her visions held 
clues to their eventual return.    

"Scully, who is Arbutus Ray?"

"Mulder..."

"Who is she?"

Scully looked directly at him and frowned. "A women who worked 
as a nurse at the Dominic Savio Memorial Hospital in 1979."

"And...?"

"She claimed your sister died there."

Her words felt like a slap and he recoiled from them as if 
he'd actually been hit. "In '79? That's impossible. Sam would 
have been only fourteen years old. We've seen her as an 
adult." She couldn't be dead. She couldn't be. 

"We've seen her clone. And clones can be engineered years 
after someone's death."

"No. I can't-- Did you see her body? In your vision, did you 
actually see Sam dead?"

"No, I just felt it was true." 

"Felt it...?" Scully had never believed in premonitions 
before. Why now? "I-I can't accept that, Scully. You...you had 
a dream, a hallucination, not a prophecy."

"Mulder, we both know what's possible, what can be done when 
men are given the necessary science and lack of conscience. My 
cancer, Emily's conception. Is it so farfetched to imagine 
Sam's fate is part of the same agenda?"

He'd thought exactly that for quite some time, but never 
imagined Sam as dead. It hollowed him to think she might have 
died years ago, that he would never see her again, that he'd 
never be able to make up for--

He rose and stalked into the cave, only to walk right back out 
again when the air seemed too stuffy and the fire too hot. 
Scoured by doubt, his skin crawled with annoyance. He wanted 
to throw or kick something, to scream at the stars at the top 
of his lungs.

Scully remained where she was, unmoving, waiting out his 
disbelief.

"You have no proof," he argued, his voice thick with dread. 
Jesus, was it possible he'd spent his entire adult life 
chasing a ghost?

"I've said those words to you more times than I can count, 
Mulder, but I'm saying to you now that I believe what I saw 
was true. I believe it was our future."

He crouched beside her and tried his best to reign in his 
temper. It was because her words were so uncharacteristic that 
he knew he had to listen to them. If she was leaning toward a 
paranormal explanation for her experience, she must have 
satisfied her own heavy-handed skepticism with a convincing 
reason.

"Earlier today you dismissed these visions of yours. What 
changed your mind? What makes you so sure now?" he asked.

"This." She opened the animal skin that blanketed her 
shoulders, exposing her bare stomach. There above her navel 
was the unmistakable scar of a recent gunshot wound. "I found 
it a few minutes ago."