Mammoth Season: ep 1.02 detailed summary
Here's episode two!
EPISODE 1.02: 'The Orphan in the Ice'
SHORT SUMMARY: Limited contact with the Cro-Magnon is established - these people hospitably offer the time travelers a new place to make camp, but Brother of Thunder already worries that he's made a mistake. The expedition sees its first mammoths, and a calf is orphaned when its mother falls through the ice. John insists on saving the calf from scavengers, including the Neanderthals. The worried Cro-Magnon begin to suspect that their guests are sorcerers, and the Neanderthals promise vengeance.
DETAILED SUMMARY: We start off with the same tense moment as we left on last week - the Cro-Magnon have entered the camp, and the time travelers have come out to meet them. Nobody is capable of reacting right away. The time travelers are too frightened, and now that we take a good look at them, the Cro-Magnon (there are only five, all men) are puzzled. This is not what they expected to find when they came here.
Dr. Pegg asks John who these people are; John says he does not know, as they were not in the valley during the summer. After the earlier confrontation with the Neanderthals, John is reluctant to try communicating with the Cro-Magnon, so Seiko takes the initiative instead. She tells the guards to lower their guns and then, since John's bag of trinkets was left inside, she takes off her scarf and offers it gingerly to Brother of Thunder. He accepts it and drapes it around his own neck, and in return offers her a string of ivory beads carved in the shapes of animals. She takes it, smiles are exchanged, and it seems that the two peoples have officially made friends.
The next morning, Gus has started filming and is excitedly describing events for his camera. Most people are busy packing up camp. The confused-looking Cro-Magnon are wandering around, watching or helping as best they can. And Seiko, John, and Jean-Pierre are attempting to communicate with Brother of Thunder. The Cro-Magnon leader has drawn a diagram of the valley in the snow, marking a number of important features, and the time-travelers are comparing it with a topographic map, trying to figure out what's what.
Once packed, they head down the hill. The chamois and okapi creature bound out of the way, and a lazy white lion lies on a crag watching them. They wend their way into a secluded part of the valley, where an intersection of steep, craggy hillsides forms a naturally defensible spot. The Cro-Magnon have walled this off with large stones and tall wooden stakes, and behind the wall is their village. This is a collection of tepee-like tents of rough cloth, most of them decorated with detailed paintwork. Mammoths and astronomical objects seem to be favourite motifs. Women and children lurk in the doorways, curious but frightened, as the time travelers enter. The Cro-Magnon are clearly less suited to the cold than the Neanderthal - they are dark-haired and dark-skinned, and even the children wear layers of clothing, where Neanderthal children went naked even in the snow.
Jim asks John whether the previous expedition came in the summer, and when this is confirmed, points out that the Cro-Magnon are clearly nomadic, only arriving in the valleys in the autumn. In fact, judging from the importance of mammoths in their iconography, they probably follow the herds. But if the mammoths are already here, why haven't they seen any?
Now we meet the Cro-Magnon as characters: Brother of Thunder gathers his people - there are not more than two dozen of them, and only the five are adult men - and reassures them that their 'clan brothers' have sent help. The women and children look wary of this, and the men cynical, but apparently what Brother of Thunder says goes. The time travelers begin setting up their own camp, which for reasons of space must be done outside the walls of the Cro-Magnon village.
While they work on this, Brother of Thunder greets his sister, and they watch the time travelers working. He is more honest with Sister of Winds than he was with the others: he mentions meeting Seiko in the woods and says he at first thought the newcomers must have been sent by their clan brothers, but now that he's seen how few and how foreign they are, he's worried. Sister of Winds asks why, in that case, he brought them back here, and he says that they are enemies of the Neanderthal and that's a start. Sister of Winds hints that they've been burned by friendly-seeming strangers before. Seeing David being carried on a stretcher, she remarks that at least they do not abandon their wounded - that's something.
Once again, John is not helping make camp. Instead, he has is trying to communicate with the Cro-Magnon children, pointing to one of the tepee paintings and saying "mammoth!" The children mimic the word and laugh at him. Jean-Pierre points out that this isn't going to work: even if they understand that he wants a translation, they're as likely to give him words for 'tepee' or 'painting' as they are for 'mammoth'. John irritably asks how Jean-Pierre would go about asking them where to find mammoths, then. Jean-Pierre doesn't know, but Seiko finds a way. She borrows some photographs of cave paintings from Jim, and lays them out, matching them to the same animals depicted in the carved beads Brother of Thunder gave her.
Eventually, the children understand the game, and she gets words for mammoth, lion, stag, rhino, and chamois. Then she scratches out a copy of Brother of Thunder's map of the valley, and puts the ivory animals in the appropriate spots. The children are happy to help and even accept some of Jim's trail mix as a reward. It seems, however, that they have done something wrong, for just as they place the mammoth, Brother of Thunder comes up and berates them, and they scatter. Seiko attempts to communicate with him now, showing him various images of mammoths - the cave painting, the bead, an artist's impression, and a still from Walking with Beasts - and points to the place where the children indicated mammoths live. Brother of Thunder scowls, but then indicates that they should follow him.
While everybody else goes to see about the mammoths, Jim chooses to stay with David - it's his fault he got hurt. David is not looking good, though he manfully says he's fine. He obviously has a fever. Kim is worried, but doesn't want to give him antibiotics just yet: she's only got so much medicine with her, and it's not a good idea to give the bacteria an evolutionary head start by exposing them to the antibiotics forty thousand years early. She'll give it a few more hours to see if he can fight off the infection on its own. Sister of Winds hovers in the door, watching.
Brother of Thunder leads the group over a hill and gestures down into a secluded little glen - and there is a small herd, perhaps a dozen mammoths, scraping the still-fresh snow aside with their tusks to get at the last grass underneath. The group heads eagerly down the hillside, but Brother of Thunder stops them; they will have to keep their distance. Gus gets straight to filming, and invites Jean-Pierre to talk about mammoth migration, but Jean-Pierre is silent and Seiko waves Gus off.
Jim sits by David while Kim reads a book. Both of them look up when Sister of Winds enters and gives them each a wood and bone rattle, which she indicates they should shake. She then begins examining David's wound; Kim tries to stop her, but Jim angrily points out that she's at least doing something. They begin to argue again, but Sister of Winds shushes them. She casts a handful of knucklebones painted with stripes and dots, then kneels by David's head and begins softly singing while she massages his temples.
In the valley, Seiko is making notes of what the mammoths are eating, while Gus is getting as close to them as Brother of Thunder will let him. Gus turns out to know enough about elephant social structure to impress Seiko, correctly pointing that all adult members of this herd are females and even identifying an individual who might be the matriarch. Jean-Pierre is just sitting there watching, quietly overjoyed. As they skirt the herd, there is a brief interruption as they spot the woolly rhinoceros that charged Boom last episode. It ignores them, but Boom is convinced that it's watching, waiting for an opportunity to come at him again.
Among the mammoths is a mother with a year-old calf. Gus moves around to get a better filming angle, with the others following him - the mammoths notice them coming and begin to plod away, but it turns out that beneath the ten centimeters of snow on the valley floor is a pond with only a thin crust of ice. The mother mammoth's weight is too much for it, and she trumpets her surprise as it cracks under her feet. Startled, the time-travelers hurry in for a closer look in spite of Brother of Thunder's attempts to keep them back; the other mammoths, seeing humans coming, retreat to the other end of the valley, making unhappy noises. It's clear that the fall hurt the mother mammoth quite badly. John instructs one of Gus' men to go get Kim.
Kim arrives and her best guess from what she can see is that the sudden drop into shallow water broke the mammoth's leg. There's nothing she can do for it, and when this upsets John, she angrily informs him that she's a doctor, not a vet. She has no idea how one would go about setting an elephant's leg or even whether it's possible. The mammoth appears to be bleeding to death and there's nothing they can do about it except put her out of her misery, which they are reluctant to do for fear of how Brother of Thunder might react; the Cro-Magnon leader is ignoring their discussion, stroking the mammoth's face and murmuring to her as if trying to reassure her.
John is adamant that if they cannot save the mother, they will at least save the calf and take it back to the twenty-first century. He accordingly tries to entice it away from its mother, but it refuses to go, and there is no other way to move it besides possibly a crane; though it's only a year old, it already weighs some six hundred kilograms. The scientists try to explain that there's very little they can do, but John is adamant. He will not listen when they tell him that it's getting late. After sunset the scavengers will come for the dead adult, and he is only risking his own life needlessly.
Jim is still sitting with David, and Sister of Winds is still working on whatever she's doing when a teenage Cro-Magnon comes in and calls her. She starts to leave, and as Jim watches her go, he stops shaking the rattle she gave him - she turns around and encourages him to keep it up, then hurries out after the girl.
As night falls, a procession of Cro-Magnon arrive around the mammoth mother and calf, carrying torches. Jean-Pierre watches, fascinated, as they stand in a circle around the injured mother, shaking rattles like the one Sister of Winds gave Jim. Sister of Winds sings a few lines and mimes massaging the mammoth's temples, although she stays a safe distance back, then kneels on the ice and casts her knucklebones. Kim remarks that she's treating the mammoth the same way she treated David, and Jean-Pierre says he's not surprised; he has often found elephants to be more human than a lot of human beings.
All Sister of Winds' efforts seem to be in vain, though - the mother mammoth is barely moving and the ice and water around her are all bloodstained. Sister of Winds gets up, head held low, and the circle of Cro-Magnon all lower their own heads. The baby mammoth trumpets unhappily, as if it understands, and the cry is echoed by the other mammoths, now invisible in the gathering dark. Heads still hung as if grieving, the Cro-Magnon start to leave, and with the wind turning chilly, the time-travelers decide to go with them.
Except for John. The calf, caught somewhere between grief and incomprehension, is still pacing by the body of its mother, and John absolutely refuses to abandon it. Gus and his crew decide to stay and help, filming this vigil and John's angry railing that these people who claim to love animals are simply going to let the calf die. Brother of Thunder sits a few meters away, perhaps wondering what in the world John is trying to do. Gus has his team set up torches around the edges of the pond to scare off the scavengers, and we start to see the shapes of white lions and honey-coloured hyenas, their eyes shining with reflected firelight. Gus talks in whispers about the size and ferocity of ice-age wildlife, and John sits, holding on white-knuckled to his shotgun.
Back at camp, David is still feverish. Sister of Winds has returned and is now again sitting next to him, moving her hands over his chest without touching him. She pauses midway through a line of her song and puts her head on his chest to listen to his heart, then casts her knucklebones again. Apparently the results are disheartening. She hangs her head a moment, then gathers up the bones and takes her rattle back, pausing to place her hand on Jim's shoulder as a gesture of consolation. Without a word, Kim gets up and begins preparing the antibiotics.
The torches are enough to keep the lions and hyenas back, but there is one scavenger in the valley that is not afraid of them - the Neanderthals. The circling hyenas suddenly scatter, chased off by something more fearsome than they. John, Gus, and the crew (Brother of Thunder seems to have vanished) form a tight circle inside their fires as the Neanderthals approach. They have their own torches, and unceremoniously kick down John’s as they move in. Armed to the teeth, dressed in leather and fur, and painted with woad, they are a terrifying sight. The one we will recognize as the leader attempts to communicate with John in a language half of guttural syllables and half of gestures. John cannot respond, so he just shakes his head. The leader has a short spear with a flint tip long enough to serve as a sword, and uses it to indicate, in no uncertain terms, that John should leave. John appears to consider it, then stands up straight, looks the man in the eye, and says, "fuck you."
All hell promptly breaks loose. The Neanderthal leader might not understand English, but he knows when he’s been insulted. Furious, he backhands John across the face. Shaped stones held between his fingers serve the same purpose as brass knuckles. Gus and his crew decide to cut and run. A fallen torch sets the dead mammoth’s pelt on fire, filling the air with the choking smell of burning hair and panicking the calf, which squeals, but still will not leave - one Neanderthal gets an arrow into it, but as he draws another, Brother of Thunder rushes out and kills the man with a spear in the gut. Other Neanderthals are throwing snow on the fire and beating it with their cloaks, trying to put it out. John struggles to his feet and discovers that his ammo has been spilled across the ice. He grabs a pair of shells.
In the bush, Boom is running for his life, and suddenly stops dead as he finds himself face-to-face with the woolly rhino. He says, “Bollocks.”
John shoots the leader of the Neanderthals twice in the back of the head. The man falls down dead, and the others back off from the wailing calf, frightened and confused. John, out of ammo, waves the gun in the air, shouting incoherently. Brother of Thunder stands beside him, bloody spear ready for action. For a moment it looks as if they have won, but when another Neanderthal tests them with a mock charge, John reflexively pulls the trigger, revealing that his boom-stick has lost its magic. The rest of his ammunition is too far away and too scattered, and he has no time to reload. The Neanderthals begin moving in again.
Then Boom comes running hell-bent back down the hill, hollering for everybody to run. Right behind him is the rhino, ready to kill the first thing it can get its horn into. The scattering Neanderthals are perfect targets - it gores one and throws its body aside, then charges the others, chasing them away into the bush.
Morning. Kim removes the arrow from the mammoth calf's shoulder, and is pleased to be able to announce that it stuck in the calf's subcutaneous fat without wounding muscle. She then turns her attention to John, who has developed a massive black eye and some other lovely bruises where the Neanderthal leader hit him. While Kim sews up a cut on his temple, he lovingly hand-feeds the baby mammoth, which has finally been persuaded to leave its mother. The others shake their heads; they wouldn't have thought John had it in him. They name the baby mammoth Angeline, and then somebody suggests they give Boom's rhino a name, too. Several are suggested, but the one they choose is 'Orwell', in honour of Boom's conviction that it is watching him. It occurs to somebody that they haven't seen Boom all morning
On the frozen pond, Jean-Pierre is taking tissue samples from the dead mother mammoth while Dr. Pegg does the same with the Neanderthals. They discuss what to do with the Neanderthal bodies, and finally conclude that they should leave them there - their own people will come and claim them. Meanwhile, Gus and his men are looking for Boom. They find him on a ledge a dozen feet up a cliff, clinging to the rock face while the newly-named Orwell, oblivious to his presence, grazes just below. He says he's been there all night. Getting him down seems like it will be a bit of a problem.
Back at camp, Sister of Winds enters the tent where David was being kept and is astonished to see him sitting up and eating breakfast while Kim gives him a checkup. She gives him a checkup of her own - this quite unnerves David, but he is amused when Kim explains that Sister of Winds tried to look after him while he was ill. Sister of Winds casts her knucklebones a third time, then snatches them up and stamps out as if she's just been slapped, leaving the time travelers to wonder what's the matter with her.
We find out a moment later, when she and her brother hold a quiet conversation. They have both seen things that have convinced them that these people are sorcerers. Sister of Winds says she just saw a man raised from the dead, though the Bones insist that he died in the night. Brother of Thunder is impressed by the respect these strangers have for the mammoths, but frightened by their magic. Brother of Thunder believes they must work hard to keep the strangers' friendship, but Sister of Winds worriedly says that they do not need friends like that. Brother of Thunder points out that they don't need enemies like that, either.
The part of the valley where the mammoths were grazing is empty now, except for the Neanderthals, who have come to collect their dead. They seem to consider taking meat from the mammoth carcass, but choose to leave it alone. One squats down to examine the wound made by the gun, and scowls, then straightens up and indicates that it's time to leave. When the bodies have been collected, this new leader cuts his own finger and spills a few drops of blood in the place where each man fell.
Tune in next week!
EPISODE 1.02: 'The Orphan in the Ice'
SHORT SUMMARY: Limited contact with the Cro-Magnon is established - these people hospitably offer the time travelers a new place to make camp, but Brother of Thunder already worries that he's made a mistake. The expedition sees its first mammoths, and a calf is orphaned when its mother falls through the ice. John insists on saving the calf from scavengers, including the Neanderthals. The worried Cro-Magnon begin to suspect that their guests are sorcerers, and the Neanderthals promise vengeance.
DETAILED SUMMARY: We start off with the same tense moment as we left on last week - the Cro-Magnon have entered the camp, and the time travelers have come out to meet them. Nobody is capable of reacting right away. The time travelers are too frightened, and now that we take a good look at them, the Cro-Magnon (there are only five, all men) are puzzled. This is not what they expected to find when they came here.
Dr. Pegg asks John who these people are; John says he does not know, as they were not in the valley during the summer. After the earlier confrontation with the Neanderthals, John is reluctant to try communicating with the Cro-Magnon, so Seiko takes the initiative instead. She tells the guards to lower their guns and then, since John's bag of trinkets was left inside, she takes off her scarf and offers it gingerly to Brother of Thunder. He accepts it and drapes it around his own neck, and in return offers her a string of ivory beads carved in the shapes of animals. She takes it, smiles are exchanged, and it seems that the two peoples have officially made friends.
The next morning, Gus has started filming and is excitedly describing events for his camera. Most people are busy packing up camp. The confused-looking Cro-Magnon are wandering around, watching or helping as best they can. And Seiko, John, and Jean-Pierre are attempting to communicate with Brother of Thunder. The Cro-Magnon leader has drawn a diagram of the valley in the snow, marking a number of important features, and the time-travelers are comparing it with a topographic map, trying to figure out what's what.
Once packed, they head down the hill. The chamois and okapi creature bound out of the way, and a lazy white lion lies on a crag watching them. They wend their way into a secluded part of the valley, where an intersection of steep, craggy hillsides forms a naturally defensible spot. The Cro-Magnon have walled this off with large stones and tall wooden stakes, and behind the wall is their village. This is a collection of tepee-like tents of rough cloth, most of them decorated with detailed paintwork. Mammoths and astronomical objects seem to be favourite motifs. Women and children lurk in the doorways, curious but frightened, as the time travelers enter. The Cro-Magnon are clearly less suited to the cold than the Neanderthal - they are dark-haired and dark-skinned, and even the children wear layers of clothing, where Neanderthal children went naked even in the snow.
Jim asks John whether the previous expedition came in the summer, and when this is confirmed, points out that the Cro-Magnon are clearly nomadic, only arriving in the valleys in the autumn. In fact, judging from the importance of mammoths in their iconography, they probably follow the herds. But if the mammoths are already here, why haven't they seen any?
Now we meet the Cro-Magnon as characters: Brother of Thunder gathers his people - there are not more than two dozen of them, and only the five are adult men - and reassures them that their 'clan brothers' have sent help. The women and children look wary of this, and the men cynical, but apparently what Brother of Thunder says goes. The time travelers begin setting up their own camp, which for reasons of space must be done outside the walls of the Cro-Magnon village.
While they work on this, Brother of Thunder greets his sister, and they watch the time travelers working. He is more honest with Sister of Winds than he was with the others: he mentions meeting Seiko in the woods and says he at first thought the newcomers must have been sent by their clan brothers, but now that he's seen how few and how foreign they are, he's worried. Sister of Winds asks why, in that case, he brought them back here, and he says that they are enemies of the Neanderthal and that's a start. Sister of Winds hints that they've been burned by friendly-seeming strangers before. Seeing David being carried on a stretcher, she remarks that at least they do not abandon their wounded - that's something.
Once again, John is not helping make camp. Instead, he has is trying to communicate with the Cro-Magnon children, pointing to one of the tepee paintings and saying "mammoth!" The children mimic the word and laugh at him. Jean-Pierre points out that this isn't going to work: even if they understand that he wants a translation, they're as likely to give him words for 'tepee' or 'painting' as they are for 'mammoth'. John irritably asks how Jean-Pierre would go about asking them where to find mammoths, then. Jean-Pierre doesn't know, but Seiko finds a way. She borrows some photographs of cave paintings from Jim, and lays them out, matching them to the same animals depicted in the carved beads Brother of Thunder gave her.
Eventually, the children understand the game, and she gets words for mammoth, lion, stag, rhino, and chamois. Then she scratches out a copy of Brother of Thunder's map of the valley, and puts the ivory animals in the appropriate spots. The children are happy to help and even accept some of Jim's trail mix as a reward. It seems, however, that they have done something wrong, for just as they place the mammoth, Brother of Thunder comes up and berates them, and they scatter. Seiko attempts to communicate with him now, showing him various images of mammoths - the cave painting, the bead, an artist's impression, and a still from Walking with Beasts - and points to the place where the children indicated mammoths live. Brother of Thunder scowls, but then indicates that they should follow him.
While everybody else goes to see about the mammoths, Jim chooses to stay with David - it's his fault he got hurt. David is not looking good, though he manfully says he's fine. He obviously has a fever. Kim is worried, but doesn't want to give him antibiotics just yet: she's only got so much medicine with her, and it's not a good idea to give the bacteria an evolutionary head start by exposing them to the antibiotics forty thousand years early. She'll give it a few more hours to see if he can fight off the infection on its own. Sister of Winds hovers in the door, watching.
Brother of Thunder leads the group over a hill and gestures down into a secluded little glen - and there is a small herd, perhaps a dozen mammoths, scraping the still-fresh snow aside with their tusks to get at the last grass underneath. The group heads eagerly down the hillside, but Brother of Thunder stops them; they will have to keep their distance. Gus gets straight to filming, and invites Jean-Pierre to talk about mammoth migration, but Jean-Pierre is silent and Seiko waves Gus off.
Jim sits by David while Kim reads a book. Both of them look up when Sister of Winds enters and gives them each a wood and bone rattle, which she indicates they should shake. She then begins examining David's wound; Kim tries to stop her, but Jim angrily points out that she's at least doing something. They begin to argue again, but Sister of Winds shushes them. She casts a handful of knucklebones painted with stripes and dots, then kneels by David's head and begins softly singing while she massages his temples.
In the valley, Seiko is making notes of what the mammoths are eating, while Gus is getting as close to them as Brother of Thunder will let him. Gus turns out to know enough about elephant social structure to impress Seiko, correctly pointing that all adult members of this herd are females and even identifying an individual who might be the matriarch. Jean-Pierre is just sitting there watching, quietly overjoyed. As they skirt the herd, there is a brief interruption as they spot the woolly rhinoceros that charged Boom last episode. It ignores them, but Boom is convinced that it's watching, waiting for an opportunity to come at him again.
Among the mammoths is a mother with a year-old calf. Gus moves around to get a better filming angle, with the others following him - the mammoths notice them coming and begin to plod away, but it turns out that beneath the ten centimeters of snow on the valley floor is a pond with only a thin crust of ice. The mother mammoth's weight is too much for it, and she trumpets her surprise as it cracks under her feet. Startled, the time-travelers hurry in for a closer look in spite of Brother of Thunder's attempts to keep them back; the other mammoths, seeing humans coming, retreat to the other end of the valley, making unhappy noises. It's clear that the fall hurt the mother mammoth quite badly. John instructs one of Gus' men to go get Kim.
Kim arrives and her best guess from what she can see is that the sudden drop into shallow water broke the mammoth's leg. There's nothing she can do for it, and when this upsets John, she angrily informs him that she's a doctor, not a vet. She has no idea how one would go about setting an elephant's leg or even whether it's possible. The mammoth appears to be bleeding to death and there's nothing they can do about it except put her out of her misery, which they are reluctant to do for fear of how Brother of Thunder might react; the Cro-Magnon leader is ignoring their discussion, stroking the mammoth's face and murmuring to her as if trying to reassure her.
John is adamant that if they cannot save the mother, they will at least save the calf and take it back to the twenty-first century. He accordingly tries to entice it away from its mother, but it refuses to go, and there is no other way to move it besides possibly a crane; though it's only a year old, it already weighs some six hundred kilograms. The scientists try to explain that there's very little they can do, but John is adamant. He will not listen when they tell him that it's getting late. After sunset the scavengers will come for the dead adult, and he is only risking his own life needlessly.
Jim is still sitting with David, and Sister of Winds is still working on whatever she's doing when a teenage Cro-Magnon comes in and calls her. She starts to leave, and as Jim watches her go, he stops shaking the rattle she gave him - she turns around and encourages him to keep it up, then hurries out after the girl.
As night falls, a procession of Cro-Magnon arrive around the mammoth mother and calf, carrying torches. Jean-Pierre watches, fascinated, as they stand in a circle around the injured mother, shaking rattles like the one Sister of Winds gave Jim. Sister of Winds sings a few lines and mimes massaging the mammoth's temples, although she stays a safe distance back, then kneels on the ice and casts her knucklebones. Kim remarks that she's treating the mammoth the same way she treated David, and Jean-Pierre says he's not surprised; he has often found elephants to be more human than a lot of human beings.
All Sister of Winds' efforts seem to be in vain, though - the mother mammoth is barely moving and the ice and water around her are all bloodstained. Sister of Winds gets up, head held low, and the circle of Cro-Magnon all lower their own heads. The baby mammoth trumpets unhappily, as if it understands, and the cry is echoed by the other mammoths, now invisible in the gathering dark. Heads still hung as if grieving, the Cro-Magnon start to leave, and with the wind turning chilly, the time-travelers decide to go with them.
Except for John. The calf, caught somewhere between grief and incomprehension, is still pacing by the body of its mother, and John absolutely refuses to abandon it. Gus and his crew decide to stay and help, filming this vigil and John's angry railing that these people who claim to love animals are simply going to let the calf die. Brother of Thunder sits a few meters away, perhaps wondering what in the world John is trying to do. Gus has his team set up torches around the edges of the pond to scare off the scavengers, and we start to see the shapes of white lions and honey-coloured hyenas, their eyes shining with reflected firelight. Gus talks in whispers about the size and ferocity of ice-age wildlife, and John sits, holding on white-knuckled to his shotgun.
Back at camp, David is still feverish. Sister of Winds has returned and is now again sitting next to him, moving her hands over his chest without touching him. She pauses midway through a line of her song and puts her head on his chest to listen to his heart, then casts her knucklebones again. Apparently the results are disheartening. She hangs her head a moment, then gathers up the bones and takes her rattle back, pausing to place her hand on Jim's shoulder as a gesture of consolation. Without a word, Kim gets up and begins preparing the antibiotics.
The torches are enough to keep the lions and hyenas back, but there is one scavenger in the valley that is not afraid of them - the Neanderthals. The circling hyenas suddenly scatter, chased off by something more fearsome than they. John, Gus, and the crew (Brother of Thunder seems to have vanished) form a tight circle inside their fires as the Neanderthals approach. They have their own torches, and unceremoniously kick down John’s as they move in. Armed to the teeth, dressed in leather and fur, and painted with woad, they are a terrifying sight. The one we will recognize as the leader attempts to communicate with John in a language half of guttural syllables and half of gestures. John cannot respond, so he just shakes his head. The leader has a short spear with a flint tip long enough to serve as a sword, and uses it to indicate, in no uncertain terms, that John should leave. John appears to consider it, then stands up straight, looks the man in the eye, and says, "fuck you."
All hell promptly breaks loose. The Neanderthal leader might not understand English, but he knows when he’s been insulted. Furious, he backhands John across the face. Shaped stones held between his fingers serve the same purpose as brass knuckles. Gus and his crew decide to cut and run. A fallen torch sets the dead mammoth’s pelt on fire, filling the air with the choking smell of burning hair and panicking the calf, which squeals, but still will not leave - one Neanderthal gets an arrow into it, but as he draws another, Brother of Thunder rushes out and kills the man with a spear in the gut. Other Neanderthals are throwing snow on the fire and beating it with their cloaks, trying to put it out. John struggles to his feet and discovers that his ammo has been spilled across the ice. He grabs a pair of shells.
In the bush, Boom is running for his life, and suddenly stops dead as he finds himself face-to-face with the woolly rhino. He says, “Bollocks.”
John shoots the leader of the Neanderthals twice in the back of the head. The man falls down dead, and the others back off from the wailing calf, frightened and confused. John, out of ammo, waves the gun in the air, shouting incoherently. Brother of Thunder stands beside him, bloody spear ready for action. For a moment it looks as if they have won, but when another Neanderthal tests them with a mock charge, John reflexively pulls the trigger, revealing that his boom-stick has lost its magic. The rest of his ammunition is too far away and too scattered, and he has no time to reload. The Neanderthals begin moving in again.
Then Boom comes running hell-bent back down the hill, hollering for everybody to run. Right behind him is the rhino, ready to kill the first thing it can get its horn into. The scattering Neanderthals are perfect targets - it gores one and throws its body aside, then charges the others, chasing them away into the bush.
Morning. Kim removes the arrow from the mammoth calf's shoulder, and is pleased to be able to announce that it stuck in the calf's subcutaneous fat without wounding muscle. She then turns her attention to John, who has developed a massive black eye and some other lovely bruises where the Neanderthal leader hit him. While Kim sews up a cut on his temple, he lovingly hand-feeds the baby mammoth, which has finally been persuaded to leave its mother. The others shake their heads; they wouldn't have thought John had it in him. They name the baby mammoth Angeline, and then somebody suggests they give Boom's rhino a name, too. Several are suggested, but the one they choose is 'Orwell', in honour of Boom's conviction that it is watching him. It occurs to somebody that they haven't seen Boom all morning
On the frozen pond, Jean-Pierre is taking tissue samples from the dead mother mammoth while Dr. Pegg does the same with the Neanderthals. They discuss what to do with the Neanderthal bodies, and finally conclude that they should leave them there - their own people will come and claim them. Meanwhile, Gus and his men are looking for Boom. They find him on a ledge a dozen feet up a cliff, clinging to the rock face while the newly-named Orwell, oblivious to his presence, grazes just below. He says he's been there all night. Getting him down seems like it will be a bit of a problem.
Back at camp, Sister of Winds enters the tent where David was being kept and is astonished to see him sitting up and eating breakfast while Kim gives him a checkup. She gives him a checkup of her own - this quite unnerves David, but he is amused when Kim explains that Sister of Winds tried to look after him while he was ill. Sister of Winds casts her knucklebones a third time, then snatches them up and stamps out as if she's just been slapped, leaving the time travelers to wonder what's the matter with her.
We find out a moment later, when she and her brother hold a quiet conversation. They have both seen things that have convinced them that these people are sorcerers. Sister of Winds says she just saw a man raised from the dead, though the Bones insist that he died in the night. Brother of Thunder is impressed by the respect these strangers have for the mammoths, but frightened by their magic. Brother of Thunder believes they must work hard to keep the strangers' friendship, but Sister of Winds worriedly says that they do not need friends like that. Brother of Thunder points out that they don't need enemies like that, either.
The part of the valley where the mammoths were grazing is empty now, except for the Neanderthals, who have come to collect their dead. They seem to consider taking meat from the mammoth carcass, but choose to leave it alone. One squats down to examine the wound made by the gun, and scowls, then straightens up and indicates that it's time to leave. When the bodies have been collected, this new leader cuts his own finger and spills a few drops of blood in the place where each man fell.
Tune in next week!