The End

The mammoth steppes of Eurasia, twenty-five thousand years ago.

The wind never seemed to stop.

During the all-too-brief summers, it howled across the drying flatlands, kicking up clouds of dust and fragments of yellowing grasses that choked the hunters' eyes and mouths with detritus.

The winters were far worse.

The gales slid over the icy crust that blanketed the grassland and found any gap in carefully stitched clothing and shelters, freezing them to their core no matter how protected a hillside or depression they'd found to wait out the cold.

The river valleys that ran from north to south through the steppes were much better, summer or winter, than the vast expanses of open space between them.

The hunters tended to leave that land to the herds of large grazers that could tolerate both the cold of winter and the lack of water in summer, and the predators who preyed on them.

Not that the hunters weren't predators.

They were, in fact, highly accomplished at tracking and slaying game, armed with throwing spears and some of the earliest bows and arrows ever invented.

Reading the spoor of mammoth, horses, wooly rhinoceros, and reindeer was second nature to them.

They could identify the number of mammoth matriarchs and juveniles in a herd from the depth of the trails they left in the omnipresent snow.

They knew the landscape well enough to tell which watering hole the herd was heading to, and they had already planned where they might spring an ambush along the route.

But they understood their limits.

Venturing into the vast, nearly featureless emptiness of the steppe, navigating by the direction of the sun and the presence of the rare, stunted conifers sticking up through the snow or jutting up out of the grass, was a perilous business.

The hunters had lived in this land for thousands of years, and surviving there meant that fools were rare indeed.

Smoke curled upward from below the lip of the hill, pointing down toward the valley of the Don River below.

Its source was the rounded roof of an enormous building covered with layers of mammoth hides.

Smaller structures held up by thin wooden poles and also draped in hides surrounded the main dwelling.

Not a single person could be seen outside.

The freezing temperatures and the wind whistling along the grain of the Don River Valley made sure of that.

Inside the structures, however, it was a different story.

Fires crackled in well-used hearths.

The thin, precious fragments of conifer wood burned out far too quickly for the hunters' taste, and the handfuls of dried grass and dung that made up the rest of their fuel gave off less heat than they preferred.

But out here on the steppe, they used what was available.

An intricate lattice of mammoth bones held up the largest dwelling, scavenged from more than sixty skeletons the hunters found on their journeys across the landscape, or created through their own expertise and predation.