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The spear took the young mammoth in the flank.

Its stone tip, razor-sharp, drove through layers of hair, fur, skin, fat, and muscle to lodge deeply in a rib.

The next two missed altogether, careening into the distance. A fourth followed a moment after,

sliding between the ribs and slicing into the heart. The massive animal bellowed once,

took two steps, and then dropped to the ground, blood pouring from the wound. The hunters rose from their hiding spot in the dead ground, indistinguishable from the

rest of the inless rolling, grass-covered tundra around them, and whooped in triumph.

They didn't know that they were the last of their people to track mammoth across this ground,

one destination among many they visited every year.

Twelve thousand years later, the mammoth and the mammoth hunters were long gone from this

place. So too was the grassland, replaced by forests of beach and elm cut through with rivers.

The dead ground where the hunters had hidden was a marsh. A hide-covered boat silently cut through the reedy waters.

A woman paddled slowly, her keen blue eyes watching for the birds returning to their nests.

She was looking for eggs, a delicacy for her people.

They had lived in these low valleys of doggarland for generations.

That was long enough to forget that

their ancestors had once called the lands far to the south near the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea,

their home. Seven millennia passed. Year by year, century by century, the seas rose.

The dead ground and low valleys became bays and inlets,

the hills, island, the high ground, the coastline. The wood planked ship wallowed through the

waves of the English Channel. It was an ungainly craft, an old merchantman rather than a fast

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