An Untimely Journey

It was lunchtime of the fourth day and a bit cool outside. So, after eating a grouse—which did make for a nice change—I decided to analyze the details of my situation one more time. In truth, I really didn't know what to do next but was not ready to admit it. I slouched in the cab of the truck with my feet towards the passenger door. The midday sun warmed the cab, and as I pondered the credibility of a short list of by then worn-out explanations, I dosed off. While in a kind of half-sleep, I suddenly felt the truck shake hard, and again a second time. In my subconscious I had not been sure if the first jolt was real, but the second confirmed it. I pried open one eye only to snap it shut, temporarily blinded by the direct rays of the afternoon sun coming through the window. But what had I seen in that split-second? Apparently, I had not woken at all but slipped back into my unfinished giant beaver dream from two days before. Is that what I had seen? Struggling for coherence, I tried again, this time shielding my eyes with one hand. Sure enough, there they were—two giant beavers complete with elephant ears and trunks, staring at me through the window by my feet. After returning my stare, one began to turn. As I expected, a tail appeared shortly after the head vanished from view. However, the tail was no beaver tail. It wasn't even flat. It looked altogether like that of an elephant. The tail, in unison with the rest of the posterior anatomy, started moving back and forth across the side-view mirror as the beast satisfied an urgent need to scratch. At the same time, its friend was getting similar but other-ended relief, nodding up and down with its forehead while pushing hard against the passenger side door handle. With each nod, the ends of two short tusks scraped against the metal door producing a fingernails-on-chalkboard response down my neck. The noise left no doubt; this was not a dream, and those were not beavers after all! Fully engaged, my brain quickly processed this new information. They were elephants, at least they sort of looked like elephants. Of course they were elephants; just kind of smallish ones. But they were different. Besides being smaller overall, their back legs were somewhat shorter than their font legs. Consequently, their backs sloped downwards front to back. Unlike the elephant we rode at the zoo as kids, these elephants would be hard to ride without sliding off the caboose. They were also brown, not gray, and were covered in hair, lots of hair. I didn't remember the zoo elephants having hair. And the heads of these elephants seemed large relative to their bodies. So, if these were elephants with sloped backs, big heads, and covered in brown hair, what could they be, and where did they come from? With lightning speed my mind processed all it knew about elephant kind and spit out the only logical answer. They were mammoths! Smallish mammoths, no doubt, and they were using my truck as a scratching post! But wait, my mind took off again. Mammoths are supposed to be extinct. The last ones died out at the end of the Ice Age, didn't they? So ... either the whole scientific world was wrong about that, or these mammoths had somehow traveled from the distant past to the present. And then it hit me, these mammoths hadn't gone anywhere at all, but I had. Crazy as it seems, three days earlier, I left the twenty-first century and landed thousands of years in the past—in their present. Suddenly, I knew why I had not found evidence of humans in this fisherman's paradise. Before me, there had been no humans to leave their stuff behind, at least not modern ones, with modern stuff. I was the first. I somehow got caught in some cosmic time warp, or perhaps I was the object of some kind of perverse celestial joke. If so, I considered it harsh punishment for messing up the destiny of a mere high school football game. Whatever the reason or cause, it appeared that I had been reassigned to the Ice Age.