Wind

No matter how far separated by time or distance we are from our earliest ancestors, we are curious to understand the mystery of our own origins and the time when people created stories against the cold during the last Ice Age.

Twenty-five thousand years ago, small, migrating bands of hunters and foragers traced converging paths across the freezing earth. Evidence of their existence is etched in their long-buried bones, turned to stone as hard as the tools they shaped over the millennia. They followed the vast herds that flourished as the earth cooled and the seas lowered, adapting to hard life in arctic and desert, forest and savannah. They traveled immense distances to trade objects—some vital, some merely useful, others prized for beauty alone. What knowledge and beliefs did they also exchange, what features and bloodlines? Did they have a religious ideal or a moral code? Were they altruistic, practicing a selfless tribalism for the greater good, or were they governed by base instinct that allowed only the strong and ruthless to survive? Proof of their humanity, along with suggestions of cruelty, have endured: a splinter of bone that required the tender help of another person to heal; a shard of rib cage shattered by a spear. Teeth worn flat like overused tools freed nimble hands to create artifacts of lasting grace, utility, and imagination. They were predators and prey. They made up for what they lacked and what they feared by shaping the equivalent of tooth and claw, weight and warmth. They took only what they could carry on their backs, staying in one place just long enough to strip the fruit from their knotty stems. They competed with the birds for the berries, swallowing flinty seeds, bitter leaves, and unyielding rind, their hard stomachs wringing the last bit of nutrition to sustain their strength. When the final fruit was plucked, and their prey took flight, they moved on in a race against time, when the ground would freeze and the vines would fold into the harsh sleep of winter.

Pat Kranish loves living in the past and sets much of her fiction in the Ice Age—even though she hates being cold and left New York ten years ago to live in the scorpion habitat called Las Vegas. New Life, The Bear, and The Time Before Memory, stories excerpted from Wind—A Novel of the Ice Age, have been published and enjoyed (maybe wept over too) by readers who share her appetite to go back in time and explore the lives of the ancient people who lived in the mountains that ring the Mediterranean Sea. Nevada is the setting for three more published stories, one set in the 1970s and a bit autobiographical, and two more from the time when the last of the big toothed cats, and beavers as big as cave bears, roamed the wet and cold landscape. Pat lives with her husband Mike, and not too far from her three grown children, who wonder what she sees in the etched rocks and faint footprints left by people who lived here so long ago.