Before long, James and Aurora finished dividing the remaining Titanis eggs between them.
Now that their defensive mother is dead, these Eggs had zero chance of survival; leaving them exposed in the dirt meant they would inevitably convert into a midnight buffet for local scavengers.
James felt no evolutionary guilt about plundering the nest.
Though the eggs were structurally massive, his upgraded Muzzle made processing them simple. He crushed them one by one, the rich, dense yolks mixing with the calcified shell fragments as he bolted them down into his gullet.
Within minutes, the tool cheetah trotted back through the juniper stands. It carried the final cream-colored sphere rolling it like a football with his paws, having successfully run down the lynx and hijacked its prize to present to the pride.
Despite clearing the entire nest, James's body remained unsatisfied, his metabolic furnace demanding meat. He returned to the clearing where the dead Titanis lay, intending to sample the flesh of the flightless giant.
But a few tears into the breast muscle left him frowning, his lips curling in distaste. Compared to the meatof the spruce grouse, the terror bird's muscle fibers were stringy, dry, and tasted strongly of iron. It was wretched forage.
He forced himself to consume enough to reach a baseline satiety before calling an end to the evening migration. Signaling his entourage, James turned his heavy shoulders and guided Aurora and the cheetah back toward the area of the reservoir.
----------------------------------------------------
Across the eastern ridges of Mount Elbert, within the limestone canyon of the Wood Clan.
The final sunlight dipped beneath the flat horizon line, letting the mountain shadows dissolve into a dense, uniform blackness.
The surrounding forest turned into a void, the cold air carrying the smell of oncoming frost.
Before the light failed entirely, the women who had ventured into the upper birch groves returned to the canyon mouth. The localized berry bushes and wild seed pods had already been thoroughly stripped by migrating herds over the past weeks; their harvest today was meager, their leather bags barely half-filled. The singular positive element was that their group hadn't crossed paths with any short-faced bears during the collection cycle.
"The growth is becoming less and less... the mountain is turning dry," one of the older women muttered, shifting her leather pack onto the stone floor of the main cavern.
If the vegetation continued to diminish at this rate, their reserves would fail before the next temperature shift.
Under normal conditions, the primary caloric foundation of the Wood Clan was anchored entirely to the tracking units—the meat and fat brought down by the prime males. The local seeds, roots, and seasonal fruits were strictly supplementary assets, highly dependent on weather patterns and constantly contested by local herbivores, making them entirely unreliable as a primary survival guarantee.
Chloe, the chieftain, inspected the evening's collection, her expression darkening under her plant-juice tattoos. Despite the deficit, she maintained her discipline, immediately preparing to divide the resources according to the ancient protocols of the clan.
Within the Clovis bands, life was governed by a strict, primitive communal structure. Every ounce of physical labor was collective, and all survival resources were divided equally among the members, regardless of age or output, ensuring the baseline continuation of the lineage.
"If the youth return empty-handed tonight, the fires will burn lean," Chloe murmured, her hands steady as she sorted the grain seeds, her eyes tracking the dark cave mouth for any sign of the tracking party.
CRUNCH. SHUFFLE.
The distinct sound of heavy footfalls echoing against the gravel broke the tension.
The gathered women turned their heads toward the threshold in unison. Through the gloom, Apache and the remaining trackers emerged, their shoulders straining under the weight of a juvenile North American Elk (Cervus canadensis).
The sight of the fresh carcass instantly broke the lethargic atmosphere in the cavern, a murmur of relief rippling through the elderly and the young.
A thin smile formed on Chloe's lips, but the relief withered a second later. Bringing up the rear of the line were two hunters carrying a third body between them.
The casualty was a young tracker named Debuku. His hide coat had been torn completely open across the lower abdomen, the coarse wool slicked in a heavy, continuous torrent of dark blood. His breathing was shallow, coming in ragged, fluid-filled gasps.
Apache didn't offer a traditional hunter's greeting. He dropped his spear into the dirt, his voice cracking with panic as he shouted into the chamber:
"Chieftain! Debuku was stabbed by the antler while hunting!"
Chloe crossed the stone floor in an instant, dropping to her knees to inspect the injury. Her brow furrowed deeply as her fingers met the wet hide.
Debuku's pulse was failing rapidly, a steady trail of dark foam escaping the corner of his mouth. His dilated, wide eyes shifted slowly through the firelight, locking onto Chloe's face with an unblinking, desperate plea for intervention. His chest heaved as he fought for oxygen.
But Chloe knew the limit of her tools.
Faced with a deep abdominal tear of this magnitude, the clan's ancestral lore offered only a singular, brutal alternative: Burn the wound with flames .
It was the universal emergency protocol passed down through generations of Clovis trackers . The logic was elementary and violent—apply extreme thermal energy directly to the site of the trauma, forcing the exposed blood vessels and muscular tissue to instantly carbonize, sealing the channels through localized necrosis to stop the drain.
But the sheer physical shock of the intervention was often terminal. More than half of the casualties subjected to the people dies from the pain alone, and against deep internal trauma, its effectiveness was entirely speculative.
Debuku seemed to read the shift in her posture. He gripped Apache's wrist, his voice dropping to a wet, barely audible rattle: "Do it... I can... hold against it."
Looking into the young provider's face, Chloe couldn't bring herself to abandon his life to the dark.
She stepped to the central hearth, utilizing a pair of fresh green pine branches to extract glowing ember from the center of the coals. She blew the active flame out, ensuring the wood tip remained a dull, incandescent white before driving the burning point directly into the center of Debuku's abdominal wound.
The moment the heat touched the exposed dermis, a sharp, violent HISS echoed through the cave, accompanied by a thick plume of white smoke and the heavy smell of burning flesh.
"ARRRGH!!!"
The agony broke through Debuku's restraint. He unleashed a high-pitched, hysterical shriek that echoed off the stalactites, his fingers clawing into the stone floor until his nails cracked.
As the seconds ticked away, the screaming deteriorated into a weak, rhythmic whimpering. But the charred, blackened margins of the wound failed to hold. The high-pressure arterial flow from the deep abdominal cavity broke through the carbonized tissue, a heavier stream of dark warmth spilling across the cave floor.
The process is failed.
The outcome was a routine tragedy. While Chloe understood the superficial utility of heat cauterization, her primitive understanding of anatomy lacked the concept of vascular pressure; applying localized surface burns to a severed internal artery only served to expand the tissue damage, destroying any natural clotting mechanics the body was attempting to form.
A few minutes later, Debuku's eyes rolled back into his skull, his chest flattening as his pulse cleared out entirely.
"Debuku!! Open your eyes! Debuku!!"
Apache and the younger hunters threw themselves over him, violently shaking his shoulders as if they could drag his consciousness back.
But the muscle tissue remained unresponsive, the skin rapidly cooling against their palms as the ambient temperature of the cave took hold.
Chloe stared at the silent form, her voice locked within her throat. In that single moment, under the flickering glare of the hearth, the weight of her lineage seemed to press down on her shoulders, making her look decades older.
After a long silence, she closed her eyes. "Carry him to the lower chamber. Prepare the burial."
The tracking party understood that he can't come back. They raised the limp weight of their kin, navigating the narrow, descending fissures toward the deepest recesses of the cavern network.
According to Clovis domestic architecture, their cave systems were organized into three distinct geographic zones:
*The Threshold (Entrance): Maintained as an active lookout and defensive checkpoint.
*The Upper Chamber: The widest, dry expanse utilized for communal living, food processing, and tool production.
*The Lower Chamber (Sub-cave):A deep, thermally static earth vault used exclusively as the tribal cemetery, Whenever a tribe member dies, their body will be buried here.
Once the burial was completed, Chloe returned to the central hearth to distribute the portions of the elk.
But as the fresh meat was distributed among the families, the mood inside the Upper Chamber remained broken.
The tracking unit had provided sustenance for the coming week, but the transaction had been made in the exchange of a prime producer. The meat would be gone within days, but rebreeding and training a tracker to navigate the mountain lines would take more than a generation.