Time flowed past like a swift mountain current.
The shifting seasons of the Rockies eventually brought the oppressive, heavy heat of the summer months. For James, who had carried a dense, double-layered winter coat through the freeze, the shift in temperature triggered a massive shedding cycle. He rubbed against the rough bark of the ponderosa pines, trading his thick, insulating underfur for a short, rigid, coarse single-layer coat.
Even with the shedding completed, the high afternoon sun remained suffocating. The heat baked the limestone ridges until they radiated warmth, destroying any desire James had to patrol. He preferred to pass the daylight hours deep within the thermal stability of his cave, sleeping off the heat.
When his body demanded fuel, he would drop down into the cool waters of the reservoir, taking a long, refreshing bath while using his heavy paws to pin massive catfish against the muddy bottom. It was a comfortable life.
However, the pursuit of Gene Points required constant hunt; to push his evolutionary rank higher, he was still forced to routinely hunt the mid-to-large tier megafauna.
By late afternoon on this particular day, a heavy bank of slate-gray storm clouds rolled over Mount Elbert, blocking out the sun and threatening a massive downpour.
Taking advantage of the sudden drop in temperature, James mobilized Aurora and the tool cheetah, heading into the timber to test their luck while the air was cool.
Their target was a small group of Stag-moose (Cervalces scotti).
With the coordinated speed of the cheetah flushing the brush and Aurora managing the lateral lane, James had zero difficulty executing a top-down wrestling anchor on a juvenile male, killing the prey cleanly. They immediately began to process the carcass on the forest floor.
Midway through the meal, the overcast sky broke, releasing a steady, cool drizzle. James gripped the remains of the meat in his jaws and guided his crew beneath the dense, protective canopy of a massive Douglas fir to wait out the weather.
"Once it rains, the mountain should stay cool for a few days," James thought, his carnassials shearing through the moose bone.
Suddenly, a strange, disjointed sequence of footfalls cut through the steady patter of the rain. The cadence was messy, heavy, and collective—resembling a massive herd moving through the mud.
"What kind of herbivore group patrols open cover during rain?"
Curiosity overriding his hunger, James scaled the lower limbs of the fir tree, utilizing his upgraded Hind Limb Musculature to clear the branches effortlessly. He hunkered down on a heavy bough, peering through the shifting curtain of rain toward the source of the noise.
What he saw cleared the sleep from his eyes, his pupils contracting instantly into narrow slits.
A coordinated line of more than thirty Clovis men was marching through the timber. They were bare-chested despite the chill, their hands gripping a formidable array of long-shafted stone spears, hand-axes, and atlatl systems. They moved in an organized, single-file formation, heading directly toward the eastern ridges.
Their pace wasn't hurried; they weren't fleeing the weather or searching for local shelter.
Instead, they moved with a halting, calculated rhythm, their trackers stopping at every intersection to scan the dense brush for sign, their entire posture is like a military unit.
James felt the muscles along his spine tighten, a sharp wave of territorial anxiety flooding his system.
His eyes locked onto the lead human navigating the line. The man was wrapped in a heavy mantle fashioned from the hide of an adult Sabertooth, a crude necklace of polished ivory fangs clacking against his collarbones.
These bipeds... were the exact high-tier hunting party he had observed weeks ago during the Ground Sloth harvest. The core elite of the region.
"Is this deployment related to that human I killed?" James calculated, his mind spinning through the variables. There was no way to verify the link.
However, tracking their trajectory across the valley floor, James realized their line was completely bypassing his reservoir. They weren't tracking a scent trail toward his cave. They were heading directly toward the eastern canyon.
What was hidden on the opposite face of the mountain?
Across the eastern ridges, within the home cavern of the Wood Clan.
The moment the sky turned to ash, the women who had been searching the upper slopes for edible roots abandoned their baskets and scrambled back toward the threshold, refusing to risk being caught in the open by a mountain storm.
The drizzle quickly intensified into a localized deluge, a thick curtain of gray water blanketing the birch groves until the entire canyon dissolved into a pale mist.
Inside the upper chamber, the central fire burned quietly. Chloe and the remaining women huddled near the embers, their eyes fixed anxiously on the dark entrance.
The morning tracking unit had failed to return before the storm broke.
The sequential deaths of Tatanka and Debuku had reduced the clan's active provider force to five inexperienced youths. To prevent total starvation, Chloe had been forced to supplement the line by deploying several of the younger women to assist with the tracking, hoping their numbers could compensate for their lack of tactical experience.
But the strategy had yielded nothing but empty caches and mounting exhaustion.
The Wood Clan had reached a terminal deficit. The local seed reserves were entirely spent, forcing the inhabitants to boil bitter roots and strip the inner bark of willow trees simply to arrest the cramping in their bellies.
Chloe scanned the dim recesses of the cave. Every individual was hollow-cheeked, their skin stretched tight over their ribs, their movements lethargic and silent—resembling a collection of ghosts waiting for the fire to die.
She had no idea how many days of life remained in her lineage.
"WHA-OH!! WHA-OH!!"
Suddenly, a series of harsh, rhythmic shrieks shattered the steady sound of the rain outside the cave.
Before the inhabitants could even scramble to their feet, a massive wave of strange men erupted through the cave mouth. They were drenched in mud, their faces contorted into furious scowls as they brandished heavy stone lances and raised their weapons in unison.
Instantly, the cavern exploded into a chaotic symphony of screaming children, desperate warnings, and guttural war cries—the violence inside completely drowning out the thunder on the ridge.
The Stone Clan.
The moment Chloe's eyes tracked their heavy, sandstone-carved ornaments, she recognized the raiders.
She had underestimated their ambition. She had never expected the western tribe to launch a coordinated offensive through a blinding rainstorm, completely bypassing her scouts to catch the camp in a total defensive vacuum.
The starving, weak women inside the upper chamber possessed zero capacity to mount a physical defense. The Stone Clan raiders moved through the space like a flash flood, pinning the inhabitants to the stone and securing their wrists with thick willow bindings. Chloe was dropped to her knees alongside her kin.
In the span of a few minutes, the Wood Clan had ceased to exist as an independent cultural entity. Their identity had been erased, converted entirely into the living property of the western valley.
Yet, in the brutal logic of prehistoric survival, the transition carried a grim silver lining. Faced with the choice between a slow, agonizing starvation inside an empty cave or surviving as integrated laborers within a dominant tribe, the evolutionary drive for life left no room for pride.
The raid had been executed with clinical speed. As the storm clouds began to fracture and the downpour slowed to a gentle mist, the Stone Clan raiders gathered their spoils, driving the line of bound captives back along the muddy mountain trails.
The rain gradually tapered off into a light drizzle, but James remained motionless on his high pine bough, his gaze anchored to the distant ridge where the human column had vanished.
"What was the objective of that deployment?"
Despite his human curiosity, James resisted the urge to follow their trail. Intruding on a concentrated force of thirty armed Clovis warriors in thick cover was an unacceptable risk to his survival. He chose to hold his vertical advantage, waiting to see if the line would return along the same corridor.
His patience was rewarded. Within two hours, the human column broke through the lower brush, entering his field of vision once more.
But their composition had altered radically.
The size of the line had nearly doubled. Walking between the armed warriors was a long, single-file column of women and youth, their upper limbs lashed securely behind their backs with thick cordage.
James watched the procession in absolute astonishment, his ears pinning back against his skull.
"Bound captives... a wholesale enslavement?"
His human historical knowledge synthesized the data instantly. The Clovis populations weren't a singular, harmonious collective; they were divided into distinct, highly competitive tribal factions. When resources collapsed, they went to war, using raw violence to claim territory and assimilate the reproductive labor of their neighbors.
"A tribal conquest happened on the eastern slopes," James realized, his jaws tightening as he watched the line move past.
The law of the jungle—the dominant consumption of the weak—was operating within human civilization just as ruthlessly as it did among the megafauna. The primates were simply playing the same game with sharper tools.
"Time to move out,"James decided, his curiosity satisfied. It was time to return to the reservoir and sleep. The political configurations and territorial wars of the two-legged apes were their own business; they held zero relevance to his trajectory.
"WHA-OH——"
Suddenly, a savage, furious voices erupted from a dense limestone ravine just fifty meters ahead of the marching column.
James turned his head around, his pupils widening. Through the ferns, a second, massive force of armed humans erupted from the shadows, waving heavy stone-tipped lances as they crashed directly into the flank of the Stone Clan line!