We waited. The shadows grew darker. The calls of the birds slackened and stilled. But no animals came to the pool. I began to wonder if something had gone wrong.

Then I heard a snuffling noise from behind me. I dared not turn around to look. I stayed absolutely still, barely breathing. I could hear my heart thumping in my ears. My palms were sweaty. I was as excited as any of these Neolithic hunters, perhaps even more excited than they.

Singly, in pairs, animals came warily down the trail to drink at the pool. Deer, boar, a strange kind of goat, others that I could not identify. They came warily, knowing full well that hunting dogs and wolves lurked in the woods. But they were not aware of the predators who lay hidden in their midst.

With a paralyzing scream Dal leaped to his feet and threw a spear at the biggest of the deer, hitting the doe just behind the forelegs. It fell, splashing, at the pool’s edge. We all leaped up, roaring with pent-up passion, and began killing.

Ava was the wildest one of all, absolutely fearless and as fierce as any demon out of hell. She nailed a fawn with her first spear, then jumped out onto the trail to block the animals’ easiest escape route. A tusked boar charged at her, head down, eyes burning with hate. Ava spitted it on her other spear, but the beast’s furious charge wrested the weapon from her grasp. I came up beside her and pinned the animal’s hindquarters to the ground with my remaining spear. Without an instant’s hesitation, Ava straddled the boar’s squirming back and slit its throat from ear to ear.

Blood spurted over us both as she leaped to her feet, arms upraised, brandishing her bloody stone knife in the air and screeching like a wild beast herself.

I stood there, suddenly transfixed by this vision of primitive ardor, the death-lust unmasked, unbridled, soaked with the blood of the prey. The killing was still going on all around us, filling the air with screams and the stench of blood. Ava flung her arms around my neck, laughing and sobbing all at once.

“Blood-mates!” she shouted. “We killed it together. We have shared a death.”

I wanted to share love with her, not death. But, to her, the passions seemed much the same.

We carried and dragged the slaughtered beasts back to the campsite, where the elder men and women oohed and ahhed appropriately. All of us were smeared with blood, stinking with the lust of killing and the disemboweled entrails of our prey. None of us had been seriously hurt; one of the teen-agers had been gashed on the calf, but it did not look serious.

I was still trembling by the time we got back to the camp. I had hunted before, alone. I had hunted with Dal and others of the clan. But this evening’s work was something different, something wild and passionate that stirred the savage killer-instinct within us all. We killed far more than we could eat; most of the game would rot before we could get to it. But like sharks in their feeding frenzy, we killed everything we could, sparing only those beasts that were fast enough or lucky enough to escape our spears.

Dal eyed me suspiciously as we made our way back to camp. But he was not worried that I was a spy from another clan or a spirit who would steal his soul. He was simply a jealous human male. He had seen Ava embrace me, and it did not please him at all.

The two elder males insisted that the clan perform a blood ritual to thank the gods for such a miraculous catch. They even wanted me to take part in it, as a representative of the gods. Dal adamantly refused.

“Orion has told us that he is a man, not a spirit,” he insisted.

“But we never had such good hunting before he came to us,” countered the eldest. “Whatever he says, out of modesty or the wisdom of the gods, he has still brought us incredible good fortune.”

I stayed out of the argument, knowing that it was better to allow them to make up their own minds while I kept silent — out of modesty or wisdom.

But Ava spoke up. “Orion helped me to kill the boar. We are blood-mates. He should take part in the celebration.”

Which, of course, set Dal’s mind even more firmly against me. The clan was a rough sort of democracy. Dal was not an absolute ruler. But like most democracies, a strong-willed minority can usually prevail over the wishes of the majority. Dal was firmly set against allowing me to participate in their tribal ritual. His purpose was reinforced by jealousy and suspicion. The others had only fairness and good will to support them. Dal won.

So I sat alone in the darkness, far from the blazing campfire, as the clan danced wildly and split the night with their strange whoops and cries. All around me the tree trunks loomed black and unyielding. They made me think of Ahriman, brooding dark and evil, as he plotted our extinction.

For hours I watched them dancing, listened to their howls and screams as I told myself that I was glad that I was not one of them, glad to be more civilized than these savages, glad to be separate and apart from them. I told myself that, over and again.

The eerie cries at last dwindled to silence and the glow of the fire sank to a sullen glower of red among the black pillars of the trees. I finally lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes to sleep.

Glad not to be one of them. The thought swirled around and around in my mind until I almost became physically sick. I was not one of them. I was alone, totally alone, thousands of years away from the nearest friend, my memory so blocked that I did not even know if I had a friend anywhere in the whole long continuum of time and space.

It was then that Ava came to me. Even in the darkness I could smell the blood and entrails that smeared her naked body.

“You could not come to the ritual,” she whispered, her voice still breathless with excitement, “so I have brought the ritual to you.”

Part of me was disgusted with her and her primitive blood-lust. Part of me knew that Dal would never forgive me for making love with his woman. Part of me was repelled at the thought of taking her in my arms and wallowing in her stench and passion. But with a suddenness that overwhelmed every thought in my mind, I became as wild and fierce as she was, and at least for a little while I was alone no longer.

The next morning we resumed our trek northward, each of us staggering under a heavy load of dead game. We traveled under clouds of flies, and the smell of meat decaying in the warmth of the day was enough to make me sick. But no one else seemed to mind it; they all seemed happy with their burdens.

Ava walked up at the head of our little column, beside Dal. If he knew what we had done the night before, Dal gave no sign of it.

Nor did Ava. When I awakened that morning, she had already left me and returned to her usual sleeping place, I supposed, beside Dal. She gave me no sign that our relationship had changed. I began to think that what happened under the maddened passion of the clan’s blood ritual was a sort of privileged event, not to be considered by the same rules as everyday life, not to be remembered or regretted once the sun arose again.

Two days later we emerged from the brooding forest and started across a broad, sunlit upland where the grass was green and sweet and dotted with flowers. Wild grains sprouted here and there, and lines of trees showed us where streams flowed. The people seemed to grow happier and lighter of heart with every step now. They knew this territory intimately, and they remarked on each and every jut of rock, bend of a stream, stand of grain that we passed.

Ava dropped back to walk with me one hot afternoon. I had taken to remaining toward the rear of the procession. For some unfathomable inner reason I had the uncanny feeling that we were being followed, watched. But, whenever I looked back, I could see no one, nothing, as far as the horizon. Yet the feeling remained, prickling the back of my neck.