Aurochs, Cave Bears and other Charismatic Megafauna
by Gareth D. Jones
Gareth D Jones is unofficially the second most widely translated science fiction short story author in the world, having been published in 33 languages. He is a father of five, two of whom are also published authors. He lives in the UK where he writes stories and reviews, fuelled by copious amounts of tea.
Author Website: www.garethdjones.co.uk
More TTTV stories by Gareth D Jones: https://talltaletv.com/?s=gareth+d+jones
The caves were magnificent: full of stalactites and stalagmites, eerie pools and fantastically colourful rock formations. They were also cold and, now that Yorick was alone, lonely and unnerving. In this section beyond the lights strung for tourists, the narrow beam of his torch gave them a rather different and more chilling air. The deep growl from somewhere nearby was particularly worrying.
*
Two weeks in Yorkshire in the autumn was not Yorick’s idea of fun, but at least they had decent Yorkshire tea to drink. He had packed lightly in anticipation of moving round several times during their stay, but in the end the same dingy 2-star hotel had been the team’s home for the entire fortnight. That morning, Yorick stood at his room’s single and slightly grotty window, peering over the supposedly expansive view of the dales that was in fact rather limited by the dull, early morning skies and scudding clouds. Opening the window let in a brisk breeze that stirred the somewhat musty smell, but after a minute it was too chilly to be comfortable.
Another day, another less-than-glamourous opportunity to track down Yorkshire’s unwelcome recent additions.
Down on the breakfast room, Lucja and Arkady were munching their way through the continental buffet in silence: cold meats and cheeses, yoghurt, fruit and cereal. They both looked up as he entered, each raised an eyebrow and returned to their repast. Sandy was tucking into to a full English as usual and, as usual, attempting to engage the waitress in an enthusiastic discussion of bioengineering and the problems of extreme pest control. That was the title of the TV series he had pitched to Channel Four and was convinced would be commissioned any day. Extreme Pest Control with Sandy Whatever-his-name-was.
Yorick considered this as he popped two slices of bread into the rotating toaster. Sandy was just Sandy. The waitress, a waif of a girl with no evident interest in wildlife despite two weeks’ worth of lectures from Sandy, took the opportunity to make an escape so she could ask Yorick if he wanted tea or coffee.
Tea. It was always tea. He had told her that it would always be tea yet, despite there being no other guests, she seemed unable to remember this important fact. Or maybe it was protocol and she was obliged to ask. She wrote the word tea carefully on her notepad with the stub of a red pencil and exited to the kitchen.
Toast successfully buttered and marmaladed, Yorick sat opposite Sandy to await his chosen beverage.
“What’s on the menu today, then?” he asked.
“Well,” said Sandy around a mouthful of bacon, “we’ll check on the two main herds of aurochs, and then we have,” he forked a pile of scrambled egg into his mouth, “our first confirmed sighting of a cave bear.”
“Great,” Yorick said. Cave bears were huge. Bigger by far than grizzlies. And Yorkshire had lots of caves. Various wildlife groups had been scouring the moors and the dales using drones to verify the sightings reported by alarmed tourists.
After breakfast they piled into the Range Rover, Yorick consigned to the back seat as usual, and set off into the wild.
The clouds seemed to be clearing and the varicoloured dales were looking a bit brighter. There was not much to be seen in the way of buildings or animals, so theoretically there was plenty of room for a few small herds of aurochs. Nobody really minded the huge, lumbering cattle that had, after all, previously lived in the British Isles until recent centuries. Other than the confusion over aurochs being both the singular and plural, they were relatively popular creatures.
Yorick held onto the door handle as Sandy took a hump in the road rather too fast. He evidently wanted to check on the herds quickly and get on with something more interesting. They’d tagged several dozen aurochs over the past two weeks and were now monitoring them, Sandy having transformed his image from Big Game Hunter to Big Game Keeper and Protector of the Countryside.
There were also lynx to be found in Yorkshire now, as well as other smaller re-introduced species, none of which were important enough for Sandy to care about. There was similarly a proliferation of taxidermists all over the British Isles, driven by the abundance of new species. Yorick had found his small business floundering in a flooded market so had packed it in and now worked full time with Sandy. Six months later he had still not decided whether that had been a good idea.
After twenty minutes Sandy took them off-road and up a shallow incline, swerving around rocky outcroppings and bringing them to a stop with a jerk. Yorick stepped out into the fresh breeze and zipped up his wax jacket. The aurochs were less than half a mile away, munching slowly. The nearest few glanced up and appraised the newcomers, decided they were no threat and continued with their extended breakfast.
Arkady, big and bearded, held up his tablet and compared the numbers onscreen with the beasts in the field. Lucja prowled around the car looking for unexpected wildlife, a compact package of unspecified deadly skills dressed all in black.
After a couple of minutes of discussion over the tablet, Sandy was satisfied and they jumped back into the Range Rover to head for the next herd. Yorick undid his zip again and braced himself for Sandy’s erratic driving. Another fifteen minutes brought them to the second aurochs herd and a repeat of the same procedure.
“Right,” said Sandy as they piled back onto the car, “off to the caves.” He pulled off with a roar.
“There were caves in Chechnya,” Arkady muttered.
They powered along winding country lanes at hair-raising speed in the direction of Stump Cross Caverns. Yorick reviewed what he knew about cave bears, which was not much. They were big and they were bears. The allegation that they lived in caves was based on the discovery of numerous bones in several caves around Britain. To Yorick this proved that they liked to die in caves more than that they liked to live in caves.
Sandy’s phone rang loudly when they were halfway there, and he answered it on his bluetooth headset in his characteristic managerial style.
“Drusilla, hi,” he drawled. Their Home Office contact. “To meet us?” Dramatic acceleration out of a bend. “A scientist, you say?”
It was almost comical, the way Sandy drip-fed bits of information to his passengers during his calls
“From the Natural History Museum?” Wash of spray from a huge puddle. “Today? Yes, can do.” Hurtle over a narrow stone bridge. “Stump Cross caverns. Yes. We’ll meet them there.”
He hung up with a flourish and left a pregnant pause.
Arkady and Lucja were never going to bite, so Yorick gave in and did the honours. “What was that about?”
“We’re meeting a scientist from the Natural History Museum…”
Yorick leaned back and re-listened to the story that sounded much more involved this time round and somehow emphasized the importance of Sandy’s enterprise. The story took them all the way to the visitors’ car park at the caverns.
“I knew a scientist in Belarus,” Arkady mused as they pulled to a halt.
One of the local cave guides came out to meet them – a man in a beige shirt and red neckerchief whose grey hair was pulled back in a ponytail. His name badge declared him to be Orville.
“Bear’s in the caverns,” he told them, somewhat unnecessarily.
Sandy began his usual professional we’re-here-to-save-the-day spiel while Yorick paced around the gravelled carpark. Arkady loaded himself up with various bits of electronic equipment while Lucja opened the back of the range rover and pulled out a huge hunting rifle. It was chunky and black and she slotted several colourful darts into its magazine.
Something large moved in the distance, across the carpark and a neighbouring field. Yorick pulled his compact binoculars from a coat pocket and swiftly tried to focus on it. He never took wildlife for granted nowadays – there were too many unknowns out there. After a moment he spotted a black mastiff loping across the grass. It paused to sniff at something then lay down. He was relieved to see it had only one head. There had been rumours of a Cerberus being spotted on Exmoor.
Sandy and the other two appeared to be ready, so Yorick joined them. His equipment was minimal and resided permanently in his coat pockets. Orville led the way to the cavern entrance where he unlocked a gate set into the rock. He preceded them down a set of steep stairs and began pointing out geological features as they entered the spot-lit interior. It was immediately cold and the air felt damp.
“We don’t need the tour,” Sandy said, patting the guide’s arm.
Arkady strode forward suddenly, his torch beam focussed on the floor in front of him. He stooped and prodded at a small, dark mass on the floor.
“Bear scat,” he said, looking up. “You want to smell it?” he asked Sandy. “Can tell what species by the smell.”
“No, thanks,” Sandy said. “We can assume it’s a cave bear.”
Orville nodded. “Big blighter, too,” he said.
Lucja had stalked ahead, head cocked to one side as though listening intently. She paused where the cavern split.
“Which way?” she asked.
“To the right,” Orville said, “towards Wolverine Cave.”
“Wolverines?” Yorick repeated, immediately racking his brains for what he knew of the creatures.
“It’s just a name,” Orville said. “There’s no wolverines.” He pulled a folded map from a back pocket and showed it to Sandy. “We’re here. As far as I know, the bear’s here.”
Sandy took the map and slid it into an exterior pocket of his hunting jacket.
“We’ll take it from here,” he said.
Orville retreated, looking relieved while Yorick followed the others onwards.
*
Almost an hour later they emerged onto the surface empty handed. No sign of any kind of bear. Orville made them teas and coffees in the café while they warmed up. There had been no further traces of bear activity and Arkady had picked up no heat signatures on his infrared scanner.
“A lot of caverns down there,” Orville said. “You were only in the show caverns. There’s plenty more further down, but you’d need specialist equipment to get down there safely.”
As they sipped at the beverages and nibbled at cream teas, another car pulled into the carpark with a crunch of gravel. It was an old Volvo estate in muddy brown. A tall woman stepped out and flexed her shoulders and arms, evidently stiff from a long drive.
“That’ll be our scientist,” Sandy announced, looking pleased with himself.
Yorick recalled his odd use of the pronoun ‘them’, rather than him or her. He had evidently decided to surprise them all with the fact that the visiting scientist was a woman, as though they were in a film from the eighties.
The scientist pulled a short jacket out of the car and put it on over a roll-neck jumper. She appeared to have short, sculpted hair, unless she actually had long hair and it was tucked into the roll-neck. She walked over to the café, glancing up into the sky as she went.
Sandy stood as she entered and gave an aborted wave, evidently realising that nobody else was there for her to confuse them with.
She approached and smiled minimally.
“Doctor Ellen West, Department of Cryptozoology, Natural History Museum,” she said, offering an elegant black hand. They all shook.
“Alexander Grantham, head of this unit. People call me Sandy.”
“Arkady,” said Arkady.
“Sonja,” said Sonja after a brief pause, as though she resented the obligation to introduce herself.
Yorick recovered his composure in time to give his name too. ‘Head of this unit’? Typical pompous Sandyism.
“Tea or coffee?” Orville called from the counter.
“Do you have any fruit teas?” Doctor Ellen West asked, and went to investigate.
“Sandy is short for Alexander?” Yorick said, broaching the more shocking half of Sandy’s introduction.
“What did you think it was short for?”
Yorick mouthed the syllables of Alexander silently and nodded acceptance.
“I thought it was because you have sandy coloured hair.”
“But I don’t have sandy coloured hair,” Sandy said, taking off his cap to reveal the dark brown truth of his statement.
“So you don’t,” Yorick said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a hat before.”
“Of course you have. I don’t wear a hat for breakfast.”
Doctor West returned with a cup of something that probably smelled better than it tasted.
“So, what have you discovered?” She sat and took a steaming sip.
“No sign of the cave bear,” Sandy said. “Plenty of aurochs. What’s your area of interest?
“Cryptozoology,” she said, “creatures of myth and legend. A few years back I tracked rumours and documents. Now I’m tracking actual creatures.”
“Wait,” Yorick said, “Doctor West – it was you that tracked the yeti in Snowdonia.”
“That’s right,” she said softly. A look of grief washed over her face. She took another sip of tea. “Call me Ellen, though.”
“Well, we’ve seen nothing like that in Yorkshire, Ellen,” Sandy said cheerfully.
“Yorkshire’s a big place,” Ellen said and put down her cup. “I’m not looking for a yeti this time. I’m looking for a cockatrice.”
“Interesting,” Yorick said. Like the celebrated taxidermized mermaid that had turned out to be part monkey and part fish, the cockatrice was a hybrid creature of myth. The body of a two-legged dragon and the head of a cockerel, he had once seen a small example in a private collection. The creatures of legend were reputed to have been of a much larger scale. “Rather an ugly creature.”
“Why don’t they make something that people actually like?” Sandy said. “Unicorns, maybe?”
“There’s a farmer breeding unicorns in Northern Spain,” Ellen said, “and they’re all over Eastern Europe. There’s even a herd of Shetland Unicorns been spotted up near Inverness.”
“Where is cockatrice?” Arkady asked.
“We were tracking it via satellite till it went to ground in this area,” Ellen said. “We think it went underground.”
“So it could be in these caves?” Sandy asked.
“They’re extensive enough. Could be any number of creatures down there.”
“So what are we looking at?” Sandy pulled out his tablet to make notes.
“The cockatrice of legend could kill you with a look, or with its breath,” Ellen said.
Arkady pulled a gas mask out from somewhere.
“We think it unlikely that anyone has imbued their creation with those abilities,” the doctor continued, “but it can obviously fly, and it had razor-sharp talons and beak.”
“Talons and beak…” Sandy muttered as he scribed. “What size?”
“Three or four foot tall.”
“So it could get into all kinds of tight spaces.”
Orville got them kitted out for the deeper caves, those not open to casual tourists. Red caving suit, knee pads, belt, helmet with mounted torch, wellington boots. Yorick pulled on the outfit and felt ever so slightly more professional.
Orville led them back through the show caves and pointed them to a roped-off side corridor. He unhooked the rope and they shuffled through. He stayed behind and re-hooked the rope.
“Check your torches before you go any further,” he said, and with that flicked a switch on the cave wall that doused the nearest lights. A faint yellow glow from around the nearest bend was all the illumination left to them. Sandy and Lucja’s pale faces could be seen in the dark, with Arkady’s bearded visage more of a blur. Ellen’s face was all but invisible in the gloom. Orville was a mere silhouette against the feeble back light. One by one they fumbled with their head-mounted torches and brought a series of white beams of light into existence, blinding each other in turn.
“I’ll keep the urn hot,” Orville said and departed like a wraith.
Arkady led the way, relying, he said, on his elite military spelunking experience in Azerbaijan. Sandy took control of the map, Ellen held the tracker, Yorick kept his recording equipment at the ready and filmed the occasional short sequence for the record. Lucja brought up the rear, several feet back as a buffer in case of attack. Every time Yorick glanced over his shoulder, she also seemed to be glancing over her shoulder.
“Where did this Cockatrice come from?” Sandy asked as they descended a steep slope. There were no smooth floors or artificially cut steps in this section.
“Where do any of them come from?” Ellen replied. Her head lamp bobbed as she ducked under a low overhang, alerting Yorick that he needed to do the same.
“From what we can tell,” she continued, “there are several semi-mobile biolabs that move between industrial units and warehouses.” There was a series of splashes as they all sloshed through a long puddle. “None of them are related, as far as we can tell.”
“That’s what Ursula said,” Sandy agreed. “Our Home Office contact.”
“Now we crawl,” Arkady announced and his light dropped to half its height.
Yorick waited his turn and crawled through a low twenty-foot long section of cavern, emerging into a chasm that disappeared overhead beyond the reach of his torch’s beam. A trickle of water ran down the centre of the chasm with around two feet of dry rock either side. They plodded on awkwardly for a minute or more.
A low growl echoed from ahead. Or maybe behind.
Everyone froze.
“Nothing on the scanner,” Ellen said quietly.
After a moment they moved on again. The chasm forked, continuing in similar vein to the left and climbing up a tumble of rocks to the right.
“They re-join in about fifty feet,” Sandy said. “We should split up so we’re not out-flanked.”
Arkady followed the right-hand fork and Sandy began scrambling up the boulders and debris. Ellen followed Arkady. Yorick paused, undecided, then followed Sandy, clambering on all fours. Darkness enveloped him from behind as Lucja took the other route.
“Some trip, huh?” Sandy said from above.
Yorick grunted in reply and concentrated on shining his headlamp in the right place to see where he needed to put his hands. They arrived at the top of the rockfall where Sandy shuffled around and began working his way down the far side. Smaller pebbles rattled off into the darkness. Sandy disappeared around a turn and the shine of his torch was immediately consumed by the darkness. Yorick sat down uncomfortably on some broken chunks of rock and swung his legs round to start lowering himself down. He wriggled and scrambled and managed to turn himself round, picking his way carefully while shining his headlamp down between his own feet.
The descent seemed to take much longer than the ascent, but finally he arrived on level ground and turned to face the way ahead.
A low-ceilinged cavern stretched off ahead, maybe ten feet wide and quite empty. There was no sign of Sandy.
“Sandy?” he called.
There was nothing but a dull echo. Why had Sandy marched off so quickly?
He took a few steps forward, called again. Nothing. No reply, no flash of torch light. Another ten feet onward the cavern narrowed to three or four feet wide.
“Sandy?”
This time there was an answer. A worryingly deep growl.
Yorick backed up a few steps. Either Sandy was pretending to be a bear; or had been incapacitated by a bear and couldn’t answer for himself; or Yorick had somehow gone down the slope to a different part of the cave system.
Deciding that the latter was the more optimistic, Yorick reversed his course hurriedly and scrambled back up the slope. A few feet beyond the roof of the cavern was another gaping crack leading to another unknown depth. Yorick swiftly slithered downward, gaining several bruises and scrapes along the way.
A pool of light illuminated a patch of floor several feet ahead. Beyond – the dim outline of Sandy.
“Hear that?” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Yorick moved away from the slope. “Bear, I think.”
“Yup.” He turned away. “Best not get split up though. Let’s find the others first.”
Nobody else had been mislaid, so they were reunited less than thirty feet further on.
“Have a reading,” Arkady announced as they joined them. “Next cavern, small life form.”
“We think we found the bear,” Sandy said.
“The cockatrice is more important,” Ellen said, marching off into the darkness before Sandy could take control.
Yorick found himself trailing at the back of the group.
The cockatrice did not wait for them to find it. Only a couple of minutes later there was an eerie screech, a scalp-tingling scratching sound and the flap of wings. The passage was rather narrow at this point and Yorick had dropped back almost ten feet, fiddling with the settings on his camera.
Nobody ahead had much opportunity to react, other than to duck, make various noises of alarm and flail their arms. Even the usually unflappable Lucja had no time nor elbow room to bring her dart gun to bear.
Alerted by the bruhaha ahead, Yorick raised the camera and filmed the flight of the cockatrice in all its high-definition, low-light, full-colour, slo-mo glory. The clip lasted only a few seconds, but he watched it back dozens of times in the following days, re-living his moment of artistic triumph.
He was almost trampled by the rest of the group as they about-turned and charged along the passage in pursuit.
It took twenty minutes or so to make their way back to the entrance, and for the last minute or two they could hear muffled screeching. The cockatrice sounded tired and irritated as though it could barely be bothered with screeching any more.
They could see it as they cautiously mounted the stairway that led up to fresh air. Yorick pushed past everyone save Lucja, filming over her shoulder as she raised her gun.
Orville had conscientiously closed the gate on they way out.
Perhaps blinded by the glare of sunlight after so long underground, the cockatrice had flown straight into the gate, wedging its head through the gap between two bars. It flapped its wings feebly. One of them looked damaged and could barely lift from the ground.
“Poor thing’s injured,” Ellen said, crowding up behind Yorick.
Lucja raised her gun and shot it.
“Could be poison breath,” she explained with a shrug.
Ellen pushed past and approached carefully as the beast sank into unconsciousness. Its wings gave a final flap and she knelt beside it.
“It’s remarkable,” she said.
Yorick recorded the entire process as Ellen and Sandy extricated the cockatrice from its predicament, with the aid of Arkady bending the bars slightly. They creaked the gate open eventually.
“Can you get the crate, Lucja?” Sandy called.
Lucja had retreated halfway down the stairs.
“Am watching for bear,” she said.
Yorick felt his stomach lurch. He had completely forgotten about the second deadly creature lurking somewhere behind them in the dark.
It took them a while to get the creature safely contained and installed in Dr West’s car, by which time Orville had served drinks for them all. They stood around the Volvo, drinking.
“I don’t see how we’d get the cave bear out even if we found it,” Yorick observed.
“No,” Sandy said. “I don’t think we could.” He slurped his coffee. “Now we’ve seen the situation. We’ll have to bait the entrances, draw it out, dart it.”
Lucja raised her dart gun affirmatively.
“Then we get some heavy lifting equipment in to take it to a zoo.”
“I’ll show you round the other exits,” Orville said.
Dr West threw the dregs of her fruit tea aside and handed the cup to Orville.
“I’m taking this beastie to Tropical World,” she said. “They have containment and veterinary facilities to look after it temporarily.”
“Is it the only one?” Yorick asked.
“I don’t think so.” She fished in her jacket pocket for car keys. “They’re springing up all over the place. All kinds of creatures.”
“They come from co-existing realities,” Arkady said.
Everybody stared at him in surprise.
“It’s a theory I’ve heard,” Ellen said. “I wouldn’t discount it.” She got into her car. “Thanks for your help.” She closed the door and drove away swiftly.
“What else might live in a co-existing reality?” Yorick asked.
Sandy ignored the question. “Come along,” he said. “Bears to trap, coffee to drink, Yorkshire to save.”
Yorick took a last clip of film as Dr West’s Volvo crested the brow of a nearby hill.
“Okay,” he said. He finished his tea and followed in Sandy’s wake.
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