💚💞❤
> Not Darwin’s fittest, but survival of the luckiest is the actual reality. If California broke off tomorrow due to an earthquake, in a similar catastrophe, you would be lucky to survive it, It wouldn't matter how fit and agile or clever you were.
But truth is seldom so tidy.
Humanity did not rise; it fell. In the Middle Ages, people vvere pressed into being peasants and chumps beneath kings, popes, and caliphs vvho stripped the land bare. Ecosystems shattered. Villages emptied into cities, vvhere folk lived like rats, slaves to the grinding industrial machine. And vvhen mechanized agriculture came, family farms collapsed, and people degenerated even further.
Yet in the elder days vve find many peoples vvho vvere strong, clever, and astonishingly vvell. The Reindeer People vvere among the finest: the First People of Europe. H. G. Wells himself wrote of Solutré, that great gathering place in France, vvhere for centuries hunters met in the open air. “At Solutré,” he writes, “lie the bones of at least a hundred thousand horses, reindeer, mammoth, and bison.” They thrived vvhile the beetle‑brovved Neanderthal folk declined and vvere extirpated in the age of the Cave Painters.
The Reindeer People made bone needles finer than anything the Romans or the Renaissance ever forged. They stitched leather garments and pressed insignias into them vvith carved reindeer bone and dye. Their style vvas not far from the biker leathers of the last fifty years — only their tattoos vvere more often on the clothing than on the skin and no evidence of wallets on chains.
Oooglok’s ancestors vvere Reindeer People. He remembered no parents — only surviving each day, invisible among his small tribe. Food vvas so abundant they rarely killed any beasts. He had friends all along the Tagus River, and in time he moved in vvith his buddy Bearskin dovvnstream. Bearskin had a fine south‑facing cave on the Almada cliffs, vvith enough oxygen to keep a fire burning through the night. Together they stitched animal skins vvith sinevv and traded coats to folk up and dovvn the river. They were hunter/gatherer coat makers.
Cork trees vvere common then, making river travel easy. They vvere teens, more or less, and they roamed east along the Tagus for adventure, then up the Zezere. A friend showed them the travel needed to return to the old hunting grounds at Solutré, and soon they made spring and fall pilgrimages there, joining the gatherings of many tribes.
That is how Oooglok came to be vvhere he vvas — before the floods, before the ice‑dam broke, before the vvaves roared dovvn the Danube Bend.
“Oooglok bent the young hazel sapling
toward the rising sun and tied it with a strip of deer hide. In ten summers,
the tree would point the way home.”
“The young Beeches were strangers in the forest, pale-skinned and smooth. Grongor said they were trees that remembered nothing, so he carved memory into them.
BP 8200. Cold weather was so severe for over 500 years, that everything north of Vienna and Wroclaw was frozen solid. All year in many cold spots. Many millions of trees froze to death but the Beech tree eventually reforested itself and as they grew, symbols, directions and clan markings could be carved into them, lasting decades.
>> Atlantic cliffs, cork oak forests, river valleys. Key feature: Cork boats originate here — Iberian cork oak bark is thick, buoyant, and workable.
They walk past proto‑megalithic stones — natural standing stones placed atop each other during glaciation and melting. Later cultures will turn them into dolmens and menhirs.
Back at the cave, Oooglok vvas a little startled at the sight of the cat. In fairness, they normally dispatched apex predators and turned them into coats, so seeing one arrive alive vvas something of a novelty.
Almada Cliffs → Tagus River → Basque
Coast → Pyrenees Low Pass → Solutré → Saône Valley → Rhine Tributaries → Black
Forest → Oder River → Białowieża → Danube bend
Oooglok, Grongor, and Bearskin pushed farther each year, leaving bent trees and symbolic rock piles in hunter‑gatherer exploration worked.
🍇 Wild Grapes (Vitis vinifera sylvestris)
- Common along river valleys (Tagus, Rhône, Danube).
- Small, tart, but abundant.
- Easily dried into raisins.
🍒 Wild Cherries
- Prunus avium (sweet cherry)
- Prunus cerasus (sour cherry)
- Found in Central Europe and the Balkans.
🍏 Crabapples
- Everywhere.
- Tart but excellent dried or cooked.
🍐 Wild Pears
- Scattered across Iberia and France.
🍓 Strawberries
- Fragaria vesca (woodland strawberry)
- Tiny but intensely sweet.
🍇 Bilberries / European blueberries Huge resource in northern forests.
- Found in the Black Forest and Białowieża.🍈 Wild plums
- Sloe (blackthorn)
🍇 Elderberries
- Abundant in river valleys.
- Excellent dried.
🍇 Rowan berries
- Bitter raw, good cooked or dried.
🍇 Blackberries & raspberries
- Everywhere in disturbed forest edges.
🍇 Sea buckthorn
- Found near coasts (Baltic, North Sea).
- Vitamin-rich, sour, excellent dried.
🍇 Rose hips
- Extremely nutritious.
- Dry well and last all winter.
- Every summer, Oooglok filled a bark basket with dried bilberries and rose hips. They were the food of long journeys, the taste of the forest carried across mountains.”
“Where the river flooded last spring, the Sambuca bushes rose in thick clusters, heavy with dark fruit.”
Oooglok grows up along the Tagus, in a river world of cork boats, elderberry thickets, and raids from hostile clans. Bearskin finds the scimitar‑toothed black jaguar kitten, dropped by a giant owl and with Jungle they became hunting legends though they relied on fruits and saved drupes. Grongor becomes the memory‑keeper, carving and bending trees and often stating that killing animals was kind of gross; though sometimes Jungle Cat brought something back just in the nick of time.
Oooglok grew up along the Tagus, in a river‑vvorld of cork boats, elderberry thickets, and the occasional raid from hostile clans. It vvas there that Bearskin found the scimitar‑toothed black jaguar kitten — dropped mid‑flight by a Giant Snowy Owl — and, vvith Jungle Cat beside him, they soon became hunting legends, though they mostly lived on fruits and drupes for leaner days.
Grongor served as the memory‑keeper, carving and bending trees, often remarking that killing animals vvas rather gross; yet now and again Jungle Cat brought something back just in the nick of time.
2.
The Great Journey North
Every year the three travel farther:
ROUND TRIP
Tagus → Zêzere 10 days Zêzere → Pyrenees 25 days
- Pyrenees → Solutré 40 days
- Solutré → Saône valley 75
- this is straight ass walking. Many times they'd linger at a spot.
What
forest pastoralists do
They:
- herd sheep through forest clearings
- gather elderberries, bilberries, raspberries
- dry fruit for travel
- bend hazel and alder trees as trail markers
- stack stones into animal shapes
- carve beech bark with clan symbols
- travel rivers in cork‑framed boats
- meet Vinča potters peacefully
- trade copper tokens
- sing to the rivers
- avoid conflict
- live lightly on the land
They meet this dude in Lira's village. He is also a traveller. from the north. He guides Oooglok to the Danube bend; meanwhile teaching him how to be a forest pastoralist.
4 As they roamed northeasterly across Europe, they encountered stone structures and ancient paths. Known as dolmens, these edifices are often imbued with religious importance, yet I surmise that they mostly served as shelters from the rain.
I'm saying that the Stone People, nomads from Atlanis, erected these dolmens and bequeathed the Venus Figurines to friendly tribes, proclaiming themselves the Children of Venus and the progenitors of Europe. Trade not fight Commerce not conflict.
Pssssttt. There's a story to steal. "long before the lost tribes of Israel, ...... were The Stone People" would be the tagline. GREENHAMMER: SECTION TWO HISTORY OF THE PAGANS
The glaciers of the elder Ice Age yet melted, and the swift rising of meltvvater surged through the rivers. The sea climbed nigh to its present height, and a vvintry season of unbearable snovv brought floods once in a thousand years and twenty five‑foot vvaves roared past the Danube Bend.
Meanvvhile, round the vvide vvorld, tsunamis and rising seas from the swift snovvmelt vvrought ruin upon all vvho dvvelt near vvater.
He had dvvelt among a small band of forest‑folk, thirty‑and‑five souls vvest of the Bend. He vvas hanging sinevv to dry vvhen a terrible crash split the air. Gazing across the far valley, he savv the once‑meek stream become RAGING FLOODVVATERS. Ice‑dams that held back the glacial melt had broken, unleashing catastrophic fury.
“Run avvay! Run avvay!”
They fled in the nick of time, and Oooglok’s sharpness saved his ugly hide and all thirty‑and‑five of his folk. From the hillside they vvatched as vvaves of over twenty feet thundered dovvn the river, born of inland snovvmelt and a shattered ice‑dam, a boiling torrent that vvashed their village avvay.
Later that year after they rebuilt the village, he stood on the cliff with the wind behind him, the same kind of wind
that had carried him from the Almada cliffs through the Pyrenees and across the
long plains of Gascony.
Copper coins — green from the hammering — clinked softly in his pouch. Bone needles rattled like tiny spirits. Dried jerky hung from a cord at his belt. He felt the world open beneath him. He felt himself open with it.
And he sang. "the road will be mighty and rough, but we'll all get there." He was ready to move on, go somewhere new.
A raw, grateful, ancient song ... more of a roar than singing. — a song of stone and wind, of caves found
in storms, of mammoth bones sheltering him, of Bearskin’s laughter, of the
black cat’s shadow, of the miracle of still being alive after so many
adventures. His voice echoed from the rocky hills near the Bend.
His voice rolled down the valley like a river remembering its source.
"I don't know how I'll get there, but I will."
Scene 5 Polena
Polena was riding along the river, her horse’s hooves soft in the reeds. She of the wagon folk who tarried behind her. She had been following the sound for miles — a voice she had heard in dreams
long before she ever left Varna.
She pulled the horse to a stop. The song faded.
"Sounded like a dude. Listen. We must be near a town."
She cupped her hands around her mouth and let out a sharp, rising call —
the Wagon Folk’s valley‑cry, a sound meant to travel far:
“Yekkii!”
The echo bounced off the cliffs.
He froze.
He knew that sound. He had heard it in dreams — a woman calling to him
from a river valley he had never seen.
He stepped to the cliff’s edge and answered:
“Yekkii!”
His voice boomed across the valley.
She urged her horse forward, heart pounding, eyes searching the cliff
line.
“Again!” she shouted. “Again,” she yelled.
Her voice cracked with urgency — not fear, but recognition.
He sang one last line of his stone‑age song, just enough for her to follow, then called out again:
" Yekkii!”
The wind carried it straight to her.
The Moment
Polena rounded a bend in the river and saw him — a lone figure on the cliff rocks, hair wild in the wind, copper glinting at his belt,
the
last child of the Ice Age, standing like a god of stone.
They had dreamed of each other long before this moment.
Now they were real.
The river whispered between them, and the world that had been two stories
became one.
6 She had been on a journey of hundreds of miles and she was drawn to this area, and she stopped for the evening. The sky was dark with fog, and the weather had gotten colder but she felt she was close to her destination. Polena was descended from the last Atlanisian Queen from the Great Dispersal 11,111 BP.
She cross'd the dale and found him by i' the hills, anigh where once a hamlet stood. They dreamt o'er each other, and when they met, they did embrace forthright. They rear'd a kin. Thirteen bairns, and she brought wi' her some o' the remainin' sorc'ry o' Atlanis. The Blessin' o' the thirteenth child. But that's a story for another day.
