A bitter, biting, numbing wind was blowing showers of sharp sleet across the valley. Only a few stunted trees clung to life on its slopes, their leafless branches leaning away from the wind, like windswept hair.

The hunter was trying hard to keep out of the wind behind an outcrop of rock. His clothes were a poor defence against the cold. He shivered and yawned. He couldn’t light a fire, the wind made that impossible, but even if the wind had dropped he wouldn’t have started one. He wouldn’t want it to see the smoke.

He had been tracking the animal for days, and had wounded it with one of his flint tipped spears when it had passed by on its way up the valley just after dawn. He hadn’t followed it. He wasn’t so much afraid as aware that among his people the top of the valley and the mountains beyond were taboo. No one had ever gone there. It was an evil, mysterious, dangerous, haunted place.

Surely hunger would force it to pass back down the valley soon. There was nothing up there. No food, no life, only the mountains, ice, snow and death.

He stooped and picked up his weapons. He still had a choice. He could return to his woman and their children back at the camp; to a fire, warmth and food. But it wasn’t really open to him to return yet; he knew he had to continue his hunt.

His father and his grandfather had hunted the animals; it had become an obsession with them. They were the enemy, the outsiders and now, as far as anyone knew there was only one left, the one that had gone up the valley. If he now let it live, he would be dishonouring his father and risking the future of his children.

Snow had started to fall and he could see almost nothing in front of him. There was a good chance now, that if it came back down the valley he would miss it. He knew what he had to do. He would have to go up and find it, go up the valley further and higher than anyone had ever gone before.

He slipped out from behind the rocks and made his way carefully over the scree and rough grass, his heart pounding more with excitement than fear. As he climbed higher the cold became more intense, and the valley began to narrow dramatically, until it became a gorge with sheer rock faces on either side.

His feet were so cold that every step was painful, and he looked around for some shelter from the wind. He became aware of a patch of blackness, against the white of the snow and the grey of the rocks to the left of him. It was a cave. At last he could get out of the wind.

The cave was the height of two men at the entrance but the roof sloped suddenly down making it less a cave than a shelter. The glare of the snow had temporarily blinded him. His eyes took some time to become accustomed to the gloom so he didn’t see the huddled shape on the floor immediately.

He poked it with his spear but it didn’t stir. It was lying on its face and as soon as he turned it over he knew he had found his quarry, and it was dead. He felt no sense of triumph but almost sorrow for the frozen creature, lying contorted in death. Perhaps he should bury it, in the way his own people buried their dead. After all it was the last of its kind.

The frozen floor was as hard as the rock of the cave walls, but there was a large pile of stones heaped in a corner. Although his people buried their dead in shallow graves dug into the ground, he had heard of burials under piles of stones, although he had never seen one. So these stones would have to form a tomb.

He began to pile them onto the body and a small cairn began to take shape. His eyes were fully back to normal now and he could see clearly. What he saw was hard for him to understand. Under the pile of stones that he was moving were bones, lots of them; bones from arms and legs, and several skulls. They were like the skulls of people like him and yet they were different. The bone was thicker and heavier, and they had a strange distorted look about them.

An idea began to form slowly in his mind. If this was a burial then, as no one had ever been here before, these bodies must have been placed here by the animals themselves. This final survivor had come here to die in a place it held special. He moved some stones away from its face. Now as he looked at it again perhaps it didn’t look so different from him.

When he’d finished arranging the stones he left the cave and made his slow painful way down the valley to his camp and to a hero’s welcome; leaving the last Neanderthal at rest in the cave of its ancestors.