Need to see a woman about a mammoth

Worked out the plan, got back into it. One useful day of writing before the weekend ended. Wanted to push forward but decided to do the rewrites first.

The revised Dune Drive sequence went quick. And then there was a line about the mammoth footprints and I wanted Doctor Bell to mention how long they'd been finding trackways at White Sands. I know I saw that somewhere. There's even an amusing story about the first Harlan's Ground Sloth tracks; the discoverer thought he had discovered Bigfoot!

So I did a quick top-level search. And of course, there is damn-all from that angle on the animal trackways, because everyone wants to post and repost off the three or four releases by Bennet's team on the human footprints.

But...I hit multiple reposts and re-telling's of his first publicity release.

So The Early Fox opens with a Pleistocene sketch. Rather pastoral, because that worked for the book. Later, Penny gets a look at what are inferred to be the footprints of the woman and child (and mammoth).

And here's the problem. As of these early, pre 2021 paper findings, the child was around three years old and a bit of a weight to carry, especially on slick mud. And while there are other children who jumped in puddles (specifically, in the water pooled in the footprint of a Harlan's Sloth in one set of prints elsewhere) this one was only on his or her feet while the girl/teenager/young woman/smaller man put her down to switch arms.

And she was booking. Moving at a pace that, especially at her height and stride, would be close to a run.

Add this to the fact that essentially all of the other trackways (and this includes the majority of the animals as well) are traveling in groups. And to the oddity that she apparently sets out with the child and returns hours or days later without it...

There's a story here, and it might be a dramatic one. This is the trackway that crossed a mammoth both ways; it stepped on her footprints, and on the way back she stepped on its footprints. And actually; there was a Harlan's Sloth as well, though she may not have noticed it. It noticed her, or perhaps just her footprints, and got up on its hind legs to look for danger before turning around and going somewhere else instead.

Oh, yeah, and this was early and thus may not be deep. The first reports were before the radiocarbon tests and put a bracket of 15K to 10K BP on them; from the known opening of the ice passage to the extinction of the mammoth in NA.

So should I rewrite that, too? This is one of those cases in which the rewrites cascade; the scene I'm working on now is the one where Penny looks at her tracks.

The downside to going dramatic with the material is that it sets up an unanswered tension. She might be running from something. She is alone, which is unusual, she is in a hell of a hurry, and she returns without the child. That's questions the reader is going to have and the trackways -- and the rest of the novel -- never do explain what is going on or what happened to her.

But...there is another perspective. This took commentary from one of those many reposts I mentioned. To us, this is a strange and threatening land. Cold, wet, those massive looming glaciers (not terribly close to Lake Otero, at least), and truly insane megafauna. Even if the twelve-foot tall Harlan's Sloth with the eight inch long digging claws is a shy herbivore, and the mammoth is a herd beast (for all that is good and bad about that!) we've got dire wolves, sabre tooths, and lions; basically all your apex predator dreams, only three times the size (as Penny puts it, the Pleistocene is like Texas; everything is bigger there).

But that's the world she knows. That's the world she grew up in. It may be dangerous to her, but that freak-out level of "surrounded by giant monsters" may not be her world picture. I glanced over the existing draft, and yes I can increase the weight of the child and the speed of the girl and all of that but still keep the general flavor of the scene. Urgent, possibly important, certainly dangerous, but not this major thriller Clan of the Cave Bear set-piece of Pleistocene adventure.