That night, my mother had made me a special dinner. It was just the two of us. I don't remember why, but my father wasn't around at the time. I remember the meal, because she prepared my favorite meal. She had started a fire in her hearth and the stones surrounding it were blazing hot. She handed me hunks of raw animal meat and told me to scrape off the skin and fat. I had my scraper always with me in a little bag tied around my neck. It was a small sharp piece of rock. Because I wasn't old enough to go on hunts, my job in the tribe was scraping meat and gathering food, so the scraper was always with me. Once I had scraped them, she grabbed the hot stones with our version of an oven mitt, and put them in a large bowl of water made from bone. The water began to boil, and I was excited because I knew what this meant. We were making soup. My mouth was watering at the carved up, raw meat that was about to be boiled. She put them all in small pieces of leather that had holes punched into them with sharp, bone awls. Small twigs were inserted into these holes, and that sealed the meat in. Then we tied these little meat packages with a long string of twine attached to a branch. We used these like fishing lines. We dunked the meat packages into the water, still attached to the twine and branch, and let them boil in there. Once we finished boiling the meat, she added some more hot stones and made a soup. She threw in some nettle leaves for the broth and brought a special treat from her neck pouch: quail eggs. She knew they were my favorite and had somehow obtained them for me. She cracked the eggs over the broth and I had quail egg soup awaiting me. We shared the soup in small clay bowls and divided up the meat packages. My mother gave me most of the packages, and I opened them up like they were Christmas presents. I broke the twigs when I was pulling them out of the leather. I held each little opened package of leather in my hand and stared at the cooked meat with glee. My mother watched me lovingly. One of the things she enjoyed about making food for me was watching the look on my face when it was time to eat it.
That night, she took a lot of care on my grooming. She gave me a bath near a waterfall. And though we didn't have soap, she brought a piece of animal hide to scrub me with. I was dried with a blanket of mammoth fur that she wrapped around me. I remember her next taking a leaf and telling me to scrub my teeth with it (no one ever brushed their teeth back then), and I started to feel nervous as I realized that something very significant would soon be happening to me. I wasn't psychologically prepared when she had me get dressed. She had made clothes especially for me that night. I was presented with chest armor made out of the bones of a boar that my mother had tied with wool from the wild sheep we had on the island. I wonder now if she hoped it would protect me. She had also made me a new pair of trousers, made from wool, which went just above my knees. And then she gave me a wool sweater that I pulled over my head. I was in shock. New clothes were a rarity back then.
Not long after reaching the beach, my mother told me that she would have to leave me there. I cried and begged her to stay, but she slapped me across the face and told me to be good. Some creatures were going to take me up to the sky tonight and I should do all that they asked. She would come by tomorrow to pick me up. And with that, my mother turned on her heels and walked away from me.
I wasn't on the beach long before I saw a giant shape appear in the sky. It was the same one you saw when Arthur was abducted. We called it "The Great Mammoth," though you would probably say it looked like an elephant. I started to run away, but an old man (and when I say old, I mean he was probably around thirty five to forty years old) grabbed me and held me still. And then a giant blue light engulfed us and I was paralyzed. I was being sucked up with the rest of the people. I was terrified, but I was also confident that my mother would never let anything bad happen to me so I took comfort in that. I felt like I was traveling up that light and into the sky for a good fifteen minutes. And then suddenly everything went dark. A split second later, I was all alone in a little exam room. It was empty except for a small bed bolted to the floor. Before I could even think what to do, a little purple person walked in with a large cart. She looked like a modern human, only she was purple and about my height (and I was maybe four feet at the time). I thought she was cute. She smiled at me and told me to take my clothes off. I obeyed. It felt normal to be without clothes at that stage of my life. Cave men and women were more comfortable with nudity than people today. She then asked me to lie down on the table, which I did, and she said that I would feel a tiny poke and then I would go to sleep. She then said that I would be going home soon, and she would see me in another ten years. I had no problems with this. I liked seeing a little purple person talk to me. I got a kick out of it. The last thing I remember her saying was that she was happy to have me on her spaceship, because I was half Neanderthal and that made me a very special boy. No one ever told me I was special for being half Neanderthal and this made me like her even more. She then gave me a kiss on the forehead right before she stuck a needle in my arm. I have no memory after that. I was asleep. The next morning, I woke up on the beach with everyone else from the night before. My mother was already there to collect me. She asked if I was okay. I told her I was great and couldn't wait to do it again in another ten years.