Wolves have a particular style of hunting, of which he is ignorant, making some scenes a sour read for the student of animal behavior. Merritt’s understanding of animal behavior is also lacking. Expect most of your hunts to end empty-handed. Note for novelists of the Pleistocene: Large animals don’t just drop over dead when you stick them with a spear.

Merritt claims inspiration from “Clan of the Cave Bear,” which is no surprise given his horribly inaccurate depiction of hunting scenes. This volume can be didactic, with a fair amount of information dumping, and descriptions in conversations that were sometimes so stilted, they sounded like they were cribbed from an encyclopedia. Novelist Jerry Merritt can write beautiful descriptions, but more is expected of an author. I listened to the author’s “A Gift of Time” and gave it four stars, so I was looking forward to this book as another pleasurable listen. In the end, Helen discovers that science in isolation cannot answer all of her questions for Tekla’s devotion to Ka Li had not died even though 600 centuries had passed.ĭo your research, but don't make it so obvious As Helen solves the puzzle of the signal cairns she finds universal fame and suffers devastating misfortune. Helen’s detective work tracking Ka Li’s timeless signals across the Alaskan wilderness now intertwines with Ka Li’s story. Skipping forward 60,000 years, Helen Ryland, a mid-20th century archaeologist, unearths one of Ka Li’s surviving signal cairns and realizes she has found trace of people who populated the Americas even before the Clovis culture. As Ka Li survives fierce predators and scarce resources, she leaves behind a series of signal cairns to help Tekla find her. Only Tekla cares enough to search for her over the years. Ka Li escapes but is unarmed and forced to flee across the Bering land bridge where she becomes hopelessly lost in the endless tracts of North America. Tekla, son of an ancient shaman, loses Ka Li when she is torn from his life by a brutal tribe of Denisovans in a Late Pleistocene kidnapping.

A gift of time by jerry merritt