Living as a Caveman

I never forgot how lucky I was to be married to Mara. There was a startling difference between her and the other women of my tribe. They looked like cheap imitations of women compared to my wife. My wife, whose red hair hung down past her waist, whose chest and hips inspired thoughts of fertility, whose smooth, creamy skin looked like it never touched the sun. I was deeply in love, and would always be in love with Mara.

I was lucky in marrying her, but my luck had limits. I was only a gatherer, after all. I worked alongside Mara, the rest of the women, and my fellow gathering males. We scoured the lands near our encampments, foraged for fruits and vegetables. That meant, understandably, that I didn't get to breed. I'd have children to raise, sure, and Mara would give birth to those children, but they wouldn't be mine by blood.

My own "father", that's to say my mother's husband, was a gatherer. So was his father and his father before that. Each of those men raised the children bred into their wives by hunters. My situation would be no different. My Mara would get bred, her large breasts, the ones I squeezed as we made love, would feed another man's spawn. There was no questioning this.

Mara chose my cousin, the soon-to-be chief, as her mate. She wanted their to be some sort of blood tie between myself and my stepchildren.