Tony was partially stuck with the story. He had been busy with work, but that, as the reader would know – was an excuse.

The reason he was stuck had more to do with a doubt on how to proceed, and what precisely, was to write about Neil and Mabel. Neil was a man, and Mabel was a woman. Both were young and unattached. Both happened to like each other. Both were together in the same opening scene in the book.
It should be pretty obvious that there needed to be some chemistry between the two. But Neil, instead was focussing on different sets of chemistry – Neil’s
mitochondrial chemistry, to be precise. It was supposed to be different from a typical romance book where the man is tall dark and handsome and his bare stomach and chiseled facial bone structures look as if they had been photoshopped.
Also, Tony had injected a sap sucker and a skunk already, along with a doze of South Western British Columbia’s topography, not to mention dragging in Bengali scientists of a century ago that worked on wireless communication as well as plant biology.

And that was not enough. Then came the parallel story of a young girl is the french riviera, but ten or fifteen thousand years ago, essentially in the middle of an ice age, stuck in a cave during a snow storm. And to complicate matters further, Tony did not know enough about the life and times of that era.

Tony had searched for free copies of eBooks on the subject, hoping to find something on the web for his iPad. But he had not found anything suitable, and free, yet.

He had mentioned wooly rhinoceros, but was tempted to toss in the giants of them all, an elasmotherium. It was supposed to be a gigantic single horned long legged rhinoceros that galloped along the siberian steppes in the Pliocene and Pleistocene, from about 2.6 million years ago, till at least 50,000 years ago. What Tony did not know, was if the animal was also present in more recent times, such as fifteen thousand years ago, and in more southern latitudes such as the mediterranean coast.
Tony was attracted by the story he heard of Russian legends that mentioned a huge unicorn like animal living in the Russian steppes, and if that legend could have anything to do with a giant rhinoceros that might or might not have survived long enough to enter human mythology.
Tony had found a sketch of the giant on wikipedia, created by one Dimitry Bogdanov. Tony decided to use that picture for his blog, and mention the source of the image. That was not going to play a major role in his story of his ancestors. But, it might add to the sense of drama in the mind of the reader. It added it for Tony for sure.

And so, a cup of coffee at his side, Tony started writing –

Early in the morning, the light was still dim through the swirling snow storm, a small group of hunter gatherers had decided this was a bad day to go searching for food. They turned back and were trying to find a shorter route back to their cave. But ahead of them, emerging out of the churning snow and the haze, a huge single horned creature that was apparently using its horns to plough the ground. Its grunts, and the sound of its exhalation were loud enough to be heard through the storm before it could be seen.
Not having as keen an eyesight as the human party, the creature continued to clear sections of the sloping ground, oblivious to the storm or the approaching bipeds.
Solu came to an abrupt halt, alerted by the pet wolf which had come to a dead stop, the hair on its neck bristling.

—-
Tony stopped again. Pet wolf ? Late Pleistocene ? Giant one horned rhyno ?
None of these creatures were a human female. Therefore, none of them carried an earlier copy of Neil’s mitochondria.
What was he doing, getting side tracked with imaginary one horned giant rhinoceros while trying to write a story about the maternal evolutionary ancestry of a Bengali babu ?

Ohh well, he thought. Lets finish the coffee and leave the story for another day.