Ötzi slumps against the rock, exhausted. The cold blunts his pain for a moment. He's ten thousand feet up, on a crest of the Ötztaler Alps. For two days, everything has gone terribly wrong. Ever since he and two other hunters found themselves on turf claimed by a mean bunch from another valley, he's been caught in a murderous, drawn-out skirmish.
Ötzi has only one good arrow left. And he had to pull it out of a dying attacker's chest. Worse luck, one of his friends died in the fight. He and his other companion finally managed to disengage and find higher ground. Today, they were ambushed by two more angry strangers. Ötzi shot his only arrow, but it just grazed the man in front. When the two closed in, Ötzi and his friend did enough damage in a knife fight to back them off, but not without being badly cut up.
Ötzi's hands and torso are slashed and bleeding. When they disengaged this time, a stupid thing happened. By some crazy logic of chance, Ötzi noticed his one precious arrow as they ran by. Without thinking, he paused, stooped, and picked it up. That mistake made him a stationary target. As he rose, he caught an arrow near his shoulder.
Once clear of the fight, his companion tried to pull it out, but his fingers were clumsy. The shaft broke off, leaving the stone point in Ötzi's back. As they started off again, the friend stumbled to his knees and doubled over. Only then Ötzi saw he'd been stabbed in the stomach. He hoisted him up in a fireman's carry. But, as they set off, the man went slack. Ötzi laid him down and looked for breath; breath was no more.
So now he's alone, still on the run, an arrowhead festering in his back. He's on a crest, all rock and snow, far higher than he'd meant to be. The killers have given up the chase; but he's lost blood and he can hardly move his arm. It's colder by the minute. The pain is terrible. "Great Goddess of the cold, cold Moon, I'm in trouble," he mutters. He sinks to the ground. Rest for a few breaths; think this through.
He still has his gear: knife, clothing, pack frame, bow and remaining arrow. He has his fine axe with its copper head and its lovingly polished handle of hard yew wood -- much good it'll do him now. He's far from home and a serious storm is starting to howl around him. No chance but to wait it out, and he knows it's death to stop moving.
He struggles to stay focused, to keep his mind from drifting back to his village in the valley far below. But seductive images of green fields beset him: warm air, heavy with smells of cow manure, grain, and grape -- a steaming pot of soup on the hearth. His imagination, unbidden, flees the pain and summons up the roaring charcoal fire where he smelts copper for his small trade in axe heads.
The screaming voice of common sense tells him to wake up. Breathe, think, stay alive! But that voice now comes from inside some remote cavern of his mind. He feels the pain ebb as his mind finally lets go. He drifts off, no longer hearing the full fury of an ice storm howling about him. Long before the next sunrise, Ötzi is frozen solid and covered over with snow.
There he lies for 5300 years -- until summer's end of 1991. Then two mountaineers, Erika and Helmut Simon, lured off the trail by the beauty of this warmest day on record, stumble across Ötzi's head and back exposed by melting ice.
They have no way of knowing his age. A piece of modern ski strapping, lately discarded on the ice above Ötzi, lies beside him. His death looks recent. They see the delicate articulation of his ribs and spine, the exposed portion of his five-foot-three body, and take him for a woman -- some hiker killed in an accident a decade or so before.
So they take the last photo in their camera and hurry down the mountain to an inn where they can report the body. The police are called and the process of extracting Ötzi from the ice, and learning who he really was, begins.
Now an astonishing window upon life in the late Stone Age in Southern Europe opens up. His sophisticated tools, his highly-evolved cold-weather gear, his knowledge of materials -- We've been amazed at how much Ötzi knew and could do. He seems to embody all of modern technology in embryo. He also embodies all the contradictions of heat and cold, speed and stillness, anachronism and currency -- that swirled down through the next five millennia, before they yielded a power technology.