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Well when we go walking in the forest, Holly and me, we go over the same old ground, again and again, day after day, morning and afternoon, tossing around the same old subjects, why she always has to run ahead of me, her nose so close to the ground, like, what are you sniffing at Holly? Whose tracks are you onto today Holly, Axel and Greta, or some old roo or wallaby which passed yesterday, or what?

It's so pleasant to have all these parcels of land a-butting and adjoinging in the forest so that Holly and I have about 200 acres to walk through without any cars or trucks to bother us, no fumes, no crashes, just have to avoid the occasional rainstorm and the rotten falling branches of rotten trees.

And of course another great benefit is that I get to study the ways of a dog and try to glean some insight into the workings of the doggie mind, noting all her little eccentricities, like being fifty yards ahead, nose very close to the ground, and yet if I take a little diversion left or right, after just a few steps she notices and immediately changes direction to keep me well within range. And sometimes I ask her why she's sniffing these trails so hard and how she's processing them in the olfactory centre of her brain, and just what she intends to do with them once they're stored and processed, but she just wags her tail in that lovely doggie fashion, "Don't you worry about it Boss, they're all in their rightful place and I'll retrieve them when I need them."

So day after day we make our passage through the forest adjoining our own land, I say ours, even though I pay the mortgage and she doesn't, but when I tell her about this she just says she's pleased that I pay the mortgage and she doesn't really know what a mortgage is anyway, she has other things to worry about, like keeping the choughs off the land even though I tell her I like the choughs. I remind her that I greatly enjoyed the company of choughs before she came to live at my private paradise, and now she's pissed them all off, and I miss them. She says she's sorry I miss them but she's not, they had to go, they made sounds which were quite disturbing to her, and it was either they go or she goes, and she wasn't likely to go so that settled that, and I guess I can't argue about that. At least she's accepted that she's allowed to frighten the magpies off as long as she leaves the robin red breasts and the superb fairy wrens alone. So we have come to that arrangement, she's allowed to chase and bark futilely at the big birds, but not the little birds because they're our friends, although occasionally she forgets and I have to remind her of our agreement.

Well just lately she's discovered a new trick of diving off into the bush and disappearing for a while, and I walk on a ways, turning things over in what's left of my mind, and hardly notice that she's gone, and then after a while it dawns on me that she's been missing for a while, but eventually she connects up with me again and just goes on ahead as if nothing has happened and there's no need to discuss this minor absenteeism. This new behaviour was repeated for a few days in a row, and eventually I noticed that it always occured about the same section of the walk, close to a rocky outcrop just down at the end of our property. So I decided it was time to see what she was up to.

Next morning I let her take her departure from the track at the by-now usual time, it happened to be a very foggy morning, not cold, just dense mist... beautiful, a different beauty of the land. I followed at a respectable distance, wondering if she had a private road-kill stashed away or what. After a few minutes I paused, just short of the base of the rocky outcrop, and there was Holly standing quietly talking to a termite mound. Well, that's what it looked like at first and I thought, "That's funny, there's no termite mounds around here, are there?" This termite mound was about four feet high and not far away was another one of similar height. Then I noticed something quite unnatural, the nearest termite mound was moving, ever so slightly, but moving, and as you probably know, termite mounds aren't supposed to move... they're meant to be quite stationary, and they're not supposed to be found in these parts anyway.

I kept quite still and tried to work out what was going on when I heard such a lovely, melodious sound coming from the moving termite mound. Holly approached closer to it and to my very great surprise a hand protruded from the mound and stroked Holly under the chin. It dawned upon me, slowly, that this was not a termite mound at all, but a person pretending to be a termite mound, and that the other one was possibly a person as well. I thought, "Crikey, don't say we've got some deadbeat dropouts camping on our land, hiding away here in the gully and Holly hasn't even told me they were here?" And then the one that hadn't moved as yet turned and I saw his face. Wow! What a face! I have never seen a face like this before in all my sixty-four years... this was a face unlike any person of any race I had ever seen, even in books. And why I had assumed it was a termite mound is because of the colour of the cloaks which these two chaps were wearing, which on closer inspection, seemed to be skins, possibly of kangaroo or wallaby. But the face was not the face of an Aboriginal person. What a clopper of a nose, it hung almost down to his lips, flat and broad and droopy and glistening with moisture at the tip. And then it hit me... "They're bloody Neanderthals.... it can't be, they're supposed to be extinct, but look at it, here they are and they look very much like the depictions of Neanderthals in the archeology books. How did they get here? Am I hallucinating? No, I'm very calm, my pulse is normal, Holly is quite comfortable with them, like, as if she'd reject a pat from anyone, seeing that I never give her enough pats."

I decide to go a little closer and risk them starting and running away, but they don't run, they just watch me with a quiet expectancy, they seem to understand that I mean no harm. Holly turns around and smiles her doggie smile, as if to say, "How do you like my new friends Boss?" And then I get another surprise, the one that is stroking Holly under the chin opens his mouth and a lovely sound comes out, which is obviously a greeting, but in a language I have never heard, and could never understand, but somehow I do... it's like... "Nice to meet you ..." But the idea just came through the air, into my mind and in-sync with the sounds which were otherwise unintelligible. I was startled by this new phenonemon, and tried to formulate what I was going to say, but he continued:

"It's alright, you don't have to say it, just think it and we'll get it. Ask Holly, she knows." "My God Holly, you're talking with these strangers in esp lingo and you didn't even tell me about them?" She said, "Well now you know Boss, it'll just have to remain our little secret, they don't want anyone else to know their whereabouts."

I was almost getting used to this new idea that I only had to think it and they'd get it when a new thought occured to me, "How long have you been here then?" But I started to worry whose thought it was, was it my thought or theirs or Holly's? For Chrissake, what's going on here, I don't even know if it's my thought or theirs, when he said, "It's your thought, silly, you just have to get used to this superior way of conversing and soon it'll all be hunky-dory. And we've been here one hundred thousand years, hiding in these rocky clefts from the malignancy of your species. We had to flee Europe and Asia and finally wended our ways down to your country, long before the Aborigines made their way here, because we couldn't abide the bad manners of the Cro-Magnons and the Sapiens. They hunted our people like animals and they tortured us and ate us and enslaved us and did bestial things with us, and finally we fled, looking for places where they would not go. But there are no places where they will not go. Even if we went to the moon they'd find a way to get there. So now we just lie low, hide away, melt into the landscape wherever the landscape still exists in a form not devastated by your kind."

This was getting to be a little embarrassing, like, I don't want to be an apologist for my species, but we're not all the same are we? So I formulated a thought, but he had already picked up what I was trying to formulate and said, "Only seven of us now, very difficult, hiding in amongst the rocks and the ferns by day, coming out only by night, lucky we have great night vision. And also lucky that your vehicles haven't killed off all the wildlife such as roos, wallabies, and echidnas... so we make a very handsome living. And sometimes when you guys leave your properties for holidays and such, we come around and scavenge a bit to see what we can add to our meagre diet."

Holly turned to me and said, "They're quite nice people aren't they Boss? Do you think they could come and visit us some time?" I responded, "Of course, as long as they don't get discovered by other people in the area, that'd be OK." Just then a few others came out from amongst the rocky clefts below the overhanging outcrop, one was yawning her head off, not the slightest bit interested in me or Holly. I asked the main chappie, "And do you have names?"

"Of course we have names, what do you think? Do you think we're so uncivilised we just go around saying "Hey you!" or something like that? Anyhow, I'm Abimelech, he's Hector and that one over there yawning her head off, she's Paris." Noting the biblical and classical references in the nomenclature I ventured to say, "Why Paris? Shouldn't she be Helen to someone else's Paris?" But Abimelech soon set me right, "No she's Paris, she thinks she's Paris Hilton." Well, as you can imagine, I was totally thunderstruck by this..."What, you mean you guys keep up with the news and current affairs and shenanigans of socialites and all that? How do you know about Paris Hilton?"

Well he told me that they often get scraps of newspaper and magazines from the rubbish bins they raid when we're away, and they have learned to read them, and are very much taken by the pictures. They just love pictures, they don't mind the writing and stuff, but it's the pictures that really grab them. In fact it's been a long time since they did the pictures on the cave walls in Perigord, Altamira and Lascaux while they were sitting out the glaciers. The glaciers lasted many thousands of years and it was damned lucky they had developed such a capacity to endure cold that they didn't even need to light fires in the caves, but they had to occupy the mind, so to speak, so they took to making paintings on cave walls, which of course our species discovered and claimed as our own, because we couldn't bear to ascribe intelligence to a mere Neanderthal.

And so the one he called Paris just fell in love with the photos of Paris Hilton in the New Idea and the Womens' Weekly and she thinks she's Paris Hilton now, and there's no harm in that is there, as long as she doesn't end up in jail? How could I disagree with such a reasonable proposition. I simply said she look very much like Paris Hilton, just needs a few new clothes and a hairdo... and he cut in, "Not to mention a nose job and a hundred million. See, you can't leave anything out in ESP talk because we can read it before you even say it, almost as quickly as you can think it. Some of us are so fastyou never know who's thinking what, so it pays to be very honest in the telepathic chatroom."

This startling new turn of events encouraged me to ask Abimelech how old he was, if he didn't mind. "No I don't mind, no use being reticent about one's age. In fact about 750 years old. We live a lot longer than you people because the God of the Bible decided to shorten men's lives way back when Methusulah was a spring chicken of 943 yrs. Fortunately he didn't count us as men, because being Neanderthals we didn't quite make the grade. And anyhow, as any good Bible Scholar will tell you, we couldn't possibly exist because the world was only created 5700 years ago, whereas we came much earlier than that. So I guess you just have to take me on trust when I say about 750 yrs. And Hector's very much younger, only 400 odd years. Paris, of course, being the youngest amongst us, is a mere two hundred and thirty-two years of age and still looking pretty. And if you are lucky enough to win Tatttslotto one day, she would dearly love to have that nose job."

I was wondering how he knew about my Tattlotto dreams, when the most wonderful thought occured to me, that I'd like to lick the drops of moisture dangling from the end of his most prominent nose. I realised very quickly that this could not possibly be one of my own thoughts, it must be Holly projecting her thoughts, and bingo, right on cue she's licking the droplets off the end of his facial promontory. "Don't do that Holly, it's very rude!" I shouted, forgetting momentarily that I didn't have to use words or shout, but Abimelech was very understanding about it and said it was OK and that Holly was a very fine person who never took liberties with other people because, as she had previously told him, she'd been to finishing school in Switzerland where she was taught that it was not necessary for dogs to fetch balls or sticks, but most necessary for them to be well behaved, patient with people and their idiosyncracies, and mostly to be very faithful. And that she could lick the noses of other people if they had fine facial prominences such as his own, and that was one of the nicest licks he had ever experienced in seven hundred and fifty odd years.

I then ventured to ask him about the use of telepathy and ESP in the Neanderthal culture, and how they had contrived to develop this extraordinary skill in lieu of vocalisation. He said, it was just the simplest way to go, that vocalisation which humans enjoy is totally unnecessary, and, as is quite obvious in our times, tremendously fractious. He pointed out that we would be much better people if we merely transferred thoughts to each other without the barrier of the many different languages. He reminded me that even if we were to represent all our different languages phonetically rather than in their individual scriptforms it would make for better understanding between us and greatly assist in the development of the longed for universal language. But I remained unconvinced and asked him, "Isn't it inconvenient when you hunt? How come the animals you hunt don't read your signals to each other?" He replied what now seems ridiculously obvious to me, that they have the ability to channel their thoughts as though on different frequencies, as though there were several bandwidths which might be used, and they merely selected the appropriate one, and blocked all the others. He followed this explanation with the delicious observation, that not too far into the future Homo Sapiens will probably have everyone implanted with broadband-receiving and transmitting chips at birth, without ever having realised there was a far more simple way to direct communication. And that when they finally achieved this new technology for the transmission-receiver chips it would come to be know as "Thal" which would be the ultimate irony. In fact he doubted that our species really wanted direct communication but rather preferred the anomalies of incommunication to preserve the states of belligerence which occupy us endlessly.

I hadn't realised how long I'd spent in their company, chatting away, passing the time of day. I said "I'd better be getting on with my walk, but I hoped that we'd meet again soon." They assured me that we would. I said they could come and visit some evening and sit around the fire and we could have a sort of soiree, which they agreed would be most pleasant, they would bring some moss wine, and they would enjoy to see the pictorial flow of images on television where all the daily atrocities merge into toothpaste, supermarket and life insurance commercials, and Paris would particularly enjoy viewing the cosmetic surgery shows. He promised to bring Holly some kangaroo thighbones to chew on. In fact they had frequently left thighbones in the night, which I had wrongfully assumed she'd been out collecting on the margins of the road.

So Holly and I finally took our leave, making our way along our usual path, I think I caught a thought flashing through my mind ever so faintly, "Deadbeat dropouts, indeed!" But I just put it down to my imagination running riot, and I said to Holly, "Well that was a nice chat, wasn't it Holly? Why didn't you introduce us earlier?"

Holly just wagged her tail in that beautiful doggie way she has, and said, "Boss, I've been trying to lead you to them for many days, but you just weren't paying attention."

So I said, "Well Holly, you'll just have to forgive me for being a bit slow, but better late than never, huh? Gees, just imagine having a bunch of Neanderthals living at the bottom of the garden!"

To which Holly replied, "Boss, some of my best friends are Neanderthals."