The Ice Age Paradox Synopsis

Jack Hampton stands in a museum and stares at the giant skeleton of a pre-historic bear. He's in awe of this animal's power when it roamed the land. His good friend Doug approaches and talks him into going to a party thrown by rival hunter Blake Collins.

Several years retired from the sport, Jack no longer feels the thrill of the hunt. No animal presents a challenge and his conscience overpowers his primal urges. He is concerned about his actions and the survival of the species he once hunted.
Blake Collins, an egotistical billionaire, wants to be recognized as the world's greatest hunter. No matter what he accomplishes the world hunting community sees Jack as the best.

To lure Jack out of retirement, Blake has possession of a time machine and plans a trip to the ice age.

Jack becomes intrigued at the thought of hunting monstrous animals that once ruled the land. With a group of the best hunters in the world, a paleontologist named Samantha and Blake's head engineer Ryan, they travel back in time.

Isolated for seven days in the green landscapes of the Ice Age, Jack and the others must use their well-honed hunting skills to evade the savage creatures of the period. After a run-in with a giant killer bird, they face the reality that they have dropped a few links on the food chain. Saber-toothed tigers, giant bears, wooly mammoths, even pigs the size of cars prove to have the ability to outwit the hunters.

Out in the grasslands, Jack befriends a mastodon he names Henry. He feeds the animal candy bars and the two of them develop a unique friendship that lasts for the entire trip.

Jack soon finds the challenge he had looked for all his life, a bear the size of a bison with the speed of a cheetah. Each time he encounters this beast, the tables turn and Jack becomes the hunted.

The group runs into difficulties. A giant bear kills one member of the group. Another hunter, (Dirk, the Texan)breaks some ribs after an encounter with a wooly rhino and Arthur,(the British Royal Marine)breaks his collarbone after tangling with a giant pig.

One day, while tracking the giant bear, someone takes a shot at Jack and it's not a stray bullet. He has to use his best hunting skills to stay one step ahead of this adept hunter and concludes that only Blake has abilities strong enough to keep up with him.

When he explains the incident to the other hunters, they view him as paranoid. With several group members having been killed by saber-tooths and the giant bear, tensions run high. The hunters are now forced to focus on their survival.

One morning Doug is found missing from camp. While Jack searches for his friend, an arrow misses him by inches. There are only two bow hunters in the group. One is a lifelong friend (Ben Graywolf) the other (Galen) he met at the beginning of the trip. There is no question this arrow belongs to Galen.

On the edge of the forest, they find Doug murdered and his head placed on top of a pole as a warning. With anxiety at a breaking point, Jack confronts Galen, however when they check his quiver, they find he still has all of his arrows.

Blake radios to the group that he found something deep in the forest. Just as they reach him, he is violently torn apart by the giant bear. While eluding the attack, Jack and the others stumble across what Blake wanted to show them. It's a tribe of stone-age people living in the forest.

Their first contact with this tribe is not friendly. The only factor that saves them is that somehow these people (later referred to as Huskers) seem to know Samantha. A young girl (Chiwa) in the tribe proudly shows off her newborn. For some reason it's important to her that Samantha approves of her baby.

With Dirk falling victim to a giant cheetah and Guy's sudden mysterious disappearance, they decide that no one will leave camp for the next twenty-four hours when the time machine returns to take them home.

That night Jack hands off guard duty to his friend Ben Graywolf. In the morning they find Ben missing. After a short search, it appears he has also fallen victim to the Huskers.

Consumed with anger and revenge, Jack travels alone into the forest and kills the chief of the primitive tribe. He makes his way back to camp just in time for the arrival of the time machine. A herd of stampeding mammoths threatens to crush them seconds before the machine activates.

They arrive back home at the exact time they left to find civilization no longer exists. In fact, mankind never existed at all. Once again, they're in a world ruled by animals. Only these creatures evolved without the influence of man. Horses have developed into carnivores and giant birds rule the sky. Wolves are enormous and hunt with the precision of soldiers.

With the suspicion that killing the tribal chief had created the world around them, they have to repair the time machine, return to the ice age and stop Jack from shooting that old man.

Because of a paradox associated with communicating between your past and future self, Jack understands there's only one way he can stop himself from making that fatal mistake. He has to hunt down and kill his past self.

Before they can leave, a tornado destroys their tent and most of their gear. A giant wolf kills Steven and a poisonous vine traps Kenneth and Phillip. Now only five remain.

Back in the ice age, their supplies are now limited. The group is forced to live off the land like the stone-age tribe. They have doubts about their survival when a rain storm almost kills Samantha.

Later on, Samantha happens upon Chiwa as she is giving birth. She helps the Husker deliver the baby and fends off a dire wolf in the process. The young girl is so grateful she names the baby after Samantha.

Jack tries to track his past self who everyone now refers to as Old Jack. He finds the instincts he uses for tracking his prey are also the instincts Old Jack uses to elude him. He seeks help from Galen the bow hunter.

When Jack and Galen return to their camp, they find it under attack from an undiscovered lion-like creature. The beast kills three of the remaining members leaving only Jack and Samantha. With the time machine having been destroyed earlier by wooly mammoths, they are left to survive with just a little more than the clothes on their backs.

Samantha has now given up any hope of fixing their situation and returning home. Jack has one last idea. He takes Samantha back to the forest and offers the Huskers a buffalo hide. With this gift, they accept Jack and Samantha into their tribe.
Over the next two days they learn the Huskers are loosing a war with a tribe of Neanderthals that also live in the forest. In fact, it was these Neanderthals that killed Doug and appeared to have killed Ben.

Jack teaches this tribe the fire starting technique taught to him by Ben. The tribe quickly uses this technique as a weapon in their war against the Neanderthals. As a reward for giving them this gift of fire, the tribe takes Jack on a hunt.

The hunt starts out as the greatest experience Jack could imagine. When he realizes the expedition is after Henry, the mastodon that he befriended, he blows the tribes cover and scares the animal away. The tribe bestows their biggest insult to Jack. They now consider him a coward and a bad hunter.

That night while sitting around the fire with the tribe, Jack comes up with one last plan to stop Old Jack from killing the Chief. He travels through the darkness back to their first camp. There, he finds Ben on guard duty. Jack talks him into coming back to the forest with him. If Ben is there when Old Jack arrives, there will be no need to kill the chief.

In the morning, Jack prepares the tribe for the arrival of his past self. Ben ventures into the forest to help Samantha who has been surrounded by Prima Leos (American Lions). He uses himself as bait to allow Samantha to escape.

Jack enters into a shooting match with his past self. Neither one of them can hit their target. Seeing himself on the other end of his riflescope causes both Jacks to flinch when they shoot. As Samantha runs to tell Jack about Ben's fate, Old Jack mistakenly shoots her in the back. The giant bear appears and violently shreds Old Jack to pieces.

Jack has one final battle with this giant bear. He notices the same look in the bear's eyes that he has when hunting. The bear does not want Jack for food. He's after Jack because he is hard to catch.

With his last bullet, Jack wounds the bear in the right shoulder. Battling the giant beast by hand turns out to be a draw. They are face to face. Jack is pinned down but has his hunting knife pressed into the bear's throat. The beast backs down as the chief and several members of the tribe come to Jack's rescue.

Ben walks out of the trees with a newly strung lion claw necklace. He and Jack head back to the first camp and get in the time machine with the members from the first trip.

The story ends where it began with Jack standing in the museum staring at a skeleton of a large ice age bear. This time the right shoulder bone of the skeleton has what looks like a healed bullet wound. Jack just smiles.

If you would like to read the first three chapters of The Ice Age Paradox send me an email to: mgwallace64@gmail.com