The only time I ever thought my parents would get divorced was after the time we lived as cave people in the Cascade Mountains.

It was part of a reality TV show, and we agreed to do it because my sister was hoping to become a film star and my father was blown away by the amount of money we were offered. My mother was not so keen on living in a cave, and I was too young to be consulted, but if I had been, I probably would have agreed. I mean, it sounded cool—running around with a bearskin and shooting deer with bows and arrows.

Reality was different, however. The bearskin itched and was too hot and cumbersome most of the time. Plus, it smelled. Not just of bear, but of the person wearing it, and then we were supposed to smear ourselves with some plant paste, so that the animals wouldn’t know we were coming-as if they couldn’t hear us crashing through the trees, cursing every time we stubbed our toes.

“Just how long do we have to do this for?” my mother asked after the second day.

“One month,” puffed my father, who was finding he was not as fit as he had thought.

“I can’t lie on that bare rock for a month,” said my mother. “Surely cave people had some form of bedding?”

“They used moss and animal hides,” said Lisa, my sister, who had read up everything she could about cavemen and who even managed to look stylish in her bearskin.

“Well, we need to go and get some moss, then,” said my mother, “we can look for moss while we gather berries.”

Berry-gathering is not nearly as fun as it sounds. You’re probably thinking of those u-pick farms where the bushes are all in rows and the berries are dripping off the branches. Finding berries in the wild is a different matter, with the bushes jammed into clefts in the rock or hidden behind larger trees, and no bush has more than a handful of ripe berries at any one time.

“I’m hungry,” I said, after a couple of days in the mountains. I knew the others were hungry too, but they wouldn’t admit it.

“I’ll catch us a deer soon,” said my father, who had only managed to trap a rabbit so far, and that was only because he drove it into a hole it could not escape from. Dad didn’t want to admit that he was no good as a caveman, so every morning he set out with his bow and arrows, looking for deer, and every evening he came back empty handed, cursing under his breath.

Later, when we saw the video footage, we discovered that he cursed all day as well, only those words were replaced by bleeps so as not to offend the viewers.

We never knew where the cameras were, as the producers had decided that it would not be realistic if we sat around in our bearskins staring at camera men in jeans, so the cameras were hidden in the cave and around the mountain, and they managed to capture most of what we did, except for the time when Lisa fell into the swamp.

Lisa was a very enthusiastic cave woman, in spite of the lack of comforts. She was convinced an agent would spot her talent and sign her up for a Hollywood movie, so she always spoke loudly and clearly, and made a point of moving around a lot so that she looked as if she was always doing something.

One morning she and I had gone out to search for frogs or anything small that we could eat, seeing as how Dad had still not caught a deer. We hiked down the hill from our cave and walked along the banks of the river, stepping over the slimy rotting logs, searching out anything edible.

“This sucks,” I said. “I can’t believe we’re still here doing this when we could be back in our apartment eating pizza and hot dogs.”

“Oh, quit whining,” Lisa said. “Think of it as an adventure; you’ll have lots to talk about when we do go back home.”

“Not if I die of starvation first,” I muttered. It was alright for her—she was always dieting, so she didn’t care if we had no food, but my stomach was digesting itself.

We got to the point where the river forked, and I turned along the smaller stream, heading for where I knew there was a pool with some frogs in it. If the French can eat frogs, they can’t taste all that bad.

I stepped across the rocks, gripping the warm stones with my toes—one good thing about being a cave boy was that I could run around in bare feet—and squatted down to reach under the reeds when I heard a shriek from behind me. I looked up to see that Lisa had fallen into a dark pool and was waving her arms frantically at me.

“Help! Get me out of here!”

Her bearskin had slipped off her shoulder, and her hair was plastered across her face, making her look like a rag doll. I couldn’t help laughing, until she pulled off one of her slimy bearskin slippers and threw it at me, hitting my left eye. Then I grabbed a handful of mud and threw it back at her, and soon it was an outright war with mud, water, sticks and even stones flying both ways.

Who knows how it would have ended if a bear had not come into the clearing just as we were hurling logs at each other. I didn’t see the bear at first because I was busy dragging a large branch over to the river, but when I looked up to aim my projectile at Lisa I saw the bear rear up behind her, and I screamed so loudly that I nearly deafened myself. Lisa thought I was screaming at her, and she just kept thrashing in her swamp and throwing stones at me, but when she saw where I was looking she leapt out of that swamp faster than I could blink and hobbled over to me.

I think the noise and the sight of Lisa wearing a bearskin covered in mud must have scared the bear because after a moment it loped off back the way it had come. Lisa and I stood in the stream, panting, then we ran back up the hill to our cave as fast as we could, slipping and sliding on the path, me in my bare feet and Lisa in her one remaining bear moccasin.

“What happened?” asked Mum, who was shelling nuts into a piece of bark.

“I fell in the river, and then a bear came,” said Lisa, looking around the cave, no doubt worrying about how she looked in front of the hidden cameras.

“Right; I’ve had enough of this,” said Mum, pushing the bark aside and struggling to her feet. “I’ve put up with this nonsense long enough. You’ve had your chance to preen for the cameras, and your father has had ample opportunity to hit a deer. We’re going home.”

“What! No way are we going home before the thirty days are up,” said Dad, emerging from the back of the cave. So much for hunting—no wonder he doesn’t catch anything if he just sits in the cave all day.

“I’m not giving up!” said Lisa, squeezing out her hair and glaring at Mum.

I just went back outside and left them at it. It wasn’t like my opinion counted anyway. They yelled at each other all afternoon, and the end result was that we got to go home early. The TV company said they had enough footage for eight episodes, and that it was good to show people giving up, which set my parents to fighting again. Lisa locked herself in her room and refused to speak to anybody, so I just went down to the basement and logged on to my video games.

Being a caveman was cool for a while, but I’ll take civilisation any day.