Evolution

He watched mothers gently bathing their infants, younger males wrestling almost politely as their limbs and skin recovered from the heat and aridity of the salt pan. Later. Let them get over the trek, before business as usual was resumed.

And besides, truth be told, he didn’t feel up to a great new war right now. His limbs ached, his skin was sore and covered in scrapes and lesions, and his gut, used to a continual flow of food and water, rumbled at the stop-start treatment it had endured. He was tired. He rubbed his eyes and yawned, allowing himself an explosive belch. Time enough later for the hard work of life, of being Capo. For now he needed to rest.

With that excuse lodged in his mind, he turned away from the water and loped into the forest.

He quickly found a kapok tree filled with large ripe fruits. The kapok, though, was armed with long sharp thorns to defend its fruit. So he tore two smooth branches from the tree and placed one under each foot, gripping the branches with his toes. Then, clinging to the branches with his feet, he climbed the tree, marching over the thorns as if they didn’t exist. The action of climbing made his limbs glow with the accustomed pleasure, their ancient design fulfilled; if he never took another step on the ground in his life he would have been content.

When he had reached a patch dense with fruit, he pulled off another branch and set it down over the thorns. Sitting on his impromptu saddle, he began to feed.

From here he could see that this forest clump had grown up around an oxbow lake, cast off by a river that wound its way back into the deeper country to the south, across this rich, vegetated Sahara. In the future this great Nile-like artery would be dislodged by tectonic shifting from its present course, and would curl around to the south, no longer crossing the Sahara. Eventually it would outflow into the Bight of Benin in western Africa, and humans would know it as the Niger: Even rivers were molded by time, as the land rose and fell, as the mountains grew and shrank away like dreams.

But for now this river was a great green corridor into the interior of the country. The troop could work that way, following the forest, penetrating deeper, moving away from the coast.

A piercing hoot echoed through the forest. It was a cry with only one meaning: Danger is here. Capo spat out a mouthful of fruit and scrambled down to the ground.

Before he got to the lake he knew what the problem was. He could smell them. And as he looked more carefully he could see the signs of their passing: bits of fruit skin, dumped even under this kapok, what looked like nests high in the taller trees.

Others.

They came swarming out of the trees and the undergrowth. There were many of them, bewilderingly many — fifty, sixty — more than Capo’s troop had ever numbered. Their males came toward the water’s edge. They were all displaying ferociously, fur bristling, drumming on roots and branches and hurling themselves through the low branches of the trees.

After all they had endured to get here, this patch of forest was not empty. Capo’s heart sank, heavy with a sense of failure.

But Capo’s troop was responding. Weak as they were, fur too damp to bristle effectively, nevertheless the males and even a couple of the older females were displaying as best they could. Capo threw himself forward to the front row of his troop and immediately began his own display, summoning up all his long experience to create as spectacular and intimidating a show as possible.

The two troops lined up; two walls of shrieking, posturing apes faced each other. They were the same species, and they looked indistinguishable, one from the other. But they could smell the differences between them: on the one hand the subtle, familiar savor of kin, and on the other the sharper stink of strangers. There was true xenophobic hatred in these displays, an authenticity in the threat they conveyed. Here was the other side of these clever animals’ social bonds: If you were locked into a group, then everybody else became your enemy, just because they weren’t you.

But Capo was scared. He quickly realized that these others were showing no signs of backing down. Indeed, their displays were becoming more ferocious, and those big lead males were steadily advancing on his troop.

Capo knew how it would go. It would not be an all-out war. The strongest would go first, the males and senior females; the infants would probably provide some sweet flesh for the bellies of these strangers. One by one. It would be a slow, bloody killing, but it would continue until it was complete. Such systematic slaughter was a horror new to the world, a horror only these apes, of all the Earth’s animals, were smart enough to conceive of and see through.

They couldn’t stay here, Capo knew. Maybe they could go on, resume the trek across the plain; maybe Capo could yet lead his troop somewhere empty, somewhere safe.