Evolution

She saw more people — folk like herself, adults and children, slim upright forms moving like shadows over the ash-strewn plain. They were exploring a miniature forest of blackened, twisted forms. It had been a birthing herd of antelopes; many of these unlucky creatures, straining over their last calves, had been unable to flee the flames. Now the people were slicing into this treasure with their marvelous stone axes, and even from here she could smell the delicious scent of cooked meat. Ax dropped the tortoise and ran off toward his people.

After a few heartbeats, torn between caution and ravening hunger, Far began to jog after him.

Night fell quickly, as it always did. The people gathered in a rocky hollow, which would give them some defense against the predators of the night.

Far, with nowhere else to go, followed them.

She couldn’t spend a night on her own; she knew that. Even now she sensed cold yellow eyes tracking her, eyes that glowed with the knowledge that she was an outlier of this group — not quite embraced within its protection — a target, like the old, the very young, the lame.

The people didn’t drive her away. They didn’t exactly make her welcome, either. But when she tucked herself into a corner of the roomy hollow, huddled over a scrap of meat she had scavenged from one of the burnt carcasses, they tolerated her presence.

She watched a man knapping a bit of rock. The man was old — in his late forties — and skinny, with one eye almost closed by an ugly scar. Two children, a boy and a girl, sat at his feet. Not much younger than Far, they watched what Scar-face was doing, and with big stones held clumsily in their own small hands, they tried to copy him. The girl trapped her thumb, and squealed in pain. Scar-face wordlessly took the rock from her hands, turned it around and by guiding her hands showed her how to hold the cobble more effectively. But when he saw this the boy was jealous, and he pinched the girl, making her drop the rock. "Me! Me!"

As the darkness deepened, many of the people resorted to gentle, wordless grooming, the habit that had come with them from the ancestral forests. Mothers caressed infants, men and women alike played wordless politics as they cemented alliances and reinforced hierarchies. Sometimes the grooming turned to noisy sex.

Far, the stranger, was excluded from all this. But as she sank toward sleep, exhausted and battered, she was aware of Ax’s eyes on her.

When she woke, the sky beyond the hollow was already very bright.

Everybody had gone, leaving behind a few scraps of food, patches of infant shit, damp urine marks.

She got to her feet quickly. The bruises on her back and chest seemed to have consolidated into a single mass of pain. But her young body was already throwing off the damage it had suffered yesterday, and her head was clear. She hurried out into the light.

The people had walked north, toward a lake. They were slim upright shadows, walking purposefully, their outlines softened by the shimmering heat haze. She ran after them.

The lakeshore was crowded. Far made out many kinds of elephants, rhinos, horses, giraffes, buffaloes, deer, antelope, gazelles, even ostriches. In the water there were crocodiles and turtles, and birds flapped over it noisily. The giant herbivores, concentrated around the water, had devastated the landscape. From this muddy arena, their wide, well-trodden avenues snaked off in every direction. On the hardpan around the lake nothing grew but a few hardy plant species distasteful to the elephants and rhinos and able to recover quickly from trampling.

The people moved down to the water. They picked a spot close to an elephant herd. Everybody knew that predators avoided elephants. The elephants ignored the people and continued with their own complex business. Some of them entered the water and were splashing and playing noisily; groups of cows rumbled mysteriously, and males trumpeted and clashed their huge tusks. These massive animals, the architects of the landscape, were slabs of muscle and power, with their own stately, flat-footed grace.

Most of the women were working the water’s edge. Far saw that one of them had turned up the nest of a freshwater turtle; its long eggs were quickly cracked, their contents devoured. Other women were harvesting the mussels that grew abundantly in the shallow waters, especially freshwater clams.

Far saw that Ax, like most of the men, had waded into the water. He was carrying a wooden spear, and he stood very still, eyes fixed on the glimmering water’s surface. After a few heartbeats he stabbed down with a powerful splash — and when he brought up the spear, a fish had been neatly skewered, its silver body wriggling. Ax hooted, pulled the fish off his spear, and threw it to the shore. Another man, a little further out, was creeping up on a water fowl that paddled complacently across the surface. The man leapt, but the bird got away, amid much comical splashing, squawking, and shouting.