Evolution

Of course it need not have happened. If not for the fluctuation of the climate, the chance isolation of Far’s ancestors, there might have been no mankind: nothing but pithecines, upright chimps screeching and making their crude tools and waging their petty wars for millions of years more, until the forests disappeared altogether, and they succumbed to extinction.

Life always had been chancy.

Far spent the night alone, cold, drifting through an uneasy sleep.

The next day, as she tried to join in the group’s activities, a woman, heavily pregnant, glared into her eyes, an ancient primate challenge. Was Far here to take food that might otherwise reach the belly of her unborn child?

Far felt more isolated than ever. She had no ties with anybody here. There was no reason why they should share their space, their resources with her. It wasn’t as if this place was brimming with riches. And now even Ax seemed to be rejecting her.

As the afternoon wore on she was the first to return, alone, to the hollow in the sandstone outcrop. She tucked herself into the peripheral corner she had come to think of as her own.

But she noticed some lumps of crimson rock scattered deeper at the back of the hollow. She picked them up, turning them over curiously. Their redness was bright in the daylight, and they were soft. They were lumps of ocher, the iron red of ferric oxide. Someone had been attracted by their color and, on impulse, brought them here.

She saw scrapes of red on scattered basalt rocks at the back of the hollow: red the same color as the ocher, red like blood. Experimentally she pushed the ocher over the rock, and was startled to see more bloody streaks smear over the rock surface.

For long minutes she played with the bits of ocher, not really thinking, her clever fingers working by themselves to add their own meaningless scribbles to the scrawls on the rock.

Then she heard the hollers of the people as they started to drift back to their temporary base. She dropped the bits of ocher where she had found them, and made for her corner.

But the palms of her hands were bright red: red like blood. For an instant she thought she had cut herself. But when she licked her palms she tasted salty rock, and the scraping of ocher came away.

Red like blood. A tentative connection formed in her mind, a chink of light shining between her compartments of thought.

She went back to the bits of ocher. Now she tried scraping them over the back of her hands, where she made a hatchery of lines, and on the healing pithecine cut on her shoulder, which she made bright red again.

And she marked herself between her legs — marking her skin red like blood, as if she were bleeding, as she had seen her mother bleed.

She went back to her corner and waited until the light faded. As the people tended and crooned to each other, she huddled over and tried to sleep.

Someone approached: warm, breathing softly. It was Ax. She could smell the dusty scent of rock chippings on his legs and belly. His eyes were pits of shadow in the fading light. The moment stretched. Then he touched her shoulder. His hand was heavy and warm, but she shivered. He leaned toward her and sniffed quietly, scenting her just as had Brow before she had become separated from her family.

She opened her legs, so he could see the "blood" in the fading light. She sat tense, watching him.

Her life hung on his acceptance; she knew that. Perhaps it was that basic desperation and longing, a longing for him to see her as a woman, which had driven her to come up with this peculiar deceit.

Unlike his forest-dwelling ancestors, Ax was a creature of sight, not smell; the message from his eyes overrode the warning of his nose. He leaned forward. He touched her shoulder, her throat, her breast. Then he sat beside her and his strong fingers began to comb through her tangled hair.

Slowly she relaxed.

Far stayed with Ax and his people for the rest of her life. But as long as she could, whenever she could — as she grew in wisdom and strength, as her children grew until they gave her grandchildren to protect and mold in turn — she ran, and ran, and ran.

CHAPTER 10 The Crowded Land Central Kenya, East Africa. Circa 127,000 years before present.

I

Pebble had found a yam vine. He bent and inspected it.

He was eight years old, naked save for smears of ocher on his barrel chest and broad face. He pulled out a little grass from around the yam’s base. This was a spot for yam, not grass, and it was best to keep it that way.

People had been here before to dig out these tubers. Perhaps he had even been here himself. At eight years old he had already covered every scrap of his people’s range, and he thought he remembered this spot, here between these eroded bluffs of sandstone.