Evolution

The woman had gone. But he could see a trail of footsteps — narrow feet, delicate heels — that led off back the way she must have come, beyond the headland. The dog’s clawed prints followed hers.

Hands and Cry were walking toward him. Cry was studying Pebble uncertainly. Hands called, "Stranger stranger wolf stranger!" He threw his cobbles down with a clatter, angry. He couldn’t see why Pebble had reacted as he had, why he hadn’t quickly driven off or killed this stranger.

Suddenly Pebble’s dissatisfaction with his life came to a focus. "Ya, ya!" he snapped. And he turned away from the others and began to walk in the tracks the slender woman had made.

Cry ran after him. "No, no, trouble! Hut, food, hut." She even grabbed his hand and pulled it to her belly, and tried to slide it down to her crotch. But he shoved the heel of his hand into her chest, and she fell to the ground where she sprawled, staring forlornly after him.

III

He followed the tracks along the beach. His broad prints covered Harpoon’s, obliterating them.

The shore was crusted with mussels and barnacles and the wrack of the sea: kelp, stranded jellyfish, and hundreds of washed up cuttlefish bones. Soon he was sweating, panting, his hips and knees aching subtly, a forerunner of the joint pains that would plague him as he grew older.

As he calmed down, his normal instincts began to reassert themselves. He remembered he was naked, and alone.

He cast around the beach until he found a large, sharp-edged rock that fit comfortably into his hand. Then, as he walked, he kept close to the water’s edge. Even though the sand here was a soft, soggy mud that clung to his feet, at least there was only one side from which he could be approached.

Still those neat tracks, with the wolf’s padding alongside, arrowed neatly through the softer sand. At last the tracks cut back up the beach. And there, in the shade of a clump of palms, he saw a hut.

He stood for long heartbeats, staring. Nobody was around. Cautiously he approached.

Set above the water’s high-tide marks, the hut was built on a frame of saplings that had been thrust into the ground. The saplings had been woven together at their tops — no, he saw, they had been tied, not woven, tied up with fine bits of sinew. On this frame branches and fronds had been laid and tied into place. Tools and bits of debris, unidentifiable from this distance, lay around the hut’s rounded opening.

The hut was nothing special. It was a little bigger than his own — perhaps big enough for twenty people or more — but that seemed to be the only difference.

His feet crunched softly over the debris on the trampled ground around the hut’s entrance. He stepped inside the hut, eyes wide. There was a rich scent of ash.

It wasn’t dark in here, but suffused by a warm brown light. He saw that a hole had been knocked in one wall, and a piece of hide, scraped thin, had been stretched over it, enough to shut out the wind but not the light. Briefly he inspected the bit of hide, looking for the marks and scrapes of teeth, but saw none. How could you prepare hide without using your teeth?

He looked around. There was dung on the floor: shit from children, what looked like spoor from wolves or hyenas. There was plenty of food litter, mostly clam shells and fish bones. But he also saw animal bones, some with scraps of meat still clinging to them. They were heavily worked, cut and gnawed. They were mostly from small animals, perhaps pigs or small deer, but even that stirred a vague envy. As far as he knew the ferocious folk of the interior kept the produce of the forests and grassy spaces to themselves.

He sat, legs crossed, and peered around, his eyes gradually adapting to the gloom.

He found the remains of a fire, just a circular patch of black on the ground. The ashes were hot, smoldering in places. He cautiously probed its edge with a finger. His finger sank into layers of ash. A pit had been dug into the ground, he saw, like the pits into which you would stick a dead person. But this pit had been made to contain the fire. The ash was thick, and he saw that many, many days and nights of burning had contributed to this dense accumulation. And on the side of the pit closest to the entrance, where the breeze was strongest, a low bank of cobbles had been built up.

It was a hearth, one of the first true hearths to be made anywhere in the world. Pebble had never seen anything like it.

Covering the ground, he saw, were sheets of some brown substance. He touched one of the sheets gingerly. It turned out to be bark. But the bark had been carefully stripped off its tree and somehow shaped, woven, and treated to make this soft blanket. When he lifted the bark blanket he saw a hole in the ground. There was food inside the hole: yams, piled up.