Evolution

Each lump of flint was a miniature cemetery. In some long-vanished sea the corpses of crustaceans had settled into sediment, and minute glassy needles that had once formed the skeletons of sponges became the nuggets of flint embedded inside the gathering chalk seams.

Pebble had always loved the feel of flint. He turned the smooth-faced, brittle rock over in his hands, sensing its structure. Flint knappers got to know all of the stone’s subtle properties. The more a flint was exposed to the elements the more likely it was to contain fractures, caused by frost or a battering by river or ocean currents. But this flint lacked the patina of exposure. It was fresh and clean. It had only recently been dug out of its chalk matrix, after a cliff had collapsed. You couldn’t get such flint in this area, anywhere within the people’s old range. Pebble had missed good flint, in the long years on this beach, before Harpoon had walked into his life.

These days he was never more content than when working stone — or, rather, he was never less discontented.

Seven years had elapsed since his first encounter with Harpoon. At twenty-six, his body was already declining, battered and scarred by the cumulative challenges of a life that continued to be very hard, despite his people’s collaboration with the newcomers.

He had embraced Harpoon, and he had embraced the newness and changes she had brought — but those changes themselves had become bewildering. Pebble’s mind was immensely conservative. And as he grew older he increasingly relished these moments alone with the stone, when he could retreat into the recesses of his roomy mind.

But this moment of peace didn’t last.

"Hai, hai, hai! Hai, hai, hai!"

Here came his son and daughter, squat Sunset and spindly Smooth, running along the beach side by side, jabbering in the patois that had resulted as a merger of Pebble’s tongue and Harpoon’s. "Come, come, come here with us!" The children, naked, their skin crusted with salt and sweat, wanted him to come work on the logs that Ko-Ko and others were pushing into the sea.

He pretended not to hear them until they were almost on top of him. Then he grabbed them both with a roar, and all three of them rolled in the sand, wrestling. At last Pebble relented. He put aside his flint, got to his feet, and lumbered after the kids along the beach.

The morning was bright, the sun hot, and the air filled with the scent of salt and ozone. As the children flew ahead of his own lumbering gait, Smooth quickly outstripping her brother, Pebble felt briefly joyful at their youthful energy. This place would never be home to him, but it had its pleasures.

Ko-Ko, Hands, and Seal were making a kind of raft. Harpoon was here, her hands resting on a belly that was already showing a bump. She grinned fiercely as Pebble came up.

The men had cut down two stout palms from the inland forests, stripped them of their branches, and lashed them together with lianas and plaited vine. Now Hands and Seal were hauling this crude construction across the sand and down to the water. There was much straining and jabbering: "Push, push, push!" "Back back, no, back, back…" "Hai, hai!"

Pebble joined Hands and Seal at their task. Even with three of them it was hard work, and Pebble was soon sweating like the rest, his legs coated with stinging hot sand. Ko-Ko tried to help, but for sheer brute strength the robust folk had no match. And they were helped, and hindered, by the two children, and by Harpoon’s wolf companion who ran around their legs, barking.

The wolf, raised from a captured cub, was all but feral. This was just the start of a relationship longer than any other between people and animals, a relationship that would ultimately shape both species.

Pebble had never forgotten his determination to reach the island. At last, as he sat brooding on his beach, he had watched skinny youngsters playing on bits of driftwood in the water — and a connection had closed in his mind.

In their mangrove swamp the ancestors of Harpoon, no better swimmers than Pebble, had been forced to find ways of crossing crocodile-infested water. After much trial and error — with every error punishable by maiming or death — they had hit on a way of using cut mangrove logs. You could ride on such a log by lying flat on it and paddling with your hands. Through all their journeying, the skinnies had not forgotten that basic technique. And that was what Pebble had seen the children trying to do out on their bits of driftwood. At last he saw a way to get to the island.

But paddling a log across the still waters of a mangrove swamp was one thing. Mastering the choppy surface of an ocean channel was a different challenge.

After a few spectacular failures, Ko-Ko’s inventive mind had come up with the notion of strapping two logs together. That way at least you got a little more stability. But these miniature rafts were still too vulnerable to tipping over.