Evolution

One man stepped forward. He was a huge fellow with a ferocious temper, like a cornered ox. Now Ox pointed back at Sour’s shelter. "Dead," he said. He pointed his ax at Mother. "You. Head, rock. Why?"

For all the control she was exerting on the situation, Mother knew that what she said now would determine her entire future. If she was driven out of the camp she could not expect to survive long.

But she was confident.

She looked at the skull, and smiled. Then she pointed at Sour’s body. "She kill boy. She kill him."

Ox’s black eyes narrowed. If that was true that Sour had killed the boy, then Mother’s actions could be justified. Any mother, even a father, would be expected to avenge a murdered child.

But now Honey pushed forward. "How, how, how?" Struggling to express herself, her plump belly wobbling, she mimed stabbing, strangling. "Not kill. Not touch. How, how, how? Boy sick. Boy die. How, how?" How is my mother supposed to have done this?

Mother raised her face to the sun, which sailed through a cloudless dome of white-blue sky. "Hot," she said, wiping her brow. "Sun hot. Sun not touch. She not touch. She kill." Action at a distance. It isn’t necessary for the sun to touch your flesh for it to warm you. And it wasn’t necessary for Sour to touch my son to kill him.

There was fear in their faces now. There were plenty of invisible, incomprehensible killers in their lives. But the notion that a person could control such forces was new, frightening.

Mother forced herself to smile. "Safe. She dead. Safe now." I killed her for you. I killed the demon. Trust me. She held up the skull, stroking its cranium. "Tell me." And so it had been.

Ox glared at Mother. He growled and stamped, and pointed at her chest with his ax. "Boy dead. Not tell. Boy dead."

She smiled. She nestled the skull in the crook of her arm, like the head of a baby. And as they stared at her, half-believing, she could feel her power spread.

But Honey wouldn’t accept any of this. Crying, jabbering meaninglessly, she lunged at Mother. But the women held her back.

Mother walked away toward her shelter. The people shrank back as she passed, eyes wide.

III

The dryness intensified. One hot, cloudless day gave way to another. The land dried quickly, the streams shriveling to brownish trickles. The plants died back, though there were still roots to be dug out with ingenuity and strength. The hunters had to range far in search of meat, their feet pounding over dusty baked-dry ground.

These were people who lived in the open, with the land, the sky, the air. They were sensitive to the changes in the world around them. And they all quickly knew that the drought was deepening.

Paradoxically, though, the drought brought them a short-term benefit.

When the dry period had lasted thirty days, the group broke up its encampment and trekked to the largest lake in the area, a great pool of standing water that persisted through all but the most ferocious dry seasons. Here they found the herbivores — elephant, oxen, antelope, buffalo, horses. Driven to distraction by thirst and hunger, the animals crowded around the lake, jostling to get at the water, and their great feet and hooves had turned the lake’s perimeter into a trampled, muddy bowl where nothing could grow. But already some of them were failing: the old, the very young, the weak, those with the least reserves to see them through this harsh time.

The humans settled, watchful, alongside the other scavengers. There were other human bands here — even other kinds of people, the thick-browed sluggish ones you glimpsed in the distance sometimes. But the lake was big; there was no need for contact, conflict.

For a time the living was easy. It wasn’t even necessary to hunt; the herbivores simply fell where they stood, and you could just walk in and take what you needed. The competition with other carnivores wasn’t too intense, for there was plenty for everybody.

The people didn’t even have to take the whole animal: The meat of a fallen elephant, say, was more than they could consume before it spoiled. So they took only the choicest cuts: the trunk, the delicious, fat-rich footpads, the liver and heart, the marrow of the bones, abandoning the rest to less choosy scavengers. Sometimes they would close in on an animal that wasn’t yet dead, but was too weak to resist. If you let it live, the ravaged animal was a larder of fresh meat for those who preyed on it, as long as it survived.

So the animals fell and their meat was consumed, their bones were scattered and trampled by their surviving fellows, until the muddy margin that surrounded the shrinking lake glinted with shards of white.

But the drought wasn’t a disaster for the people. Not yet.