Evolution

"If you want to impress her you shouldn’t try to walk, not with a leg like that. You ought to hop like a kangaroo."

Jana, his face burning, found himself staring into the deep, handsome eyes of Osu, Agema’s brother. More of her siblings surrounded him. Jana tried to control his anger. "You tripped me."

When Osu made out the genuine anger in Jana’s eyes his face clouded. "I didn’t mean disrespect," he said gently.

His decency only made it worse. Jana bent to pick up the mussels.

Osu said, "Here, let me help."

Jana snapped, "I don’t need your help. They’re for—"

"Ah. For my sister?" Osu looked up at the girl, and Jana saw him wink.

Another of the brothers — Salo, impossibly tall, impossibly good-looking — stepped forward. "Look, fellow, if you want to impress her, this is what you ought to bring home." And he showed Jana a mussel shell — a huge one, so big he needed two hands to hold it.

Jana had never seen a mussel of such a size, not in a lifetime of gathering the mollusks — in fact nobody alive had seen such a giant. "Where did you find this?"

Salo nodded vaguely. "Along the beach, in an old midden. I’m thinking of using it as a bowl."

Osu nodded. "Giant mussels, eh? Ejan and Rocha must have eaten well in those days. All gone now, of course. Bring back one of those, little kangaroo, and Agema will open her legs faster than a mussel on the fire opens its shell."

More laughter. Jana saw that Agema was hiding her face, but her shoulders were shaking. Again that uncontrollable anger surged, and Jana knew he had to get out of there before he behaved like a child by displaying his anger — or, even worse, by striking one of these infuriating brothers.

He gathered up his mussels and got out with as much dignity as he could muster. But even as he left he could hear Osu’s gently mocking voice: "I hear his dick is as bent as his leg."

Jana got very little sleep that night. But, as he lay awake, he knew what he had to do.

He rose before dawn. He gathered up his ropes, fire-hardened spears, bow, arrows, and fire tools, and crept out of the encampment.

Following the bank of a river, he worked his way inland.

As Jana stepped silently across the dead matter of the forest floor, he disturbed a cluster of scurrying, rodentlike creatures. They were a kind of kangaroo. They peered at him with large, resentful eyes before fleeing. He barely noticed them as he pushed on.

Many of the trees in the sparse riverbank forest were eucalyptus, wreathed by strips of half-shed bark. These peculiar trees, like much of the flora, were distant descendants of Gondwanaland vegetation, stranded when this raft continent had broken away from the other southern lands. And through the river water, shaded by the trees, cruised more relics of ancient times. They were crocodiles, rafted here like the eucalyptus — but unlike the trees, and like their cousins elsewhere, they were barely changed by time.

He came to a clearing.

A family of four-legged creatures the size of rhinos was working its way across the clearing. They had small ears, stubby tails, and they walked on flat feet, like bears. They were making a mess of the forest floor: With their tusklike lower teeth, they scraped steadily at the ground, seeking the salt bushes they favored. These herbivorous marsupials were diprotodons — a kind of giant wombat.

There were many kinds of kangaroo here. Some of the smaller kinds searched for grass and low vegetation on the ground. But the larger ones were much taller than Jana; these giants had grown so tall so they could browse at the trees’ foliage. As they searched for food the kangaroos levered themselves forward using their forelegs, tails, and those powerful hind legs, a unique means of locomotion. They were slow and oddly graceful despite their size.

But now, from the forest on the far side of the clearing, there was a roar. The kangaroos, large and small, turned and fled, bouncing away with their extraordinary elastic leaps. The originator of the roar loped casually into the clearing. It looked like a lion, but it was not a close relation of any cat. It was a thylacoleo — another marsupial, like the diprotodons and the kangaroos — but this one was a carnivorous predator, molded into its leonine form by identical opportunities and roles. The catlike creature moved with silky stealth around the clearing, its cold eyes studying its prey.

Jana moved cautiously around the fringe of the clearing, eyeing the thylacoleo.