Evolution

While in the rest of the world the placental mammals had become dominant, Australia had become a continent-sized laboratory of marsupial adaptation. There were carnivorous kangaroos that hunted in ferocious, high-bounding packs. There were strange creatures unlike any elsewhere: huge relatives of the platypus, giant tortoises the size of family cars, land-going crocodiles. And in the forests walked immense monitor lizards — related to the komodo dragons of Asia, but much larger — an eerie Cretaceous memory, one-ton carnivorous lizards big enough to take out a kangaroo, or a human.

Jana moved on, his thoughts far away.

Jana had known Agema all her life, as she had known him; here in this tight community everybody knew everybody else. But it was only in the last year, as she had passed seventeen, that he had become so attracted to her. Even now he could not have said what it was about her that had so enthralled him. She was not tall, not very shapely, with breasts that would always be small, hips and buttocks too wide, and her face was a wide moon of flesh with a small nose and downturned mouth. But there was about her a quietness, like the quiet of the sea when your canoe was far from land, a stillness masking depths and richness.

He had barely spoken to her of this. He had barely spoken to her at all, in fact, for a year, since becoming aware of her in this way.

What really hurt was that Osu and those other braying idiots were right to goad him, to point up his limping, his unsuitability as a husband for Agema. They were trying to protect their sister from a poor match. He knew that his damaged leg was no real impediment to his making a living, to his being able to help Agema raise the kids he wanted to share with her so badly, but what he had to do was convince her and her family of that.

And he was never going to do that by scraping mussels off rocks like a child. He was going to have to hunt, that was all. He was going to have to go out and bring home some big game — and he would have to do it alone, so he could prove to Agema and the rest that he was as strong, resourceful, and capable as any man.

The bulk of the people’s food came from hunting small creatures or just simple foraging, in the sea, the river, and the coastal strip of forest: straightforward, low-risk, unspectacular stuff. Hunting bigger prey was pretty much a male preserve, a risky game that gave men and boys the chance to show off their fitness, just as it always had. And this ancient game was what Jana was going to have to play now.

Of course he wasn’t foolish enough to take on anything too massive alone. The largest animals could be brought down only by a cooperative hunt. But there was one target that a solo hunter could bring home.

He kept walking, heading deeper into the forest.

At length he came to another clearing. And here he spotted what he wanted.

He had found a nest of roughly assembled foliage inside of which a dozen eggs had been carefully arranged. What made the nest extraordinary was its size — probably Jana himself could have laid down inside it — and some of those eggs were as big as Jana’s skull. Purga, if she could have seen this tremendous structure, might have believed that the dinosaurs had indeed returned.

Jana laid his trap with skill. He scouted around the clearing until he spotted the mother bird’s huge splay-footed tracks. He followed the tracks a little way into the forest. Then he strung ropes between the trees across the tracks, and he took his double-pointed spears and rammed them into the ground.

After that, it was time to set the fire.

It was quick work to gather bits of dry wood. To create a flame he used a tiny bow to rotate a stick of wood in a socket in a small log. He nursed the blaze with bits of kindling. When the fire had caught he thrust torches into the flames, and hurled them around the forest.

Everywhere the torches landed, flames blossomed like deadly flowers.

Birds rose with a shriek, fleeing the rising smoke, and ratty little kangaroos scurried at his feet, their eyes wide with alarm. By the time he had retreated to the clearing the flames were spreading, the separate pockets of fire joining up.

At last a huge bipedal form came screeching out of the forest. She bristled with dark feathers, her head held up on a long neck, and her muscular legs seemed to make the ground shake as she ran. She was a genyornis, a giant flightless bird twice the size of an emu. In fact she was one of the largest birds that would ever live. But she was terrified, Jana could see that: her eyes were wide; her startlingly small beak gaped.