Evolution

He was following the coiled trail of the ancestral snake: the first snake of all, which, it was said, had greeted Ejan on his first landing in his boat from the west. And every centimeter of the trail was laden with story, which he chanted to himself as he walked. The story was a codification of the people’s knowledge of the land: It was a map story, very specific and complete.

The most important details concerned water sources. There was a tale attached to every category of waterhole and a variety of rock clefts and cisterns, hollow trees and dew traps. The first source he stopped at, in fact, was a slow seepage. Its particular story was of how in days gone by you would often see huge kangaroos gathered here, fascinated by the water and so easy to kill. But now the kangaroos were gone, leaving only the battered remnant of a eucalyptus as guardian of the water.

And so on. To Jo’on the land was as crammed with vivid detail as if it had been painted over with signposts and arrows — even though he had walked this way only once before in his life.

Such tales were the beginning of the Dreamtime. The tales would last as long as Jo’on’s descendants kept their independent culture alive, mutating, growing steadily more elaborate — and yet always retaining a core of truth. It would always be possible to use the story of the ancestral snake to find water and food.

And no matter how far the people wandered, how deep into time they sank, it would always be possible to trace the Dreamtime trails back across the landscape, back to the northwest, to the place where Ejan and his sister had made their first footfalls.

Still, for all this oral wisdom, Jo’on could not know that this land was emptier, far emptier, than when his remote ancestor had first arrived here.

After a day’s walking he reached a patch of forest, as he knew he would. Here he intended to do some hunting, to round out his store of trade goods with meat, before passing on to the coast. He moved silently into the forest.

He quickly found a treat: wild honey, retrieved from a hive hanging from a gum tree. As he dismantled the hive a blacksnake approached him, but he was able to grab its tail and crack it like a whip, easily smashing its head on a branch.

His greatest triumph that evening was spotting a goanna — a varanid lizard a couple of paces long. On seeing him the goanna took fright and hid in a hollowed-out log. But Jo’on had patience. As soon as the goanna had spotted him, he froze in midstride. Then he stood unblinking, as the sun sank further into the west, and the soil glowed still more brightly crimson. He saw the goanna’s flickering tongue probing cautiously out of the log. Everybody knew goannas liked to taste the air to see if predators or prey were nearby. Still Jo’on stood still as a lump of rock; there was no wind, and his scent would not carry to the goanna.

At last, as he knew it would, the goanna’s slow, patient brain forgot Jo’on was there. It scuttled out of the cover of its log. His spear got it in a single strike, pinning it to the ground.

At the foot of a eucalyptus, Jo’on made a fire with a rubbing stick. He briskly skinned and gutted the goanna, softened its flesh in the fire, and enjoyed a rich meal. Above him the sparks from the fire rose up into the towering dark.

When he woke in the dawn, the fire had subsided, but it was still alight. He yawned, stretched, voided briskly, and munched down a little more of the goanna.

Then he made a torch of dead wood, lit it in his hearth, and began to walk through the forest, setting fires. He looked especially for hollow trees that would burn well, and set alight the detritus at their roots.

After all this time the basic strategy of the forest hunters had not changed: to use fire to flush out game.

The smoke soon forced out possums, lizards, and marsupial rats from inside the trunks. They were small creatures all, but he managed to club some of them, and added their little corpses to the pile he accumulated close to his original hearth. But to impress the fisher folk by the sea he needed larger game than this. So he began to roam wider through the forest, setting alight more trees and undergrowth.

Gradually the flames spread and merged, self-organizing, feeding on each other’s energy, generating draughts and winds that fed back to intensify the fires further. Soon the separate blazes were merging into a bushfire, a writhing wall of flame that moved forward faster than a human could run.

But Jo’on, by that time, was safely out of the forest. And as the treetops exploded into flame as if they were made of magnesium, he stood ready with his spear-thrower.