Evolution

The hunters returned from the sea. They dispersed among their families, bearing the food they had brought. There were no expressions of gratitude. These people had no words for please or thank you; among these hunter-gatherer folk there were no social inequalities that would have required such niceties. The food was simply shared out, according to need.

Of Jahna and Millo there was much quiet talk.

Mesni, mother of Millo and Jahna, visibly strove for self-control. She went about the tasks of the day, caring for her infant, gutting the fish and preparing the rest of the ocean harvest Rood had brought home. But sometimes she would put down her knife or her bowls and give way to open despair. She even wept.

She became insane with grief: that was how it seemed to Rood. The people prized themselves for their equanimity and control. To show visible anger or despair was to behave like a small child who knew no better.

As for Rood, he withdrew into himself. He stalked around the village, and out into the country, in his shame and sorrow struggling to keep his face expressionless. There was nothing he could do for Mesni. He knew she must adjust to her loss, must regain her own inner sense of calm and control.

But the loss was indeed terrible for the little community. There weren’t that many of them to begin with. This little village of around twenty people consisted essentially of three large families. They were part of a more extended clan, who every spring would gather at the bank of a great river to the south of here for a great celebratory festival of trade, partner seeking, and storytelling. But, though they came from far away, there were never more than about a thousand at these gatherings: The tundra could support no higher a density of people than that.

In later times, archaeologists would find artifacts left behind by people like Rood’s and wonder if some of them signified fertility magic. They did not. Fertility was never a problem for Rood’s folk. Quite the opposite: The problem was controlling their numbers. The people knew they must not overstretch the carrying capacity of the land that sustained them — and that they must stay mobile, in case of flood or fire or freeze or drought.

So they took care over the number of children they raised. They spaced their births by three or four years. There were a number of means to achieve this. Mesni had breast-fed both Jahna and Millo to advanced ages to suppress her fertility. Simple abstinence, or nonpenetrative sex, would do the trick. And, just as it always had, death stalked the very young. Disease, accident, and even predators could be relied upon to take away a good fraction of the weak.

If necessary — though Rood was grateful he had not gone through this himself — if a healthy child arrived for whom there really was no room, death could be given a helping hand.

As long as they met the basic constraint of numbers, even in this sparse landscape at the edge of the habitable world, Rood’s people ate well, enjoyed much leisure and, with their nonhierarchical, respectful society, were granted great health in body and mind. Rood inhabited a boggy, half-frozen Eden — even if a price had to be paid in countless small lives snuffed out in the cold and regretful dark.

But none of this grim calculus applied to Millo and Jahna.

They had both arrived at a time when their parents had been able to cope with supporting them. They had survived the hazards of early childhood. They were growing healthy and intelligent. Jahna had even been approaching her menarche, so that Rood had been anticipating his first grandchild. Now, thanks to a freak spring storm and his own unforgivable carelessness, all of that investment in energy and love had been taken away from him.

Preoccupied, Rood had walked out of the settlement. He was approaching the crude shantytown of the boneheads.

The boneheads looked up dully as he passed. Some of them were gorging on scraps of narwhal skin. One cow had an infant clamped to her scrawny breast; she turned away from him, cowering. The boneheads had no place in this land owned by human beings. Indeed the boneheads would have starved if not for the largesse, and waste, of the people. Neither animal nor person, nothing about the boneheads was worthy of respect. The boneheads didn’t even have names.

But they could be useful.

He came across one cow younger than the rest. In fact she was the cow whom Jahna had tormented not long before the disastrous expedition to the sea.