Evolution

She looked up at him dully, her absurdly flat skull smeared with dirt. He knew this one was the same age as Jahna, but she was more advanced than his daughter; the boneheads grew up faster, lived harder, died younger. She sat in the dirt, dressed in an untied skin wrap, toying with a worn, broken pendant. The boneheads seemed to have enough mind to be fascinated by the artifacts of the people, yet not enough to make them for themselves: You could buy whatever you wanted from a bonehead for the sake of a mammoth-ivory bead or a carved bone harpoon.

On an impulse he didn’t fully understand, Rood reached down and pulled the wrap away from the cow’s body. If not for that pulled-forward face, that flattened head, her body wasn’t so bad, he thought; she had yet to develop the full, bearlike stockiness of the adults.

He found an erection pushing out of his own wrap.

He knelt down, grabbed the cow’s ankles, and twisted her onto her back. She complied easily, spreading her legs; evidently it wasn’t the first time she had been used like this. Probing at her warm flesh he found her crotch and anus were crusted with filth. He scraped her clean with his fingers.

And then, with a single, savage thrust, he entered her. For a brief, oceanic time, he was able to forget that disastrous moment when the storm closed in and he realized he had lost Jahna and Millo on the ice.

But it was quickly over. Pulling away from the girl he felt a deep, stomach-churning sense of revulsion. He used a corner of his wrap to clean himself.

The girl, still naked, rolled on her back and held up her hands, pleading silently.

Around his neck he wore a pendant, the tooth of a cave bear. He ripped it off his neck, breaking its deerskin thong, and threw it in the dirt. The bonehead girl scrabbled for the pendant and held it up before her face, turning it over and over, peering into its endless mysteries. A trickle of blood seeped from her bruised thighs.

Jahna and Millo continued to follow the coast, still hoping to come across the headland where they had last seen their father and his companions. At night they built snow houses, if there was snow, or slept under hastily constructed lean-tos. Jahna’s bow and Millo’s fast reflexes kept them provided with some food; small animals and birds.

They could keep themselves fed, even build shelter. But already Millo had spent one agonizing night after unwisely eating a fish that had not been properly gutted. Worst of all they had failed, night after night, to make a fire, no matter how earnestly they rubbed sticks or smashed bits of rock together. And that was costing them dearly. The uncooked meat was beginning to make Jahna’s teeth and stomach ache, and in the dead of night she imagined she would never be truly warm again.

The children plodded on; they had no choice. But they were losing weight, growing more tired every day, their clothing more ragged. They were slowly dying, Jahna knew. Though they were guided by the elder spirits within them, they did not yet know all they needed to know to keep themselves alive.

They came to a place where the tree line had strayed north, so they had to push through a scrap of forest. The trees, pines and spruce, grew sparse and tangled: gaunt and without leaves, they looked oddly frail. The path the children followed, worn by deer or goats, was soft with moss. It twisted through the trees, passing occasionally through more open glades.

As the light faded, ending another dismal day, the shadows of the trees striped over the ground, and the undergrowth turned black. Jahna and Millo were five million years removed from Capo, their last forest-dwelling ancestor, and to them the forest was a place well stocked with monsters and demons. They hurried forward anxiously.

At last they burst out of the trees. They found themselves on a scrap of snow-littered grassland where the yellow sward terminated in a ragged cliff edge. Beyond that blunt horizon the sea rolled, the pack ice distantly groaning and cracking, as it always did.

But the children faced a wall of flesh and antlers. It was a herd of megaloceros — creatures that would one day be called Irish elk. They walked massively, cropping at the new grass that poked hopefully through the scattered snow.

In the van was a huge male. He peered down his long nose at the children. His back bore a fleshy hump, a mound of fat to help sustain him through harsh times; in this early spring the hump was deflated. And his antlers, each twice as wide as a human was tall, were great heavy sculptures oddly like the open hands of a giant, with fingerlike tines branching off smooth palms.