Evolution

The group from home who had walked with Rood and Olith fanned out. Many of them were looking for partners: perhaps for a quick spring tumble, or perhaps with a view toward a longer-term relationship. This few days’ gathering was the only chance you got to meet somebody new — or to check out if the skinny kid you remembered from last year showed signs of blossoming in the way you hoped he would.

Rood spotted a woman called Dela. Round, fat, with a booming laugh, she was a capable hunter of large game. In her younger days she had been a beauty with whom Rood had lain a couple of times. He saw that she had, typically, set up a large, flamboyant shelter of stretched hide painted gaily with designs of running animals.

Rood and Olith marched down the bank. Dela welcomed him with an embrace and a hearty back slap, and she served them bark tea and fruit. Though Dela eyed Olith, evidently wondering what had become of Mesni, she kept her counsel.

A huge fire already blazed on open ground before the shelter, and somebody was throwing handfuls of fish grease onto it, making explosions and crackles. It was Dela’s folk who had brought in the megaloceros. Brawny young women were carving open the deer carcass, and the smell of blood and stomach contents filled the air.

Rood and Olith sat with Dela around a low fire. Dela began to ask Rood how this year’s hunting had gone so far, and he responded in kind. They talked of how the season had unfolded this year, how the animals were behaving, what damage the winter storms had done, how high the fish were jumping, on a new way somebody had found to treat a bowstring so it lasted longer before it snapped, a way somebody else had found of soaking mammoth ivory in urine so you could straighten it out.

The purpose of this gathering was to exchange information, as much as food or goods or mates. Speakers did not exaggerate success or minimize failure. To the best of their ability they spoke with detail and precision, and allowed other participants in the discussion to ask questions. Accuracy was much more important than boasting. To people who relied on culture and knowledge to keep themselves alive, information was the most important thing in the world.

At last, though, Dela was able to move on to the subject that clearly fascinated her.

"And Mesni," she said carefully. "Has she stayed home with the children? Why, Jahna must be tall now — I remember how she caught the boys’ eyes even last year — and—"

"No," Rood said gently, aware of Olith’s hand covering his. Dela listened in silence as he described, in painful detail, how he had lost his children to the ice storm.

When he had finished Dela sipped her tea, her eyes averted. Rood had the odd sense that she knew something, but held it back.

To fill the silence, Dela recited the story of her land.

"…And the two brothers, lost in the snow, fell at last. One died. The other rose up. He grieved for his brother. But then he saw a fox, digging under a log, its coat white on white. The fox went away. But the brother knew that a fox will return to the same spot to retrieve what it has buried. So he set a snare, and waited. When the fox returned the brother caught it. But before he could kill it the fox sang for him. It was a lament for the lost brother, like this…"

Like Jo’on’s Dreamtime tales, though they were a blend of myth and reality, such stories and songs were long, specific, fact-heavy. This was an oral culture. Without writing to record factual data, memory was everything. If dreams and the shaman’s trances were a means of integrating copious information to aid intuitive decision making, the songs and stories were an aid to storing that information in the first place.

Remarkably, the story Dela told was itself evolving. As the story passed from one listener to another, through error and embellishment its elements changed constantly. Most of the changes were incidental details that didn’t matter, churning without effect, like the coding of junk DNA. The essentials of the story — its mood, the key nodes, its point — tended to remain stable. But not always: Sometimes a major adaptation would take place, by a speaker’s intention or accident, and if the new element improved the story, it would be retained. The stories, like other aspects of the people’s culture, had begun an evolutionary destiny of their own, played out in the arenas of the new humans’ roomy minds.

But Dela’s story was more than a mere tale, or aid to memory. With her story, by her setting out the narrative of her land and by her listeners’ accepting it by hearing it, she was proclaiming a kind of title. Only by knowing the land well enough to tell its story truly could you affirm your right to that land. There were no written contracts here, no deeds, no courts; the only validity for Dela’s claim came from the relationship of narrator to listener, reaffirmed at gatherings like this.