Evolution

Now Solo turned on the females. The aunts could easily have resisted Solo, if they had combined their efforts. But they scrambled out of Solo’s way. Solo’s assault had disturbed them as much as its victim. They had never seen anything like it. All of them were mothers; all thought immediately of the infants they had left parked in the high branches.

Solo ignored them too. With a carnivore’s steely movements he advanced on Noth’s mother, his principal target.

She hissed, she showed her teeth, she even kicked at him with her powerful hind legs. But he resisted her blows easily, walked through her kicking — and took the unresisting, baffled infant from her grasp. He bit quickly into the pup’s throat, opening up the flesh, and rummaged there until he had ripped open the infant’s trachea. It was over in heartbeats. He dropped the quivering scrap into the forest below, where mesonychids, alerted by the scent of fresh blood, ran forward with their eerie uncaninelike barking. His mouth and hands bloodied, Solo turned to Noth’s mother. Of course she would not be fertile yet, perhaps not for some weeks, but he could mark her with his scent, make her his own, and repel the attentions of other males.

There was nothing truly cruel in Solo. If her pups were killed, it was possible Noth’s mother would come into heat again before the end of the summer — and if Solo covered her then, he could generate more offspring through her. So, for Solo, infanticide was a good tactic.

Solo’s brutal strategy wouldn’t have been sustainable for everybody. Notharctus males were not equipped to fight. They lacked the canine teeth that later primate species would use to inflict damage on rivals. And this polar forest was a marginal environment where true fights were literally a waste of energy, a squandering of scarce resources, which was why the ritual stink fights had evolved. But for Solo, the exception, it was a strategy that worked, over and over, and which had won him many mates — and which had generated many offspring, scattered through the forest, whose veins ran with Solo’s blood.

But it wasn’t going to work this time.

Noth’s mother, marked by the killer’s scent, gazed down into the green void below. She had lost her baby — just as Purga, her remote grandmother, had once endured. But, considerably more intelligent than Purga had been, she was much more acutely aware of her pain.

Blackness filled her. She lunged at Solo, her small limbs flailing, mouth gaping. Startled, he darted back.

She lunged past him. And she fell.

Noth saw his mother fall into the pit where his infant sister had fallen before. Immediately her twisting form was lost under the slick, writhing bodies of the mesos.

Noth had been weaned a few weeks after he had been born. Soon would have come a time when he would have wandered from the troop. His link to his mother was tenuous. And yet he felt a loss as powerful as if his mother’s breast had been ripped from his mouth.

And still the rain fell, harder all the time.

Noth, shivering, crawled through the branches. With the wind low, the rain fell in massive drops that pounded exposed flesh and hammered against the trees’ broad leaves.

Following lingering traces of his mother’s scent, he found his baby sister. She still clung motionless to the tree trunk where her mother had parked her — where she would have clung, probably, until she starved. Noth sniffed her damp fur. He huddled up close and wrapped his arms around her. She was a tiny shivering mass against his belly fur, but he was sheltering her from the rain.

He was drawn to stay with her. She smelled of family; she shared much of his genetic inheritance, and therefore he had a stake in any offspring she might one day have.

But the rain fell through a night and a day, as the sun continued its purposeless dance around the sky. The forest floor became sodden, and glimmering pools, laden with floating leaf debris, began to cover the ground, hiding gnawed and scattered bones.

And the continuing rain washed away the last traces of the scent markers of Noth’s troop from the trees. Noth and his sister were lost.

II

As the endless day wore on, as the sun wheeled through its meaningless cycles, Noth and Right stumbled through the forest’s branches.

They had already been lost for a week. They had found none of their own kind. But here in the forest canopy there were many adapids, cousins of the notharctus. Many of them were smaller than Noth. He would glimpse their glowing eyes, like eerie yellow pits, peering out of a shadowed nook. These miniature insect hunters looked more like mice. Some of them scuttled along branches, racing from shaded cover to cover. But one made a spectacular upright leap from tree to tree, its powerful hind legs dangling, its paws reaching. Its membranous ears swiveling like a bat’s, it caught an insect, plucking it out of the air in its jaws in midjump.