Evolution

And then there was the grooming. In a small group there was time to groom everybody. It all helped to maintain relationships and cement alliances. When a group got too big, there just wasn’t the time to do that. So cliques were forming, subgroups fragmenting out whose members groomed each other exclusively, ignoring the rest. Already some of the cliques were traveling separately during the day, although they would still come together to sleep.

Eventually all of this would become too intense. The grooming cliques would fission off, and the group would split up. But the new, smaller groups each had to be large enough to offer protection against predators — the main purpose of these daytime bands in the first place — so it would be a long time yet, perhaps even years, before any fission was permanent. It happened all the time, an inevitable consequence of the growing sizes of primate communities. But it meant there was a lot of squabbling to be done.

So Roamer was happy to get away from all the bickering for a while.

The bug thoroughly masticated, Roamer inspected her palm nut. She knew that the kernel was delicious to eat, but her hands and teeth were not strong enough to break open the shell. So she began to pound the shell against the branch.

She became aware of two bright eyes watching her, and a slim, rust-colored body clinging to a branch. She was not alarmed. This was a crowder, a type of primate closely related to Roamer’s kind but smaller, more slender — and a lot less smart. Beyond its slim form Roamer made out many more of its kind, clinging to the branches of this tree and the next, arrayed through the forest’s green-lit world. The crowder was not competing for Roamer’s nut, and was certainly not threatening her; all the little primate wanted was Roamer’s leavings.

Roamer was mostly a fruit eater. But the crowders, like their common adapid ancestors, relied heavily on the caterpillars and grubs they snatched from the branches, and they had sharp, narrow teeth to process their insect prey. They lived in great crowded mobile colonies of fifty or more. This gave them a defense against predators and other primates. Even a troop of anthros would have had trouble driving off one of these agile, coordinated mobs.

But Roamer was a lot smarter than any crowder.

It would be tens of millions of years before any primate used anything that could be called a true tool. Much of Roamer’s intelligence was of a specialized kind, designed to enable her to cope with the fast-shifting intricacies of her social life. But Roamer was clever at understanding the natural environment around her and manipulating it to get what she wanted. Smashing a nut against a tree trunk was hardly advanced engineering, but it required her to plan one or two steps ahead, a precursor of much greater inventiveness in ages to come. And such nut smashing was a cognitive leap beyond the grasp of any crowder, which was why the crowders were hanging around now.

Roamer heard a rustling far below. She clung to her branch, peering down into the green gloom.

She could see the litter of the forest floor, and a shadowy shape moving through the trees with a rustle of feathers, tentative pecks at the ground. It was a flightless bird, something like a cassowary. And when she tracked back the way the bird had come to the middle of the clearing, Roamer made out a rounded, polished gleam.

Eggs. There were ten of them, nestling in the bird’s crude nest, each of them a reservoir of yolk as big as Roamer’s head. In the stillness of noon, with her mate away, the bird had left her nest briefly unguarded, taking the chance that no harm would come to it while she briefly assuaged her hunger. She was unfortunate that Roamer’s sharp eyes had detected the nest so quickly.

Roamer hesitated for a heartbeat. If she went after the eggs she would be taking a risk. Her nut cracking had already delayed her long enough for the troop to move away, and it would be bad to get lost. And the bird itself was a menace. A stalking monster, it was one of the last representatives of a twenty-million-year dynasty. After the comet, around the world, the land mammals had at first remained small, crammed into the dense forests — but some birds had grown large, and flightless monsters like this had briefly contested the role of top predator. Released from the weight limitations of flight they had become heavily built, muscular, and monstrously powerful, with beaks that could snap a backbone. But they had been out of time: When the mammalian herbivores grew large, so did mammal carnivores, and the birds could not compete.

The eggs were there, right below Roamer. She could take them easily.