Evolution

Capo and Leaf were close. Though mating was promiscuous, sometimes Capo and Leaf would take themselves off into the forest for days on end — just the two of them — and during such safaris of tenderness, previsioning the sexual privacy of later kinds, most of Leaf’s children by Capo had been conceived, including Elephant.

What Capo and Leaf felt for each other at such moments as this was nothing like human love. Each of the apes remained locked inside a wordless prison; their "language" still wasn’t much more sophisticated than a cry of pain. But they were among the least lonely creatures on the planet, the least lonely who had ever lived.

Meanwhile young Elephant pored over Capo’s tool kit. He started tapping nut against cobble, cobble against anvil.

Capo’s apes, as they grew from infancy, had much to learn about their environment. They needed to learn where to find water and food, how to use occasional tools to get at the food, how to apply their simple bush medicine. They had been driven to live this way, in fact, because of competition from the monkeys: They had to figure out how to extract food the monkeys couldn’t steal, and that took smarts.

But there was no schooling here. It wasn’t that Elephant was trying to figure out what Capo had been doing. But by experimenting, using trial and error and the tools the adults left lying around — all the time driven by the lure of the delicious palm nuts — Elephant would eventually learn how to smash nuts for himself. It would take him three more years before he got it right. Elephant had to figure everything out from scratch himself, as if repeating in his own lifetime the whole intellectual progression of the species.

On and on he pounded at the shells, as if he were the first ape ever to try this trick.

Capo brought himself to a slow, shuddering orgasm, his first of the day. He withdrew from Leaf and rolled onto his back, rather unjustifiably proud of himself, and allowed her to groom him, picking knots from the fur of his belly.

But now his peace of mind was disturbed by a sudden cacophony from deeper into the forest: hooting cries, drumming, the rustle of large bodies clambering and swinging.

Capo sat up. In his world it wasn’t good to have too much excitement in which he wasn’t involved. He vaulted over a tree stump, drummed on a branch, routinely cuffed Elephant about the head, and loped off toward the source of the noise.

A group of young males were hunting a monkey.

To Capo’s eye it looked like the little vervetlike creature he had disturbed munching on acacia flowers earlier. Now it sat cowering at the top of a young palm.

The hunters had spread out around the base of the tree, and were clambering stealthily up neighboring trees. Others, Frond and Finger among them, had gathered around to see the excitement. It was these spectators who were making all the noise; the hunters themselves moved with stealth and silence. But to the monkey the din was terrifying and disorienting.

Capo was unpleasantly surprised when he saw who the hunters were. They were the rowdy young males who had loped off not days before on a foraging trip to another part of the forest clump. Their informal leader, a burly creature called Boulder, had given Capo some trouble in the past with his rebellious ways, and Capo had been happy to see him go: Let him blow off steam, make a few mistakes, even get hurt, and he would soon defer to Capo’s authority once more.

But Boulder had been away just days, where Capo had expected weeks to pass. And from the look of his bristling aggression, his jaunt hadn’t made him any calmer.

Capo was worried by the hunt, too. Monkey hunting usually happened only when other food was scarce, such as during periods of drought. Why hunt now?

One of the clambering apes made a sudden leap. Cluttering, the monkey jumped the other way — straight into the arms of a waiting hunter. The watching apes hooted and barked. The hunter swung the screaming monkey around and slammed its skull against a tree trunk. Its cries were cut off immediately. Then the hunter hurled the limp carcass to the ground, its smashed head making a bright red splash in the forest’s green murk.

That was Capo’s moment. He vaulted past Boulder to be first onto the body. He grabbed up the still-warm scrap, got hold of one ankle and twisted, hard, ripping the little limb loose at the knee.

But, to his astonishment, Boulder challenged him. The burly male leapt at him feetfirst, ramming him in the chest. Capo fell sprawling, an ache spreading along his rib cage, the breath knocked out of him. Boulder deliberately picked up the monkey limb and bit into it, blood spurting over his mouth. All the apes were madly excited now, and they hooted and drummed and scrambled over one another.