Evolution (62 page)

Meanwhile, Rood had stalked into the boneheads’ camp, looking for haulers.

The camp was a shanty on the edge of the human village. The huts and shacks were as squat and misshapen as the boneheads themselves. They just sat on the tundra like huge turds, with adults and grotesque kids lumbering everywhere. In places like this, wherever they survived across the Old World, the robust boneheads made their simple tools and built their ugly huts— just as they had for half a million years, all the way back to the time of Pebble and long before. Unlike the cultural explosion of the humans, there had been no significant variation in the boneheads’ industry across huge swaths of space and time.

With a tap of his whip handle Rood selected two powerful-looking young bucks. Passively the bucks followed him, and allowed themselves to be harnessed to the sled.

All too soon the sled was loaded. It took only a touch from Rood’s whip to encourage the boneheads to begin their hauling. The first heave, to free the sled’s runners from the hard earth, took some effort. Boneheads were bandy-legged and clumsy, their frames built for strength, not speed. But soon the two bucks had the sled hissing along at a little over walking pace. The hunters followed with whoops and hollering.

To the eerie wail of their bone flutes, the party crossed kilometer after kilometer of tundra. Rood sat on top of the bundles piled up on the sled, his whip of cured hide ready for the boneheads’ backs. Millo sat up beside his father, hair streaming.

This was northern France. The hunting party, traveling southwest toward the Atlantic coast, would pass close to the eventual site of Paris. But the tree line— the latitude at which trees could grow tall— ran mostly many kilometers south of here. And not so far north of here lay the edge of the ice cap itself. Sometimes you could hear the wind howling off the ice, cold air that had spilled off the pole itself, a heavy, restless, relentless wind that had scoured clean a great chill desert at the feet of the glaciers.

The land was a patchwork of white and blue, with splashes of premature green. The sled’s runners hissed as they ran over trees: they were dwarf willows and birches, flattened forests that clung to the ground, hiding from the wind. It was a shallow land, a skim of life-bearing soil over a deeper layer of permafrost. It was dotted with lakes, most of them still frozen, glimmering blue with the deeper ice that would not melt all summer. The ponds and lakes and marshes of summer were actually little more than transient lenses of meltwater pooled over the permafrost.

But spring was coming. In places the grass was growing already, and ground squirrel ran and foraged busily.

The tundra was a surprisingly productive place. The plants included many species of grass, sedges, small shrubs, and herbaceous plants like types of pea, daisy, and buttercup. The plants grew quickly and abundantly, whenever they could. And the various plants’ short growing seasons did not overlap, so that for the animals that thrived here there was a long period of good feeding each year.

This complex, variegated mosaic of vegetation supported a huge population of herbivores. In eastern Europe and Asia there were hippos, wild sheep, and goat, red, roe, and fallow deer, boar, asses, wolves, hyenas, and jackals. In the west, here in Europe, there were rhinos, bison, boar, sheep, cattle, horses, reindeer, ibex, red and roe deer, antelope, musk oxen— and many, many carnivores, including cave bears and lions, hyenas, arctic fox, and wolves.

And— as Jahna saw, in the far south, as they worked across the snow-littered ground— mammoths.

There was a great herd of them— walking ponderously, in no hurry— a wall of bodies that stretched from one horizon to the other. They were not true migrants, but had spent the winter sheltering in valleys to the south, where immense herds would gather, channeled by geography. Their hair was a deep black-brown, but as they walked the curtains of guard hairs that hung from their trunks and flanks flowed and waved, shining golden in the low spring sunlight. They looked like boulders, bulky fur-covered boulders. But occasionally one would lift her head, and there would be a flash of trunk or curling tusk, and a thrilling, unmistakable trumpet. The woolly mammoths had become the most successful of all the ancient elephant lineages. They could be found throughout the great tundra belt that wrapped right around the planet’s pole, making a giant herd that outnumbered by far any other proboscidean species that had ever lived.

On these great open lands, where such huge prey walked across open ground, the hunting was as easy for humans as it would ever be, in all their history. But already times were changing; soon the ice would begin its retreat once more. And already, whether they realized it or not, people had started to reshape the life and the land, just as in Australia.

They were thinly scattered, and life seemed hard. But in a sense humans had already reached the peak of their fortunes.

As they traveled the hunters pointed out the features of the land to each other, every bluff and ridge, every river and lake. Everything was named, even features off in the far distance, and everybody was listened to with respect as they shared and confirmed their knowledge. In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

They told stories, too, about the animals they glimpsed— how they lived, what they thought, what they believed. Anthropomorphism, attributing to animals personalities and characters, was a powerful tool for a hunter. A mammoth or a bird did not think about its foraging and movement in the same way as a human would, of course, but
imagining
that it did could be an excellent predictor of the animal’s behavior.

So, as they traveled, they talked, and talked, and talked.

This land was Jahna’s home, as it was Rood’s, and his mother, Jahna’s, before him. Her people owned it— but not as property that could be disposed of; they owned it as they owned their own bodies. Jahna’s ancestors had always lived here, back through the generations, into the unending mists of time, when, so it was said, humans had sprung into existence from fire and trickery. Jahna could imagine living no place else.

At the precise midpoint of the journey, the party stopped.

Snow had drifted in the shelter of a sandstone bluff. Rood briskly cleared the snow with sweeps of his arms, and he dug out a large slice of narwhal skin, with subcutaneous fat still clinging to it. The meat had been there since last autumn, and much of it had been devoured by passing foxes, gulls, and ravens. But Rood cut off chunks with a fine stone knife, and soon they were all chewing. The tough, partially decomposed meat was a luxury. It had a name of its own, meaning something like meat-of-dead. It had been left here as an emergency cache in case a traveling party should find itself stranded.

The two bonehead bucks, panting, their hips and clumsy knees obviously aching, were allowed to rest awhile, chewing on bits of meat.

The hunters began to talk of the shaman’s prophecies. Little Millo piped up. “I had a dream. I dreamed I was a big gull. I dreamed I fell in the sea. It was cold. A big fish came and ate me. It was dark. And then, and then—”

The hunters listened gravely, nodding.

Dreams were important. Each day the people faced decisions about what kind of gathering or hunting to attempt, what kind of animals to pursue, how the weather might behave. It was essential to make the correct call; a run of bad guesses could quickly starve your family. But their heads were crammed full of specific knowledge, about the land, the seasons, the plants, the behavior of animals, acquired over a lifetime and distilled from the experience of generations. On top of that there was a mass of daily data to absorb, on weather, animal marks. All this voluminous, tentative, fast-changing data had to be processed to support rapid, firm decision making.

The hunters’ thinking was as a result much more intuitive than systematic and deductive. Dreams, in which the unconscious mind had a chance to sort and explore all the data available to it, were an essential part of that processing. And with their chants and dances, trances and rituals, the shamans were the most intense dreamers of all.

The convergence of the shaman’s visions and fortune-telling and the dreams of Rood and Millo was reassuring, a valid piece of information to guide the hunters. It showed that their deep intuition about the nature of the world was in accord.

Still, Jahna thought, Rood looked troubled. As he kicked the boneheads to their feet she approached him. “Father? Your face is long.”

He glanced down at her, frowning. “It was just that dream of Millo’s. The water, the cold, the dark. Yes, it may be that he dreamed of hunting in the sea, of catching fish. But . . .” He raised his head, sniffing the air. “Millo’s nose is smarter than yours or mine, daughter. Perhaps he smells something we don’t. But we are committed. Let us go and raid the sea.”

With a smart slap on the buttocks of one of the buck boneheads, he launched the sled off across the frozen ground once more. Millo, perched on a pile of sleeping bags, squealed with joy.

When they reached the coast, Rood released the two boneheads and let them forage on the cold ground. They wouldn’t have the energy to run off, or even the wit to imagine escape.

The ocean was frozen.

At this time of year only the coastal fringe was completely free of pack ice. But the ice was broken by leads, huge open channels of black water that radiated out from the tip of a headland. The hunters knew the leads formed in this place every year because of the shape of the coast— and that was why they had come here.

Eagerly, the hunters clambered on to the sea ice. Their bone harpoons in their mittened hands, Jahna and Millo hurried ahead of the others, hoping to be the first to get to the seals.

Jahna found herself surrounded by miniature mountain ranges, hillocks of ice pushing four or five meters into the air. Wisps of ice crystals blew languidly, and gulls wheeled, seeking fish. As the sea swelled impatiently, its skin of ice groaned and cracked; the air was full of sharp noise. But the ice was rough: autumn storms and the tides around the headland had piled up heaps of huge fractured slabs.

Rood and a number of the others had gathered around the open water, and were calling excitedly. A narwhal had come up to breathe, and perhaps the hunters would make a spectacular kill.

But Millo, cawing like a gull, hurried ahead through the maze of ice. Jahna scampered after him. They came to a place where the water was crusted over by grayish new ice. But the ice was broken by circular holes, a pace or two across.

Millo and Jahna came to a hole and peered into it. In the chill waters, life teemed. Jahna could not make out the tiny plankton that crowded the waters, but she could see the tiny fish and shrimplike creatures that fed on them. In these cold, dry, windy times, dust eroded from the land was blown far out to sea, depositing iron salts; and the iron, always in short supply in the ocean, made life bloom.

But now Millo grabbed her arm and pointed. A little farther out to sea, close to a larger, slush-capped hole, seals lay on the ice. They were brown slabs of limp flesh, totally relaxed, frost sparkling on their fur. Seals were always attracted to such holes, so they could breathe or come up to bask.

Jahna thrilled at the opportunity here.

With immense care, making as little noise as possible, Jahna and Millo made their way across the ice. If one of the seals raised its head, they froze in place, crouching down against the ice, until the seal had relaxed again. Meanwhile, a moaning wind rose. Jahna welcomed it. She wasn’t interested in the weather right now; she had eyes, ears for nothing but the seals. But the wind helped mask their crackling footsteps.

They were almost there, almost close enough to touch the nearest seals. They raised their harpoons.

Then, without warning, the wind howled like a wounded animal.

The seals woke up, startled. They looked around, honking, and with liquid grace and speed they slid into the water. Millo howled his frustration and hurled his harpoon anyway; it slid uselessly into the water and out of sight.

But Jahna had looked up. A wall of wind-driven snow was descending on them, turning the world white.

Jahna grabbed Millo’s hand and dragged him into the shelter of an obtruding block of ice. They huddled up against the ice, knees tucked against their chests. The wind screamed through hollows and flutings in the ice, too loud for her to hear her own voice, too loud to think.

Then the snow was on them.

She could see nothing but white— no sea, no horizon, no sky. It was as if they had been thrust inside an egg, she thought, a perfect, closed-over egg, sealed off from the world.

Soon the snow was sticking to their furs and piling up against the ice wall. She knew there was a danger that the snow would drift, here in the lee of this boulder, and she tried to clear away the gathering layers of sharp white crystals.

But the storm went on, and on. And with every heartbeat that passed, the chances were that Rood and the others were getting farther and farther away.

Millo’s patience ran out. He pushed her away and stood up, but the swirling wind almost knocked him off his feet. She pulled him back down.

“No!” he screamed through the wind, struggling. “We’ll die if we stay here.”

“We’ll die if we leave,” she yelled back. “Look at the snow! Listen to the wind! Think— which way is the land?”

He turned vaguely, his small round face battered by the snow.

“We already made a bad mistake,” she said. “We didn’t see the storm coming. What does your soul tell you to do? What does Millo, your great-grandfather, tell you?” She could probably have overpowered him, just forced him to stay, but that would have been wrong. She had to convince him to stay put. For if he chose to leave— well, that was his prerogative.

At last he relented. With tears freezing to his cheeks he dropped back to the ice and huddled up against his sister. She held him until the weeping was done.