Evolution

She shied back, pulling as far as she could on the wire.

He tried miming, putting a flake or two into his own mouth and exaggeratedly devouring it with every expression of enjoyment. “Yum, yum. Delicious.”

But still she wouldn’t take the food from his hand. Then again, neither would a deer or a rabbit, he thought. So he put the flakes on the ground between them and backed away.

She grabbed a couple of the flakes and crammed them into her mouth. She chewed and chewed at the bits of banana, as if extracting every bit of flavor from them, before finally swallowing them. She must never have tasted anything so sweet, he thought.

Or maybe it was just that she was starving. He had set the trap a couple of days before; she might have been here for forty-eight hours already. All the shit and piss, the way the fur on her legs was matted and stained, indicated that too.

As she ate he got a good look at the foot that had been caught in the snare. It was a simple loop snare, meant for the heads of rabbits and hares. In her efforts to get free she had pulled the snare tighter — it had worked just as it had been designed — and it had cut so deeply into her leg that it had made a grisly, bloody mess of her flesh, and he thought he could see the white of bone in the wound.

What now? He could slug her and take her back to the base camp. But this wasn’t a prey animal, a rabbit or a hare; it wasn’t some interesting specimen, like the huge half-way-flightless parakeet Sidewise had caught stalking the fringe of a stagnant pond. This was a person, no matter what she looked like. And, he reminded himself, those stretch marks told him she had at least one kid out there waiting for her.

“Did I come all this way, across a thousand fucking years, to make the same mess of your life as I’ve made of mine? I don’t bloody think so,” he muttered. “Pardon me.” And without hesitating he leapt on her.

It was another wrestling match. He got her pi

The moment he released her she was gone. He glimpsed a figure, upright and lithe, shimmering through the long grass toward the trees, limping but moving fast even so.

It was already late afternoon. They weren’t supposed to be alone in the dark, away from base: Ahmed’s standing orders. He longed to follow the girl into the green mysteries of the denser forest. But he knew he must not. Regretfully he gathered up his gear and set off back to the base camp.

Snowy was the last to join the group that evening.

They had decided to settle close to a lake a few kilometers from the ruined town. The site was in the lee of a compact, cone-shaped hill — apparently artificial, maybe an Iron Age barrow, or maybe just a spoil heap of some kind.

Ahmed made them gather round the stump of a fallen tree, where he sat, a bit grandly. Snowy wanted to tell the others of his encounter, of what he had found. But the mood wasn’t right. So he just sat down.

Moon had grown increasingly withdrawn as the weeks had worn away; now she just sat cross-legged before Ahmed, her eyes averted. But she was the center of everything, as always, all the wordless maneuvering. Sidewise had his usual detached dreaminess, but he was sitting facing Moon, and Snowy saw how his gaze strayed over the curve of her hip, the centimeters of calf she showed above her boot. Ahmed himself sat beside the girl, raised up on his tree stump, as if he owned her.

Bo

They were breaking up, Snowy saw, drifting apart, with great fault lines ru

And Ahmed, their leader, was aware of none of this. Ahmed, in fact, was smiling. “I’ve been thinking about the future,” he said.

Sidewise gave a muffled groan.

“I mean, the further future,” Ahmed said. “Beyond the next few months, even the next few years. However we get through the next winter, times are going to be hard for our children.”

At the talk of children, Snowy cast a glance at Moon. She was glaring at her hands, her nested fingers.

Ahmed said that during the industrialized period — and especially during the last few insane decades — mankind had used up all its accessible supplies of fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. “The fossil fuels are probably forming again even now. We know that. But incredibly slowly. The stuff we burned up in a few centuries took around four hundred and fifty million years to form. But there will always be fuel for our descendants,” he said. “Peat. Peat is what you get when bog mosses, sedges, and other vegetation decompose in oxygen-starved wetlands. Right? And in some parts of the world peat-cutting for fuel continued right until the middle of the twentieth century.”

“In Ireland,” Sidewise said. “In Scandinavia. Not here.”

“Then we go to Ireland, or Scandinavia. Or maybe we’ll find it here. Conditions have changed a lot since we went into the cold sleep. Anyhow, if we don’t find peat we’ll find something else. We’ve inherited a burned-out world.” He tapped his temple. “But we still have our minds, our ingenuity.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sidewise said explosively. “Ahmed, don’t you get it? We’re just a bunch of castaways — that’s it — castaways in time. For Christ’s sake, man, we only have one womb between us.”

“My womb,” said Moon now, without looking up. “My womb. You insufferable prick.”

“Bog iron,” Ahmed said smoothly.

They all stared.

Ahmed said, “You get iron oxide forming in bogs and marshes. When iron-rich groundwater comes into contact with the air, well, it rusts. Right, Sidewise? The Vikings used to exploit that stuff. Why don’t we?”

As the bickering went on, Snowy’s gaze was drawn to the nearby woods, the shadowed green. Sidewise is right, he thought. We are here by accident, just a kind of echo. We are just going to fall apart, and get pulled down by the green like all the ruined buildings, and just disappear, adding our bones to the billions already heaped in the ground. And it won’t matter a damn. If he hadn’t known it before, known it in his gut, he was convinced of it now, having encountered the ape-girl. She is the future, he thought; she, with her bright lion’s gaze, her naked little body, her nimbleness and strength — her wordless silence.

As they dispersed, Snowy took Sidewise to one side, and told him about the feral woman.

Sidewise asked immediately, “Did you fuck her?”

Snowy frowned his disgust. “No. I felt like it — I got a hell of a rod — but when I saw what she was really like, I couldn’t have.”

Sidewise clapped him on the shoulder. “No reflection on your manhood, pal. Weena is probably the wrong species, that’s all.”

“Weena?”

“An old literary reference. Never mind. Listen. No matter what El Presidente over there says, we ought to find out more about these critters. That’s a hell of a lot more important than digging peat. We need to figure out how they are surviving here. Because that’s the way we are going to have to live too. Go find your girlfriend, Snowy. And ask her if she’d like a double date.”