Evolution

He squirmed across the branch, trying to force his way deeper into the group. Each of the adults knew that it was in everybody’s long-term interests that she should take her turn at the edge of the group, briefly suffering the cold in order to shelter the rest; it wouldn’t help to have outliers die of frostbite. But still Noth’s lowly rank worked against him, and when the other males picked up his scent they sleepily combined to push him back out of the huddle, so he finished up almost as exposed as when he had started.

He lifted his muzzle and puffed out a breath, hooting mournfully.

These primates could draw no comfort from those around them. Noth found pleasure in grooming — but only in his own physical sensations, and in the effect it had on others’ behavior toward him, not in how others felt. The other notharctus were simply a part of his environment, like the conifer trees and podocarps, the foragers and predators and prey: nothing to do with him.

These huddling notharctus, despite their physical closeness, were each lonelier than any human would ever be. Noth was forever locked inside the prison of his head, forced to endure his miseries and fears alone.

The morning dawned clear, but a freezing mist lay over the forest. Even though the sun grew bright there was little heat to be had from its rays.

The notharctus stretched limbs stiff with cold and long hours of immobility. Cautiously, watchfully, they headed down to the ground. On the forest floor they scattered slowly. The senior females moved around the edge of this loose clearing, using their wrists, armpits, and genitals to renew scent markers.

Noth picked through the frozen mulch. The dead leaves were of no use to him, but he had learned to burrow under places where the leaf litter was particularly thick. The mulching leaves could trap moisture and keep the frost away; here there was dew to lap up, and unfrozen ground to dig in search of tubers, roots, or even the rhizomes of hardy ferns.

A series of hooting cries broke out, startlingly loud, echoing through the forest. Noth looked up, whiskers twitching.

There was a commotion around a stand of podocarp. Noth saw that a group of notharctus, strange females with a scattering of pups, had come out of the forest. They were approaching the podocarp.

Biggest and some of the other females dashed forward. The troop’s big dominant male — who Noth thought of as something like the Emperor — joined in the females’ charge. Soon they were all displaying ferociously, hooting and scraping musk over their long tails. The strange females cowered back, but they responded in kind. The forest briefly filled up with the cacophony of the argument.

The female clans, the heart of the notharctus’ society, were fiercely territorial. These strange females had ignored the scent markers left by Big and the others, bright warning signs in a notharctus’ sensorium. At this time of year food was becoming short; in the final scramble to stoke up their bodies’ stores for the rigors of winter, a rich stand of podocarp was worth fighting for.

The females, with babies clinging to their fur, went further in their wars than their males were prepared to. They quickly escalated the confrontation to lunges and feints and even slashes with canine teeth. The females fought like knife fighters.

But it wasn’t going to work. Though not one notharctus laid a paw on another, the display by Biggest and the rest overwhelmed the newcomers. They backed off toward the long gray-brown shadows of the deeper forest — though not before one older pup had lunged forward, cheekily sunk his teeth into a cold-wizened fruit, and run off with his bounty before he could be stopped.

Suddenly aware of the vulnerability of their treasure, the females closed around the podocarp now, munching greedily at the fruit. Some of the older, more powerful males, including the Emperor, were soon feeding alongside Biggest and the rest. Noth, with the other young males, circled the feeding group, waiting his turn at whatever would be left.

He dared not challenge the Emperor.

Male notharctus had their own complex and different social structure, overlaying that of the females. And it was all about mating, which was the most important thing — the only thing. The Emperor had a large territory, including the ranges of many female groups. He would aim to mate with all the females in his territory, and so maximize his chances of propagating his genes. He would scent mark females to repel other suitors. And he would fight fiercely to keep other strong males away from his wide empire, just as Noth’s father had fought to exclude Solo.

The Emperor had done well to hold on to his wide-ranging fiefdom for more than two years. But like all of his short-lived kind, he was aging quickly. Even Noth, the lowliest newcomer, made endless automatic computations of the Emperor’s strength and fitness; the drive to mate, to produce offspring, to see his own line go on, was as strong in Noth as in any of the males here. Soon the Emperor would surely meet a challenge he could not withstand.

But for now, Noth was in no position to challenge the Emperor or any of the stronger males in the loose pecking order above him. And he could see that the supply of podocarp fruit was dwindling rapidly.

With a frustrated hoot he hurried over the forest floor and scampered briskly into a tree. The branches, slippery with residual frost, dew, and lichen, were all but bare of leaves and fruit. But it might still be possible to find caches of nuts or seeds, stashed away by providential forest creatures.

He came to a hollow in an aging tree trunk. In its dank, rotting interior, he saw the gleam of nutshells. He reached in with his small, agile hands and hauled out one of the nuts. The shell was round, seamless, complete. When he rattled it he could hear the kernel inside, and saliva spurted into his mouth. But when he bit into the shell his teeth slid over the smooth, hard surface. Irritated, he tried again.

There was an almighty hissing. He hooted, dropped the nut, and scuttled to a higher branch.

A creature the size of a large domestic cat came scrambling clumsily toward the nut cache. It raised its head to Noth and hissed again, showing a pink mouth with powerful upper and lower incisors. Satisfied that it had driven off the raider, it dug out one of its stored nuts and, with a clench of its powerful jaws, cracked the shell. Soon it was nibbling purposefully, widening the hole it had made. At last it reached the nut’s kernel — Noth, tucked behind the tree trunk, was almost overwhelmed by the sudden sweet aroma — and fed noisily.

This ailuravus looked something like a rudimentary squirrel, with a mouselike face. It had a long bushy tail, the purpose of which was to slow its fall, parachute-like, every time it tumbled out of a tree, as it frequently did. Although it was clumsier than the notharctus as it moved about in the trees, lacking a primate’s grasping hands and feet, it was more than big enough to have fought off Noth.

The ailuravus was one of the first rodents. That vast, enduring family had emerged a few million years earlier in Asia, and had since migrated around the world. This small encounter was a skirmish at the start of an epochal conflict for resources between the primates and the rodents.

And the rodents were already wi

They were beating primates to the food, for one thing. Noth would have needed a nutcracker to eat hazelnuts or brazil nuts, and a millstone to process grains like wheat and barley. But the rodents, with their ferocious, ever-growing incisors, could break through the toughest nut and grain seed coats. Soon they would begin to consume the fruits of the best trees before they were even ripe.

Not only that, the rodents outbred the primates by a large factor. This ailu could produce several litters within a single year. Many of its young would fall to starvation, competition with their siblings, or predation by birds and carnivores. But it was enough that some should survive to continue the line, and for the ailu each of its young represented little investment — unlike the notharctus who bred just once a year and for whom the loss of a single pup was a significant disaster. And the rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.