Evolution

He picked up a blackened lizard, stiff and immobile. With a kind of shaped stone — its form wasn’t familiar to her — he scraped off the charred skin, exposing a morsel of pink flesh that he gulped down quickly. Now he found a snake, an adder, scorched to stiffness. Though he tried cutting through its burned skin it was too tough, and he threw the little corpse away.

Now the man found a real treasure. It was a tortoise, cooked in its shell. He picked it up and turned it over, muttering to himself. He took his handheld tool — it was a stone flake, but it was triangular, with each face worked, and a sharp edge all around it — and jammed it into the tortoise’s neck entrance. With a little effort he cracked open the shell, and soon he was using the tool to slice up the meat. Tortoises were actually a favorite prey of pithecine hunters. They were one of the few sava

Far was fascinated by the young man’s stone ax. With its finely worked edge and shaped faces, it was far beyond her own people’s chopping stones and pithecine-like flakes. But she understood it immediately, at a deep somatic level; she had an impulse to reach out and take the stone teardrop, to try it out for herself.

As long as she knew him, she would associate this young man with the stone tool he wielded so expertly. She would think of him as Ax.

Suddenly Ax looked up, straight into Far’s eyes.

She cowered back behind her boulder, but it was too late.

He growled and dropped the tortoise — its shell clattered on the sooty ground — and held up his stone ax.

She had nowhere to run. She stood up. She thought his gaze wandered over her body, her back and buttocks still wet from the stream. He lowered the ax and gri

Calls came floating from the distance.

She saw more people — folk like herself, adults and children, slim upright forms moving like shadows over the ash-strewn plain. They were exploring a miniature forest of blackened, twisted forms. It had been a birthing herd of antelopes; many of these unlucky creatures, straining over their last calves, had been unable to flee the flames. Now the people were slicing into this treasure with their marvelous stone axes, and even from here she could smell the delicious scent of cooked meat. Ax dropped the tortoise and ran off toward his people.

After a few heartbeats, torn between caution and ravening hunger, Far began to jog after him.

Night fell quickly, as it always did. The people gathered in a rocky hollow, which would give them some defense against the predators of the night.

Far, with nowhere else to go, followed them.

She couldn’t spend a night on her own; she knew that. Even now she sensed cold yellow eyes tracking her, eyes that glowed with the knowledge that she was an outlier of this group — not quite embraced within its protection — a target, like the old, the very young, the lame.

The people didn’t drive her away. They didn’t exactly make her welcome, either. But when she tucked herself into a corner of the roomy hollow, huddled over a scrap of meat she had scavenged from one of the burnt carcasses, they tolerated her presence.

She watched a man knapping a bit of rock. The man was old — in his late forties — and ski

As the darkness deepened, many of the people resorted to gentle, wordless grooming, the habit that had come with them from the ancestral forests. Mothers caressed infants, men and women alike played wordless politics as they cemented alliances and reinforced hierarchies. Sometimes the grooming turned to noisy sex.

Far, the stranger, was excluded from all this. But as she sank toward sleep, exhausted and battered, she was aware of Ax’s eyes on her.

When she woke, the sky beyond the hollow was already very bright.

Everybody had gone, leaving behind a few scraps of food, patches of infant shit, damp urine marks.

She got to her feet quickly. The bruises on her back and chest seemed to have consolidated into a single mass of pain. But her young body was already throwing off the damage it had suffered yesterday, and her head was clear. She hurried out into the light.

The people had walked north, toward a lake. They were slim upright shadows, walking purposefully, their outlines softened by the shimmering heat haze. She ran after them.

The lakeshore was crowded. Far made out many kinds of elephants, rhinos, horses, giraffes, buffaloes, deer, antelope, gazelles, even ostriches. In the water there were crocodiles and turtles, and birds flapped over it noisily. The giant herbivores, concentrated around the water, had devastated the landscape. From this muddy arena, their wide, well-trodden avenues snaked off in every direction. On the hardpan around the lake nothing grew but a few hardy plant species distasteful to the elephants and rhinos and able to recover quickly from trampling.

The people moved down to the water. They picked a spot close to an elephant herd. Everybody knew that predators avoided elephants. The elephants ignored the people and continued with their own complex business. Some of them entered the water and were splashing and playing noisily; groups of cows rumbled mysteriously, and males trumpeted and clashed their huge tusks. These massive animals, the architects of the landscape, were slabs of muscle and power, with their own stately, flat-footed grace.

Most of the women were working the water’s edge. Far saw that one of them had turned up the nest of a freshwater turtle; its long eggs were quickly cracked, their contents devoured. Other women were harvesting the mussels that grew abundantly in the shallow waters, especially freshwater clams.

Far saw that Ax, like most of the men, had waded into the water. He was carrying a wooden spear, and he stood very still, eyes fixed on the glimmering water’s surface. After a few heartbeats he stabbed down with a powerful splash — and when he brought up the spear, a fish had been neatly skewered, its silver body wriggling. Ax hooted, pulled the fish off his spear, and threw it to the shore. Another man, a little further out, was creeping up on a water fowl that paddled complacently across the surface. The man leapt, but the bird got away, amid much comical splashing, squawking, and shouting.

Far joined the women.

She quickly found a horseshoe crab, crawling stiffly along a muddy cha

Thus the day wore on, as the people foraged for their food, just another type of animal on this crowded sava