by John Darnton
She followed the path to the waterfall and stood before it for a long while, listening to the roar. She looked down into the basin and realized with a jolt that Kellicut was there, sitting on the rocks with a group of hominids. She watched, riveted. He sat above them, rocking slowly and at times closing his eyes and then opening them. The hominids looked so trusting. She knew in an instant why he was there, why he was drawn to the place where the crashing water drowned out all extraneous sound. He was the teacher learning from his students.
There was something terribly private, illicit even, about the gathering. She turned away and walked back to the village. Her anger against Matt had dissipated. For the first time in years, she thought back to the small white-clapboard church she had attended as a child on the hilltop in Oregon.
That evening in the bower she turned to Matt. “You were right—not that part about me still being his lover, but about me not being true to myself. Of course we have to save Van.”
They embraced, then kissed. As she undid a button on his shirt and moved her hand in a slow circle across his chest, he turned toward her and she caressed the back of his neck and spine. He slipped his hand down the back of her shorts and inside her panties, feeling her buttocks, soft and slightly cool. When she rolled on top of him and kissed him again, he felt desire roll through him, and yet he was conscious of a center of resistance, the nagging presence of someone else. He was able to push it to one side yet was aware of it dimly throughout their foreplay and then their lovemaking. The sense of an alien consciousness did not leave him until afterward, when she was resting in his arms, her hair straggly with perspiration and her breathing gradually calming. Then it disappeared as stealthily as a ghost.
Matt got up, dressed, and walked quickly along the path to the village. Not far away he encountered Kellicut leaning against a tree, and for a moment something in the man’s look, flustered at being discovered and yet oddly challenging, planted the ridiculous notion in Matt’s mind that it had been Kellicut who had invaded his brain.
They waited in ambush around a clearing in the thickest part of the forest. Longtooth and Blue-Eyes were on one side, Lancelot and Hurt-Knee on a second, and Matt and another youth, Tailboy, on the third. Susan, Leviticus, and several others were making their way noisily toward them through the woods, trying to flush an animal out of hiding and into their trap.
Matt and Susan had thought carefully about who to select for the band of hunters. They began with Lancelot, remembering the flash of anger he displayed during the wrestling match. Hurt-Knee had already been exposed to the renegades and had taken on some of their aggressive traits. There were a few other younger hominids who seemed to be moving in the same direction now that Longface was gone and the other feeble elders were losing their sway.
Now they all held clubs and spears. Matt had spent hours searching for saplings the proper length and weight, sharpening them, and burnishing the points in flame. Instructing the hominids in how to throw the spears was harder still, since they did not readily grasp the point of the exercise. He used a straw dummy as a target, and eventually the hominids entered into the spirit and were actually able to hit it from time to time. Still, whether they realized that it was a stand-in for a living, breathing animal was doubtful.
At first war games were even more difficult. The pacific hominids had trouble grasping the concept of teams, two groups opposed to each other for no discernible reason. Then Susan had a brainstorm. She vanished into the woods, came back with gobs of mud, and emerged from a hut with a concoction of bright ocher, which she proceeded to smear on the upper torsos of one group. At first Matt objected—it made him feel, he said, as if he were a kid playing cowboys and Indians—but soon he noticed what a remarkable effect the streaks of war paint had. It was as if the whole idea was suddenly made clear and some primitive instinct for combat was awakened. What had happened, they theorized, was that the ocher triggered an association with the feared and hated renegades. In effect the battle lines had already been drawn. The psychological construct of enemy was latent; it simply had to be filled in.
Now the crashing sounds got closer as the beaters approached. Suddenly Matt heard a different sound above the others, the crackling and rustling of an animal in flight as its hooves touched down upon leaves and twigs and sprang up again. He looked at Tallboy and could tell that he was listening to it too. But what was he thinking? Was he feeling the same adrenaline coursing through his veins, the tingling scalp, the mind clearing away anything extraneous and concentrating its energies for the kill?
Twice so far Matt had tried to teach them how to ambush and each time he had failed; the only spear that flew toward the animal had been his. Once it had been a marmot and the weapon flew harmlessly overhead. The second time it was a stag, which deflected Matt’s spear with a toss of its antlers and sent it rattling against a tree trunk. On neither occasion did any of the hominids make a move. Matt had no reason to think that this time would be different, but he had to keep trying because they needed the skins.
Suddenly an ibex bolted into the clearing and stood motionless for a moment, testing the wind, as if it sensed danger all around. Matt could see its black nose twitching and the gracefully arched horns curving backward. He fell into a special position—crouching down on one leg in a posture of concentration—and tried to send out messages to the hominids, images of spears and blood, as he had done unsuccessfully before. Then he slowly stood, amazed by how much time he had. He raised his right arm slowly, cocked it back, and hurled the weapon with all his strength, sending the shaft directly at the animal’s throat. As soon as the spear flew he knew that its direction was true. It sank its pointed head into the animal’s brown chest. The ibex leaped back, stunned, and swung back and forth on its haunches. The spear was not so deeply planted after all; it wiggled, then fell on the ground. But the animal was gravely wounded. It could not take flight and fell to its front knees. Though it tried to stand again and again, it finally collapsed and rolled over on its side. Matt could not repress a thrill within him and a swelling of hunter’s pride that reached back across the ages. When he stepped out into the clearing, the others did too, though they hung back a bit.
“Well, well,” said Susan, running up, still panting. “You Tarzan.” The ibex was bleeding through its mouth, the eyes turning dull, expiring quickly in front of them. The hominids stared. The carcass was oddly positioned, perched too high off the ground. Matt bent down and wrestled with it, turning it over, and saw another shaft, sunk a foot deep into the rib cage, around a wound that was pouring blood. He looked up in surprise. Only one hominid was without a spear. Lancelot stood there, his shoulders square, a smile playing upon his face. Susan and Matt locked eyes. “He did it!” she exclaimed softly.
The other hominids stood around, uncertain of what to do. Two of them dropped their spears and began the high-pitched bleating that sounded like a cry of distress and mourning, then turned abruptly and ran off into the forest. They did not return, but Lancelot looked at the carcass proudly.
Matt and Susan decided to camp for the night where they were. The hominids collected firewood and ignited it with a transported ember. Matt took out his pocketknife and began cutting off one of the haunches, making the incision low to preserve as much of the hide as possible. With such a tiny blade it was difficult to slice through the flesh and he had to cut it in layers so that soon his hands were blood-red. When he reached the ball-and-socket joint of the femur and pelvis, he couldn’t sever it with the knife, so he smashed it with a sharp rock and then lifted the joint to his knee and bent it backward, cracking it. As he stood up and approached the fire, holding the mangled leg bone in both hands with blood running down to his elbows, the hominids drew back in horror. They watched closely as he placed the bone across two burning branches. A hiss filled the air, followed by the smell of singeing meat.
Matt cut off small chunks and ate them, gave some to Susan, who ate them, and passed some to the hominids. The
y stared at the bits of meat. Two of them refused to touch them, but the others held them up and examined them in the firelight. Longtooth sniffed his piece, then touched it with his tongue. The others watched him as he tentatively bit off a tiny sliver, which he then spit out and held between a thumb and forefinger, raising it up to the light as if it were a precious gem. He looked at Matt, who quickly chewed another piece to encourage him, then placed the sliver between his teeth and bit into it. Seconds later he put the rest in his mouth and chewed tentatively. Susan exhaled, realizing only then that she had been holding her breath. All but two of the others began to eat.
Later that night as Susan lay awake, listening to Matt’s steady breathing and staring up at the stars, she heard the rustle of footsteps disappearing into the woods and then the sound of vomiting. Was it more than one of them? How unnatural to swallow the sinews of another animal, to force down meat and feel the bloody juice trickling down your throat, she reflected. She knew the hominids had passed a Rubicon and that, whatever happened, life would never again be the same in the valley.
The next morning Matt skinned the ibex. He laid it on its back and, while Susan and Longtooth held its feet in the air, used his knife to make an incision along the white fur of its underbelly. Then he picked up a large rock, rounded on one end to rest inside his palm and sharp along the outer edge, and pounded it like a cleaver against the underside of the hide as he peeled it away from the viscera. He used sharp rocks to cut out pieces of meat and sever the ligaments attaching muscles to the bone. Every few minutes he stopped to resharpen his tools by knocking them against another rock to remove small flakes from the edges. Something caught his attention and he stopped; there, along a shaft of a bone, were tiny cut marks he had made He had seen hundreds of bones with such marks and had been excited when he found them at early Stone Age sites.
They prepared to move on to another campsite. Today they would learn how to set a snare, Matt decided, then perhaps a pit trap with pointed stakes at the bottom. Half a dozen skins were all they needed, enough so that a group could enter the cave and not be instantly spotted as outsiders. The hominids pitched in to break camp. Leviticus and Tallboy used the hide to wrap large pieces of meat and hung it from a branch they carried on their shoulders. Just as they were leaving the clearing, Lancelot turned back and knelt beside the gutted ibex. He picked up the cleaver stone and smashed it down upon the upper skull. He repeated the movement three or four times, and Matt and Susan were shocked until they saw him dislodge the beautiful curved horns and sling them over his back, a trophy.
Susan knew whenever Leviticus was viewing through her. The sensation occurred often during the hunting expedition, especially when they were separated, one near the front of the line of march and the other at the back. She even came to depend on that familiar feeling, a filling up inside, sometimes lasting only a minute or two—a way of saying hello, checking in, she thought. She could not be positive that Leviticus was the source, but she was convinced that he was by the way she felt when it happened—not violated or invaded but warm and cared for.
She wondered if the hominids could identify those in the tribe who moved in and out of their perceptual fields. Clearly their special faculty was more complex than she and Matt had at first supposed. Perhaps it entailed two-way communication and perhaps it was more far reaching than seeing through another’s eyes, something closer to ESP. Perhaps it was reduced to crude telepathic images only when it crossed the species barrier.
Which would explain a lot—for one, why the hominids had never developed language. On the face of it, language seemed a better medium of communication because it conveyed abstract concepts and could be written down, allowing a compendium of knowledge to accumulate. But if the hominids could do more than send pictures back and forth, if they could actually feel and think what another one was feeling and thinking, there would be no need for language because their communication would be complete. Language—speaking—was only the pale shadow of a discourse so sublime and perfect that it was tantamount to actually exchanging places. In this case it was not the ability to communicate that turned Homo sapiens into nature’s overachievers, it was the inability to communicate.
Susan was proud to call herself an empiricist, but she was also willing to postulate the unproven, so she did not rule out the possibility that in their primordial state humans might have possessed a similar faculty but lost or abandoned it. Perhaps, she speculated, we still have a vestigial capacity for ESP, which is why so many people are intent on establishing its existence. Further, perhaps being exposed to it will reawaken it the way a child who is exposed to language learns to talk. Unless, she thought, by now too much of our brain is consumed in the service of mere words.
She met Leviticus in a meadow under a hot sun, whether by accident or not she did not know. She approached him and stood two feet away, staring into the eyes set deep in his overly broad face. Putting her hands on his bare shoulders and turning him gently around so that he faced away from her, she closed her eyes. Nothing. She tried pushing her mind outward. A breeze came up and she moved closer, hugging him from behind and smelling a pungent odor from the hair and dried sweat on the back of his neck. She leaned to one side and looked over his shoulder at the waving golden grass of the meadow and the trees beyond, then closed her eyes and concentrated, but the meadow and the trees did not reappear. When she felt herself filling up, she released him. “No,” she said out loud, knowing he would not understand but saying it anyway. “No, I want to do it.” But the familiar warm sensation continued.
Their return to the village did not cause a stir even though they came back with weapons, cutting stones, and skins. Remembering vividly what had happened when he had produced a single dead fish, Matt was surprised until he realized that of course the villagers had been aware of what the hunters were doing every step of the way.
Kellicut was a different matter. He was waiting for them at the fire cave and he was shaking with fury. “Don’t you understand anything? Didn’t you learn anything from all those years?”
Matt stood up to him. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said, “but we know what we’re doing.”
“Like hell you do! Teaching them to hunt! You’re supposed to be observers here. Do you understand that? It’s the first law of social science. You’re observers and nothing else. You don’t enter in. You don’t teach, you don’t change, you don’t convert. Got that?”
“This is different.”
“How is it different?”
“A man’s life is at stake.”
“A man’s life! You don’t even know who that man really is.”
“That’s another reason to go. We have to find out.”
“And what’s a man’s life compared to all this?” Kellicut swung his arm around, taking in the village, the trees, the whole valley. “An entire species, a species that’s been around longer than we have. Our progenitors, for God’s sake!”
“Maybe we can save him and protect them in the process.”
“Protect them from the renegades, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you don’t understand. You are not supposed to have anything to do with this. You are not even supposed to be here. This is a primitive world and you’re like some goddamn time traveler. You interfere and you throw the whole thing off!”
“So did you, Jerry,” said Susan. She used her teacher’s first name softly. “If you feel so strongly about this, why did you give Hurt-Knee the blood transfusion?”
Kellicut spluttered in anger. “That was different. That was a discrete act that didn’t affect the whole future of the species.”
“Besides,” interjected Matt, “it made you feel like God, didn’t it?” He reached into his pocket, brought out the skull fragment on a silver chain that Kellicut had given him nearly two decades ago, and held it up. “Just like teaching made you feel like God. Or taking us on digs and distributing little rewards. Or sleepi
ng with Susan.”
They never had a chance to hear Kellicut’s answer, for at this moment Dark-Eye stepped out of the shadows, walked over to them, took Matt’s and Susan’s hands, and rested his own hand roughly upon theirs. It was hard to tell whether the gesture was a blessing or a curse.
21
Before their foray to the cave, Matt and Susan checked their preparations. Not that they had so much equipment that there was a danger of forgetting some. What they really needed was to prime themselves psychologically, and planning ahead raised their spirits, feeding the illusion that they had a concrete plan to spring Van and then escape in one piece.
They had blindfolds made of cloth strips, with the knot dampened to hold better, which were tied around their necks so that they could be pulled up quickly over their eyes. This had been Susan’s idea, recalling Van’s directive in the cave to keep their eyes closed. She thought of it as a defensive maneuver against their adversaries’ power—a way to thwart it momentarily if they were caught in a tight spot. At least that was the theory; in practice they had no way of knowing whether it would work.
They had decided to take three hominids from the hunting expedition, beginning with Hurt-Knee, who presumably could guide them through the labyrinth of tunnels. Matt and Susan could only hope that he would comprehend his mission once they got under way, because how they would explain it to him, or look to him for help if things went awry, was beyond thinking about. Lancelot, who was becoming a tribal leader; was an indispensable member of the group. He had brought the ibex horns back to the village, placing them at the entrance to his hut with the points sunk in the dirt, and the trophy appeared to raise his stature, especially among the young males. Leviticus was the third, chosen by Susan, who said he would be valuable because of his cleverness. Our Odysseus, she called him.
