Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  Now Millo came running up. Jahna’s brother, eight years old, was a little bundle of energy and noise, wrapped up in an ill-fitting sealskin coverall. On his feet he wore the skins of gulls turned inside out, so that their feathers kept his feet warm. Seeing what she was doing he grabbed the mammoth out of Jahna’s hand. “Me, me! Look, bonehead. Look! Mammoth!” He jabbed the little carving at the bonehead cow’s face.

  Piss trickled down the cow’s legs, and Millo squealed with delight.

  “Jahna, Millo!” Both of them turned. Here came their father, Rood, tall and strong, arms bare despite the chill of this early spring day. Wearing his well-loved boots of mammoth skin, he was striding strongly. He looked exhilarated, excited.

  Responding to his mood the youngsters forgot their game and ran to him. While Millo hugged his legs as he always did, Rood bent to embrace them. Jahna could smell smoked fish on his breath. He greeted them formally, according to their names. “My daughter, my mother. My son, my grandfather.” Then he reached around Millo’s waist and efficiently tickled his son; the boy squealed and writhed away. “Last night I dreamed of seals and narwhal,” Rood said now. “I talked to the shaman, and the shaman cast his bones.” He nodded. “My dream is good; my dream is the truth. We will go to the sea and hunt for fish and seals.”

  Millo jumped up and down, excited. “I want to ride the sled!”

  Rood peered into Jahna’s face, searching. “And you, Jahna? Will you come?”

  Jahna pulled back from her father’s embrace, thinking carefully.

  Her father had not been flattering her in asking her approval. In this community of hunters, children were treated with respect from birth. Jahna bore the name, and hence the soul, of Rood’s own mother, and so her wisdom lived on in Jahna. Similarly little Millo bore the soul of Rood’s grandfather. People were not immortal — but their souls were, and their knowledge. (Jahna’s name, of course, was doubly special. For it was the name not just of Jahna’s grandmother but of her grandmother before her: It was a name that had roots thirty thousand years deep.) And besides the business of the names, how were children to grow into adults if they were not treated as adults? So Rood waited patiently. Jahna’s judgment might not prevail, of course, but her reasoning would be listened to and tested.

  She glanced at the sky, assessing the wind, the thin scattering of clouds; she probed at the frozen ground with her toe, estimating if it was likely to thaw significantly today. She had an odd sense of unease, in fact. But her father’s enthusiasm was overwhelming, and she pushed down the particle of doubt.

  “It is wise,” she said seriously. “We will go to the sea.”

  Millo whooped and jumped on his father’s back. “The sled! The sled!” Together the three of them headed back toward the village.

  Throughout the exchange they had all ignored the bonehead cow, who lay huddled and quaking in the dirt, urine leaking down her legs.

  At the village, the preparations for the hunt were already under way.

  Unlike the boneheads’ ugly shantytown, the village was an orderly grid of dome-shaped huts. Each hut had been erected over a frame of spruce saplings, brought from the forests to the south. Skin and tundra sod had been piled over the frame, and a doorway, windows, and chimney hole cut into the walls. The floors of the huts were paved, after a fashion, with riverbed cobbles. Even some of the open areas between the huts had been paved, to save the people from sinking into the mud of the fragile tundra loam.

  Each hut was layered over with huge bones from mammoth or megaloceros antlers. These carapaces were there to help the huts endure the savage winds of winter and to obtain the animals’ protection: The animals knew that human beings took their lives only when they had to, and in return they lent their great strength to the people’s shelters.

  Around these huts of bone, there was a hum of activity and anticipation.

  One tall hunter — Jahna’s aunt, Olith — was using a fine bone needle to repair her deerskin trousers. Others, in a small open area used as a workshop, were making nets and baskets and barbed harpoons of bone and ivory, and weavers were using looms to make cloth of vegetable fiber. Much of the clothing the people wore was made of animal skin for warmth and durability, but there were luxury items of woven cloth — skirts, bandeaus, snoods, sashes, and belts. This expertise in cordage dated back many tens of thousands of years, fueled by the need to find an alternative to animal sinew to strap together rafts and canoes.

  Everybody wore decoration, pendants, necklaces, beads sewn into their clothing. And every surface, every tool of bone or wood or stone or ivory, was adorned with images of people, birds, plants, and animals: there were lions, woolly rhinos, mammoth, reindeer, horses, wild cattle, bears, ibexes, a leopard, even an owl. The images were not naturalistic — the animals leapt and pranced, their legs and heads sometimes a blur of movement — but they contained many precise details, captured by people who over generations had grown to know the animals on which they depended as intimately as they knew one another.

  Everything so shaped was loaded with significance, for each element was part of the endless story by which the people understood themselves and the world they lived in. There was nothing with only one meaning, one purpose; the ubiquitous art was a testimony to the new integration of people’s minds.

  But even now ghosts of the old compartmentalism lingered, as they always would. An old man struggled to explain to a girl how she should use her flint blade to carve her bit of mammoth ivory just so. In the end it was easier for him to take the tool from her and just show her, letting his body’s half-independent actions demonstrate themselves.

  These people, as they went about their tasks, looked remarkably healthy: tall, long-limbed, confident, keen-faced, their skin clear and unlined. But there were very few children here.

  Jahna passed the shaman’s hut. The big, scary man was nowhere to be seen. He was probably sleeping off the exertions of last night, when once more he had danced and chanted his way into the trance world. Outside his hut was scattered a handful of broken shoulder blades, from deer and horses. Some of them had been mounted on slotted sticks and held in a fire. Even at a glance Jahna could read the fortunes told in their patterns of scorching; today would indeed be a good day for hunting by the water.

  Though their language abilities were hugely advanced, the people were reaching out to distant and unknowable gods. And so they fell back on older instincts. As Pebble had once known, communication in a situation where you had no or limited language had to be simple, exaggerated, repetitious, unequivocal — that is, ritualistic. And, as Pebble had once tried to convince his father he spoke the truth about approaching strangers, so the shaman now labored to make his indifferent gods hear, understand, and respond. It was hard work. Nobody resented him sleeping late.

  Millo and Jahna reached the hut they shared with their father, mother, infant sister, and aunts. Mesni, their mother, was here in the gloom. She was smoking megaloceros meat, scavenged from a lion kill a few days earlier.

  “Mesni, Mesni!” Millo ran to his mother and grabbed her legs. “We’re going to the sea! Are you coming?”

  Millo hugged her son. “Not today,” she said, smiling. “Today it’s my turn to fix the meat. Your poor, poor mother. Don’t you feel sorry for her?”

  “Bye,” Millo snapped, and he turned tail and ran out of the hut.

  Mesni humphed, pulling a pretend-offended face, and continued patiently working.

  Most of the megaloceros carcass had been stored in a pit dug into the permafrost. Mesni used a stone knife to slice the meat paper-thin, then hung it up on a wooden frame beside the hearth. In a few days’ time the slices would be perfectly preserved; they were a source of protein that could be stored for many months. But Jahna’s nose wrinkled at the smell of the meat. Only in the last month had the spring opened up enough to enable them to hunt and forage and to bring home fresh meat; before that, they had all endured a long winter consuming the dried remnants of last season, and Ja
hna had grown thoroughly sick of the leathery, tasteless stuff.

  She stroked her mother’s back. “Don’t worry. I will stay with you and smoke meat all day while Millo rides the sled.”

  “I’m sure you would love that. You’ve done your duty by offering. Here.” Mesni gave Jahna a bundle of meat wrapped in skin. “Don’t let your father starve his wretched bonehead runners. You know what he’s like. And I wouldn’t trust him with these.” She gave Jahna a handful of dried eulachon.

  These were sardinelike fish, so rich in fat you could stand them on end and burn them like a candle. More parochially you could boil out the grease to use as a sauce, medicine, and even mosquito repellent — or in a pinch you could just eat the fish; the fatty flesh would sustain you for a long time. These precious items were an emergency kit.

  Jahna took the fish solemnly and tucked them into a fold of her jerkin. It was quite a responsibility she had been given — but the soul of her grandmother, riding in her heart, gave her the confidence to accept that responsibility. She kissed her mother. “I’ll look after everybody,” she promised.

  “I know. Now go help get ready. Go on.”

  Jahna grabbed her favorite harpoon and followed Millo out of the hut.

  The hunting party briskly loaded up the sled with nets, harpoons, lines, sleeping bags made of reindeer hide, and other provisions. The sled was a sturdy affair, already ten years old, a wooden frame mounted on long runners of mammoth ivory. The lashing and lines were made from tough sealskin, and the reins that would control the bonehead haulers were made of mammoth leather. The sled was useful only in the early spring or late autumn, when the ground was frozen or snow-covered; in the late spring and summer, the ground grew too boggy for the sled’s runners. Still, in a world where the wheel had yet to be invented and the horse yet to be tamed, this sled of wood and ivory was the height of transportation technology.

  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 jou
rney, 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.