She gathered up her gear. She equipped herself with stone tools and spears from the Ham encampment — without guilt, for the Hams seemed to make most of their tools as they needed them and then abandoned them. With her hat of woven grasses and her poncho of animal skin, all draped over the remnants of her air force coverall, she must look like the wild woman of the woods, she thought.
She attempted to say goodbye to the Ham who had first found her, and to some of the others she had gotten to know. But she was met with only blankness or bafflement.
After all, since nobody ever went anywhere, nobody said goodbye in a Ham community — except maybe at death.
She slipped into the forest.
Shadow:
Thanks to extended pulses of volcanism, this small world was steadily warming, and temperate forests were shrinking back in favour of more open grasslands. The range of Shadow’s family group was only a little smaller than the remnant of forest to which they clung; with invisible, unconscious skill, Shadow’s elders had always guided her away from the exposed fringes of the forest.
But now her people had turned on Shadow. And to escape them she would have to leave her forest home.
Emerging from the trees, she found herself at the foot of a shallow forest covered slope, a foothill of taller mountains which reared up behind her. She faced a wide plain, a range of open, park-like savannah, grasslands punctuated by stands of trees. To the right of the plain a broad river ran, sluggish and brown. Away to the left a range of more rocky hills rose, their lower slopes coated with a thick carpet of forest. The hills marched away m a subtly curving ring; they were the rim mountains of a small crater.
She longed to slink back into the dark cool womb of the woods behind her.
She looked again at that smudge of green covering the crater wall. Forest: the only other patch of it in her vision. She thought of food and water, nests high in the trees.
She took a step out into the open.
The sun’s heat was like a warm hand on her scalp. She saw her shadow at her feet, shrunken by the height of the sun. The forest behind her tugged at her heart like the call of her mother. But she did not turn back.
She ran forward, alone, her footsteps singing in the grass.
She was soon hot, panting, dreadfully thirsty. Her thick fur trapped the heat of the sun. Her feet ached as they pounded the ground. Her arms dangled uselessly at her side; she longed to grasp, to climb. But there was nothing here to climb. She ran on, clumsy, determined, over ground that shone red through sparse yellow grass.
But as she ran she turned this way and that, fearing predators. A cat or a hyena would have little difficulty outrunning her, and still less in bringing her down. And she watched those remote woods. To her dismay they seemed to come no closer, no matter how hard she ran.
She came to a clear, shallow stream.
Unbearably thirsty, panting, she waded straight into the water. The stream was deliciously cool. The bed was of cobbles, laced with green growing things that streamed in the water. At its deepest the stream came up a little way beyond her knees.
She slid forward until she was on all fours. She rolled on her back, letting the water soak into her fur. She raised handfuls of water to her mouth. The water, leaking from her fingers, had a greenish tinge, and it was a little sour, but it was cold. She drank deeply, letting the water wash away the dust in her mouth and nose. She saw a thin trail of dust and blood seeping away from her.
A thin mucus clung to her wet hand. She saw that it contained tiny, almost transparent shrimps. She scraped the shrimps off her palm and popped them in her mouth. Their taste was sharp and creamy and delicious.
She stood up. With her gravid belly stroking the surface of the stream, she put her hands in the water, open like a scoop. She watched carefully as the water trickled through her fingers, and when the little crustaceans struck her palm she closed her hands around them.
Her thoughts dissolved, becoming pink and blue, like the sky, like the shrimp.
When she had had her fill of shrimp she clambered out of the stream, her fur dripping. She reclined on the bank. She folded her legs and inspected her feet. They were bruised and cut, and a big blister had swollen up on one toe. She washed her feet clean of the last of the grit between her toes, and then inspected the blister curiously; when she poked it with a fingernail the clear liquid in it moved around, accompanied by a sharp pain.
She heard a distant growl.
Startled, she tucked her feet underneath her, resting her knuckles on the ground. She peered around at the open plain.
The shadows, of rocks and isolated trees, had grown long. She had forgotten where she was: while she had played in the water, the day had worn away. She mewled and wrapped her long arms around her torso. She did not want to return to the running. But every instinct in her screamed that she must get off the ground before night fell.
She climbed out of the stream and began running towards the crater rim hills.
The light faded, terribly rapidly. Her shadow stretched out before her, and then dissolved into greyness.
Her face began to itch, as if some insect was working its way into her skin. She scratched her cheeks and brow. She looked for someone to groom her. But there was nobody here, and the itch wouldn’t go away.
Still she ran, thirsty, dusty, exhausted.
And still those growls came, echoing across the savannah: the voices of predators calling to each other, marking out the territory they claimed.
It grew darker. The earth climbed in the sky. The land became drenched in a silvery blueness.
There was a growl, right in front other. She glimpsed yellow eyes, like two miniature suns.
She screamed. She picked up handfuls of dirt and threw them at the yellow eyes. There was a howl.
She turned and ran, not caring where she went. But her gait was waddling and stiff, her feet broken and sore.
She could hear steady, purposeful footsteps behind her.
Memories clattered through her mind: of a bite that had crushed the skull of a child in a moment, of the remains of a predator’s feast, bloody limbs and carcass, of the screams of a victim taken live to a nest, where cubs had fed long into the night. She screamed and ran and ran.
There was light ahead of her.
She ran towards the light, panting and hooting. She thought of daybreak in a safe tree top, her nest warm under her, her mother’s massive body close by.
The light was yellow, and it flickered, and shadows moved before it. A fire.
She heard those scampering footsteps. There was a hot, panting breath on her neck.
A stone zinged through the air, past her head. It clattered against a rock, harmlessly. Now another stone flew. It caught her in the chest, knocking her flat on her back.
Behind her, the chasing cat yelped and yowled. When she sat up and turned, she saw its lithe silhouette sliding across the blue, glittering grass.
“Elf Elf away.”
She yelled and scrabbled in the dirt.
She found herself looking up at a tall figure — a woman, perhaps twice as tall as she was, taller even than Big Boss had been, her torso long and ugly. She had small flat breasts. She was hairless, save for knots of hair on her head and between her legs. She had a small face and wide nose, and she carried a stick that she was pointing at Shadow.
She was a Runner.
Cautiously Shadow got to her feet. She jabbered at the woman, a series of intense pants, hoots, screeches and cries. She expected the woman to respond. They would chatter together, sounds without words, their cries slowly matching in pitch and intensity as they greeted each other.
But the woman jabbed with the stick, coming close to piercing Shadow’s skin. “Elf Elf away!”
Shadow feared the stick. But before her was the yellow fire. She could hear the fire pop and crackle, and she could smell food, the sharpness of leaves and burned meat. Many people were there — all tall and skinny and hairless like this stretched-out woman, but people nevertheless. Behind her there was only the darkness of the savannah, like a vast black mouth waiting to swallow her.
She took a pace towards the woman, hands outstretched. She tried to groom her, reaching for the hair on the woman’s head.
The sharp stick jabbed in her shoulder. Again Shadow was thrown back into the dirt. She poked a finger in her latest wound; blood seeped slowly from it, soaking her fur. She whimpered in misery. The sharp noses of the cats would soon detect the blood.
Still the woman stood over her, arms akimbo, stick poised for another thrust.
Shadow tried to stand. A searing pain clamped around her stomach, making her stumble to the crimson dirt. She cried out, and beat her fists on her betraying belly. She looked up at the threatening, curious woman. She whimpered. She held out her feet, and flexed her toes. Helpless, she was reduced to the gestures of an infant.
The woman lowered the stick. She crouched down. Clear eyes looked into Shadow’s. She reached out with her hand and stroked Shadow’s fur. She touched the wounded shoulder, and the hand came away bloody; the woman wiped it in the dirt at her feet. Then she ran a curious hand over the bump in Shadow’s belly.
Again Shadow reached for the woman’s scalp and crotch to groom her. But the woman flinched back.
Shadow dropped her head, her energy exhausted. She lay in the dirt, on her back, her arms and legs splayed; Shadow was beaten.
The woman stared at her a while longer. Then she walked away, towards the fire.
Shadow curled over on her side.
Something hit her chest. She flinched back.
It was a piece of meat. It lay on the ground before her. She saw it had been cut from an animal — perhaps an antelope — by a sharp-edged stone. And people had bitten into it already; she saw where it had been ripped and torn by teeth. But still it was meat, a piece as big as her hand. She crammed it into her mouth, tearing at it with hands and teeth.
When she was done she lay down once more. The ground was hard and dusty, and she longed for the springy platform of a nest. But her arm made a pillow for her head.
Suspended between black night and the flickering fire light, she sank into redness.
Reid Malenfant:
On the walk through the forest with McCann, this oddball English guy, Malenfant got fixated on McCann’s crossbow.
The crossbow, made purely of wood, was heavy. There was a long underslung trigger that neatly lifted a bowstring out of the notch. The trigger mechanism worked smoothly. The string itself was made of twisted vine, very fine, very strong. But there was no groove to direct the bolt. And the bolts themselves seemed crude to Malenfant: about as long as a pencil, but a lot thinner, and with a flight made from a single leaf, tucked into a slice in the wooden bolt, just one plane. It was hard to see how you could make an accurate shot with such a thing. But as they walked McCann did just that, over and over, apparently pleased to have an audience.
Nemoto’s silent contempt for all this was obvious. Malenfant didn’t care. His mind was tired of all the strangeness; to play with a gadget for a while was therapy.
