When the morning came, everyone knew that Elephant had been taken.
Capo peered with fascination at the scuffed, hair-strewn gravel patch where Elephant had briefly struggled, at the line of bloody paw marks, already dried to brown, that led away into the distance. He felt a vague regret at the loss of Elephant. It seemed baffling that he would never again see that clumsy youth with his stiff, awkward attempts at grooming, his clumsy fumbling as he tried to figure out how to get the flesh out of an oil palm nut.
But before the day was done, only Elephant’s mother would remember him. And when she was dead in her turn, there would be nothing to say he had ever existed, and he would be gone into the final blank darkness that had swallowed up all of his ancestors, every one.
Elephant had paid the price of the troop’s survival. Capo felt a cold relief. Without hesitation, without even performing the follow-me display, Capo moved down the slope and out onto the salt flats.
III
The next day they had to cross the salt. Under a washed-out blue-white sky the pan spread almost to Capo’s horizon, where hills, trees, and marshes crowded. It was as if this gray sheet were a flaw in the world.
The salt, lying over hard, grayish mud, was broadly flat, but the surface had texture, streaked here and there by swooping concentric lines that crowded to central knots. In one place an underground spring had caused the salt to billow up in great blocks that the apes had to clamber over.
But nothing grew, here on the salt. There weren’t even any tracks. Nothing moved save the apes, no rabbits or rodents, not even an insect. The wind moaned across this hard mineral stage, nowhere broken by the rustle of bushes and trees, the hiss of grass.
But still Capo kept on, for there was nothing else to do.
It took hours to cross the salt pan. But at last, his feet and hands aching, Capo found himself reluctantly climbing a ridge. At the crest of the ridge there was a belt of forest — even if it was a dense, uncomfortable-looking kind of forest.
Capo hesitated, facing the forest. He was overheated; his legs and feet were bleeding from a dozen small lesions. Then he pushed forward awkwardly and entered the forest’s green gloom.
The ground was hidden by a tangle of roots, branches, moss, and leaves. Wild celery grew in clumps everywhere. Although it was around noon, the air here was cold, made damp by a faint mist like a morning fog. The tree trunks were clammy, and thick lichen and moss left uncomfortable green streaks on his palms. The dampness seemed to dig through his fur. But after the aridity of the salt pan he relished the close, comforting tangle of green around him, and he devoured the leaves, fruit, and fungi he was able to pluck from the ground around him. And he felt safe from predators. Surely there was nothing that could strike at the hungry, weary band in this green density.
But now he saw hulking brown-black shapes just ahead, dimly visible through the tangled green. He froze.
A huge arm reached out to a branch wider than Capo’s thigh. Muscles worked in a great mound of shoulder, and the branch was snapped in two as easily as Capo might snap off a twig to clean his teeth. Giant fingers plucked leaves from the nearby branches and pushed them steadily into immense jaws. The whole head worked as the big animal chewed, heavy muscles working the skull and jaw together.
The nearest creature was an ape, as Capo was, a male — and yet unlike Capo. The big male watched the odd, scrawny little apes without curiosity. He looked powerful, threatening. But he didn’t move. The male, and a small clan of females and infants, did nothing but sit around and feed on leaves and the wild celery that carpeted the forest floor.
This was a gorilla: a remote cousin of Capo’s. His kind had split off from the broader lineages of apes a million years ago. The split had come in a period when another forest had fragmented, isolating the populations it supported. As their habitat shrank to the mountaintops, these apes had turned to a diet of leaves, endlessly abundant even here, and became huge enough to resist the cold — yet they remained oddly graceful, able to move silently through this dense forest.
Though populations of gorillas would later adapt back to lowland conditions, learning to climb trees and subsist off fruit, in a sense their evolutionary story was already over. They had become specialized in their environments, learning to eat food that was so well-defended — covered in hooks, spikes, and stings — that no other creatures competed for it. They could eat nettles, for example, with an elaborate maneuver that involved stripping leaves from a stem, folding in the stinging leaf edges, and popping the whole packet into their mouths.
Sitting in their montane islands, lazily eating their leaves, they would survive almost unchanged until human times, when the final extinction would overtake them all.
When he was sure the gorillas were no threat, Capo crept away, leading the others onward through the forest.
At last Capo emerged from the far side of the forested ridge.
They had at last clambered out of the arid lowland basin. When he looked south across the plateau he had reached, he faced a rocky, rubble-strewn valley that scoured its way down to lower ground. But there, beyond the valley, he could see the land he had hoped to find: higher than the plain he had left behind, but well watered, glistening with lakes, coated green by grass, and studded with pockets of forest. The shadowy forms of a great herd of herbivores — proboscideans, perhaps — drifted with stately grandeur across the lush plain.
With a hoot of triumph Capo capered, vaulted over rocks, drummed on the stony ground, and shit explosively, spraying the dry boulders with his stink.
His followers responded to Capo’s display only listlessly. They were hungry and dreadfully thirsty. Capo was exhausted himself. But he displayed anyway, obeying a sound instinct that every triumph, however small, should be celebrated.
But now he had climbed so high that the remote, persistent growling from the west had grown louder. Dimly curious, Capo turned and looked that way.
From this elevated place he could see a long way. He made out a remote turbulence, a white billowing. It seemed to hover above the ground like a boiling cloud. He was actually seeing a kind of mirage, a very remote vision carried to him by refraction in the warming air. But the billowing steam clouds were real, though their suspension above the ground was not.
What he was glimpsing was the Strait of Gibraltar, where even now the mightiest waterfall in Earth’s history — with the power and volume of a thousand Niagaras — was thundering over shattered cliffs and into an empty ocean basin. Once the plain from which Capo had climbed had been covered by water two kilometers deep, for it was the floor of the Mediterranean.
Capo had been born in the basin that lay between the coast of Africa, to the south, and Spain, to the north. In fact, he was not very far from the place where a clever dinosaur called Listener, long ago, had stood at the shore of Pangaea and gazed out on the mighty Tethys Sea. Now he had climbed out of the basin to reach Africa proper. But if Listener had seen the birth of the Tethys, Capo was witnessing something like its death. As the ocean levels dropped, this last fragment of the Tethys had become dammed at Gibraltar. Landlocked, the great ocean had evaporated — until at last it emptied, leaving behind a great valley in places five kilometers deep, littered with salt pans.
But as the climate oscillated, the sea level rose again, and Atlantic waters broke through the Gibraltar barrier. Now, the ocean was refilling. But Capo had nothing to fear of giant waves cascading from the west, for even a thousand Niagaras could not refill an ocean overnight. The Gibraltar waters suffused the great basin more gradually, creating great rivers. The old seafloor turned slowly into sodden marshland, where the vegetation slowly died, before the waters rose so high they covered over the ground altogether.
But after each refilling the global ocean levels would drop again, and once again the Mediterranean would evaporate. This would happen as many as
But this trapped ocean’s dryings were having a profound effect on the area Capo lived in — and on Capo’s kind. Before the great dryings, the Sahara region had been densely forested and well watered, and home to many species of apes. But with the climatic pump of the dryings, and in the lengthening rain shadow cast by the more remote Himalayas, the Sahara was becoming increasingly arid. The old forests were breaking up. And with them the communities of apes were splintering, each fragmentary population embarking on its own journey to a new evolutionary destiny — or extinction.
But the great rumbling, the blurred vision of Gibraltar, was too remote to have any meaning for Capo. He turned away, and stumbled down onto the plain.
At last Capo moved off bare rock on to vegetation. He relished the green softness of the grass under his knuckles as he loped forward. As the others tumbled after him they rolled and sprawled, pulling up the long grass around them, relishing the delicious contrast with the hard lifeless rock.
But they weren’t home yet. A stretch of a few hundred meters of open savannah, studded with thorn bushes, separated them from the nearest forest clump — and the plain was not unoccupied.
A group of hyenas worked at a fallen carcass. Bulky, round, it might have been an infant gomphothere, perhaps felled by a chasma. The hyenas snapped and growled at each other as they worked at the scavenged meat, their heads buried in the creature’s stomach, their sleek bodies writhing industriously.
As Capo cowered in the grass, Frond and Finger came up alongside him. They hooted softly, and gave Capo’s backside a perfunctory groom, picking out bits of dust and rock. The younger males were cursorily acknowledging his authority. But Capo could tell they were impatient. Weary, thirsty, hungry, thoroughly spooked by the trek across the openness, they, like the rest of the troop, longed to reach the shelter and provision of the trees. And that was corroding Capo’s hold on them. The tension between the three males was powerful, toxic.
But it was a confrontation conducted in near silence, as the three of them kept their presence concealed from the hyenas.
While Capo still hesitated, it was Frond who made the move. He took one, two tentative shuffles forward. He received a hefty clout on the back of his head from Capo for his defiance. But Frond just bared his teeth, and moved out of reach.
The tall grass stems waved languorously at Frond’s passing, as if he were swimming through a sea of vegetation. And now Frond got up on to his hind legs, poking his head, shoulders, and upper torso out of the grass so he could see better. He was a slim shadow, upright, like a sapling.
The hyenas were still intent on their baby elephant. Frond ducked back into the grass and continued on his way.
At last he reached the nearest stand of trees. Capo, with a mixture of resentment and relief, saw him climb up a tall palm tree, his legs and arms working in synchrony, like components of a smoothly oiled machine. When Frond had reached the top of the palm he hooted softly, calling the others. Then he began plucking nuts from the palm and throwing them down to the ground.
One by one, led by Finger and the senior female, Leaf, the apes scurried through the grass toward the forest pocket.
They were not troubled by the hyenas, though many of the scavengers scented the vulnerable apes. They were fortunate that in the bloody calculations of the hyenas’ small minds, the lure of the immediately available meat outweighed the attraction of attacking these dusty, ragged-looking primates.
Capo tried to make the best of it. He slapped and punched the other males as they loped along, as if the whole thing had been his idea, as if he were directing them in their short migration. The males submitted to his blows, but he sensed a tension about them, a subtle lack of deference that made him uneasy.
On entering the forest, the apes fanned out.
Capo pushed through a bank of slim young trees to find a marshy lake: flat green-blue water surrounded by the comforting green and brown of forest. He hurried down to the water’s edge, pushed his muzzle into the cool liquid, and began to drink.
As the apes reached the water, some of them waded into it, walking upright until they were waist deep. They used their fingers to strain blue-green algae from the water and gobbled it down: a way of feeding that was another little gift of bipedalism. Several youngsters dove headlong into the water and started scraping the accumulated dust out of their fur; they made a terrific hooting and splashing. A flock of birds had been drifting in peace at the heart of the lake, but now they took fright, and clattered thunderously into the sky.
But some of the younger males had gathered together at the water’s edge, Frond and Finger among them. Frond had found a cobble that might serve as a hammer-stone; he was toying with
