Evolution

center. On one side fine barbs had been carved into the surface, pointing away from the direction in which the harpoon would be thrust. Its surface wasn’t roughly finished like his own tools; it looked smooth as skin.

Her harpoon wasn’t her only artifact, he saw now. She wore a scrap of some treated hide around her waist. A thing like a net, woven of vines, perhaps, was slung around her neck. Inside it nestled a collection of worked stones. They looked like flint. Flint was a fine stone, easy to shape, and he had encountered it several times during his trek out of Africa. But there was no flint to be found anywhere near this beach. So how had it got here? His confusion deepened.

But his attention was drawn back to that harpoon point. It was made of bone.

Pebble’s people used bits of broken bone as scrapers or as hammers to finish the fine edges of their stone tools, but they did not try to shape it. Bone was difficult stuff, awkward to handle, liable to split in ways you didn’t anticipate. He had never seen anything like this regularity, this finishing, this ingenuity.

In the future he would always associate her with this marvelous artifact. He would think of her as Harpoon. Unthinking, helplessly curious, he reached out with his long, broad fingers to touch the harpoon’s point.

'Ya!' The woman backed off, grasping the harpoon. At her side, the wolf bared its teeth and growled at him.

Tension immediately rose. Hands had picked up heavy cobbles from the beach.

Pebble raised his arms. 'No no no…' He had to work hard, gesturing and jabbering, to persuade Hands not to hurl his stones. He wasn’t even sure why he did this. He ought to be joining Hands in driving her off. Strangers were nothing but trouble. But the dog, and the woman, had done him no harm.

And she was staring at his crotch.

He glanced down. An impressive erection thrust out. Suddenly he was aware of the pulse that beat in his throat, the hotness of his face, the moistness of his palms. Sex was a commonplace with Green or Cry, and it was usually pleasurable. But with this child-woman, with her flattened, ugly face and her harpoonlike body? If he were to lie on her, he would probably crush her.

But he had not felt like this since his first time, when Green had come to straddle him in the night.

The wolf growled. The woman, Harpoon, scratched the creature’s ruff. 'Ya, ya,' she said gently. She was still looking at Pebble, her teeth showing. She was grinning at him.

Suddenly he felt ashamed, as if he were a boy who could not control his body. He turned and ran into the sea. When the water was deep enough to cover him he plunged forward face first. There, his mouth clamped closed, he grabbed at his erection and tugged it. He ejaculated quickly, the stringy white stuff looping in the water.

He kicked and stood up, gasping for breath. His heart still hammered, but at least the tension had gone. He stalked out of the water. The cuts he had made in his arm the night before had not yet healed, and red blood, diluted by salt water, dripped down his fingers.

The woman had gone. But he could see a trail of footsteps — narrow feet, delicate heels — that led off back the way she must have come, beyond the headland. The dog’s clawed prints followed hers.

Hands and Cry were walking toward him. Cry was studying Pebble uncertainly. Hands called, 'Stranger stranger wolf stranger!' He threw his cobbles down with a clatter, angry. He couldn’t see why Pebble had reacted as he had, why he hadn’t quickly driven off or killed this stranger.

Suddenly Pebble’s dissatisfaction with his life came to a focus. 'Ya, ya!' he snapped. And he turned away from the others and began to walk in the tracks the slender woman had made.

Cry ran after him. 'No, no, trouble! Hut, food, hut.' She even grabbed his hand and pulled it to her belly, and tried to slide it down to her crotch. But he shoved the heel of his hand into her chest, and she fell to the ground where she sprawled, staring forlornly after him.

III

He followed the tracks along the beach. His broad prints covered Harpoon’s, obliterating them.

The shore was crusted with mussels and barnacles and the wrack of the sea: kelp, stranded jellyfish, and hundreds of washed up cuttlefish bones. Soon he was sweating, panting, his hips and knees aching subtly, a forerunner of the joint pains that would plague him as he grew older.

As he calmed down, his normal instincts began to reassert themselves. He remembered he was naked, and alone.

He cast around the beach until he found a large, sharp-edged rock that fit comfortably into his hand. Then, as he walked, he kept close to the water’s edge. Even though the sand here was a soft, soggy mud that clung to his feet, at least there was only one side from which he could be approached.

Still those neat tracks, with the wolf’s padding alongside, arrowed neatly through the softer sand. At last the tracks cut back up the beach. And there, in the shade of a clump of palms, he saw a hut.

He stood for long heartbeats, staring. Nobody was around. Cautiously he approached.

Set above the water’s high-tide marks, the hut was built on a frame of saplings that had been thrust into the ground. The saplings had been woven together at their tops — no, he saw, they had been tied, not woven, tied up with fine bits of sinew. On this frame branches and fronds had been laid and tied into place. Tools and bits of debris, unidentifiable from this distance, lay around the hut’s rounded opening.

The hut was nothing special. It was a little bigger than his own — perhaps big enough for twenty people or more — but that seemed to be the only difference.

His feet crunched softly over the debris on the trampled ground around the hut’s entrance. He stepped inside the hut, eyes wide. There was a rich scent of ash.

It wasn’t dark in here, but suffused by a warm brown light. He saw that a hole had been knocked in one wall, and a piece of hide, scraped thin, had been stretched over it, enough to shut out the wind but not the light. Briefly he inspected the bit of hide, looking for the marks and scrapes of teeth, but saw none. How could you prepare hide without using your teeth?

He looked around. There was dung on the floor: shit from children, what looked like spoor from wolves or hyenas. There was plenty of food litter, mostly clam shells and fish bones. But he also saw animal bones, some with scraps of meat still clinging to them. They were heavily worked, cut and gnawed. They were mostly from small animals, perhaps pigs or small deer, but even that stirred a vague envy. As far as he knew the ferocious folk of the interior kept the produce of the forests and grassy spaces to themselves.

He sat, legs crossed, and peered around, his eyes gradually adapting to the gloom.

He found the remains of a fire, just a circular patch of black on the ground. The ashes were hot, smoldering in places. He cautiously probed its edge with a finger. His finger sank into layers of ash. A pit had been dug into the ground, he saw, like the pits into which you would stick a dead person. But this pit had been made to contain the fire. The ash was thick, and he saw that many, many days and nights of burning had contributed to this dense accumulation. And on the side of the pit closest to the entrance, where the breeze was strongest, a low bank of cobbles had been built up.

It was a hearth, one of the first true hearths to be made anywhere in the world. Pebble had never seen anything like it.

Covering the ground, he saw, were sheets of some brown substance. He touched one of the sheets gingerly. It turned out to be bark. But the bark had been carefully stripped off its tree and somehow shaped, woven, and treated to make this soft blanket. When he lifted the bark blanket he saw a hole in the ground. There was food inside the hole: yams, piled up.

He found a heap of tools. A thick pile of spill showed that this was a place where stone tools were habitually made. He rummaged idly through the tools. Some were only half-finished. But there was a bewildering variety — he saw axes, cleavers, picks, hammer-stones, knives, scrapers, borers — and other designs he didn’t even recognize.

Now he saw what looked like an ordinary ax, a stone head fixed to a handle of wood. But the head was bound by a bit of liana so tightly wound he couldn’t unpick it. He had seen lianas strangle other plants. It was as if someone had put this ax head and its handle into the grip of a living liana, and then waited until the plant had grasped the artifacts, binding them more tightly together than any fingers could manage.

Here was a bit of netting like the one he had seen Harpoon wearing on the beach. It was a bag with tools of stone and bone inside it. He picked the bag up experimentally and lifted it to his shoulder, as he had seen Harpoon do. Pebble’s kind did not make bags. They carried only what they could hold in their hands or sling over their shoulders. He teased at the stringy netting. He thought it might be creepers or lianas. But the fibers had been twisted tightly into a strong rope that was finer than any liana.

He dropped the bag, baffled.

It was like his hut, and yet it was not. For one thing it was strange to have everything separated. At home, you ate where you liked, made your tools where you liked. The space was not divided up. Here there seemed to be one place to eat, one to sleep, one to make the fire, one to work on tools. That was disturbing. And -

'Ko, ko, ko!'

A man had come in through the entrance. Silhouetted against the daylight he was tall, skinny like Harpoon, and had the same bulging dome of a head. There was fear in his weak face, but he raised a spear.

Adrenaline flooded Pebble’s system. He got to his feet quickly, assessing his opponent.

The man, dressed in tied-on skins, was whip thin, with stringy muscles. He would be no match for Pebble’s brute strength. And that weapon was just a spear of carved and hardened wood, light for throwing: It wasn’t a thrusting spear, which was what was needed for fighting in this tight space. Pebble would be able to snap that scrawny neck easily.

But the man, frightened, looked determined. 'Ko, ko, ko!' he yelled again. And he took one step forward. Pebble growled, bracing himself to meet the thrust.

'Ya ya.' Here was Harpoon. She grabbed the man’s arm. He tried to pull away. They began to argue. It was a conversation just as might have occurred in Pebble’s hut: a string of words — none of which he could understand — with no structure or syntax, and only repetition, volume, and gesturing for emphasis. It took a long time, as all such arguments did. But at last the man backed down. He glared at Pebble, spat on the floor of the hut, and stalked out.

Cautiously Harpoon clambered into the hut. Watching Pebble, she sat on the trampled ground. Her eyes were bright in the gloom.

Slowly, Pebble sat before her.

At length Harpoon pushed her slim hand under a bark blanket and pulled out a handful of baobab fruit. She held it out to Pebble. Hesitantly he took it. For long heartbeats they sat in silence, representatives of two human subspecies, with not a word, not a gesture in common.

But at least they weren’t trying to kill each other.

After that day Pebble felt increasingly uncomfortable in his home, with his people.

The stringy folk seemed to accept him. The tall man who had found him in the hut, Ko-Ko — for Pebble would always think of his cries of 'Ko, ko!' 'Get away!' — never quite trusted him, that was clear. But Harpoon seemed to take to him. They worked tools together, she showing off the subtle skills of her delicate fingers, he his immense strength. They peered across the sea at the rich island that still tantalized Pebble.

And they tried to work out each other’s vocabulary. It wasn’t easy. There were many words, such as directional terms like 'west,' which Pebble’s ancestors had never needed.

He even went hunting with her.

These newcomers were by preference scavengers or ambush hunters. With their lithe but feeble frames they used guile rather than brute strength to make their kills, and their weapons of