Evolution

Jana, his face burning, found himself staring into the deep, handsome eyes of Osu, Agema’s brother. More of her siblings surrounded him. Jana tried to control his anger. 'You tripped me.'

When Osu made out the genuine anger in Jana’s eyes his face clouded. 'I didn’t mean disrespect,' he said gently.

His decency only made it worse. Jana bent to pick up the mussels.

Osu said, 'Here, let me help.'

Jana snapped, 'I don’t need your help. They’re for—'

'Ah. For my sister?' Osu looked up at the girl, and Jana saw him wink.

Another of the brothers — Salo, impossibly tall, impossibly good-looking — stepped forward. 'Look, fellow, if you want to impress her, this is what you ought to bring home.' And he showed Jana a mussel shell — a huge one, so big he needed two hands to hold it.

Jana had never seen a mussel of such a size, not in a lifetime of gathering the mollusks — in fact nobody alive had seen such a giant. 'Where did you find this?'

Salo nodded vaguely. 'Along the beach, in an old midden. I’m thinking of using it as a bowl.'

Osu nodded. 'Giant mussels, eh? Ejan and Rocha must have eaten well in those days. All gone now, of course. Bring back one of those, little kangaroo, and Agema will open her legs faster than a mussel on the fire opens its shell.'

More laughter. Jana saw that Agema was hiding her face, but her shoulders were shaking. Again that uncontrollable anger surged, and Jana knew he had to get out of there before he behaved like a child by displaying his anger — or, even worse, by striking one of these infuriating brothers.

He gathered up his mussels and got out with as much dignity as he could muster. But even as he left he could hear Osu’s gently mocking voice: 'I hear his dick is as bent as his leg.'

Jana got very little sleep that night. But, as he lay awake, he knew what he had to do.

He rose before dawn. He gathered up his ropes, fire-hardened spears, bow, arrows, and fire tools, and crept out of the encampment.

Following the bank of a river, he worked his way inland.

As Jana stepped silently across the dead matter of the forest floor, he disturbed a cluster of scurrying, rodentlike creatures. They were a kind of kangaroo. They peered at him with large, resentful eyes before fleeing. He barely noticed them as he pushed on.

Many of the trees in the sparse riverbank forest were eucalyptus, wreathed by strips of half-shed bark. These peculiar trees, like much of the flora, were distant descendants of Gondwanaland vegetation, stranded when this raft continent had broken away from the other southern lands. And through the river water, shaded by the trees, cruised more relics of ancient times. They were crocodiles, rafted here like the eucalyptus — but unlike the trees, and like their cousins elsewhere, they were barely changed by time.

He came to a clearing.

A family of four-legged creatures the size of rhinos was working its way across the clearing. They had small ears, stubby tails, and they walked on flat feet, like bears. They were making a mess of the forest floor: With their tusklike lower teeth, they scraped steadily at the ground, seeking the salt bushes they favored. These herbivorous marsupials were diprotodons — a kind of giant wombat.

There were many kinds of kangaroo here. Some of the smaller kinds searched for grass and low vegetation on the ground. But the larger ones were much taller than Jana; these giants had grown so tall so they could browse at the trees’ foliage. As they searched for food the kangaroos levered themselves forward using their forelegs, tails, and those powerful hind legs, a unique means of locomotion. They were slow and oddly graceful despite their size.

But now, from the forest on the far side of the clearing, there was a roar. The kangaroos, large and small, turned and fled, bouncing away with their extraordinary elastic leaps. The originator of the roar loped casually into the clearing. It looked like a lion, but it was not a close relation of any cat. It was a thylacoleo — another marsupial, like the diprotodons and the kangaroos — but this one was a carnivorous predator, molded into its leonine form by identical opportunities and roles. The catlike creature moved with silky stealth around the clearing, its cold eyes studying its prey.

Jana moved cautiously around the fringe of the clearing, eyeing the thylacoleo.

While in the rest of the world the placental mammals had become dominant, Australia had become a continent-sized laboratory of marsupial adaptation. There were carnivorous kangaroos that hunted in ferocious, high-bounding packs. There were strange creatures unlike any elsewhere: huge relatives of the platypus, giant tortoises the size of family cars, land-going crocodiles. And in the forests walked immense monitor lizards — related to the komodo dragons of Asia, but much larger — an eerie Cretaceous memory, one-ton carnivorous lizards big enough to take out a kangaroo, or a human.

Jana moved on, his thoughts far away.

Jana had known Agema all her life, as she had known him; here in this tight community everybody knew everybody else. But it was only in the last year, as she had passed seventeen, that he had become so attracted to her. Even now he could not have said what it was about her that had so enthralled him. She was not tall, not very shapely, with breasts that would always be small, hips and buttocks too wide, and her face was a wide moon of flesh with a small nose and downturned mouth. But there was about her a quietness, like the quiet of the sea when your canoe was far from land, a stillness masking depths and richness.

He had barely spoken to her of this. He had barely spoken to her at all, in fact, for a year, since becoming aware of her in this way.

What really hurt was that Osu and those other braying idiots were right to goad him, to point up his limping, his unsuitability as a husband for Agema. They were trying to protect their sister from a poor match. He knew that his damaged leg was no real impediment to his making a living, to his being able to help Agema raise the kids he wanted to share with her so badly, but what he had to do was convince her and her family of that.

And he was never going to do that by scraping mussels off rocks like a child. He was going to have to hunt, that was all. He was going to have to go out and bring home some big game — and he would have to do it alone, so he could prove to Agema and the rest that he was as strong, resourceful, and capable as any man.

The bulk of the people’s food came from hunting small creatures or just simple foraging, in the sea, the river, and the coastal strip of forest: straightforward, low-risk, unspectacular stuff. Hunting bigger prey was pretty much a male preserve, a risky game that gave men and boys the chance to show off their fitness, just as it always had. And this ancient game was what Jana was going to have to play now.

Of course he wasn’t foolish enough to take on anything too massive alone. The largest animals could be brought down only by a cooperative hunt. But there was one target that a solo hunter could bring home.

He kept walking, heading deeper into the forest.

At length he came to another clearing. And here he spotted what he wanted.

He had found a nest of roughly assembled foliage inside of which a dozen eggs had been carefully arranged. What made the nest extraordinary was its size — probably Jana himself could have laid down inside it — and some of those eggs were as big as Jana’s skull. Purga, if she could have seen this tremendous structure, might have believed that the dinosaurs had indeed returned.

Jana laid his trap with skill. He scouted around the clearing until he spotted the mother bird’s huge splay-footed tracks. He followed the tracks a little way into the forest. Then he strung ropes between the trees across the tracks, and he took his double-pointed spears and rammed them into the ground.

After that, it was time to set the fire.

It was quick work to gather bits of dry wood. To create a flame he used a tiny bow to rotate a stick of wood in a socket in a small log. He nursed the blaze with bits of kindling. When the fire had caught he thrust torches into the flames, and hurled them around the forest.

Everywhere the torches landed, flames blossomed like deadly flowers.

Birds rose with a shriek, fleeing the rising smoke, and ratty little kangaroos scurried at his feet, their eyes wide with alarm. By the time he had retreated to the clearing the flames were spreading, the separate pockets of fire joining up.

At last a huge bipedal form came screeching out of the forest. She bristled with dark feathers, her head held up on a long neck, and her muscular legs seemed to make the ground shake as she ran. She was a genyornis, a giant flightless bird twice the size of an emu. In fact she was one of the largest birds that would ever live. But she was terrified, Jana could see that: her eyes were wide; her startlingly small beak gaped.

And the bird’s great feet caught in his rope. She plummeted forward toward the ground. Her own momentum skewered her neatly on Jana’s spear. She did not die immediately. Trapped, the bloody spear protruding from her back, the genyornis flapped her feeble, useless wings. A deep part of her awareness experienced a kind of regret that her remote ancestors had given up the gift of the air. But now here was a capering, yelling hominid, and an ax that fell.

The flames were spreading. Jana was going to have to hurry his butchery and get out of here.

There had been fires in Australia before the arrival of humans, of course. They had come mostly in the monsoon season, when there were many lightning strikes. Some fire-resistant species of plants had developed in response. But they were not widespread or dominant.

But now things were changing. Everywhere they went the people burned, to encourage the growth of edible plants and to drive out game. The vegetation had already begun to adapt. Grasses, as hardy and prevalent as they were everywhere, were able to burn fiercely and yet survive. Candlebark eucalyptus trees had actually evolved to carry flame; bits of bark would break off and, borne by the wind, ignite new blazes tens of kilometers away. But for each winner there were many, many losers. The more fire-sensitive woody plants couldn’t compete in the new conditions. Cypress pines, which had once been prevalent, were becoming rare. Even some plants prized by the people as food sources, like some fruiting shrubs, were extinguished. And as their habitats were scorched, animal communities imploded.

From Ejan’s original pinprick landing site, people were diffusing out, generation by generation, along the coasts and river courses. It was as if a great wave of fire and smoke were spreading out from Australia’s northwestern fringe, working across the interior of this vast red land. And before this front of destruction, the old life succumbed. The loss of the giant mussels had been just the first of the extinctions.

As Jana left the forest the fire still blazed, spreading rapidly, and great pillars of smoke towered into the sky. Uninterested, he did not turn back.

He could not carry the whole bird home, of course. But then, bringing back food wasn’t really the point. And when Jana walked into his camp with the genyornis’s head mounted on a spear, he was gratified by the slaps of approval from Osu and the others — and by the shy acceptance of his gifts by Agema.

III New South Wales, Australia. Circa 47,000 years before present.

The bark canoe sat motionless on the lake’s murky water.

Jo’on and his wife, Leda, were fishing. Jo’on was standing up, holding his spear ready for the fish. The spear was tipped with wallaby bone, ground sharp and set in gum resin. Leda had made her line from pounded bark fiber, and had fitted it with a hook made from a bit of shell. But the hooks were brittle, the line weak, so Leda’s intention was to lead in a hooked fish as gently as possible, while Jo’on stood ready to spear it.