Jo’on was forty years old. He was scrawny, but his wrinkled face was good-humored, though lined by a lifetime of hard work. And he was proud of his boat.
The canoe had been made by cutting a long oval of bark from a eucalyptus and tying up its ends to make bow and stern. The gunwale was reinforced with a stick sewn on with vegetable fiber, and shorter sticks served as spreaders. The cracks and seams were caulked with clay and gum resin. The canoe was unstable, though; low in the water it flexed with every ripple and leaked enthusiastically. But, leaky or not, with a little skill you could handle this canoe even in rough water. And if it was crudely finished, its main beauty was its simplicity; Jo’on had knocked it together in a day.
Jo’on’s ancestors, starting with Ejan’s very first landing, had walked right across Australia, from the northwest to this southeast corner, right across the continent’s arid center. But they had never lost the knack for building a fine boat. Jo’on’s canoe even had a fire, burning on a slab of wet clay sitting on the bottom, so they could cook the crayfish they caught.
Or could have, if they had caught any.
Jo’on didn’t really care. He could have stood here in the seductive silence of his boat all day, whether the fish came to see him or not. Even the crocodiles that slid past, eyes glinting, failed to disturb his equilibrium. It was better than being back in the camp by the shore, where kids ran everywhere, men boasted, and women ground roots. Not to mention the yapping dingoes. In his opinion those half-wild dogs were more of a nuisance than they were worth, even if they did sometimes help flush out game.
Leda’s patience snapped. With a snort of disgust she hurled her line into the water. 'Stupid fish.'
Jo’on sat down before her. 'Now, Leda. The fish are just shy today. You shouldn’t have thrown away your line. We’ll have to—'
'And stupid, useless, leaking boat!' She kicked at the puddle of river water that lay in the flexing bottom of the boat, splashing him.
He sighed, fetched a bowl of carved wood, and began to bail. He kept his counsel, hoping to let her calm down.
Fish entrails were piled on Leda’s head, slowly frying in the sun and leaking foul-smelling oil over her body and head. The oil kept away the mosquitoes that plagued the lake at this time of year. Her small nose was screwed up, her mouth a pucker. Only a year younger than Jo’on, as she aged she had become a heavy, nervous woman, quick to anger.
She had never looked uglier, he thought. And yet he knew he would never leave her. He remembered as if it were yesterday the day he had had to take her youngest child off her — he had smashed its head with a rock, then thrown its body on the fire — and the day only a few moons later when he had been forced to induce an abortion, thumping her belly until the child came out to see the world too early.
She had understood why he had had to take the children away. The people had been on the march, and she was already laden with a barely weaned toddler. She could not have afforded to bear another child. She had known all that. She had not even formed close bonds with either of her lost children; they had been taken too early for that. Yet those incidents had shaped her personality, set its pattern forever like the cracked mud of a dried-up lake bed. And, for the pain she suffered, she blamed Jo’on.
'We have to do better than this,' she snapped now.
'Umm.' He stroked his chin. 'A thicker line? Or maybe—'
'I’m not talking about thicker lines, you crocodile turd.
He closed his eyes, suppressing another sigh. Alli, Alli, Alli: some days all he seemed to hear was the name of her older brother, so much smarter than Jo’on, not to mention better-looking, who lived life so expertly. 'Shame you couldn’t have your kids by him,' he muttered.
She snapped like a dingo. 'What did you say?'
'Never mind. Leda, be reasonable. We don’t have any flint left.'
'Then get some. Go to the coast and trade.'
He restrained an impulse to argue. After all, stripped of the insults, her suggestion wasn’t a bad one; the hundred-kilometer route to the sea was well trodden. 'All right. I’ll ask Alli to come with me—'
'No,' she said, and now she looked away.
He frowned. 'Why not? You spoke to your brother yesterday, before the dancing. What did you say to him?'
Her mouth pinched tighter. 'We had words.'
'Words. What about?' Now he was growing irritated. 'About me? Have you been insulting me before your brother again?'
'Yes,' she hissed now. 'Yes, if you must know. So if you don’t want to look like a foolish boy in front of everybody you should keep away from him. Go yourself.'
'But such a journey…'
He had no choice, in the end, but to prepare for a solitary walk to the coast. But before he left he found out the truth. When Leda spoke to Alli, she hadn’t been attacking Jo’on, but
When he set off a couple of the dingoes followed him out of the encampment. He threw rocks at them until they backed off, snarling.
Away from the lake, he walked into silence. The ground was flat and red, littered with ghost-white spinifex grass. Nothing moved save his own puddle of shadow at his feet. There were no people, not as far as he could see, all the way to the horizon.
Australia would always be a marginal place to live. After five thousand years of human habitation there were less than three hundred thousand people in the whole continent — only one person for every twenty-five square kilometers — and most of them were concentrated around the coasts, the riverbanks, and lakes. And in the great red heart of the continent, the vast, ancient limestone plain and saltbush desert, less than twenty thousand people lived.
But humans, though sparse, had covered Australia in a thin web of their culture, in middens and hearths and shells, in images scrawled in the crimson rocks. And Jo’on had the confidence, even alone, even aged a creaky forty, to walk out naked into the red dust, armed only with his spear and woomera. He was confident because his family’s knowledge was soaked into the landscape.
He was following the coiled trail of the ancestral snake: the first snake of all, which, it was said, had greeted Ejan on his first landing in his boat from the west. And every centimeter of the trail was laden with story, which he chanted to himself as he walked. The story was a codification of the people’s knowledge of the land: It was a map story, very specific and complete.
The most important details concerned water sources. There was a tale attached to every category of waterhole and a variety of rock clefts and cisterns, hollow trees and dew traps. The first source he stopped at, in fact, was a slow seepage. Its particular story was of how in days gone by you would often see huge kangaroos gathered here, fascinated by the water and so easy to kill. But now the kangaroos were gone, leaving only the battered remnant of a eucalyptus as guardian of the water.
And so on. To Jo’on the land was as crammed with vivid detail as if it had been painted over with signposts and arrows — even though he had walked this way only once before in his life.
Such tales were the beginning of the Dreamtime. The tales would last as long as Jo’on’s descendants kept their independent culture alive, mutating, growing steadily more elaborate — and yet always retaining a core of truth. It would always be possible to use the story of the ancestral snake to find water and food.
And no matter how far the people wandered, how deep into time they sank, it would always be possible to trace the Dreamtime trails back across the landscape, back to the northwest, to the place where Ejan and his sister had made their first footfalls.
Still, for all this oral wisdom, Jo’on could not know that this land was emptier, far emptier, than when his remote ancestor had first arrived here.
After a day’s walking he reached a patch of forest, as he knew he would. Here he intended to do some hunting, to round out his store of trade goods with meat, before passing on to the coast. He moved silently into the forest.
He quickly found a treat: wild honey, retrieved from a hive hanging from a gum tree. As he dismantled the hive a blacksnake approached him, but he was able to grab its tail and crack it like a whip, easily smashing its head on a branch.
His greatest triumph that evening was spotting a goanna — a varanid lizard a couple of paces long. On seeing him the goanna took fright and hid in a hollowed-out log. But Jo’on had patience. As soon as the goanna had spotted him, he froze in midstride. Then he stood unblinking, as the sun sank further into the west, and the soil glowed still more brightly crimson. He saw the goanna’s flickering tongue probing cautiously out of the log. Everybody knew goannas liked to taste the air to see if predators or prey were nearby. Still Jo’on stood still as a lump of rock; there was no wind, and his scent would not carry to the goanna.
At last, as he knew it would, the goanna’s slow, patient brain forgot Jo’on was there. It scuttled out of the cover of its log. His spear got it in a single strike, pinning it to the ground.
At the foot of a eucalyptus, Jo’on made a fire with a rubbing stick. He briskly skinned and gutted the goanna, softened its flesh in the fire, and enjoyed a rich meal. Above him the sparks from the fire rose up into the towering dark.
When he woke in the dawn, the fire had subsided, but it was still alight. He yawned, stretched, voided briskly, and munched down a little more of the goanna.
Then he made a torch of dead wood, lit it in his hearth, and began to walk through the forest, setting fires. He looked especially for hollow trees that would burn well, and set alight the detritus at their roots.
After all this time the basic strategy of the forest hunters had not changed: to use fire to flush out game.
The smoke soon forced out possums, lizards, and marsupial rats from inside the trunks. They were small creatures all, but he managed to club some of them, and added their little corpses to the pile he accumulated close to his original hearth. But to impress the fisher folk by the sea he needed larger game than this. So he began to roam wider through the forest, setting alight more trees and undergrowth.
Gradually the flames spread and merged, self-organizing, feeding on each other’s energy, generating draughts and winds that fed back to intensify the fires further. Soon the separate blazes were merging into a bushfire, a writhing wall of flame that moved forward faster than a human could run.
But Jo’on, by that time, was safely out of the forest. And as the treetops exploded into flame as if they were made of magnesium, he stood ready with his spear-thrower.
At last the animals started to rush out of the blazing forest pocket. There were kangaroos, possums, lizards, and many marsupial rats, all terrified. They ran in all directions. Some, blinded and bewildered, came dashing straight toward Jo’on. He ignored the small, fast-moving creatures. But here came two large animals, a pair of red kangaroos bounding with extraordinary speed toward him. He took his spear, lodged it in his grandfather’s spear-thrower. He waited; he would get only one chance.
At the last moment the kangaroos saw him and veered away. His spear sailed uselessly into the smoky air.
Yelling his frustration he ran to retrieve his weapon. Cursing Leda’s stubbornness and his own foolishness, he set his spear in the thrower and settled down to wait once more. But he knew that his best chance was already gone. He would have to make do with his pitiful pile of possums and lizards, because there were no large animals left to kill.
The goanna Jo’on had trapped was a relative of the giant lizard carnivores that had once stalked the red center of the continent. This hapless wretch had been a fraction of the size of those immense ancestors; the giants had all gone, hunted and burned to extinction. The red kangaroos he had tried to trap were similarly diminished echoes of mighty lineages. All the big ones had been killed off. Those that survived now were the small, fast-moving, fast-breeding creatures able to outrun fires and the hunters’ spears.
Since Ejan’s arrival, fifty-five species of large backboned animals had gone into the dark. Across the continent, in fact, every creature larger than a human had disappeared.
Eventually Jo’on reached the sea. He had come to the eastern coast of Australia, not far from the place that would one day be called Sydney. The light here, so much brighter than inland, dazzled his eyes, the stinks of salt and seaweed and fish overpowered his nose, and the restless grumbling of the sea filled his ears. After his trek across the dusty red center he wasn’t accustomed to so much sensory clamor.
As he descended to the shore he made out people working the sea, in canoes and on rafts. In the bright light off the sea, they were slender upright figures working with their lines and nets
