and spears. These people stuck to the coast, and their main food resource was fish, which was why they were open to trading for meat from the interior.
Jo’on approached the people, his hands empty save for his bits of meat, yelling greetings in his few words of the local language.
The first locals he met were women with nursing infants. They were methodically eating their way through a pile of oysters. They watched him incuriously. As he walked toward them he found himself crunching over oyster shells, all broken open, a layer that grew thicker as he approached the women. Eventually, he saw with amazement, he was walking on top of a midden of shells taller than he was, the deposit of centuries of uninterrupted gathering. The midden was outside one of the scores of sandstone caves that lined the shores of this harbor. Some of the cave entrances were covered by crude sheets of woven bark. In the shade of the nearest cave, children played with heaps of ancient shells.
The women showed little interest in him. He walked on.
At last an elderly woman came limping out of one of the caves. Her hair was gray, and her naked skin hung on her like an empty sack. She said something incomprehensible, glanced at his wares dismissively, and beckoned him into the cave.
The floor was littered with flint chips, middens of shells, bone points, and charcoal. Where his feet disturbed this detritus he saw deeper layers of garbage beneath — even human turds, dried up and without odor. Like his own people, these fisher folk were not enthusiastic about tidying up their garbage, and would just walk away when a camp became unlivable, trusting in the invisible forces of nature to take care of the mess for them.
But he could see a great pile of flints piled up at the rear of this cave, an enviable treasure. It was said that there were caves on another coast to the south where you could just pry such flints out of the wall. But people of the interior like Jo’on understood little of the provenance of the valuable stones, and had to trade with those who did.
The fisher folk were hospitable enough, in the interest of future relations. They gave him food and water. In their mutually incomprehensible languages, they tried to talk over what he had seen on his journey, what new features of the land he had noticed. But they were not eager to trade. They took his ocher and what poor scraps of meat he had. But it was clear that this was valued at only a handful of flints. Better than nothing, he thought gloomily.
The fisher folk let him stay the night.
He lay down on a pallet of dried seaweed. It stank of salt and decay. He found himself peering by the dying firelight at paintings on the roof, pictures in charcoal, ocher, and a purplish dye that, it turned out, came from a sea creature. There were vivid images of wombats, kangaroos, and emus; the people shown hunting them loomed over the fleeing animals.
But — he peered more closely to see better — these pictures were laid over still stranger images: Giant birds, lizards, even kangaroos towered over the humans who hunted them. These images must be older than those he had first made out, he thought, because they lay underneath. But he was confused about what they showed. He supposed they meant nothing. Perhaps they had been drawn by a child.
He was wrong, of course. It was a peculiar tragedy that Jo’on’s generation had already forgotten what had been lost.
Jo’on lay down and closed his eyes, settling himself to ignore the noisy lovemaking of a couple in the corner, and waited for sleep. He wondered what Leda was going to say to him when he returned home with just a handful of flints. Meanwhile, over his head, the ancient, vanished birds, the giant kangaroos and snakes and diprotodons and goannas, all danced mournfully in the firelight.
CHAPTER 13
Last Contact
I
Hiding the carved mammoth in her fist, Jahna approached the bonehead girl.
The sullen creature looked up at Jahna, baffled, dimly frightened. She sat in the frosty dirt, filthy, ragged, doing nothing.
Jahna sat on her ankles and peered straight into the creature’s eyes. They were dark globes hidden under the great bony browridge that gave her kind their name. Jahna was twelve years old — and so, as it happened, was this bonehead cow. But the similarities ended there. Where Jahna was tall, blond, slender, and supple as a young spruce, the bonehead was short and squat and fat — strong, yes, but as round and ugly as a boulder. And where Jahna wore close-fitting clothes of stitched leather and plant fiber, with straw-stuffed moccasins, a fur-lined hood and woven cap, the bonehead cow wore simple wraps of filthy, well-worn leather, tied on with bits of sinew.
'Look, bonehead,' Jahna said now, raising her fist. 'Look.
The bonehead squealed and stumbled back, making Jahna laugh. You could almost see the cow’s slow mind working. The boneheads just couldn’t hold it in their heads that a bit of ivory could look like a mammoth; to them an object could only be one thing at a time. They were
Now Millo came running up. Jahna’s brother, eight years old, was a little bundle of energy and noise, wrapped up in an ill-fitting sealskin coverall. On his feet he wore the skins of gulls turned inside out, so that their feathers kept his feet warm. Seeing what she was doing he grabbed the mammoth out of Jahna’s hand. 'Me, me! Look, bonehead. Look! Mammoth!' He jabbed the little carving at the bonehead cow’s face.
Piss trickled down the cow’s legs, and Millo squealed with delight.
'Jahna, Millo!' Both of them turned. Here came their father, Rood, tall and strong, arms bare despite the chill of this early spring day. Wearing his well-loved boots of mammoth skin, he was striding strongly. He looked exhilarated, excited.
Responding to his mood the youngsters forgot their game and ran to him. While Millo hugged his legs as he always did, Rood bent to embrace them. Jahna could smell smoked fish on his breath. He greeted them formally, according to their names. 'My daughter, my mother. My son, my grandfather.' Then he reached around Millo’s waist and efficiently tickled his son; the boy squealed and writhed away. 'Last night I dreamed of seals and narwhal,' Rood said now. 'I talked to the shaman, and the shaman cast his bones.' He nodded. 'My dream is good; my dream is the truth. We will go to the sea and hunt for fish and seals.'
Millo jumped up and down, excited. 'I want to ride the sled!'
Rood peered into Jahna’s face, searching. 'And you, Jahna? Will you come?'
Jahna pulled back from her father’s embrace, thinking carefully.
Her father had not been flattering her in asking her approval. In this community of hunters, children were treated with respect from birth. Jahna bore the name, and hence the soul, of Rood’s own mother, and so her wisdom lived on in Jahna. Similarly little Millo bore the soul of Rood’s grandfather. People were not immortal — but their souls were, and their knowledge. (Jahna’s name, of course, was doubly special. For it was the name not just of Jahna’s grandmother but of
She glanced at the sky, assessing the wind, the thin scattering of clouds; she probed at the frozen ground with her toe, estimating if it was likely to thaw significantly today. She had an odd sense of unease, in fact. But her father’s enthusiasm was overwhelming, and she pushed down the particle of doubt.
'It is wise,' she said seriously. 'We will go to the sea.'
Millo whooped and jumped on his father’s back. 'The sled! The sled!' Together the three of them headed back toward the village.
Throughout the exchange they had all ignored the bonehead cow, who lay huddled and quaking in the dirt, urine leaking down her legs.
At the village, the preparations for the hunt were already under way.
Unlike the boneheads’ ugly shantytown, the village was an orderly grid of dome-shaped huts. Each hut had been erected over a frame of spruce saplings, brought from the forests to the south. Skin and tundra sod had been piled over the frame, and a doorway, windows, and chimney hole cut into the walls. The floors of the huts were paved, after a fashion, with riverbed cobbles. Even some of the open areas between the huts had been paved, to save the people from sinking into the mud of the fragile tundra loam.
Each hut was layered over with huge bones from mammoth or megaloceros antlers. These carapaces were there to help the huts endure the savage winds of winter and to obtain the animals’ protection: The animals knew that human beings took their lives only when they had to, and in return they lent their great strength to the people’s shelters.
Around these huts of bone, there was a hum of activity and anticipation.
One tall hunter — Jahna’s aunt, Olith — was using a fine bone needle to repair her deerskin trousers. Others, in a small open area used as a workshop, were making nets and baskets and barbed harpoons of bone and ivory, and weavers were using looms to make cloth of vegetable fiber. Much of the clothing the people wore was made of animal skin for warmth and durability, but there were luxury items of woven cloth — skirts, bandeaus, snoods, sashes, and belts. This expertise in cordage dated back many tens of thousands of years, fueled by the need to find an alternative to animal sinew to strap together rafts and canoes.
Everybody wore decoration, pendants, necklaces, beads sewn into their clothing. And every surface, every tool of bone or wood or stone or ivory, was adorned with images of people, birds, plants, and animals: there were lions, woolly rhinos, mammoth, reindeer, horses, wild cattle, bears, ibexes, a leopard, even an owl. The images were not naturalistic — the animals leapt and pranced, their legs and heads sometimes a blur of movement — but they contained many precise details, captured by people who over generations had grown to know the animals on which they depended as intimately as they knew one another.
Everything so shaped was loaded with significance, for each element was part of the endless story by which the people understood themselves and the world they lived in. There was nothing with only one meaning, one purpose; the ubiquitous art was a testimony to the new integration of people’s minds.
But even now ghosts of the old compartmentalism lingered, as they always would. An old man struggled to explain to a girl how she should use her flint blade to carve her bit of mammoth ivory just so. In the end it was easier for him to take the tool from her and just show her, letting his body’s half-independent actions demonstrate themselves.
These people, as they went about their tasks, looked remarkably healthy: tall, long-limbed, confident, keen-faced, their skin clear and unlined. But there were very few children here.
Jahna passed the shaman’s hut. The big, scary man was nowhere to be seen. He was probably sleeping off the exertions of last night, when once more he had danced and chanted his way into the trance world. Outside his hut was scattered a handful of broken shoulder blades, from deer and horses. Some of them had been mounted on slotted sticks and held in a fire. Even at a glance Jahna could read the fortunes told in their patterns of scorching; today would indeed be a good day for hunting by the water.
Though their language abilities were hugely advanced, the people were reaching out to distant and unknowable gods. And so they fell back on older instincts. As Pebble had once known, communication in a situation where you had no or limited language had to be simple, exaggerated, repetitious, unequivocal — that is, ritualistic. And, as Pebble had once tried to convince his father he spoke the truth about approaching strangers, so the shaman now labored to make his indifferent gods hear, understand, and respond. It was hard work. Nobody resented him sleeping late.
Millo and Jahna reached the hut they shared with their father, mother, infant sister, and aunts. Mesni, their mother, was here in the gloom. She was smoking megaloceros meat, scavenged
