Evolution

They ran across the frozen grass. The cliff edge sloped away sharply beneath a lip of turf. Hastily the children scrambled down. The bow on Jahna’s back caught on outcroppings of the rock, slowing her down. But they made it. They huddled on a narrow ledge, peering up at the ocean of black-brown fur that washed slowly along the cliff top.

The huge male looked on indifferently. Then he turned away, his burdened head dipping.

The antlers were heavy to carry, like weights held at arms’ length, and the buck’s neck had been redesigned to bear that load, with huge vertebrae and muscles like cables. The antlers were for sexual display — and for fighting; it was an awesome sight when two of these giant bucks clashed, heads down. But those great antlers would doom these animals. When the ice retreated and their habitat shriveled, there would be a selection pressure for smaller body sizes. While other species shrank to fit, the megaloceros would prove unable to give up their elaborate sexual displays. They had become overspecialized, their tremendous antlers over-expensive, and they would prove unable to cope with change.

The children heard a muffled growl. Jahna thought she saw a pale form, low-slung, stocky, move over the snow like a muscled ghost, trailing the deer. It might have been a cave lion. She shuddered.

'What now?' Millo whispered. 'We can’t stay here.'

'No.' Jahna cast around. She saw that their ledge led down the cliff face to a hollow a few body’s lengths below. 'That way,' she said. 'I think it’s a cave.'

He nodded curtly. He led the way, edging his way down the narrow ledge, clinging to the chalk. But he was more frightened than he was prepared to admit, she realized.

At last, the perilous descent over, they threw themselves into the hollow and lay panting on the rough floor. The cave, worn in the chalk, reached back into dark recesses. The floor was littered with guano and bits of eggshell. It must be used as a nesting ground, by gulls, perhaps. There were blackened patches scattered over the floor — not hearths, but obviously the sites of fires.

'Look,' said Millo, his voice full of wonder. 'Mussels.'

He was right. The little shellfish were piled up in a low heap, surrounded by a scattering of flint flakes. A flicker of curiosity made her wonder how they had got there. But hunger spoke louder, and the two of them fell on the mussels. Frantically they tried to prize open the shells with their fingers and stone blades, but the shells were stubborn and would not yield.

'Graah.'

They both whirled.

The gravely voice had come out of the darkness at the back of the cave. A figure came forward. It was a burly man, dressed in a wrap of what looked like deer hide — no, Jahna thought, not a man. He had a vast, prominent nose, and powerful stocky legs, and huge hands. This was a bonehead, a massive bull. He glared at them.

The children backed away, clutching at each other.

He had no name. His people did not give themselves names. He thought of himself as the Old Man. And he was old, old for his kind, nearly forty years old.

He had lived alone for thirty of those years.

He had been dozing at the back of this cave, in the smoky, comforting glow of the torches he kept burning there. He had spent the early morning combing the beaches below the cliffs at low tide, seeking shellfish. With the coming of evening he would soon have woken up anyway; evening was his favorite time of day.

But he had been disturbed early by the noise and commotion at the cave’s entrance. Thinking it might be gulls coming after his piles of shellfish — or something worse, an arctic fox maybe — he had come lumbering out into the light.

Not gulls, not a fox. Here were two children. Their bodies were tall and ludicrously spindly, their limbs shriveled and their shoulders narrow. Their faces were flat, as if squashed back by a mighty punch, their chins were pointed, and their heads bulged upward into comical swellings like huge fungi.

Skinny folk. Always skinny folk. He felt a vast weariness — and an echo of the loneliness that had once plagued his every waking moment and poisoned his dreams.

Almost without conscious thought he moved toward the children, his huge hands outstretched. He could crush their skulls with a single squeeze, or crack them together like two birds’ eggs, and that would be the end of it. The bones of more than one skinny robber littered the rocky beach below this cave; and more would join them before he grew too old to defend this, his last bastion.

The children squealed, grabbed each other, and scurried to the wall of the cave. But the taller one, a girl, pushed the other behind her. She was terrified, he could see that, but she was trying to defend her brother. And she was holding her nerve. Though panic piss trickled down the boy’s bare legs the girl kept herself under control. She dug into her jerkin and pulled out something that dangled on a string around her neck. 'Bonehead! Bonehead man! Leave us alone and I’ll give you this! Pretty, pretty magic, bonehead man!'

The Old Man’s deep-set eyes glittered.

The pendant was a bit of quartz, a little obelisk, gleaming and transparent; its faces had been polished to shining smoothness, and one side had been painstakingly carved into a design that caught your eye and dazzled your mind. The girl swung the amulet back and forth, trying to draw his eyes, and she stepped forward from the wall. 'Bonehead man, pretty, pretty…' The Old Man peered into blue eyes that stared straight back at him in that unsettling, direct way of the skinnies: a predator’s gaze.

He reached out and flicked at the amulet. It flew around the girl’s neck and smashed against the wall behind her. She yelped, for its leather string had burned her neck. The Old Man reached out again. It could be over in a heartbeat.

But the children were jabbering again, in their fast, complicated language. 'Make him go away! Oh, make him go away!' 'It’s all right, Millo. Don’t be afraid. Your great-grandfather is inside you. He will help you.'

The Old Man let his huge hands drop to his sides.

He looked back at the mussels they had tried to take. The shells were scraped and chipped — one showed teeth marks — but not one was broken open. These children were helpless, even more so than most of their kind. They couldn’t even steal his mussels.

It had been a long time since voices of any kind had been heard in this cave — any save his own, and the ugly cawing of gulls or the barking of foxes.

Not quite understanding why, he stalked off to the back of his cave. Here he stored his meat, his tools, and a stock of wood. He brought back an armful of pine logs, brought down from the forested area at the top of the cliff, and dumped them close to the entrance of the cave. Now he fetched one of his torches, a pine branch thick with resin and bound up with fat-laden sealskin. The torch burned steadily but smokily, and would stay alight all day. He set the torch on the ground and began to heap wood over it.

The children still cowered against the wall, eyes wide, staring at him. The boy pointed at the ground. 'Look. Where’s his hearth? He’s making a mess…' The girl clamped her hand over his mouth.

When the fire was burning brightly, he kicked it open to expose red-hot burning logs within. Then he picked up a handful of mussels and threw them into the fire. The mussels’ shells quickly popped open. He fished them out with a stick and scooped out their delicious, salty contents with a blunt finger, one after another.

The boy squirmed and got his mouth free. 'I can smell them. I’m hungry.'

'Hold still; just hold still.'

When the Old Man had had his fill of the mussels he lifted his leg, let out a luxurious fart, and clambered painfully to his feet. He lumbered to the entrance to his cave. There he sat down with one leg folded under him, the other straight out, with his skin wrap over his legs and crotch. He picked up a flint cobble he had left there days before. Using a granite pebble as a hammer-stone he quickly began to shape a core from the flint. Soon waste flakes began to accumulate around his legs. He had seen dolphins today. There was a good chance one of those fat, lithe creatures might be washed up on the shore in the next day or two, and he needed to be prepared, to have the right tools ready. He wasn’t planning, exactly — he wasn’t thinking as a skinny might have thought — but a deep intuition of his environment shaped his actions and choices.

As he let his hands work — shaping this lump of compressed Cretaceous fossils, as the hands of his ancestors had worked for two hundred and fifty millennia — he gazed out to the west, where the sun was starting to set over the Atlantic, turning the water to a sheet of fire.

Behind him, unnoticed, Jahna and Millo crept to the fire, threw on more mussels, and gulped down their salty flesh.

As the days passed, the spring thaw advanced quickly. The lakes melted. Waterfalls that had spent the winter crusted with ice began to bubble and flow. Even the sea ice began to break up.

It was time for the gathering. It was a much-anticipated treat, a highlight of the year — despite the walk of several days across the tundra.

Not everybody could go: The very young, the old, and the ill could not make the journey, and some had to remain behind to look after them. This year, for the first time in many years, Rood and Mesni were freed of the burden of children — save for their youngest, still an infant small enough to be carried — and were able to travel.

Rood would not have chosen the situation; of course not. But he believed they must make the best of their damaged lives, and he urged Mesni to come with him to the gathering. But Mesni wanted to stay at home. She turned away from him, retreating into her dark sadness. So Rood decided to walk with Olith, Mesni’s sister, the aunt of his children. Olith herself had one grown boy, but his father had died of a coughing illness two winters ago, leaving Olith alone.

The party set off across the tundra.

In this brief interval of warmth and light, the ground underfoot was full of life, saxifrages, tundra flowers, grasses, and lichens. Clouds of insects gathered in the moist air above the ponds, mating frantically. Great flocks of geese, ducks, and waders fed and rested on the tundra’s shallow lakes. Olith, taking Rood’s arm, pointed out mallards, swans, snow geese, divers, loons, and cranes that looped grandly, filling the air with their clattering calls. In this place where the trees lay flat, many of these birds built their nests on the ground. When they stepped too close to a jaeger’s nest, two birds dived at them, squawking ferociously. And, though most of the migrant herbivores had yet to return, the people glimpsed great herds of deer and mammoth, washing across the landscape like the shadows of clouds.

Yet how strange it was, Rood thought, that if he were to dig just a few arms’ lengths anywhere under this carpet of crowded color and motion, he would find the ice, the frozen ground where nothing could live.

'It has been too long since I walked this way,' said Rood. 'I had forgotten what it is like.'

Olith squeezed his arm and moved closer to him. 'I know how you must feel—'

'That every blade of grass, every dancing saxifrage, is a torture, a beauty I do not deserve.' Distantly he was aware of the scent of the vegetable oil she rubbed into her cropped hair. She was not like Mesni, her sister; Olith was taller, more stringy, but her breasts were heavy.

'The children are not gone,' Olith reminded him. 'Their souls will be reborn when you next have children. They were not old enough to have gathered wisdom of their own. But they carried the souls of their grandparents, and they will bring joy and exuberance to—'

'I have not lain with Mesni,' he said stiffly, 'since we last saw Jahna and Millo. Mesni is — changed.'

'It has been a long time,' Olith murmured, evidently surprised.

Rood shrugged. 'Not long enough for Mesni. Perhaps it will never be long enough.' He looked Olith in the eyes. 'I will not have more children with Mesni. I do not think she will ever want that.'

Olith looked away, but dipped her head. It was, he realized, startled, a gesture of both sympathy and seduction.

That night, in the crisp cold of the open tundra, under a lean-to hastily constructed of pine branches, they lay together for the first time. As when he took the young bonehead cow, Rood felt relief from the guilt, the constant nagging doubts. Olith meant much more to him than any bonehead animal, of course. But afterward, when Olith lay in his arms, he felt the ice close around his heart once again, as if in the midst of spring he was still stranded in the depths of winter.

After four days’ steady hiking, Rood and Olith reached the riverbank.

Already hundreds of people had gathered. There were shelters set up on the bank, stacks of spears and bows, even the carcass of a great buck megaloceros. The people had marked