Now she picked up Right and pushed her against the trunk of the tree, where the infant clung. Parked like this, her brownish fur blending into the background of the tree bark, Right would remain here until her mother returned to feed her. She was able to stay immobile for long hours.
It was a form of protection. The notharctus were deep enough in the forest to be safe from any diving bird of prey, but the pup was vulnerable to the local ground-based predators, especially the miacoids. Ugly animals the size of ferrets, sometime burrow-raiders who scavenged opportunistically from the kills of other predators, the miacoids were an unprepossessing bunch, but nonetheless were the ancestors of the mighty cats and wolves and bears of later times. And they could climb trees.
Now the attentive mother moved along the branch, seeking a comparable place of safety to leave Left. But the stronger child was happy where she was, clinging to her mother’s belly fur. After gentle pushing, her mother gave up. Laden with her daughter’s warm weight, she worked her way down a ladder of branches toward the ground.
On all fours, Noth walked across a thick mulch of leaves.
The trees here were deciduous, every autumn dropping their broad, veined leaves to cover the ground with a thick layer of decaying vegetation. Much of the mat on which Noth walked was made up of last autumn’s leaves, frozen by the winter’s hard cold before they could rot; now the leaves were mulching quickly, and small flies buzzed irritatingly through the misty air. But there were also butterflies, their gaudy wings making splashes of flitting color against the drab ground cover.
Noth moved slowly, seeking food, wary of danger. He wasn’t alone here.
Two fat taeniodonts grubbed their way across the ground, their faces buried in the rotting leaves. They looked like heavy-jawed wombats, and they used their powerful forelimbs to dig into the dirt, seeking roots and tubers. They were followed by an infant, a clumsy bundle pushing at her parents’ legs, struggling through the thick layer of leaves. A paleanodont scuffed for ants and beetles with its long anteater’s snout. And here was a solitary barylambda, a clumsy creature like a ground sloth with powerfully muscled legs and a stubby pointed tail. This creature, scuffling gloomily in the dirt, was the size of a Great Dane — but some of its cousins, in more open country, grew to the size of bison, among the largest animals of their day.
In one corner of the clearing Noth made out the slow movement of a primate, in fact another kind of adapid. But it was quite unlike Noth himself. Like the loris of later times, this slow, ground-loving creature looked more like a lazy bear cub than any primate. It moved slowly across the mush of leaves, making barely a sound, its nose snuffling the ground. This adapid generally stuck to the deeper forest where its slowness was not as disadvantageous as it would be on more open ground. Here, its slow and silent movements made it almost invisible to predators — and to the insect prey it sniffed out acutely.
Noth wrinkled his nose. This adapid used urine as its scent marker; every time it toured its range it would carefully urinate on its hands and feet to leave its signature. As a result, to Noth’s sensitive nose it stank badly.
Noth found a fallen beehive. He inspected it curiously, hesitantly. Hive bees were relatively new arrivals, part of an explosion of new forms of butterflies and beetles and other insects. The hive was abandoned, but there were whole handfuls of delicious honey to be had inside it.
But, before he attacked the honey, Noth listened carefully, sniffing the air. His sensitive nose told him that the others, high in the trees above, were still far away. He ought to be able to devour this food before they reached him. But he shouldn’t. There was a calculation to be made.
Noth was low-ranking among the males in his group. What Noth was expected to do was to call out, letting the rest know he had found food. Then the other males and the females would come, take as much honey as they wanted, and — if Noth was lucky — leave him a little for himself. If he stayed silent and was caught with the honey, he would be severely beaten, and any food left would be taken away, leaving him nothing at all. But on the other hand if he got away with it he might get to eat all the honey, and be spared any punishment…
The choice was made. Soon he was working the honey with his small hands, licking it down as fast as he could, eyes flicking around to check on the others. He had finished the honey and wiped away any traces on his muzzle by the time his mother reached the ground.
She still had her pup, Left, clinging to her belly. She began to scrabble at the floor, her fat-ladened tail held out behind her, silhouetted against the bright shafts of light that pierced the forest’s higher layers. She quickly uncovered more chunks of the fallen hive. Noth made a play of grabbing at the honey, but his mother pushed him away with a sharp shove and fell on it herself.
Noth’s father now tried to join in the bounty, but his mate turned her back on him. Here came two of Noth’s aunts, his mother’s sisters. They immediately rushed to their sister’s side and, with screeches, bared teeth, and handfuls of thrown leaves, drove Noth’s father away. One of them even grabbed a chunk of honeycomb from his hand. Noth’s father fought back, but, like most adult males, he was outsized by any one of the females, and his struggles were futile.
It was always the way. The females were the center of notharctus society. Powerful clans of sisters, mothers, aunts, and nieces, together for life, excluded the males. All this was a behavioral fossiclass="underline" The dominance of females over males, and the tendency of male-female pairings to endure after mating, were more common in nocturnal species than those able to live in the light. This powerful matriarchy was making sure that the sisters had first call on the best of the food, before any male.
Noth took his own exclusion calmly. After all, the taste of illicit honey still lingered in his mouth. He loped away in search of more food.
Purga and Plesi had lived isolated lives, usually as females with pups, or as half of a mating pair. Solitary foraging was a better strategy for nocturnal creatures; not being part of a noisy group made it easier to hide from night hunters, who would wait in silent ambush for their prey.
But animals active by day did better to keep to groups, with more eyes and ears on the alert to spot attackers. The notharctus had even evolved alarm calls and scents to warn each other of different classes of predators — birds of prey, ground predators, snakes — each of which required a different defensive response. And if you were part of a group there was always the chance that the predator would take the next guy, not you. It was a cold-blooded lottery that paid off often enough to be worthwhile adapting for.
But there were disadvantages to group living: mainly, if there were large numbers of you, there was increased competition for food. As that competition resolved itself, the inevitable result was social complexity — and the size of the adapids’ brains had increased so that they were capable of handling that complexity. Then, of course, they were forced to become even more efficient at searching for food to fuel those big brains.
It was the way of the future. As primate societies became ever more complex, a kind of cognitive arms race would continue, increasing smartness fueled by increasing social complications.
But Noth wasn’t that smart. When he had found the honey, Noth had applied a simple behavioral rule: Call out if the big ones are close by. Don’t call if they aren’t. The rule gave Noth a good chance of getting away with maximum food and minimal beating. It didn’t always work, but often enough to be worth trying.