The primates found a place far enough from any of the predators to be able to drink unhindered. They bent and plunged their muzzles into the chill water, sucking it up gratefully.
The largest animals of all wallowed at the muddy fringes of the lake.
A pair of uintatheres stood side by side. These great animals looked like gargantuan rhinos, each with a set of six bony horns on its head and long upper canine teeth like a saber-toothed cat’s. Their thick hides were coated with mud, which helped keep them cool and kept off insects. They cropped placidly on the soft vegetation of the lake bottom, sucking at water stained green by algae, while a fat youngster, more agile and lively, played around his parents’ legs, barging their tree-trunk knees with a head ladened with stubby, unformed tusks. Noth watched their huge feet fearfully. Closer to the shore there walked a family of moeritherium. No more than a meter tall, the adults moved through the water with a stately calm, rumbling reassurance to each other, while their round-bodied infants splashed at their feet. They worked the lake bottom vegetation efficiently with their long noses. These were among the first proboscideans, the ancestors of elephants and mammoths. They were still more piglike than elephantine, but they were already clever and social animals.
Around the herbivorous herds circled carnivores. These were mostly creodonts; they looked like foxes and wolverines. And there was one pack of hoofed predators — like carnivorous horses — bizarre, terrifying creatures with no analogies in human times.
Many of these creatures looked slow and lumbering, oddly ill-formed, the results of nature’s first experiments in producing large herbivores and predators from the mammalian stock that had survived the dinosaur extinction. Open grasslands still lay millions of years in the future, along with the fleet, long-legged, graceful herbivorous forms that would adapt to their open lush spaces, and the cleverer, faster carnivores that would arise to prey on them. When that happened most of the species around Noth would succumb to extinction. But the orders that would be familiar to humans — the true primates, the hoofed animals, the rodents and bats, the deer and the horses — had already made their entrance on the stage.
And there was no more complex and crowded an ecology anywhere on Earth right now than here on Ellesmere Island. This place was a pivot on the great migratory routes up through the Americas and over the roof of the world to Europe, Asia, and Africa. Here, pangolins from Asia, carnivores from North America, hoofed creatures from Africa, European insectivores like ancestral hedgehogs, and even anteaters from South America mingled and competed.
Suddenly Noth pulled back his head.
From inside the water two primates were looking out at him, a burly male and a small female. He could not smell the male, could not tell if he was kin or stranger. He screeched, baring his teeth. The male primate bared his teeth in response.
Enraged, Noth got to his feet and displayed his musk glands to the stranger in the water — who displayed back, angering him further — and then he stamped at the water until the reflected notharctus was gone.
Noth could recognize others of his species, could distinguish them as male or female, and as kin or not kin. But he could not recognize himself, for his mind did not contain the ability to look inward. All his life he would feel threatened by any such chance reflection.
A sleek form burst from the water itself and came lurching up on clumsy flippered limbs onto the rocky platform. Noth and Right stumbled back. Over a snout like a crocodile’s the newcomer gazed at the two baffled primates.
This ambulocetus was a relation of the hyena-like mesonychids. Like an otter, it was covered in sleek black fur, and it had large, powerful back legs equipped with toes ten centimeters long. Ages ago this animal’s ancestors had returned to the water, seeking a better living, and selection had begun its relentless molding. Already the ambulocetus looked more aquatic than terrestrial.
Soon its kind would take permanently to the oceans. Its skull and neck would become shorter, and the nose migrate backward, while its ears would close so that sound would have to pass through a layer of fat. Its legs would morph at last into fins, with more bones added, the fingers and toes becoming shrunken and useless, at last disappearing. When it reached the vast spaces of the Pacific and Atlantic, it would begin to grow — ultimately becoming as large compared to its present form as a human was to a mouse — but those mighty seagoing descendants would still retain within their bodies, like fossils of bone and molecular traces, vestiges of the creatures they had once been.
The walking whale stared uncomprehendingly at the two timid primates. Deciding this crowded shore wasn’t such a good place to bask after all, it flexed its spine and swam gracefully away.
As the light faded, Noth and Right retreated to the shelter of the trees. But the branches were now all but bare, and cover was hard to find. They huddled in a branch’s crook.
The herbivores splashed out of the water, family groups calling to each other. And the predators began to call, harsh doglike barks and leonine growls echoing through the sparse forest.
As the chill settled deeper Noth felt torpor steal over him. But he felt cold, stuck here like this with only his baby sister, cold away from the huddle of his troop.
And then, to his surprise, he was startled awake by a powerful musk scent.
Suddenly there were notharctus all around. They were on the branches above and below him, huddled shapes with their legs drawn up beneath them and their long, fat tails dangling. Their scent told him this was his kind, but not his kin. He had not detected their scent markings before; in fact the markings were sealed in by layers of frost. But the strange notharctus had noticed him.
Two powerful females gathered closely, drawn by the scent of an infant. One, who he thought of as Biggest, pushed aside the other — who was merely Big — to get a closer look at Right.
Noth’s mind churned. He knew that it was vital that they be accepted by this new group. So he reached for the female closest to him, Big, and began, tentatively, to dig his fingers into the fur at the back of her legs. Big responded to his grooming, stretching out her legs with pleasure.
But when Biggest saw what was going on she hooted and slapped them both. Noth cowered, trembling.
Noth was bright enough to understand his own place on the social ladder — in this case, down on the bottom rung. But his social mentality had its limits. Just as he could not detect the beliefs and desires of others, so he was not smart enough to form judgments about the relative ranking of others in a group. He had got it wrong: Biggest outranked Big, and she expected this new male to pay her attention first.
So Noth waited as Biggest played with the drowsy Right. But at least she did not drive him away. And at length Biggest let Noth approach her and groom her own dense, rank-smelling fur.
III
Every day was shorter than the last, every night longer. Soon there were just a few hours of bright daylight, and the intervals between the darknesses were lit only by a pink-gray twilight.
The forest was all but silent now. Most of the birds and the large herbivore herds had long gone, migrated south to warmer, easier climes, taking their dinning cries with them. The buzzing insect swarms of high summer were a memory, leaving only larvae or deep-buried eggs, sleeping dreamlessly. The big deciduous trees had already dropped their broad leaves, which lay in a thick litter on the ground, welded together by the persistent frost. The bare trunks and leafless branches would show no signs of life until the sun returned in a few months’ time. Beneath them, plants like the ground fern had died back to their roots and rhizomes, soon to be sealed into the earth under a lid of frost and snow.