The light in the sky seemed to grow brighter, and a wind picked up suddenly, ruffling the surfaces of the ponds and scattering brown fronds across the ground. She felt a rising sense of panic; she was a long way from her troop. She dropped the egg back into the nest and reached for another.
But suddenly the sweet, sickly smell of yolk reached her nose. The egg she’d dropped, falling against the others in the nest, had broken. She jammed her hands into the jagged crack and pushed her face into the sweet yellow goo, and was crunching on half-formed bones. But when she took another egg, she couldn’t remember how she had opened the first. She fingered the egg and tried to bite it, starting the whole trial-and-error process over.
Dropping eggs onto each other was how her mother had opened them before. But even if her mother had been here to demonstrate how to do it, Roamer would not have learned the technique, for Roamer was not capable of reading another’s intentions, and so she couldn’t imitate. Psychology was beyond the anthros, and every generation had to figure everything out from scratch from basic raw materials and situations. It made for slow learning. Still, Roamer soon got into another egg.
She was so intent on the food she wasn’t aware of the lustful eyes that studied her.
Before she broke into a third egg the rain started. It seemed to come out of nowhere, huge droplets falling out of a blank, bright sky.
A great wind swept over the marshes. Wading birds took flight, heading west toward the ocean, away from the approaching storm. The big herbivores turned to face the rain, stoic misery in their posture. The crocodile slid beneath the surface of its pond, preparing to wait out the storm in the changeless depths of its murky empire.
And now clouds fled across the sun, and darkness closed in like a lid. To the east, at the center of the continent where the storm had brewed, thunder clattered. It was a storm of a ferocity that lashed the area only a few times in a decade.
Roamer cowered in the wreckage of the nest, her fur already plastered to her body. The droplets hammered into the ground around her, battering the dead vegetation and digging tiny pits into the clay. She had never known anything like it. She had always ridden out storms in the comparative shelter of the trees, whose foliage diffused and deadened the falling water. But now she was lost, stranded out in the open, suddenly aware how far she had come from her troop. If a predator had found her in those few heartbeats, then she might have lost her life.
But as it was, she had been found by one of her own kind: an anthro, a large male. He dropped to the sodden ground before her and sat still, studying her.
Startled, whimpering, she approached him cautiously. Perhaps he was one of the males who dominated her own troop — the loose, fissioning band she thought of as a kind of composite father — but he was not, she quickly saw. His face, the white fur beaten down with the rain, was strange, and a peculiar patterning of coloration gave him white drips down his black-furred belly, almost like blood.
This male — Whiteblood — was twice her size, and a stranger. And strangers were always bad news. She screeched and scrabbled backward.
But she was too late. He reached out his right hand and grabbed the scruff of her neck. She twisted and fought, but he lifted her easily, as if she were a piece of fruit.
Then he hauled her without ceremony back into the forest.
Whiteblood had spotted Roamer — a juvenile female wandering alone, an unusual opportunity. He had stalked her carefully, a fruit eater moving like an experienced hunter. And now the cover of the storm had given him the opportunity he needed to take her. Whiteblood had his own problems — and he thought Roamer might be part of the answer.
Like their notharctus ancestors, anthro females lived in tight supportive groups. But in this seasonless tropical forest, perpetually abundant, there was no need for their breeding cycles to be synchronized. Life was much more flexible, with different females coming into estrus at different times.
That made it easier for a small group of males — even a single male, sometimes — to monopolize a female group. Unlike the notharctus Emperor, it wasn’t necessary for an anthro male to try to cover all his females in a single day, or to face the impossible task of keeping other males away. Instead it was enough that he kept rivals away from the small number of females who were fertile at any given time.
Though they were physically larger, anthro males did not “own” the females, or dominate them excessively. But the males, bound to the female group by a genetic loyalty — in a promiscuous group there was always a chance that any child born might be yours — would work to protect the group from outsiders and predators. For their part the females were generally content with the loose satellite male communities that accreted around them. Males were occasionally useful, obviously necessary, rarely troublesome.
But recently, for Whiteblood’s troop, things had gone wrong.
Ten of the twenty-three females in the group had gone into estrus simultaneously. Soon other males had been attracted, drawn by the scent of blood and pheromones. Suddenly there weren’t enough females to go around. It had been an unstable situation, intensely competitive. Already there had been bloody battles. There was a danger the group might fission altogether.
So Whiteblood had gone out hunting females. Juveniles were the preferred target: young and small enough to be handled easily, foolish enough to be easy to separate from their home groups. Of course it meant waiting a year or more before a child like Roamer could be mated. But Whiteblood was prepared to wait: His mind was complex enough for him to act now in the prospect of reward later.
For Whiteblood the situation was quite logical. But for Roamer it was a nightmare.
Suddenly they were swinging and running at a ferocious rate. Whiteblood kept hold of her scruff, seeming to find her no trouble to haul. Roamer had never moved in these great bounds, swoops, and leaps: Her mother and the other females, more sedentary than the males, moved much more cautiously than this. And she was being carried a long way; she could smell muddy water, for they were approaching the bank of the river itself.
And meanwhile the rain clattered down, pelting through the leaves and turning the air into a gray misty murk. Her fur was sodden and water ran into her eyes, making it impossible to see. Far below them, water ran across the sodden ground, rivulets gathering into streams that washed red-brown mud into the already swollen river. It was as if forest and river were merging, dissolving into each other under the storm’s power.
Her panic intensified. She struggled to get free of Whiteblood’s grasping hand. All she got for her troubles were cuffs on the back of her head, hard enough to make her squeal.
At last they reached Whiteblood’s home range. Most of the troop, males, females, and infants, had clustered together in a single tree, a low, broad mango. They sat in rows on the branches, huddled together in sodden misery. But when the males saw what Whiteblood had brought back, they hooted and slapped the branches.
Whiteblood, without ceremony, thrust Roamer at a group of females. One female started poking hard at Roamer’s face, belly, and genitals. Roamer slapped her hand away, hooting in protest. But the female came back for more, and now more of them crowded around her, striving to get close to the newcomer. Their curiosity was a mixture of the anthros’ usual fascination with someone new, and a kind of rivalry over this potential competitor, a new recruit in the ever-shifting hierarchies.
For Roamer everything was bewildering: the sheets of lightning flashing over the purple sky, the hammering rain on her face, the roar of water below, the damp-fur, unfamiliar stink of the females and young around her. Surrounded by open pink mouths and questing fingers, she was overwhelmed. Struggling to escape, she lunged forward, and found herself briefly dangling over the branch.