But Far held her hands out again, making piteous animal mewls. Just once more. Just for today. I’ll help tomorrow.
“Graah!” Calm, as Far had known she would, dumped the food on the rock. She had gathered nuts, tsin beans, cowpeas, and asparagus bean tubers. She handed Far a fat tuber; Far bit into this quickly.
The Brat sat close to his mother. He was still too young to sit with the men, who were pawing through their own pile of food. The Brat had pulled apart his hare by main force, twisting off the limbs and head, and was using a chip of rock to lay open the chest. But as he performed this miniature butchery his gestures were tense, shivery.
None of his family knew it, but he was already gravely ill, through hypervitaminosis. A few days before one of the men had given him a few scraps of hyena liver, brought down in a brief battle over the remains of an antelope. Like that of most carnivorous predators, the liver had been full of vitamin A, and that subtle poisoning would soon become visible in the boy’s body.
In a month he would be dead. In twelve, forgotten, even by his mother.
But for now Calm cuffed him, reasonably gently, and grabbed some of his hare away from him, making him share with his sister.
Since Capo’s time the world had continued to cool and dry.
North of the equator, a great belt of taiga stretched right around the world, through North America and Asia, a forest of nothing but evergreen trees. And in the far north tundra had formed for the first time in three hundred million years. For the animals, the living offered by the taiga was meager compared to the old mixed deciduous and coniferous temperate forests. Similarly, the great grasslands continued to expand — grass was less thirsty than trees — but grass made arid plains, able to support only a much-reduced assemblage of animal species compared to the vanishing forests. As the slow desiccation continued, there were extinctions again.
But if the quality was diminished, the quantity of life was tremendous, astonishing.
The need to ride out periods of seasonal food shortages, and the need for guts able to process coarse diets all year round, favored the development of large herbivores. Giant mammals, a new “megafauna” on a scale not seen since the death of the dinosaurs, spread across the planet. Ancestral mammoths had already spread across northern Eurasia and, crossing the land bridges periodically exposed by the falling ocean levels, walked into North America. For now, living in equable climes, they were hairless and ate foliage rather than grass. They looked like typical elephants, but they had the high crowns and curling tusks of their woolly descendants.
Meanwhile there were giant camels in North America, and in Asia and Africa wandered the huge, mooselike sivatheres. A type of large rhino called an elasmotherium roamed across northern Eurasia. For a rhino it had long legs and a horn that could grow to two meters in length: It looked like a muscular unicorn.
And along with these huge packages of meat came new, specialized predators. The cats, freshly evolved, had perfected the technology of killing. They had side teeth like shears that could slice through skin, rip it aside, and get inside a body, where their incisors could nibble at the flesh. The saber-tooths were the acme. The saber-tooths would grow to twice the size of the lions of human times, becoming vast muscular predators built like bears, with short stocky limbs. They were built for power, not speed, and were ambush hunters, with mouths that could open hugely wide to crush prey. But all cats made even the dogs look like generalists by comparison; cats were perhaps the ultimate land predators.
But then, some half million years before Far’s birth, a new and dramatic worsening of the climate began. For the world’s creatures, the rules changed again.
There was a call from the plain. “Look, look! Me, look, me!” People stood up, gathering to see.
A man was approaching. He was tall, more heavily muscled than the rest, with a powerful, abnormally prominent browridge. This man, Brow, was dominant right now, the boss man in the tight, competitive world of the males. And he had a dead animal draped across his shoulder, a young eland.
The eight other adult men in the band began dutifully to whoop and yell, and they ran down the rocky slope. They slapped Brow on the back, stroked the eland respectfully, and ran and capered, kicking up a spectacular cloud of dust that hung, glowing, in the light of the descending sun. Together they hauled the eland up the slope and hurled it to the ground. The older children ran to see the eland, and began competing for its meat. The Brat was amongst them, but he was weaker even than others younger than himself, and he was easily pushed aside. Far could see a snapped-off wooden spear buried in the animal’s chest. That was how Brow had killed his prey, probably after an ambush, and perhaps he had left the spear in there to show how he had achieved this feat.
Brow, meanwhile, had sprouted an impressive erection. The women, including Calm, Far’s mother, made subtle signs of availability — a crooked hand here, thighs smoothly parting there.
Far, neither woman nor child, hung back from the rest. She nibbled on a root and waited as events unfolded.
Some of the adults had brought volcanic pebbles from the nearby stream. Now men and women began briskly to knap the pebbles, their hands working rapidly, their fingers exploring the stone. The tools emerged from the stone without real conscious effort — this was a skill that was already ancient, embedded in a self-contained section of a rigidly divided mind — and within a few minutes they had fashioned crude but serviceable choppers and cutting flakes. As quickly as each tool was finished its manufacturer fell on the eland.
The skin was sliced open from anus to throat, and pulled briskly off the carcass. The hide was discarded; nobody had thought up a use for animal skins, not yet. Now the carcass was briskly butchered, with the fine stone blades slicing into joints to separate the limbs from the body, through the rib cage to expose the soft, warm organs within, and then into the meat itself to separate it from the bone.
It was a fast, efficient, almost bloodless affair, a skillful butchering born of generations of ancestral learning. But the butchers did not work together. Though they deferred to Brow, allowing him to take the prime cuts and to extract the heart and liver, they competed as they scavenged the corpse, grunting and prodding at each other. Despite the tools in their hands, they worked at the eland like a pack of wolves.
Few of the women fought for the meat. Their unglamorous scavenging in the acacia grove and elsewhere had been successful today, and their bellies, and those of their children, were already full of figs, grewia berries, grass shoots, roots — fruits abundant in these dry lands that did not require much preparation before eating.
When most of the meat had been taken from the eland’s bones, the bargaining began in earnest. Brow stalked among the men with a blade in one hand and a mighty slab of haunch in the other. He sliced off chunks of the meat and handed them to some of the men — and not to others, who turned away as if it were unimportant, but who would later try to snatch bits of the best meat from the rest. It was all part of the endless politicking of the men.
Then Brow walked among the women, handing out bits of meat like a visiting king. When he reached Calm, he paused, his erection proud, and sliced off a large and succulent slab of eland haunch. Sighing, she accepted it. She ate some of it quickly, then put the rest to one side, close to her infant, who was asleep in a nest of dead grass. Then she lay on her back and opened her thighs, and held up her arms to accept Brow.