She had nowhere to run. She stood up. She thought his gaze wandered over her body, her back and buttocks still wet from the stream. He lowered the ax and grinned at her. Then he went back to his tortoise and resumed carving it out of its shell.
Calls came floating from the distance.
She saw more people — folk like herself, adults and children, slim upright forms moving like shadows over the ash-strewn plain. They were exploring a miniature forest of blackened, twisted forms. It had been a birthing herd of antelopes; many of these unlucky creatures, straining over their last calves, had been unable to flee the flames. Now the people were slicing into this treasure with their marvelous stone axes, and even from here she could smell the delicious scent of cooked meat. Ax dropped the tortoise and ran off toward his people.
After a few heartbeats, torn between caution and ravening hunger, Far began to jog after him.
Night fell quickly, as it always did. The people gathered in a rocky hollow, which would give them some defense against the predators of the night.
Far, with nowhere else to go, followed them.
She couldn’t spend a night on her own; she knew that. Even now she sensed cold yellow eyes tracking her, eyes that glowed with the knowledge that she was an outlier of this group — not quite embraced within its protection — a target, like the old, the very young, the lame.
The people didn’t drive her away. They didn’t exactly make her welcome, either. But when she tucked herself into a corner of the roomy hollow, huddled over a scrap of meat she had scavenged from one of the burnt carcasses, they tolerated her presence.
She watched a man knapping a bit of rock. The man was old — in his late forties — and skinny, with one eye almost closed by an ugly scar. Two children, a boy and a girl, sat at his feet. Not much younger than Far, they watched what Scar-face was doing, and with big stones held clumsily in their own small hands, they tried to copy him. The girl trapped her thumb, and squealed in pain. Scar-face wordlessly took the rock from her hands, turned it around and by guiding her hands showed her how to hold the cobble more effectively. But when he saw this the boy was jealous, and he pinched the girl, making her drop the rock. “Me! Me!”
As the darkness deepened, many of the people resorted to gentle, wordless grooming, the habit that had come with them from the ancestral forests. Mothers caressed infants, men and women alike played wordless politics as they cemented alliances and reinforced hierarchies. Sometimes the grooming turned to noisy sex.
Far, the stranger, was excluded from all this. But as she sank toward sleep, exhausted and battered, she was aware of Ax’s eyes on her.
When she woke, the sky beyond the hollow was already very bright.
Everybody had gone, leaving behind a few scraps of food, patches of infant shit, damp urine marks.
She got to her feet quickly. The bruises on her back and chest seemed to have consolidated into a single mass of pain. But her young body was already throwing off the damage it had suffered yesterday, and her head was clear. She hurried out into the light.
The people had walked north, toward a lake. They were slim upright shadows, walking purposefully, their outlines softened by the shimmering heat haze. She ran after them.
The lakeshore was crowded. Far made out many kinds of elephants, rhinos, horses, giraffes, buffaloes, deer, antelope, gazelles, even ostriches. In the water there were crocodiles and turtles, and birds flapped over it noisily. The giant herbivores, concentrated around the water, had devastated the landscape. From this muddy arena, their wide, well-trodden avenues snaked off in every direction. On the hardpan around the lake nothing grew but a few hardy plant species distasteful to the elephants and rhinos and able to recover quickly from trampling.
The people moved down to the water. They picked a spot close to an elephant herd. Everybody knew that predators avoided elephants. The elephants ignored the people and continued with their own complex business. Some of them entered the water and were splashing and playing noisily; groups of cows rumbled mysteriously, and males trumpeted and clashed their huge tusks. These massive animals, the architects of the landscape, were slabs of muscle and power, with their own stately, flat-footed grace.
Most of the women were working the water’s edge. Far saw that one of them had turned up the nest of a freshwater turtle; its long eggs were quickly cracked, their contents devoured. Other women were harvesting the mussels that grew abundantly in the shallow waters, especially freshwater clams.
Far saw that Ax, like most of the men, had waded into the water. He was carrying a wooden spear, and he stood very still, eyes fixed on the glimmering water’s surface. After a few heartbeats he stabbed down with a powerful splash — and when he brought up the spear, a fish had been neatly skewered, its silver body wriggling. Ax hooted, pulled the fish off his spear, and threw it to the shore. Another man, a little further out, was creeping up on a water fowl that paddled complacently across the surface. The man leapt, but the bird got away, amid much comical splashing, squawking, and shouting.
Far joined the women.
She quickly found a horseshoe crab, crawling stiffly along a muddy channel. It was easy to catch. She held it upside down, and it waved its clawed legs feebly. She used a bit of stone to open up its head shield, which was the size of a dinner plate. Inside, near the front, there was a mass of eggs, like fat rice grains. She scooped them out with her fingers and gulped them down. The flavor was very strong, like oily fish. The rest of the crab’s meat proved too tough to be worth digging out. She flipped away the smashed head shield, and moved on in search of more food.
Thus the day wore on, as the people foraged for their food, just another type of animal on this crowded savannah.
As midday approached, the hominids moved away from the water, relaxed, satiated.
But Ax struck out on his own. Far trailed after him. He gazed back at her. She knew he was aware she was following him.
Ax came to a dried-up streambed laced with worn cobbles. He walked up and down the bed, examining the rocks, until he found what he wanted. It was a cobble about the size of his fist, flattened and rounded. He sat squat in the streambed and rummaged around until he found a suitable hammer-stone. He had brought some dried brush that he spread over his crossed legs for protection. Then he went to work, tapping at the core he had selected. Soon flakes flew away, briskly rattling off the cobble.
Far sat ten meters away, her legs folded before her, hugging her knees, fascinated by his toolmaking. It was like nothing she had seen before.
In fact, Ax and Far had grown up in toolmaking traditions separated by millennia.
Once they had put the trees behind them and moved definitively out onto the savannah, a new range of possibilities had opened up for the walkers. They were more than merely mobile. They migrated. But it wasn’t purposeful. For each individual, it was just a question of making a living. For people able to exploit new landscapes, it was often easier to walk to somewhere that looked a better place to live than to try to adapt to harsh conditions.
But as the generations ticked by the people covered thousands of kilometers. They even walked out of Africa, into lands where no hominid had set foot before. Before the great clamp of the glaciations tightened, equable conditions had spread well out of Africa into southern Europe, the Middle East, and southern Asia. Walking into these familiar surroundings the people followed the easy living of the coastlines, west around the Mediterranean and diffusing inland, at last colonizing Spain, France, Greece, Italy — as did animals later associated only with Africa, like elephants, giraffes, and antelope. To the east, they worked through India to the Far East, suffusing through what would become China, even working south to reach Indonesia.