In the darkness behind him, his mother watched, her bone-hooded eyes clouded.
Pebble was woken in the gray of the predawn — but not by the light or the cold.
A tongue lapped at his bare foot. It was almost comforting, and it penetrated his uneasy dreams. Then he woke enough to wonder what was doing the licking. His eyes snapped open.
A shaggy, muscular wolf stood on all fours before him, silhouetted against the dawn sky.
He yelped and dragged his legs back. The wolf whined, startled. Then it scampered away a few paces, turned and growled.
But a person stood beside the wolf.
She was at least a handbreadth taller than he was. Her body was slender, her shoulders narrow, her long legs elegant, like a stork’s. She had narrow hips and shoulders, small high breasts, and a long neck. Her body was all stringy muscle: He could see the firm bulges of her arms and legs. She looked almost like a child, a great stretched-out child, her features unformed. But she was no child — he could tell that from the breasts, the thatches of hair under her arms, and from the fine lines that had gathered around her eyes and mouth.
The skinny folk on the island were just like this, from the neck down, anyhow. But from the neck up, Pebble had never seen anything like her.
Her chin stuck out into a kind of point. Her teeth were pale and regular — and unworn, like a child’s, as if she had never used them to treat animal skin. Her face seemed flattened, her nose small and squashed back. Her hair was frizzy and black but hacked short. And the ridge over her eyes — well, there was no ridge. Her brow rose smoothly and straight up, and then her skull swept back into a great bulging shape like a rock, quite different from the turtle-shell shape of his own cranium.
She was a human — anatomically, a fully modern human. She might have stepped out of a tunnel through time from Joan Useb’s chattering crowd in Darwin Airport. She could not have been a greater shock to heavy-browed Pebble if she had.
Her eyes flickered as she glanced from Pebble to the people — Hands, Cry, others — who had come out to see what was going on. She said something incomprehensible, and held out the harpoon at Pebble, point first.
Pebble stared, fascinated.
The harpoon’s shaft was notched at the end, and in the notch, attached by resin and sinew thread, there was a carved point. It was a slim cylinder, not more than a finger’s-width wide at the center. On one side fine barbs had been carved into the surface, pointing away from the direction in which the harpoon would be thrust. Its surface wasn’t roughly finished like his own tools; it looked smooth as skin.
Her harpoon wasn’t her only artifact, he saw now. She wore a scrap of some treated hide around her waist. A thing like a net, woven of vines, perhaps, was slung around her neck. Inside it nestled a collection of worked stones. They looked like flint. Flint was a fine stone, easy to shape, and he had encountered it several times during his trek out of Africa. But there was no flint to be found anywhere near this beach. So how had it got here? His confusion deepened.
But his attention was drawn back to that harpoon point. It was made of bone.
Pebble’s people used bits of broken bone as scrapers or as hammers to finish the fine edges of their stone tools, but they did not try to shape it. Bone was difficult stuff, awkward to handle, liable to split in ways you didn’t anticipate. He had never seen anything like this regularity, this finishing, this ingenuity.
In the future he would always associate her with this marvelous artifact. He would think of her as Harpoon. Unthinking, helplessly curious, he reached out with his long, broad fingers to touch the harpoon’s point.
“Ya!” The woman backed off, grasping the harpoon. At her side, the wolf bared its teeth and growled at him.
Tension immediately rose. Hands had picked up heavy cobbles from the beach.
Pebble raised his arms. “No no no…” He had to work hard, gesturing and jabbering, to persuade Hands not to hurl his stones. He wasn’t even sure why he did this. He ought to be joining Hands in driving her off. Strangers were nothing but trouble. But the dog, and the woman, had done him no harm.
And she was staring at his crotch.
He glanced down. An impressive erection thrust out. Suddenly he was aware of the pulse that beat in his throat, the hotness of his face, the moistness of his palms. Sex was a commonplace with Green or Cry, and it was usually pleasurable. But with this child-woman, with her flattened, ugly face and her harpoonlike body? If he were to lie on her, he would probably crush her.
But he had not felt like this since his first time, when Green had come to straddle him in the night.
The wolf growled. The woman, Harpoon, scratched the creature’s ruff. “Ya, ya,” she said gently. She was still looking at Pebble, her teeth showing. She was grinning at him.
Suddenly he felt ashamed, as if he were a boy who could not control his body. He turned and ran into the sea. When the water was deep enough to cover him he plunged forward face first. There, his mouth clamped closed, he grabbed at his erection and tugged it. He ejaculated quickly, the stringy white stuff looping in the water.
He kicked and stood up, gasping for breath. His heart still hammered, but at least the tension had gone. He stalked out of the water. The cuts he had made in his arm the night before had not yet healed, and red blood, diluted by salt water, dripped down his fingers.
The woman had gone. But he could see a trail of footsteps — narrow feet, delicate heels — that led off back the way she must have come, beyond the headland. The dog’s clawed prints followed hers.
Hands and Cry were walking toward him. Cry was studying Pebble uncertainly. Hands called, “Stranger stranger wolf stranger!” He threw his cobbles down with a clatter, angry. He couldn’t see why Pebble had reacted as he had, why he hadn’t quickly driven off or killed this stranger.
Suddenly Pebble’s dissatisfaction with his life came to a focus. “Ya, ya!” he snapped. And he turned away from the others and began to walk in the tracks the slender woman had made.
Cry ran after him. “No, no, trouble! Hut, food, hut.” She even grabbed his hand and pulled it to her belly, and tried to slide it down to her crotch. But he shoved the heel of his hand into her chest, and she fell to the ground where she sprawled, staring forlornly after him.
III
He followed the tracks along the beach. His broad prints covered Harpoon’s, obliterating them.
The shore was crusted with mussels and barnacles and the wrack of the sea: kelp, stranded jellyfish, and hundreds of washed up cuttlefish bones. Soon he was sweating, panting, his hips and knees aching subtly, a forerunner of the joint pains that would plague him as he grew older.
As he calmed down, his normal instincts began to reassert themselves. He remembered he was naked, and alone.
He cast around the beach until he found a large, sharp-edged rock that fit comfortably into his hand. Then, as he walked, he kept close to the water’s edge. Even though the sand here was a soft, soggy mud that clung to his feet, at least there was only one side from which he could be approached.
Still those neat tracks, with the wolf’s padding alongside, arrowed neatly through the softer sand. At last the tracks cut back up the beach. And there, in the shade of a clump of palms, he saw a hut.