Soon she had produced a smoothly curved stick some thirty centimeters long, flat on one side and rounded on the other. She hefted the boomerang in her hand, assessed its balance and weight with a judgment born of long practice, and quickly scraped away a little excess.
Then she walked out of the baobab’s shade and around the perimeter of the lake’s muddy fringe. She found the place where she had stashed a net of plaited bark fiber a few days before. The net was undisturbed. She shook it clear of dust, and the beetles that gnawed its dry fibers.
She hung the net across two gaunt, conveniently placed baobabs so that it faced the lake. She had chosen this site, in fact, because of the baobabs.
Now she walked back around the lake, until she was sideways when compared to the position of her net. She took her throwing stick. Her tongue protruding, she hefted it, rehearsing the throw she would make. She would get only one shot at this, and she had to get it right.
Pain pulsed at her temples, distant, like thunder in remote mountains.
She lost her balance, and grimaced, annoyed at the distraction. The pain itself was trivial, but it was a precursor of what was to come. Her migraine was a relentless punishment she endured frequently, and there was nothing to be done about it — it had no cure, of course, not even a name. But she knew she had to get on with her task before the pain made it impossible. Otherwise she would go hungry today, and so would her son.
Ignoring the throbbing in her head, she set herself once more, hefted the stick, and hurled it with strength and precision. The whirling stick followed a sweet curving arc high into the air over the lake, its wooden blades whirling with a subtle whoosh.
The roosting waterfowl rustled and cawed irritably, and when the stick turned in the air and fell on them they panicked. With a clatter of ungainly wings the birds took to the air and fled from the lake — and the flock’s low-flying outliers ran straight into Mother’s net. Grinning, she ran back around the lake to claim her prize.
Connections. Mother threw the boomerang, which scared the birds, which flew into the net, because Mother had placed it there. As examples of Mother’s causal-link thinking went, this had been elementary.
But with every step she took her headache worsened, as if her brain were rattling in her capacious skull, and her brief pleasure at her success was crowded out, as it always was.
Mother’s people lived in a camp close to a dry, eroded channel that ran into a gorge. Shelters had been set up among the rocky bluffs, just lean-tos, sheets of hide or woven rattan propped up on simple frames. There were no permanent huts here, unlike the structures in Pebble’s long-vanished encampment. The land wasn’t rich enough for that. This was the temporary home of nomadic hunter-gatherers, people forced to follow their food supply. The people had been here for a month.
The site had its advantages. There was a stream, the local rock was good for toolmaking, and there was a clump of forest nearby, a source of wood for fires, and bark, leaves, liana, and vines for cloth, netting, and other tools and artifacts. And the site was a good place to ambush animals that came wandering foolishly toward the gorge. But the produce of the area here had not been good. The camp was poor, the undernourished people listless. They would probably move on soon.
Mother stumbled home, three waterfowl slung on bits of leather rope over her shoulder. The pain in her head had grown sharp now, and every surface seemed overbright and tinged with strange colors. The ballooning of the human brain, in the millennia before the birth of Mother’s distant ancestor Harpoon, had been spectacular. This hasty rewiring brought unexpected benefits — like Mother’s pattern-making ability — but costs, like her plaguing migraine.
“Hey, hey! Spear danger spear!”
She looked around dimly.
Two of the younger men were staring at her. They wore wraparound hides tied in place with bits of sinew. They both held wooden spears, crudely finished, their tips hardened by charring. They had been hurling their spears at an ox hide they had draped over the branches of a tree. Mother, distracted by the pain and the strange lights, had almost blundered into their path.
She had to wait while the spear throwers completed their contest. Neither of the two young men was particularly skillful, and their hide wraps were shabby. Only one of their spears had pierced the hide to embed itself in the tree; the rest lay scattered in the dirt.
But one of the hunters was at least hurling his spears with more power, she saw. This boy held the spear unusually far back along its shaft, and used the length of his bony arms to get a little more leverage.
Tall for his age, whip thin, she thought of him as a sapling, drawn up by the sunlight. When Sapling threw the spear, it hissed through the air, oscillating slightly. The spear’s movement was intriguing. But as her eyes tracked it, her head hurt even more.
When the spear throwers were done she blundered on, seeking the dark of the hide she shared with her son.
Inside Mother’s hut was a stocky woman of thirty-five. She had ragged, graying hair and a habitually pinched, sour face. This woman, Sour, was using a pestle to grind a piece of root. She glared at Mother, her expression as hostile as usual. “Food, food?”
Mother waved a hand vaguely, caring nothing about Sour. “Birds,” she said.
Sour put down her pestle and root, and went outside to see the birds Mother had hung up.
Sour was Mother’s aunt. She had become embittered when she had lost her second child to some unknown illness a couple of days after childbirth. She would probably steal the birds, giving Mother and Silent a fraction of what Mother had brought home. But Mother, her head full of pain, felt too weary to care.
She tried to focus on her son. He sat with his back to the slanting woven roof, his knees tucked up to his chest. A sickly boy of eight, short and bony, he was using one bit of twig to push another around the dirt floor. Mother sat beside him and ruffled his hair. He looked up at her with heavy, sleepy eyes. He spent a lot of his time like this — silent, withdrawn from the rest, waiting for her. He took after his father, a short, unsuccessful hunter who had lovelessly coupled with Mother just once — and in that one coupling had succeeded in impregnating her.
Her experience of sex had been sporadic and not very pleasurable. She had met no man strong enough, or kind enough, to withstand the intensity of her gaze, her obsessiveness, her quickness to anger, and her frequent pain-driven withdrawals into herself. It was her great misfortune that the man who finally made her pregnant had quickly moved on to another — and that he had soon fallen to the ax blow of a rival.
The child was Silent, for that was his defining characteristic. And likewise, since it sometimes seemed that she had no identity in the eyes of other people here — no identity for anybody except the boy — she was Mother. She had little to give him. But at least he was spared the swollen-belly hunger that was already afflicting some of the other little ones in this time of drought.
At length the boy lay on his side and curled up, thumb in his mouth. She lay down herself on her pallet of bundled-together straw. She knew better than to try to fight the pain.
She had always been isolated, even as a child. She could not throw herself into the games of chase and wrestling and chattering that the other youngsters had indulged in, or their adolescent sexual experiments. It was always as if the others knew how to behave, what to do, how to laugh and cry — how to fit in, a mystery she could never share. Her restless inventiveness in such a conservative culture — and her habit of trying to figure out why things happened, how they worked — didn’t make her any more popular.