My total absorption into both the Minid band and their curious simulacrum of the Pleistocene altered even the texture of my subconscious mind. I ceased to dream about my twentieth-century past and began to experience night visions full of ancient East African imagery. By becoming a habiline and accepting the reality of their world I had purified my dreams. Seville, Van Luna, Cheyenne, Fort Walton Beach, Riverdale, and all the other hot spots of my childhood no longer figured prominently in these visions.
Now I was far more likely to dream about the fauna around Lake Kiboko, the wildflowers along the rivercourses, or my relationship with Helen.
This change embodied a kind of paradox. Whereas during my life in the twentieth century such dreams would have been spirit-traveling episodes, now they were merely dreams. My physical displacement into the past had cured me of the principal affliction of my life. At last I was “normal.” My dreams proved as much. And I hoped that I would never again have to suffer the disorienting indignity of spirit-traveling….
One day was like another. Each began with sunrise and limped through the heat of noon toward the exit signs of twilight. Between these clear-cut demarcations we took care to consume at least the recommended minimum daily requirements of nutrients sufficient for survival. The savannah was our supermarket, Mount Tharaka our after-hours convenience store. When not playing habiline games or furiously loafing, we shopped. Our purchases were paid for in the coin of cunning, persistence, luck, or various combinations of all three. If we ever encountered inferior merchandise or empty shelves, there was no manager to complain to and no way of getting our money back. Stumbling across an extraordinary bargain was one of the few unfailing means of burning a noteworthy brand into the otherwise bald backside of the day.
About two-thirds of the way through Helen’s pregnancy, when her belly was ripening like a huge Concord grape, she and I tripped over an extraordinary bargain. The jolt of this discovery bumped me out of dream consciousness into the predicament of rational awareness. Because what we had found was too big for us to dismantle alone, I left Helen on the edge of a small rivercourse and returned to Shangri-la for Alfie and the others. By eye movements and clumsy vocalizations I made them understand my welcome news and led them down the mountain to the stream bed on the steppe.
Helen was sitting on the bank of the little gully jabbering insults at the carrion birds swooping on our find.
It lay capsized in the water, trapped by the submerged stones into which it had apparently lumbered while alive. The vultures could get at it only by alighting on its shiny flank or wading determinedly through the muddy stream, their outspread pinion feathers dripping and their neck ruffs comically frazzled. When Alfie, the rest of the Minids, and I burst onto the scene, the vultures scattered, but settled near enough at hand to glut themselves with envy if not with flesh.
Helen and I had found a hippopotamus, a representative of H. gorgops, that rare species with bulging, periscopic eyes. Moreover, we had found it quite soon after its death, in a section of rivercourse partly concealed from the eyes of carrion eaters by the surrounding shrubbery. Sheer serendipity. Had we been a day earlier, we might have supposed the hippo contentedly wallowing and so passed it by. On the other hand, had we been a day later, the vultures would have reduced our supermarket special to an immense naked rib cage. Ecologically speaking, we had come in the niche of time, and the hippo was ours, all ours.
The beast disturbed me, though. It was an albino hippopotamus, with skin the color and seemingly the consistency of blancmange. Finger-long freckles of pink and pinkish-brown dappled its back, and its eyes, which arose from the massive head like elongated burn blisters, appeared to track my movements—as if the hippo and I had an affinity of which I was ignorant. I was alert to the dead animal’s scrutiny, its implied criticism of my status as a scavenger. My consciousness had engaged, and suddenly, frighteningly, I felt that not even Helen’s love could legitimately bind me to these savage doings. The white hippopotamus was an omen, probably an evil one.
It occurred to me that recently I had dreamed a dream in which Helen and I, astride a pair of docile chalicotheres, had ridden down from Shangri-la onto the moonlit savannah. During this ride we had seen an albino riverhorse run across our path from one half-hidden streambed to another. Other disconcerting events had followed, including my own painful transformation into a state that I could no longer recall. In fact, I probably would not have remembered dreaming about a white hippopotamus if Helen and I had not, quite by accident, found this one. What a strange concatenation of circumstances.
Wading into the water to butcher and cheerfully apportion our find, the Minids fell to. My sense of estrangement heightened. Once, as a boy, I had relished a gone-awry dream in which a band of hominids mutilated and devoured a creature from a children’s television program. Today, though, the Minids were scavenging an image from one of my recent Pleistocene dreams. How could I abet them in the complete destruction of that image? This was a world in which even the projections of the dreaming mind were converted into food.
I sat apart and watched the habilines carve the hippo into strips with craftily ad-libbed flake tools. Alfie and Malcolm worked over the carcass in the water, while Ham and Jomo passed chunks of flesh to the women and children on the bank. Fred and Roosevelt cooperated in gutting the beast and washing its luminous internal organs in the muddy water. I had dreamed a very substantial, very meaty behemoth; its flensing required concentration and time. I concealed my distaste and tried hard to recall what Babington had taught me about hippos.
“It might interest you to know,” I informed the Minids, “that you’re butchering a first-rate source of protein. As much as four ounces out of every pound of hippo flesh is solid protein, about twice what you’d get in a comparable amount of mutton, beef, or pork.”
Irritated, Alfie gestured for me to join him and the others in the water.
“Forgot my pocketknife,” I begged off. “Stay at it, though. Nearly three quarters of a hippo carcass may be usable, whereas even with a blue-ribbon Four-H steer you’re sometimes lucky if half the carcass will render. You know, if only President Tharaka had had the foresight to encourage hippo ranching, Zarakal might have been able to avert famine in its frontier districts.”
Alfie, shaking his head, grumbled over the curl of his bottom lip, and I relapsed into silence. When I looked up again, I saw that Helen had taken notice of my change of mood. She waded through the ankle-deep water to join me beneath the trees on the sandy bank. Her manner was quietly reassuring.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Go ahead—eat with the others. It’s not every day we run into something like this.”
Helen would not budge from my side. She sat with one arm draped over my shoulder. Upon occasion she would wave off an encroaching vulture or fling a handful of sand, but otherwise she was motionless.
She seemed to be willing to share my lack of appetite. I looked down at the swollen ball of her abdomen.
Its surface bulged once, then surrendered to a run of elastic waves. The fetus—our child—was fisting out feisty rhythms in the bistro of Helen’s womb.
“You’re eating for two, Helen. Go on now, get down there, take your share.”
She would not budge. She was adamant. If I would not eat, neither would she. I wanted to make a sacrifice for her, to give her an excuse to eat—but I could not face the prospect of forcing down a single bite of blancmange, not even one, and so kept Helen from feeding with the others. I was ashamed of myself and half in awe of Helen. She was a saint, a genuine habiline saint.