A Bone From a Dry Sea

THEN

THE CHILD WHO had trapped the shark had no name, nor did the others. As a baby she’d known her mother and had made sucking movements when she came near, and she still sometimes did this, a lip-sound, Ma-ma, but it was more an affectionate greeting than a name. Later she’d begun to recognize the others, her mother’s sister first, then other close family, then playmates, all as separate people who mattered in different ways to her. By the time of the shark-hunt she knew every member of the tribe, and they knew her, but without names.

(I must use names to tell their story. We are looking into our furthest possible past, which is like looking at a group of people far off across a flat, hot plain. The rising air wavers and changes. Light bends as if it were passing through invisible lenses. The people seem to dwindle, stretch, vanish, stand clear for a moment and distort again. We are looking through lenses of time, right at the edge of imagination’s eyesight. To give the tribe names distorts them, but it’s the best I can do from where we’re standing. It’s said that before Eve there was Lilith, but we are going back far beyond the imaginary Lilith. I shall call the child Li.

The same with her thoughts. We have to imagine them in words, but the tribe were only about half-way towards words. Their ancestors had been apes, who had used calls for alarm and anger and so on, but had mainly communicated by gestures, grimaces, smells and touch. Then the sea had risen and those ancestors had been cut off on a large offshore island. At the same time Africa had grown hotter and drier, and the forest cover where the ancestors had lived and fed had dried out and almost vanished, so they’d started to forage for the rich pickings along the shore, taking more and more to the water, changing in many ways. Among these were their calls. Smell was no use to them in water, gestures difficult. Except in a dead flat sea a swimmer can see only a few yards, but a call will still be heard far off.

So the tribe had plenty of calls – Come-help, Shark! Big Wave!, Follow me, Good Food This Way, Praise, Triumph, Have mercy, and so on. And when they came out of their caves in the morning, or rose on one of their roosting-ledges to let the rising sun warm their night-chilled bodies, they sang. These were all calls, not words, not sentences. But how can we imagine Li’s thoughts without using words? We are looking through the time-lens again, distorting what was, then, into something we seem to see, now. It’s the best we can do.)

The wind had shifted and the tribe had moved on down the coastline to where an immense sea-marsh blocked their way. Once it had been the channel between their island and the shore, but the land had risen and the island was ceasing to be an island. They didn’t like the marsh. They were creatures of the coast, of clean rocks and beaches.

Immediately north of the marsh lay a stretch of pure, fine sand where, for a few days at each full moon as the tides came higher, the shallows swarmed with millions upon millions of almost invisible transparent shrimps. The tribe caught them by lacing their cupped hands together with the fingertips just touching the webbing between the lower knuckles of the other hand. When they lifted their hands and let the water drain away, a few shrimps might be left wriggling in the trap.

It was slow feeding, but Li was clever at it and had eaten her fill while most of the others were still busy. She felt a need to be alone, out of the crowded shallows. If she swam further from the shore, the shark-watchers would chivvy her back. The beach itself was roasting hot, so she climbed the low dunes behind it, looking for shade. In front of her the mountain chain that had formed the island rose steep and barren, but between the shore and the first rocks lay a strip of plain which itself had been beach and shallows until this end of the island had tilted upwards. Now it was hard earth, mottled with tussocks of coarse grass, and here and there a tree. One stood, or rather leaned, not far off, so after a wary look around she made for it.

(Suppose for a moment that the time-lens lets us see her undistorted, what does she look like, this single, night-black figure crossing the glaring flat? She walks erect, but is still not quite a metre tall. Her body is hairless but her head has a glossy black mane falling over her shoulders. She is plump, roly-poly, from the layer of insulating fat beneath her skin. Her feet are like ours, but webbed between the toes, and her long fingers have webs to the first knuckle. Her head is the shock, tiny to our eyes, with a face more monkey than human. What room can there be in that cramped skull for thoughts, imaginations, questions, wonders, for all that makes us human? Can this be where we came from?)

From the shade of the tree, Li studied the plain. She felt excited but tense. She had never been so far from the tribe alone. She didn’t know what there was to be afraid of – there could be no sharks out here and she’d never seen a leopard, but the instinct was still there, deep inside. Another instinct made her climb into the crotch of the tree, and on up until she was well above ground level. Now she relaxed a little.

The tree had been flat-topped once, but an earthquake had tilted it so that on one side its branches touched the ground and on the other they lifted enough for her to see out beneath them. She stared, amazed, at the distance. Before her lay the marsh. From the shore it had seemed endless, but now beyond it she saw a wavering line of blue, rising to peaks from two of which thin trails of smoke drifted skyward. She recognized them because there was another such peak at the centre of the island. Sometimes it flamed, sometimes it rumbled or groaned, but mostly it merely smoked, peaceful and harmless.

Li stared entranced at the view. The fifty miles or so of island shore which was the tribe’s territory was all she had ever known, all the world there was. Now, over there beyond the marshes, she saw another world, immense.

Cramp broke the trance, making her shift her position. Then a flick of movement caught her eye, speed followed by stillness, like a minnow in a pool. It had happened where the spread twigs of the tree swept down to the earth. Inquisitive, she climbed down and crept across to see.

The spider was crouched over its prey, bouncing gently on its springy legs. Spiders were no good to eat. The bug it had caught might have been but Li wasn’t hungry. She wanted to see what the spider would do. She crouched and watched while the spider dragged the bug clear of the insect-size track along which it had been scuttling. It climbed into the twigs above the track and rapidly wove a coarse, loose web, then returned to earth and stretched a couple of threads across the path. It moved into the shadows and waited. So did Li.

Nothing happened. Her absorption dwindled. She became aware of the dry, alien plain around her, and her distance from the tribe. Every insect-click, every faint rustle, might be a danger-sound. She must go back. But first she needed to know what the spider was up to. There was no reason for the need, no purpose or use in knowing. It was the mere knowledge that mattered.

Moving as carefully as if she’d been stalking a minnow she pulled a grass stem from a tussock and, starting some distance from the web, trailed the seed-head along the path. It moved jerkily, like a crawling bug. As it touched the threads the web tumbled from above, tangling loosely round it, and the spider had leaped and was crouching over it to inspect its prey. Li couldn’t see what had triggered the web to fall.

She watched the spider strip the remains of web from the seed-head and eat them. The stem was too heavy for it to draw the seed-head clear of the path, so it chose a new place, built another web-trap and waited. Li peered closely, trying to see how the web was made, but it was too complicated for her. The sense of danger returned, overwhelming her longing for knowledge, so she gave up and returned to the beach.

The tide was ebbing and there were no more shrimps, so the tribe were resting in the shallows. Li chose a place a little apart, deep enough for her to float upright, ducking her head now and then to re-wet her thatch of hair against the fierce sun. She could have dozed like that, as the others were doing, but the excitement of thought kept her awake. There were two pictures in her mind – the minnow in the pool and the web dropping from the twigs. Northward there were rock-pools with minnows in them. A yellow one was especially delicious, but almost impossible to catch. But if she could make a web . . . How . . . ? With what . . . ?

Towards evening she crossed the dunes again and collected the longest grass stems she could find. Returning to the beach she scooped away the burning surface, making a cooler hollow where she could sit and work at the problem, stopping only when it was too dark to see. She got nowhere. The stems were brittle and wouldn’t stay together, her fingers didn’t understand what she wanted them to do, but she remained absorbed. The failures themselves were knowledge, feeding her need.

Here the tribe slept in scooped nests in the sand, some always wakeful in case of danger. At the midnight tide they woke and shrimped through the shallows under the white full moon as their ancestors had done for thousands of generations on this beach, at this tide. They didn’t need memories or knowledge to wake at the proper time. The tide was in their blood and called to them. The shrimps were easier to catch at night because they were phosphorescent, moving in drifting sheets of light above the rippled sand. This was how it always had been. It could not change.

Climbing the dunes next morning for fresh grass stems, Li noticed a fragment of net-like orange stuff protruding from the wind-blown sand. She pulled it free and found that it was no larger than the webbing between two of her fingers. It was in fact gourd-fibre, left after the flesh of the gourd had rotted away, and then blown on to the dunes. Li tested it and found how delicate it was, and far too small in any case, so she went on and collected her grass stems. In the night the notion had come to her that they were brittle because they were dry, and if she wetted them she might have more luck. This helped a little, but soon the sun became too hot for further work on shore, and in the water the grass stems floated about uncontrollably, so she gave up.

Then she remembered that she had sometimes seen bigger pieces of gourd-fibre, so she went and searched the dunes till she found one about as large as her spread hand. At the noon tide she tried it out. She was still thinking of minnows. She hadn’t intended to use it to catch shrimps – she could do that with her hands – and only wanted to see how the mesh worked, but at her first trawl she found several transparent bodies wriggling on the net. Delicately she picked them out, calling Come-and-see to Ma-ma.

The fragile mesh soon tore so she supported it with both hands, cupping them in the usual way but with more space between the fingers so that the water drained quickly away, leaving the shrimps trapped. As the swarms increased she was catching twenty or thirty at a time, and Ma-ma picked them off and fed both of them. The females and young used to start the shrimping, with the males joining in only when there were enough of them to catch with their clumsier fingers, so at first Li was able to keep her invention to herself while Ma-ma shooed the others away. Then the males arrived.

Since the shark-hunt Li’s uncle Presh had without an actual fight challenged and outfaced old Mirn and become the undisputed leader of the tribe. It was in his interest to investigate any commotion among the lesser members, and since Li’s invention was causing a stir of interest he waded over to see what was happening. Humbly she offered him a meshful of shrimps which he picked greedily off, ruining the mesh as he did so.

Without resentment she returned to shrimping with her bare hands, and then rested in the water, thinking not about webs or nets but reliving the wonder of seeing that far, blue other world across the marshes.