No Enemy But Time

Chapter Ten

Our contingency plan demanded that I be present at lakeside every sunrise and sunset for the possible extrusion of the Backstep Scaffold, a stipulation that cut down my range and frustrated my efforts to observe Helen’s people. This demand was doubly difficult to observe because the scaffold did not appear. Nevertheless, after missing my first sunrise assignation, for the entire week afterward I honored my end of the bargain and showed up at lakeside even when irritably certain that my colleagues in the twentieth century would fail me again. Still, I did not believe I was permanently stranded. Kaprow and his assistants were experiencing Technological Difficulties, bugs that they would undoubtedly overcome in time, and time was Kaprow’s private bailiwick.

In fact, I began to believe that maybe my apprehension of time differed in some significant way from that of my White Sphinx colleagues. Maybe, because of the sheer temporal distance of my dropback, my sunrises and sunsets no longer corresponded to theirs. Eventually, I decided, Kaprow would figure that out, and the scaffold would appear—seemingly out of thin air—exactly when it was supposed to. In the meantime, though, I would abandon the lake to give the habilines my full attention, returning at the end of another week to see if I had surmised correctly. After all, getting to know the protohumans was what I had come for.

For the next couple of days after this decision, then, I mounted dogged forays on the Minids to press my suit. They did not react well. Although they no longer tried to drive me away, they would not tolerate my presence closer than forty or fifty yards from the huts. To make me keep my distance they hurled figs, mongongo nuts, berries, tubers, clumps of dirt, and stones. I had hoped to make inroads on their concerted resistance by plying two or three of the younger habilines with sugar cubes and gum sticks from my survival gear, but the children would not let me approach them, and the mothers of the Minid teddy bears were extremely conscientious about keeping them close to hand.

On the third morning, I arrived in the clearing between the fingers of gallery forest to find empty huts.

The Minids had moved, had relocated Helensburgh elsewhere in the mosaic of interlocking East African habitats. Momentarily I panicked. I had driven them from their capital, and it might not be easy to find them again. This fear passed. The morning after I had fired my pistol into the air—the morning after I had entertained them with a soulful rendition of “A Day Ago”—the Minids had again greeted the sunrise by singing. Their wordless chorale, awakening me, had echoed over woods and veldt like the spirit of thunder or earthquake.

To find where the Minids had relocated their village, all I would have to do was listen for their next reverent aubade. They sang, I had decided, not only to express feelings that they could not otherwise articulate, but also to inform other habiline bands of their whereabouts—not as an irrevocable claim on territory, but as a social courtesy and a means of keeping the communication channels open. In fact, I had heard faint habiline singing from the far northern shore of Lake Kiboko and also from the vicinity of Mount Tharaka to the southeast. I was certain, too, that habiline ears were much better than mine, that they apprehended these faint dawn concerts as powerful surgings of emotion. Although the singing of one habiline band probably alternated with that of another, up to now all I had been able to hear clearly were the voices of the nearby Minids. If they had not moved too far off, I would hear them singing again tomorrow. They would not sever their polyphonic alliance with others of their kind merely to be forever shut of Joshua Kampa.

I was right.

The next morning I heard the Minids chorusing their raw benedictions of the dawn. By following these sounds I tracked them to a site about two miles from their former encampment, where they had reestablished Helensburgh (I could not give it any other name) on a grassy hillside overlooking the vast checkerboard of savannah, thornveldt, and forest strips fronting Mount Tharaka. A citadel, this community.

Its chief disadvantage from my point of view, and one that genuinely fretted me, was that I could not approach the new capital except by walking exposed on the open grassland below. A battlement of granite boulders partly blocked my view of the haystack hovels behind it, and there was not a tree within sixty or seventy feet. The Minids themselves were arrayed across the southwestern face of the hillside like spectators at a high-school football game, but when they caught sight of me, they scampered to their battlement and treated me to a torrent of stones and taunts.

So. Their singing had led me to them again, but their placement on the hillside thwarted easy access, and I was no better off than I had been before their move. They had hardened their position, in fact. A cunning and fearless leopard might be able to get to them, but I never would. That most Pleistocene leopards had too fine an instinct for self-preservation to make the attempt was not lost on me, either. I returned to my headquarters feeling lower than Lake Kiboko in an epoch of protracted drought.

I am not going to detail here the piddling hardships I suffered (dysentery is not a pretty topic), or the dangers I passed (not all of them in my stool), or the fabulous menagerie of quadrupeds, serpents, and birds that I either befriended or ate (if not the one before the other). Nor am I going to recount my daily chores in the acacia thicket, from washing clothes to gathering firewood to burying my garbage (which last task I scrupulously performed to discourage the visits of a host of four-legged trash collectors, most notably the giant hyenas). Instead, I want to tell you what I learned of the Minids while still trying to gain admittance to their clannish hearts.

First, I found that between, say, ten in the morning and the hour before sunset, the males and the females often went their separate ways. Blessed or encumbered with children, the women—on days not expressly devoted to dawdling—occupied themselves accumulating berries, birds’ eggs, beetle larvae, scorpions, melons, and other easily portable foodstuffs, all of which they carried in crude bark trays or unsewn animal skins. One of the older females had a vessel so expertly woven that I wondered if some unsung chrononaut had dropped back in time to give it to her, whereupon I realized that her “basket” was in fact a weaverbird nest that she or her husband had stolen from an acacia tree. (Necessity is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention.) With their children in tow and an armed male nearby to harry the kids back into the woods if danger threatened, the women skirted the edges of the savannah.

To benchmark their progress through the bush, and to maintain contact with one another, they babbled, cooed, and scatsang as they foraged. Usually they gave way in silence to a herd of elephants or a pride of lions or a pack of giant hyenas. If, however, the interlopers were lesser hyenas, baboons, wild dogs, or robust australopithecines, the women were as capable as their male counterparts of raising a diversionary ruckus or a spirited defense of their foraging domains.

Three or four times I contrived to tail the womenfolk, but I was no more welcome a tagalong than a flasher on an outing of Camp Fire Girls. Once aware of my presence, they invariably shrieked and hurled things at me. The stain imparted to my bush shorts by the albumin of a well-thrown guinea fowl’s egg remained set in the fabric to the day I gave them up for lost.

Helen never went on these excursions. She had no child, and the womenfolk, though generally tolerant of her, were uneasy when she was about. Instead, Helen went hunting with the males.

These hunts took place on the savannah, where, if ever I climbed off my belly, I was unable to disguise myself effectively. I saw either a great deal or almost nothing. It did become clear to me, though, that the Minids not only tolerated Helen among them but frequently put her in a position to deliver the coup de grâce after a well-coordinated stalk. Under my astonished gaze she batted down a warthog and a duiker. Often good for two or three days’ eating, these kills released the Minids from the burdensome need, if not the nagging desire, to hunt—so that I sometimes had nothing to do but sit in my tree and reread Genesis. The Minids, meanwhile, stayed in New Helensburgh and feasted.

What progress was I making? Very little, it seemed. The best construction I could place on my relationship with the habilines was that I was no longer a stranger to them.

I recognized by sight each one of the adult Minids. In addition to christening the band’s obvious head honcho Alfie, I had assigned the following monickers to its menfolk: Ham, Jomo, Genly, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Fred. Ham and Jomo were the two oldest Minids, if their creased faces and salt-and-pepper manes were reliable indices of age. Genly was the habiline who had given me so intense a scrutiny after the fateful pistol-shot incident, while Roosevelt was the unfortunate soul whose sphincter muscle had betrayed him. Malcolm, he of the red-black goatee and pencil-point eyes, had served as sentry the day I discovered the original Helensburgh, and Fred was the youngest of the hunters, a hobbit with a permanently dislocated jaw and a wide gap in his front teeth—as if in bygone days he had run afoul of one of his elders’ more emphatic fits of pique.

The ladies I named in this wise: Dilsey, Guinevere, Emily, Miss Jane, Odetta, and Nicole. Dilsey and Guinevere were the consorts of, respectively, Ham and Jomo. Guinevere was the harridan who had given Helen such an extended tongue-lashing on my first afternoon as a spy. Since that time I had developed a more favorable opinion of her. In fact, I had even begun to suspect that she was Helen’s mother. Emily, Genly’s wife, struck me as the inveterate sexpot among the distaff Minids, a lady with a roving eye and a wandering backside. She was Alfie’s favorite, although he too apparently appreciated a carnal smorgasbord. Miss Jane, Odetta, and Nicole had made a single distinctive impression on me: They were excellent mothers, tenacious in their children’s defense, and amiably feisty in their dealings with the menfolk.

As for the children, I had not yet familiarized myself with all of them beyond the point of assigning names.

The oldest among them, probably Dilsey’s offspring, was an adolescent male whom I called Mister Pibb.

Thereafter the children, toddlers, and babies got mixed up in my mind, but the names I eventually wrote on the genealogy page of my reduced-print Bible and field guide included Jocelyn, Groucho, Duchess, Bonzo, Pebbles, Zippy, Gipper, and A.P.B.

A.P.B. was Fred and Nicole’s baby. His initials stood alternately for Alistair Patrick Blair and All Points Bulletin, the latter earned by the shrillness of his demands to be given suck.

Twenty-three habilines in all (for I had been counting the Minids). I was their first cousin, two million years removed, come home for a visit, and they refused to acknowledge me. I was also beginning to wonder if I had become a nonentity to my colleagues in the dream territory of the twentieth century.

Perhaps, for them, I had never existed….

I, Joshua Kampa, was extinct on my feet. The invisible man, another country’s native son, cut off from his roots in the primeval Kane’an. A has-been, a may-one-day-be, a dreamfaring dodo bird, and I might have to stay.

Two days running at the end of a week, I returned to Lake Kiboko to see if Kaprow had lowered the Backstep Scaffold for me, and it still did not descend. But I was beginning to feel a part of both the Pleistocene and the habilines to whose band I now wanted to be admitted for more than solely scientific reasons. And at length I managed a minor breakthrough with Roosevelt, the young male who had reacted to my pistol shot by soiling himself. He did not lack courage in more commonplace bush-country situations. In fact, at catching birds and tracking small game such as hyraxes and hares, he seemed to me one of the most adept of all the habilines. Often, in the early evening, he did not scruple to carry out solitary hunting expeditions—as much for his own private pleasure as for the trophies he might bring home. For safety’s sake he kept these outings brief and did not venture very far from New Helensburgh, but by persistent observation I learned of his penchant for such trips and determined to act upon my knowledge by shadowing him.

Alert to my clumsy trailing tactics, Roosevelt usually made sure that I got no closer than sixty or seventy yards. On at least four occasions, after spotting me he gave up the hunt and sauntered home with a kind of wounded dignity. I was forever associated in his mind with loud noises and the terrible humiliation of independently functioning bowels. However, the terrain came to my rescue. The veldt below New Helensburgh abounded in kopjes, those granite outcroppings showing either bare rock or an austere covering of scrub. I began using them as blinds, as the Minids and other predators habitually did, and it is to a kopje and my own improving stealth that I owe my first successful tête-à-tête with Roosevelt.

Roosevelt had just caught a hare by a technique that Babington had tried to teach me in Lolitabu, a technique I had not yet mastered. It involves observing a spring hare’s half-cocked ears as you run behind it in full pursuit. As soon as the hare flattens its ears against its neck, you jump to either the right or the left and open your hands for a possible capture. The flattening of the ears is an infallible sign that the hare is going to “jink,” or turn, and by jumping to one side you give yourself a fifty-fifty chance of intercepting it. On this occasion Roosevelt’s intuitive leap to the right proved correct, and the hare forfeited its life to the Minid’s quick and brutal hands. I witnessed the denouement of this primal drama from the slope of a barren kopje overlooking the plain.

Carrying the dead hare by one of its hind legs, Roosevelt approached my outcropping and squatted just beneath me in the lee of its overhang. He had decided to eat his catch in solitude rather than carry it back to camp, where the others would expect and probably receive placatory allotments of the carcass.

Although Odetta, his consort, probably deserved the consideration of a rabbity drumstick, I did not half blame Roosevelt. He had taken the risk and he had won the prize.

I peered down on him with respect and great excitement. Roosevelt, ignorant of my presence, knapped some sharp flakes from a lava cobble and began to perform deft surgery on the limp underside of the hare. The single-mindedness with which he was dismembering his dinner suggested that unless I revealed myself, he would never awaken to the fact that he was being watched. Sheer youthful carelessness on his part, but a break for Joshua Kampa.

Carefully, then, I got to my feet and balanced on the edge of the kopje. The sun was sinking toward Lake Kiboko, and my shadow fell behind me to the east, out of Roosevelt’s line of sight. Catching my breath, I leapt as far out into the savannah as I could and twisted about in midair so as to be facing Roosevelt when I landed. My backpack banged my shoulder blades as, instantly crouching and spreading my arms to prevent the Minid’s escape, I hit the ground. Roosevelt shrieked and dropped the mangled hare. Unfortunately, he also dropped the contents of his lower intestines.

Dear Ngai, I thought. Not again.

I let my backpack slide into the grass behind me and tore off my T-shirt by way of a hasty peace offering. After demonstrating how it might be used to clean one’s backside, I thrust the undershirt toward Roosevelt with many solicitous murmurs and smiles. He regarded the garment with the utmost suspicion and attempted to sidle past me to the right—but I stayed with him, and he seemed to understand that he would have to grapple with me to win his escape. Consequently, he showed me his teeth—his tongue—his liver-colored throat—while the hair along his shoulders and upper arms crackled erect and undulated in the faint twilight breeze. My height advantage seemed irrelevant. I did not want to fight him.

“Take the T-shirt,” I intoned sweetly. “Please take the T-shirt, Roosevelt.”

Against all my expectations, he did, snatching it from my hand as if retrieving something that had belonged to him in the first place. He then set about a swift, comprehensive clean-up campaign, never taking his eyes from my face. A moment later the soiled T-shirt was lying in a wad at my feet and Roosevelt was sidling along the face of the kopje to the left. I moved with him. Our clumsy little waltz was getting neither one of us anywhere. We halted.

What now? Roosevelt’s beetle-browed expression appeared to inquire.

From the thigh pocket of my bush shorts I removed my last unwrapped package of Fruit of the Loom cotton briefs and nimbly extracted them from the plastic. Like a matador displaying his cape, I shook them out. They were clean and bright, so seductive that a week ago I had almost broken down and changed into them as a means of combating my can’t-get-started-with-you-habiline blues. Now I was glad I had not. The briefs had a waistband of resilient elastic completely encircled by a single golden thread. I posed behind them so that Roosevelt could see how they were supposed to be worn.

Roosevelt’s mamma had not raised a blockhead. He quickly made the necessary notional leap and snatched the briefs away. Then he retreated to the southern end of the kopje’s overhang to fondle and examine them. Warily eying me as I gestured encouragement, he stood on one foot long enough to insert the other through the garment’s leg opening, then hurriedly switched feet and completed the job, shinnying the briefs up his lean thighs and over the hairy knot of his genitalia. Voilà! A habiline in immaculate Fruit of the Looms.

I was misty-eyed. “Jesus, Roosevelt,” I told him; “Jesus, you really look nice.”

Still leery, he swaggered back toward me and retrieved the gutted hare. This, without ceremony, he gave into my hands, apparently in exchange for the underwear. Before I could assure him that there were no strings attached to my gift—beyond the heretofore badly frayed hope that it might establish my trustworthiness as an ally—Roosevelt had darted off across the darkening savannah in the direction of New Helensburgh.

I hunkered in the shelter of the kopje to eat the remains of the hare, pleased with myself for not having pointed out to Roosevelt that he had donned my resplendent briefs backwards.

It had not rained since my arrival in the Pleistocene. Obviously it had been dry for quite some time.

Recently, however, this lack of rain had provoked the migration of many herd animals—gazelles, wildebeest, zebras, and several species of protoantelope—out of the area. Although the food-gathering techniques of the Minid females probably accounted for two thirds of what the band actually ate, the absence of meat on the hoof would eventually work real hardships on Helen’s people, primarily by depriving them of a vital supply of protein. Mongongo nuts were rare in this part of Africa; and if the smaller game animals—guinea fowl, hares, warthogs, monkeys, hyraxes, and water birds—followed the example of the ungulates, why, the Minids would soon be facing the ghastly specter of Famine.

And so would I.

The prospect excited as well as disturbed me. A change for the worse in hunting conditions might prove my best opportunity since the Great Fruit of the Loom Giveaway of winning friends and influencing habilines.

After giving Roosevelt the briefs, I detected among all the hunters a heightened willingness to tolerate me on their trail, as if I embodied a queer sort of sartorial example and maybe even a source of further handouts. It perplexed me that Roosevelt did not wear the briefs—I could not help wondering what he had done with them—and that these hunts usually went badly, but at least I had been granted the right to spectate. A genuine concession. Helen, across a hundred or more yards of savannah, would sometimes turn and fix me with a stare, neither hostile nor admonitory, that would make me tremble in my chukkas. I do not know exactly why I trembled, but the impetus might have been simple gratitude. A pariah often interprets the bone flung into his face as nourishment rather than rebuke.

But, as I said, these latest hunts seldom concluded successfully. Even though I tried to keep a low profile, my presence on the veldt handicapped the Minids. Nevertheless, the most compelling factor in their slow undoing was the drought. After the zebras, Tommies, wildebeest, et al., withdrew in populations numbering in the several thousands, an exodus of lions, leopards, cheetahs, and mangy canids ensued. Soon the Minids and I were sharing our homeland with game too big to dispatch easily (giraffids, quasi-elephants, hippos) and territorial competitors like the hyenas and those awesome baboons called Simopithecus jonathani that reminded me of agile gorillas. Only a few robust australopithecines remained in the area, sad-sack shamblers who provoked in me—on our increasingly rare encounters—a disquieting blend of pity and guilt. They were vegetarians, who, I knew, sometimes fell victim to the omnivorous cunning of their cousins. Most of them had probably deserted the gallery forest not so much because of the drought as because of the habilines’ merciless depredations.

Helen’s people, I might reiterate, were not the only protohumans in the area. At least three other bands of comparable size roamed the mosaic of habitats bordering Lake Kiboko on the east. I had heard them singing in the mornings; and on three or four occasions, taking particular care not to reveal myself, I had actually seen the hunters of one of these bands—the Lakeys, I called them—conferring on the plain with Alfie or other representatives of the Minids.

Indeed, a few days later the Lakeys and the Minids had engaged in a seemingly spontaneous fiesta in a river strip of fig trees about halfway between Lake Kiboko and New Helensburgh. Such get-togethers, I understood, provided an essential social outlet for the habilines. A randy young male might well find a nubile femme fatale among the unattached ingénues of the other band. Depending on circumstances, he would either return with her to his own people or remain with his bride as an adoptive son of his in-laws.

As yet, however, I had witnessed no marriages and could not predict which of these two likely patterns would prevail. Mister Pibb was the only Minid even remotely close to marrying age, but he had not asserted himself during the shindy with the Lakeys, so nothing but chatter and good-natured wrestling had come of that meeting.

In addition to the Lakeys and the Minids, I had evidence—in the form of haunting morning songs and an occasional distant sighting of strange bipeds—that two other bands of habilines lived relatively near. One of these had colonized a wooded flank of Mount Tharaka to the southeast, while the other had established an amorphous principality somewhere in the opposite direction (a region today given over to Zarakal’s chronic border disputes with Ethiopia and Somalia). The tacit understanding among all these bands was that they fared better as maverick units than as partners in even a semiformal alliance. The availability of edible plants and the disposition of game across the plains did not permit the mounting of a grandiose habiline republic, especially in seasons of drought.

United (beyond a certain ecologically determined limit) you fell. Divided (into autonomous bands of fewer than thirty) you stood. For which reason Alfie the Minid did not aspire to be Alexander the Great.

During this fallow period, the Minids compounded their problems by missing several kills and allowing a pair of aggressive lionesses to drive them off another. It struck me that I could improve my status by demonstrating my talents as a breadwinner. I would make my reluctant cousins a present of an animal large enough to keep them well fed and sassy for two or three days. To that end, I went out one morning before dawn, before the ritualistic choiring of habilines, and walked in the cool half-dark all the way to the edge of Lake Kiboko. By the time I arrived the sun was rising, marbling the eastern horizon with delicate rose and salmon. The lake itself was a vast looking glass of turquoise.

I drew my .45 and crouched on a lava flow above the southeastern shore.

At which moment, glancing sidelong, I saw that the Backstep Scaffold from Kaprow’s omnibus was hanging in space like a mechanical variation on the Old Hindu Rope Trick. My pulse quickened, and I leapt to my feet. Here, if I wanted it, was rescue. Even after all this time, Blair and Kaprow had not forgotten me. They had solved their Technological Difficulties. Peering upward, I approached the scaffold, startled anew by the window into deliverance. I was tempted, too. It would be so easy to chin myself into position, strap myself in, push the control retracting the scaffold, and dream myself back into the bosom of a world of double-digit inflation and percale bed sheets. Who could say, in fact, whether I would ever get another chance?

I took out my transcordion and keyed in the following message: “I am fine, surviving quite well. Have made contact with a band of local hominids—Homo habilis,I believe—and am gradually winning acceptance. Intend to pursue these observations for several more weeks. Very necessary if we are to learn anything. If possible, will return at weekly intervals, starting from today. Cannot afford wasting time traipsing back and forth. Listen: SCAFFOLD NOT HERE EVERY DAY! Please don’t forget me. I will be back. Best, J.”

Then I put the instrument on the scaffold, and boosted the platform back into its spacious aerial womb.

The sky was whole again, and I had reduced my morning’s various options to one. Quite a significant one. I felt better for having done so, too. My entire life had pointed to this mission, and I was not about to abort it simply because a drought was threatening my habiline cohorts and me with hard times—especially now that I knew I could, with a little luck, get home.

I resumed my vigil at lakeside. Fifteen minutes later I shot a small, lone antelope of a species unknown to both me and my field guide—the creature had a copper-colored pelt and graceful, corkscrewing horns—and dragged it away from the water’s edge to prevent its being purloined by a crocodile. After gutting the antelope, I hoisted its lolling carcass to my back. My plan was to carry it over the intervening grasslands to New Helensburgh, lay it sacramentally before the Minids’ citadel, and thereby earn their undying gratitude and respect. This was a heroic scenario, but because I had fully envisioned it, I expected it to work.

The trip back to New Helensburgh, however, did not go as I had foreseen. As I staggered along, the body of the dead antelope grew progressively stiffer and heavier. Also, as part of my revolving alert for hyenas, wild dogs, and other potential dacoits, I made myself turn about in a circle every thirty or forty yards. Unhappily, about two hours into my journey, just as I was beginning to believe in my ultimate, if not my immediate, success, my conscientiousness paid off in a sighting. Some distance off, sharkishly patrolling the steppe, a pack of giant hyenas trotted toward me from the northeast.

“Oh, shit,” I murmured aloud. “Oh, holy shit.”

I dropped the antelope carcass (Aepyceros whazzus) and unholstered my Colt (Equus fatalis).

Unbalanced by the sudden removal of so much dead weight, however, I fumbled the pistol to the ground, where it fired a muffled shot into the dust and kicked over onto its side. The noise halted the hyenas in their tracks, but only briefly. As soon as I had retrieved the.45 and pointed it shakily in their direction, they were already advancing again, contracting from a file of animals into an ugly, loping wedge. Only six bullets remained in my eight-clip, and although Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy might have found that number sufficient, it would fall about ten shy of what I needed to survive this onslaught. I sighted along the pistol’s muzzle, pulled the trigger, and—

Click.

I had not slid a fresh clip into the butt of the.45 that morning. Further, under prevailing circumstances I was going to have a hard time extracting the old clip and feeding in a substitute. A single bandolier crossed my torso, and I hurried to squeeze seven or eight cartridges out of its canvas loops into my hands. I was shaking so badly that a couple of these fell into the grass at my feet. Looking up, I saw the lead hyena. Its mouth was as big as one of the Carlsbad Caverns; its shallow panting breaths seemed to be coming in perfect synchrony with my heartbeats.

The hyena jumped. Scattering bullets everywhere, I struck the creature a desperate blow to the head with the butt of my pistol. A froth of saliva showered up into my vision, and I fell backward over the little buck I had killed. The hyena rolled away from me, unconscious.

Dazed, I struggled to my feet again. A second and a third hyena, intimidated, went around me—but their remaining comrades had just crested a gentle swelling in the plain, and it did not seem likely that, in light of their overwhelming numerical advantage, they would all prove such cowards. I dug into my pocket for the Swiss Army knife, not even daring to think what good it might do.

Whereupon, so help me, the cavalry arrived.

Leaping, ululating, brandishing their clubs, the Minids scurried into my field of vision from the east. Alfie and Helen were in the vanguard of this unexpected counterattack, and Alfie, bless him, had girded up his loins in the same pair of Fruit of the Loom that Roosevelt had snatched from my hand days and days ago.

Whether Roosevelt had relinquished the briefs willingly, I had no idea—but the sight of that hairy habiline modeling those dirty jockey shorts while laying waste about him with his stave—well, it cheered my twentieth-century soul.

All the Minids—Jomo, Ham, Genly, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Helen—performed admirably, swinging their clubs so spiritedly that the hyenas, for all their size, were beset, bashed, brained, and bested.

Moreover, throughout this abbreviated combat my rescuers kept up a demoralizing stream of hoots, yodels, and yawps.

Those hyenas that could tucked tail and ran. Four or five others crawled away with crushed skulls. I, altogether overcome, crumpled to the ground, a collapse that could have spelled an end to White Sphinx—except that the Minids, when they came forward to finish off the hyena that I had knocked unconscious, treated me, not as an odious interloper, but as a fellow habiline.

A fellow habiline in rather indifferent standing, perhaps, but undeniably a comrade and band member.

Hunkering nearby, Jomo and Malcolm banged the dead hyena’s massive head against the ground, fingered its nostrils and eyelids, and mumbled in their scraggly beards. Genly, squatting beside the antelope, was deeply curious about the bullet hole behind the buck’s right ear. While Roosevelt kept popping up from his crouch to survey the savannah, Ham, Alfie, and Helen lackadaisically cut away strips of meat from the open belly of my kill. I had never, without a pistol in hand, been this close to the Minids as a group before, and I wondered that they did not take more interest in me. Only Helen occasionally made eye contact, and I could not tell whether she was finding fault with my appearance or trying to index me in her mental catalogue file of bipedal neighbors. Somehow, as she had known all along, I was not quite right. I was, and I was not, one of their own.

I gave her a smile—that ancient, self-serving primate signal of one’s own inoffensiveness—and lay back on the ground. I had accomplished my design. All it had required was weeks of effort, a bribe of inexpensive underwear, a drought, a foolhardy hunting expedition, and a posture of absolute helplessness in the face of an attack by giant hyenas.

Helen sidled near.

Into my hand she placed a collop of antelope meat. I accepted this and looked into her eyes, which were red-rimmed and haggard—but beautiful for all that. Then I cast a glance at my slaughtered prey, the antelope, and a reminiscent queasiness flooded through me. (Bambi.) Embarrassed, memory-choked, I averted my head and closed my eyes.