No Enemy But Time

Chapter Twelve

Exhausted and shaken, I returned to New Helensburgh with the habilines. The trip back included a detour through the acacia grove where I had made my headquarters. Here I picked up much of the gear—rope, jacket, shaving bag, and so on—that I had not carried to Lake Kiboko with me. (Malcolm and Roosevelt were toting the uneaten portions of my kill.) I had explained the need for this side trip by improvising finger lingo, snatches of pidgin Phrygian (an ignorant king having once decided that Phrygian was the oldest human language), and a range of facial tics and tremors that would have done Mary Pickford proud. These ploys, in combination, had persuaded the Minids to follow me to the place where I had stowed my gear, for, to communicate with one another, they were themselves dependent on hand signals, vocalizations, and a subtle repertoire of eye movements. While gathering my belongings together I was especially conscious of how much information they appeared to be able to transmit through glances, blinks, and brow furrowings. They could “whisper behind my back” without having to face away from me.

Once in New Helensburgh itself, a wide ledge on a hillside overlooking the steppe, I had to contend with the curiosity of the children and the mistrustfulness of their mothers. The male habilines had ceased to regard me as a threat, but the women did not want me touching their offspring, bribing them with sugar cubes, entertaining them with the narrow beam of my penlight. That the children—especially Malcolm and Miss Jane’s little imp, the Gipper—enjoyed being terrified by this strange instrument, and came back again and again to have their minds teased and their pupils shrunken, did not soften this maternal hostility.

I was not allowed to enter any of the four clumsy huts on the ledge, or to partake of the women’s food stores, or to wander too near when Odetta took her toddler Pebbles up to the hilltop for walking lessons, which always occurred under the vigilant gaze of Fred, Roosevelt, or Malcolm.

In short, I was a second-class citizen. My sophisticated wardrobe aside, I was the Minids’ resident nigger, only begrudgingly better than a baboon or an australopithecine. The role was not altogether unfamiliar.

My survival kit contained a six-foot tube tent and a windscreen. I pitched the tent and erected the windscreen about thirty feet from the citadel’s main thoroughfare. A dwelling of bright yellow plastic, the tent invited—yea, demanded—the curiosity and admiration of the Minid children, who liked to play inside it whenever I left it untended even for the duration of a whiz in the weeds. On my third day as a semihonorary habiline, in fact, I returned from emptying my bladder to find Jocelyn, Groucho, and Zippy entangled in twenty feet of fishing line. My Bible-cum-field guide, meanwhile, lay three quarters of the way down the slope, its pages riffling in the breeze like the wings of lazily mating moths. I had to cut the young Minids free with my pocketknife, thus ruining the fishing line, while Groucho kept baring his teeth and screeching. After releasing the children I looked outside my tube tent to find it surrounded by fretful Minid hunters as well as their wives. Thereafter, despite the inconvenience, I rolled up the tube tent every morning and redeployed it in the evenings when I was ready for bed. My knapsack became a permanent daytime fixture between my shoulder blades because I did not dare leave it anywhere else. Quasimodo Kampa.

If I fit into the Minid band at all, it was because of Helen. She took a special interest in me, I think, because I simultaneously mirrored and magnified her own predicament vis-à-vis her conspecifics.

Granted, she had once joined the hunters in attacking me, but her participation had probably resulted not so much from a fear or a mistrust of me as from her own innate allegiance to her people—even if her lot among them was decidedly peculiar. I had ceased to be a complete outsider to the habilines because their own outsider-in-residence had chosen to acknowledge my existence. We were two of a kind, Helen and I. Our similarities transcended even the gross and arbitrary dictates of taxonomy.

Helen’s status among the Minids derived from two unusual conditions. The first was her size, which made her either equal or superior to her male counterparts in speed and strength. She could outrun even Alfie, and although he might have been able to overpower her physically—a dubious speculation at best—he tended to avoid situations pitting him head to head against Helen or any other habiline. He ruled by force of personality, the hint of intimidation. If Helen submitted unquestioningly to his preeminence, she may have done so because her speed and strength did not yet give her a psychological antidote to the social dictates of gender. A big, strong, swift-footed, and cunning female was still a female.

The second circumstance determining Helen’s status among the Minids was her barrenness. She had no child. She showed no signs of ever conceiving one. In fact, she stood outside the more or less formal pair-bonding relationships structuring the habiline band. Undoubtedly she had had paramours among the males. Alfie had almost certainly plucked from her the fresh gardenia of her maidenhood, for his chieftaincy of the Minids gave him carnal access to almost every female who had attained menarche.

Those exempt from his lust included Dilsey (probably his mother) and, among the younger women, both Miss Jane and Odetta (perhaps his sisters). But if Helen had coupled with Alfie or any of the other hunters, she had apparently never conceived. Her breasts were high and small, her loins lithe and undisfigured.

At present, whatever her sexual behavior in the past, she seemed to avoid engaging in amorous dalliance with the males. In view of her vigor and appetite in other areas of physical indulgence—running, killing, eating, excreting, climbing, and rough-housing with the Minid children—this scruple puzzled me. Had her barrenness, exiling her from the tender domestic concerns and the friendship of female habilines, inflicted upon her an aversion to the woman’s role in the sex act? Well, possibly. She ran with the males, and cocks of a feather may sometimes celebrate the joys of treading their jennies.

Together, Helen’s size and barrenness permitted her to fashion, within a social structure predicated on cooperation, a lifestyle of surprising autonomy. It would be false to argue that she had the best of both worlds (male and female), for only Guinevere and Emily on the distaff side ever treated her with affection; whereas among the hunters she had achieved “equality” not as another competent comrade but as a potent secret weapon (the bipedal equivalent of a Remington 30.06) against the merciless enemy Hunger.

Still, being childless, she came and went pretty much as she chose; and, although Roosevelt or Alfie might occasionally go on solitary hunts, Helen was the only Minid who regularly ventured well beyond the citadel for longer than an hour or two.

Once, in fact, Helen disappeared for an entire afternoon, and I worked myself into a lather imagining that she had fallen to predators. She returned a little before sunset carrying a baboon infant, still alive, which she cuddled and unintelligibly wooed for several hours. How Helen was able to cull the baby from its troop without sustaining a scratch or setting off a riotous chase over the grassland, I cannot guess—but somehow she had managed. For most of the evening, the other Minids—with the exception of the children—kept their distance. Finally, however, Alfie sauntered into the little creature’s field of vision, frightening it so badly that it bit Helen. This incident ended Helen’s brief tenure as madonna, for Alfie, after fussing for a moment over her wound, insisted that she relinquish her baby to Jomo. Jomo and Malcolm carried the infant baboon into the darkness, and that was the last any of the rest of us ever saw it. I derived some consolation from the fact that it did not come back to us in bloody sections.

Helen liked me for my oddness, I think. In my own way, I was as peculiar a Minid as she—tall enough to discomfit Alfie, sufficiently fleet and steadfast to run at her side without lapsing, and enough of an inveterate loner to chafe under the sometimes onerous burden of habiline togetherness. For these and other reasons she would occasionally tolerate my company on one of her private foraging expeditions.

The benefit to me was twofold. I got out of New Helensburgh without having to follow the men, and I learned some clever food-gathering techniques that made it possible for the Minids to remain where they were when drought seemed to demand that they pull up stakes for a happier hunting ground.

Here is one such technique:

Over a stretch of savannah from which the snow-clad peak of Mount Tharaka rose skyward like a colossal, milky diamond, Helen led me into a glade of whistling thorns. Inside this copse she took pains to move as silently as she could. Although less adept at such stealth, I took pains to follow her example. I soon realized that she was searching for bird nests lodged in the thorny branches of the shrubs. I did not understand how we were going to be able to grab any birds, though.

A thought hit me. “Eggs?” I asked Helen. “Huevos?” I made an egglike circle with my thumb and forefinger, then made a show of extracting this sign from between my legs. Helen merely curled her upper lip back in negation and maybe disgust.

By creeping up beneath a nest, squinting long and hard at its bottom, and then snatching from it a fine, fat mouse—which she deftly squeezed to death while withdrawing her hand—Helen demonstrated what our task was and how to proceed with it. Empty nests permitted light to pass through them. Nests sheltering mice, however, appeared tightly woven from the bottom. If you reached into a twiggy domicile through which no light shone, your reward was usually a rodent.

We crept through the whistling thorns evaluating every nest we chanced upon, and at the end of an hour we had five furry mice for our pains. I cached them in the enormous, snap-down pockets of my bush shorts, which were now so frayed and seam-worn they hung upon me like an overelaborate breechclout.

Twilight sifted through the thorn bushes, for we had begun this outing quite late; and the coming of darkness, which my newfound avidity for mouse snatching had pretty much disguised from me, was suddenly plain. Helen was still not ready to go—despite the fact that the darkness was going to invalidate our method of discovering occupied nests. Although I tried to hasten our departure from the thicket, she continued to tarry.

The problem was that for Helen this thicket was an irresistible supermarket of tree mice. In early starlight, because her vision was so much keener than mine, she managed to sniggle two more of the hapless rodents. My pockets bulging, my brain bugling retreat, I could not persuade her to leave off hunting. Maybe the only way to win her over was to let her get her fill.

I found my penlight in my pocket, under a warm, bleeding mouse, and showed Helen how to operate the gizmo. She handled it with such enthusiasm and skill that she could have prolonged our hunt almost indefinitely, spotlighting nests and nabbing any occupants. However, the sight of that tiny beam stabbing upward through the thorn branches reminded me of another spotlight, a spotlight seventeen years into my twentieth-century past, and I grabbed the penlight from Helen’s hand and brusquely returned it to my pocket.

Helen’s astonishingly luminous eyes said, “Indian giver,” but she did not try to reclaim the instrument.

Because it was now too dark to mouseknap by the Helen Habiline Method, she reluctantly gave up her sport and led me back to the Minid citadel.

Among the hunters Genly was Alfie’s sole rival for undisputed leadership of the band. However, he was a rival who had apparently failed to achieve victory in some pivotal past confrontation. As a result, Genly bore a deep scar on one forearm (habiline teeth marks, if I was any judge) and carried himself with a kind of saintly diffidence. He had redirected his aggressive instincts into the hunt, during which he could sometimes behave so belligerently—battering a warthog to death, driving a troop of baboons out of an attractive foraging area, snapping the neck of a colobus monkey with his teeth—that even Vince Lombardi would have quailed before such meanness. On these occasions, gentle Genly unloosed scads of repressed hostilities, bees out of a jostled hive, and Alfie would glance nervously sidelong, bemused by the intensity of his former rival’s rage.

In New Helensburgh, on the other hand, Genly was deferential, glad to be of use. He never pushed for his share of any kill toted among us by another, never withheld so much as a wishbone from the importunate little beggars clamoring for a bite of his guinea fowl. You could easily wonder how he stayed alive on so little food. In fact, the vertebrae of his spine locked like broken wing nuts, and his face was more haggard than his comrades’, with a hint of sagittal crest running like an embossed central part in his frowzy hair. While watching the others eat or handing an antelope thighbone over to a youngster, he would sometimes rub a finger along this crest, as if absentmindedly trying to press it flat. An endearing gesture. It made me think that he was trying to assist the hit-and-miss laborings of evolution.

The foremost indignity of Genly’s life sprang from the control that Alfie exerted over his relationship with Emily, his bond partner. Wolves and whippoorwills establish essentially steadfast pair bonds; so did the majority of habilines, but Alfie, unlike all the other Minid males, rotated among a series of pallet partners.

His favorite, as I have mentioned, was Emily, Genly’s “wife.”

Emily was a lanky lady with atavistically prehensile toes and skin the deep blue color of ripe plums.

Frequently she would forsake the bosom of her family to live in Alfie’s windbreak mansion. She did this so often that her allegiance to Genly began to seem a function of Alfie’s whim rather than of her own free will and devotion. She came each time Alfie summoned her and departed each time he dismissed her—so that I could hardly blame her if she no longer knew her own mind.

Not long after my arrival among the Minids, Genly turned to me for solace, the innocent solace arising naturally between people who must make do in the emotional hinterlands of pariah-hood. Almost, he was a male Helen. Not quite, though, because when Emily returned to him, he melted back into the habiline status quo and became just another adult hunter—whereas Helen and I were never that smoothly folded into the aspic of Minid society. Often, then, Genly came to me seeking either comfort or diversion, and I tried to oblige him.

He wanted little enough, really. A chance to fondle or heft certain of my twentieth-century artifacts was enough to transport him from his problems. I gave him, for instance, the penlight. He shone it into his eyes and ears, played its beam across the faces of the children as he had seen me do, poked it into snake holes and warthog burrows, and exhausted its batteries within a mere three days. I took the penlight back and gave him my magnifying glass. He accepted this new plaything, lifted it to his eye, and, after “reading” a few pages of the tiny book I had also handed him, returned both items and stared meaningfully at my pistol.

Startled, I shook my head. “Cain and Abel are still a few centuries up the line, Genly. Murdering Alfie isn’t going to solve your personal problems.” (In retrospect, however, I wonder….) Genly put his hand on the butt of the automatic, forcing me to twist aside from him and spread my fingers across his chest as a friendly caution. Disturbingly, he did not take his eyes from the weapon.

“Veddy dangerous,” I told him. “Pull trigger. Go boom. You recall this effect, no?”

My pre-Phrygian patois did not impress Genly. He raised his eyes and leveled at me a long, disarming stare.

Well, not quite disarming, for I refused to yield the Colt and finally distracted him by jockeying a new set of batteries into the penlight and directing its beam through the thatching of one of the nearby huts.

Alone among the habilines, however, Genly displayed no fear of the pistol. Even though I tried to keep it holstered and had not used it since shooting the copper-colored antelope at the lake, even Helen eyed it warily. Alfie, too, remembered what my.45 had done. I felt sure that his present laissez-faire attitude toward me owed a great deal to enlightened self-interest. He was far from stupid (even if he did not yet understand the benefits of occasionally washing the briefs he had taken from Roosevelt), and insofar as my weapon went, at least, the other Minids had adopted his policy of Leave Well Enough Alone. All, that is, but Genly.

I began to believe—naïvely, as it happened—that a new demonstration of the Colt’s power would deepen the other habilines’ awe of my weapon and convert even the persistent Genly to this respectful attitude. I decided to use the pistol the next time we went stalking on the plains. The fact that the males’ last several hunts had been only middling successes, and that scavenging during this period had not been very profitable, either, gave me an additional excuse for unholstering the.45 again. Genly must learn to respect the Colt, and the Minids, me included, deserved the psychological boost of a kill larger than hyrax, hare, or guinea hen. We had gone a long time without.

The day after my little talk with Genly (while Emily was still shacking up with Alfie), I shot a giant suid—a devastatingly ugly warthog—at almost the full extent of my pistol’s effective range.

During the stalk the habilines closed in on this bygone beast by looking one another to the places where each hunter ought to be. Depending on eye contact and discreet head bobs, they made very little use of hand signals. Eventually, without its ever having seen them, they half encircled the animal in a copse of whistling thorns, convincing me that it would be unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive to break out my.45. Then, however, Fred and Roosevelt, who had been engaged since dawn in a kind of frisky one-upmanship, destroyed the element of surprise by bursting into the copse from the north and flushing the warthog into the open before their fellow hunters had completely closed their dragnet.

Therefore, when the suid, lifting its tail, attempted to vamoose, I planted my feet, took aim, and fired.

The noise scattered a flock of migrating swallows from the whistling thorns and momentarily confounded the Minids, who dropped to the ground or darted to the cover of the shrubbery. Although the fear of loud noises is supposedly innate, a carryover from the automatic fears of our reptilian forebears, Genly merely winced and crouched. A moment later he was at my side, his jittery attention focused not on the dead warthog across the savannah but on the smoking barrel of my gun.

“You’re hopeless,” I told him.

Was it possible that Genly had a hearing impairment? Other than his immunity to noise-induced panic, I had no real evidence for this theory, but life among the habilines would not have been impossible for a deaf person, merely exceedingly difficult. Sight, smell, and the more subtle tactile senses might have compensated for an auditory deficiency. In any case, Genly was not wholly deaf.

“Boom,” I said, holstering the pistol and fastening the snap.

We got the pig home by means of a crude travois that I improvised from branches, my open bush jacket, and a couple of pieces of nylon rope. My marksmanship with the.45 and my ingenuity in assembling the travois—a feat of on-the-spot engineering that I had craftily premeditated—gave the Minids a great deal to think about. You could see their thinkers thinking, whirring toward better mousetraps and self-propelled family vehicles and maybe even unspoken unified field theories. As Genly and I dragged my makeshift sledge and its savory burden back toward New Helensburgh, I felt that Alfie and the others had finally concluded that I, Joshua Kampa, was… a Credit to All Hominidae. I basked in their (probably illusory) esteem and wished that Helen were there to witness my moment of self-justifying triumph. Helen, however, had remained with the womenfolk that morning, probably with the intention of going off later and plundering our populous paradise of tree mice.

Her absence did not badly cramp my enjoyment of the moment. Little aware of what was to come, I strutted and strained in harness.

That evening we partied. The warthog was dragged, shoved, boosted, and kneed up the slope of the hill to the flat, grassy summit above New Helensburgh. In that spot all the Minids gathered to partake of the dead animal’s flesh. Excitement ran through these creatures—indeed, through me too—like surgings of electricity, the elemental élan vital. Our gamboling on that gentle rampart was spontaneous and joyful.

The hunters made an initial show of nonchalance, but this gave way to undignified chases and hide-and-go-seek games with Mister Pibb, Jocelyn, Groucho, Bonzo, et al., and only Helen seemed to be having any success resisting the general frolic.

Alfie had bequeathed to me the honor of butchering the suid for dinner; I did so with never an appeal to habiline flake tools, relying instead on my Swiss Army knife to slit, slice, and dismember. This hard work kept my inward ebullience on an outward simmer. Once I had finished cutting, Alfie indicated that I was to have the first substantial bite and the opportunity to parcel out allotments as I saw fit. At social gatherings like this one, habiline etiquette demanded that whoever had made the kill receive the proper due, even if the successful hunter were a youth, a female, an outlander, or, like me, an exotic freak of nature. Alfie was abiding by this tradition, this natural morality, and I played my part by distributing meat to all those brave enough to come and get some.

At first even Ham and Jomo hung back, afraid to approach me. After they had come forward to take generous servings from my hands, however, the children and some of the women clustered near, too. No one disputed my right to serve, or squabbled with me or any other partygoer about the size of our portions, or sought to secure seconds before everyone else had taken firsts. I nibbled as I worked, twilight giving the veldt beneath us the beautiful antique dinge of an old painting.

By this time, though, flies—miniature fighter aircraft with hairy landing struts and faceted double cockpits for eyes—were buzzing about with annoying persistence, and the redness of the warthog’s flesh had begun to alarm me. Against the entire thrust of my survival training with Babington, I suddenly feared contracting either a pest-borne viral disease or the worm-communicated agonies of trichinosis. Dizziness descending, I stopped nibbling, stopped dispensing cold cuts.

“Brothers,” I cried. “Sisters,” I added. “How would you like to top off this party with a taste sensation nonpareil?”

The Minids gaped at me. They seemed to regard my rare verbal outbursts as staunch Anglicans might view the babblings of a Pentecostal ecstatic. That is, as unseemly lapses. Ironically, their own bursts of amelodic song at sunrise or other unpredictable moments of emotional overload were inarticulate analogues of my recourse to speech. The Minids did not recognize this similarity, of course; and, at the time, neither did I.

“Brothers, sisters, gather round. For the first time in the history of the prehuman race, I offer you the chance of a lifetime. You ain’t seen nothing like what I’m about to lay on you this evenin’….”

And so on.

Unraveling this tawdry spiel, I got my nausea under control, waved merrily at the circling flies, and spitted the remainder of our warthog on a stick. There was not a lot of fuel lying about the hillside, but I gathered what I could find—dry grass, twigs, some underbrush—and flicked a match into the pile. The flare-up so astonished the Minids that they gasped and fell back. The sinuous flicker of the fire imparted an iridescent oiliness to the dark eyes and skins of the habilines, who, recovering, crept forward again.

Still talking, still spouting poppycock, I thrust the haunch of the suid into the flames and held it there until the popping of its skin and the outrush of a delectable fragrance had overwhelmed our entire company.

“There,” I said. “There’s the first-time-ever smell of roast pig. Ain’t it sweet, though? Ain’t it sweet?”

The fire drove the Minids back, but the aroma enticed them closer; not one of them seemed to have a good idea which impulse to obey. For want of fuel, unfortunately, my fire was going out, and the sparks drifting up into the African twilight were like evanescent stars, forming and dying at the same time. I had driven off the pesky flies, but the meat was still red, empurpled by thickening blood and the advent of early-evening darkness. I had to keep the fire going if I wanted this pig to cook, and the only way to keep the fire going was to add more fuel to the tiny conflagration at my feet.

“Here we go,” I crooned. “Here we go now. Gonna barbecue up some ribs for every little Minid.”

I began nudging the heart of my fire across the hilltop to the ledge of eroded boulders overlooking New Helensburgh. I charred the toe of one of my chukkas doing this, but the habilines, fuddled, parted to give me passage, then closed again and followed me to the lip of the granite wall. Directly below me was one of the four habiline huts. Crying “Banzai!” I kicked the pitiful remains of my fire over the ledge and onto the topknot of dry grass roofing that shelter. The hut ignited almost at once, sending a shower of sparks back up the hillside and illuminating our citadel, no doubt, for miles across the outlying steppe.

Several of the Minids began singing, pouring out arias of praise or lamentation to the youthful night. Your heart would have leapt or broken to hear them, and mine, I think, did both. In my hands, though, was the stick on which I had spitted the remaining meat, and I lifted this load into the air with both hands, presenting it to Ngai, Who dwells on Mount Tharaka. The fitful singing of the habilines faded in my ears.

“Preheat to four hundred fifty degrees!” I shouted. “Then roast until a tender cinnamon-brown throughout and bubbling with natural juices! Serve with pineapple slices, parsley sprigs, and side dishes of fresh spinach salad!”

I hurled the warthog haunch into the burning hut, where it collapsed a section of thatching and disappeared into an angry roar of flames. The smell of the roasting meat was heavenly. The habilines left off lamenting the ruin of the hut to peer down into the conflagration. I half expected to see the soul of that poor suid ascending to the realm of spirits on blistered pig’s feet. Helen, who had crowded forward, was suddenly at my elbow.

“You don’t have to roast the rafters with the repast,” I announced to all and sundry. “But it’s a time-honored technique. Invented by a Chinese nitwit descended, I assume, from Peking man. Read all about it. Read all about it in… in ‘A Dissertation on Roast Lamb’ by one Charles Pigg—for of all the delicacies in the entire mundus edibilis, my friends, this one is the princeps. Hallelujah. Step right up, brothers, sisters; step right up for a succulent taste of heaven.”

The fire did not spread to the other huts. Twenty or thirty minutes later, when the ashes were smoldering and a few acacia boughs crumbling into crimson coals, I worked my way down the hillside to New Helensburgh with Alfie, Helen, Genly, Emily, Mister Pibb, and several of the smaller children. With a stick I rolled the burnt warthog haunch out of the ashes and onto a rock to cool. Later, I gave a taste to everyone who wanted one. The habilines all appeared to enjoy what they ate, but I have since begun to doubt if their taste buds were sufficiently developed to permit fine discriminations. A pity, if true. Why were our ancestors so late to harness the random lightning to the cooking of their foods? Perhaps because they had no incentive in their mouths…

Following dinner the Minids wrestled, raced, and cut capers, the curmudgeons along with the kiddies.

There was not much order to these postprandial festivities, only enthusiasm and a high level of tolerance for juvenile mischief, no matter how old the perpetrators. I had recovered from both my dizziness and my irrational fears of coming down sick. And although the bloated feeling that springs from overindulgence now plagued me, I bore it stoically. I did not care if I ever returned to the present. The moon, looking little or no different from the way it looks today, spilled its ghostly lantern sheen across the vast savannah.

The Minids and I were Children of Eve together, Sons and Daughters of the Dawn. With Genly and Roosevelt as sentries, we lay down like siblings on the hilltop.

I was happy; supremely, unconditionally happy.

But I dreamt that night, a dream of my adolescence many thousands upon thousands of years into the future of the planet. No Alka Seltzer in the Pleistocene, you see, not even in the first-aid kit of an Air Force chrononaut…