By noon we were in more or less open country, full-fledged savannah, but the mountain—still, I decided, about fifteen miles away—sometimes appeared to retreat from our approach.
A brake on our progress, the children continued to tumble about like puppies and to lolligag over any bit of desiccated matter in the grass. Mary was one of them now, and Helen sometimes edged out of the
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center of our column as if to renounce motherhood for sentry duty. She hurried back to Mary, though, each time the child showed signs of fatigue or crankiness. Her dedication to our daughter made me pensive and a little resentful. I had liked Helen as a comrade as well as a lover.
Late that afternoon Ham separated from the group and ran gimpily ahead of us to a depression in the grass. He circled this small concavity (which, but for Ham's strange behavior, I would not have looked at twice), then halted and cautiously circled it in the other direction. He hooted for reinforcements. When the other habiline men arrived, me among them, he lurched forward and yanked a large wedge of sod from the hollowed-out place in the savannah.
A high, perilous hissing sound ensued. I supposed that Ham had uncovered a snake, maybe one of those egg snakes whose ceaselessly coiling bodies and cobralike hoods make your blood turn to ice. But their behavior is all empty bluff, and Babington had taught me not to fear them.
What Ham had found, though, was not an egg snake or a bona fide cobra. Not at all. He had uncovered a litter of cheetah kittens. I counted four of them, elegant little felines with masks for faces and jewels for eyes. In their immature, silver-blue coats, they pressed against one another spitting out their fear and indignation. Their outrage was humorous. Mother was off hunting somewhere, but she would be back soon and we had better scram before she caught us poking around in their crib. Who did we think we were, anyway?
Even after several months in the Pleistocene I was surprised when I found out.
Roosevelt and Fred clubbed three of the kittens to death, showering blood and gray matter all over the grass. The fourth kitten tried to run, but Alfie booted it in the butt and fell upon it with his knee, cracking its ribs and pinning it to the ground. He killed it by biting through its neck. When he next looked up at me, blood was running from his mouth and there was a tuft of beautiful, wintry fur caught in his beard.
* * * *
As soon as every gut had taken on a load of kitten loin, torpor descended. No one wanted to leave.
Although we could have traveled several more miles that afternoon, the satiated habilines had decided to make camp where we were.
A more vulnerable spot it would have been hard to find. There was not a tree or kopje within two or three hundred yards. Setting up housekeeping in that open place was a little like pitching a tent on an interstate highway. You were asking to be run over. But, gorged and insouciant, the Minids either did not recognize or blithely dismissed the possibility of peril. Fortunately, we were able to while away the late afternoon without having to defend ourselves against roving predators.
The sun went down like a Day-Glo bob in the mouth of the Primal Perch. There, then gone.
* * * *
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My spirits began to improve. Maybe I had been suffering from hesperian depression or evening melancholy. Watching the ants on the thorn branches curl up into weightless clinkers revived my sense of camaraderie with the habilines. Insects, unlike cheetah kittens, were not mammals. You could consign them to perdition with lighthearted hallelujahs, then stand back from the roaring hellfires and gleefully watch them burn.
Fred—feckless, reckless Fred—returned, not with kindling, but with a weaverbird basket full of fuzzy little fruits. Where he had found them I had no idea. They were lavender-yellow ellipsoids with a sour-sweet musk. I did not eat one until Dilsey, who had taken charge of Fred's basket, consumed six or seven with steadily increasing gusto and no conspicuous ill effects—when, by rights, she should have been stuffed to the jowls with cheetah flesh. Fruits, I told myself, watching Dilsey, were even farther down the evolutionary ladder of sentience than ants, and by now I was hungry enough to demand my share. Helen brought me a handful.
My first taste of one of these fuzzy ellipsoids inspired me to name them. I called them puckerplums.
Puckerplums inebriate.
Indeed, I got drunk on puckerplums. I was not the only one, but I was by far the most maudlin of all the maudlin Minids reeling about our fire in ambulatory contemplation of the nastiness, brutality, and brevity of life. Why, in only umpteen hundred thousand years, I reflected aloud, all my habiline acquaintances—never, oh never purged from mind!—would be as Phoenician sea wrack on the condominium sands of Miami Beach. No one would ever know—
really
know—the living details of how they had steered their course toward the serendipitous disaster of our survival. How much we owed them, I thought, and how little most folks cared about what they had suffered for us. It was a goddamn shame, I told the Minids, that latter-day ignorance of their courage and sacrifice had pretty much denied them a place in the Annals of Great Human Heroes. They deserved better, much better, and maybe, when White Sphinx retrieved me, I would rectify this ignoble oversight.
And then, striking one of my waterproof matches and lifting its impudent head against the travertine streaks of the horizon, I searched my memory for a haunting snippet from Yeats:
"
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
/
All the folly of a fight
/
With a common wrong or right.
/
The innocent and the beautiful
/
Have no enemy but time;
/
Arise and bid me strike a match
/
And
strike another till time catch ...
”
“In the days of the chalicothere,” I said, “there came unto you a chiromancer—that is, a diviner of palms—and I am he who will riddle the life lines in your secretive hands.”
I went first to Dilsey, only a yard or so from the fire. Taking her scarred old hand into my own—the habiline hand with the abbreviated, crooked thumb—I tried to tell her who she was in order to predict what she would become and what would befall her.
“Dilsey, long ago you met a small, dark man who swept you off your calloused feet and rose to a position of influence among the Minids. His name was Ham. Upon you, with your complicity, he begot the son whom we know today as Alfie. Alfie is the gemsbok melon of your eye, but your daughters Miss Jane and Odetta are also well beloved of you and your consort. In this savage place, Dilsey, you have lived a good and useful life. Though your body crawls with vermin and your mouth frequently vents the stench of rotting meat, in dignity and honor you are immaculate. Your life is as lengthy as the Nile, but you are already near the fathomless ocean into which it and all other lives inevitably pour.”
I dropped Dilsey's hand and stared around at the shadows staring back at me. Not quite spellbound, the
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old woman pushed another puckerplum into my mouth. I ate it, realizing that I had prophesied Dilsey's death. What everyone wanted from me now was the details. Taking up her hand again, I tenderly rotated its palm into view. My saliva, I noticed, was ropy, ropy and bitter.
“Dilsey, my dear Dilsey, you will be decapitated when the Toyota in which you are riding slips beneath the tailgate of a logging truck. Ham, your driver, will suffer the same grisly fate, but the sheriff's report will absolve him of culpability because of local weather conditions and the failure of the logging vehicle to display a flag on the end of its projecting cargo.
“Odetta will enter a multimillion-dollar suit against the implicated pulpwood company on your family's behalf, but the litigation will drag on for years, in part because the coroner's inquest has revealed an unacceptable percentage of alcohol in Ham's bloodstream at the time of his demise. Puckerplum intoxication, apparently.
“As for your and Ham's funeral, Dilsey, it will be a grand event, with many hyenas and vultures in formal attire gathered together at graveside. Oh, yes, a grand event. The talk of the savannah for weeks. None of this posthumous notoriety will matter to you, however, because in addition to being dead you are a deferential and unassuming lady who does not permit such silly flapdoodle to set her head spinning.”
After kissing Dilsey on her bony brow ridge, I reeled away into the darkness beyond the fire, which the children were continuing to feed with twigs and dung pats. Jomo caught me and led me back into the semicircle of adults. Insistent, he shoved the fingers of his open palm into my chest.
“What do you want me to tell you?” I demanded. “Dead of cancer, of gunshot wounds, of radiation poisoning? No, sir. No, ma'am. To hell with that. Gone with a bang or a whimper, I don't want to prophesy our end, and I
won
'
t
. Tonight I'm not going to think any more about it.”
Helen approached me out of the windy desolation of the veldt, Mary in her arms. Our fire whipped about madly, and my tattered bush shorts popped like a string of firecrackers. Helen wanted a reading.
She adjusted Mary on one hip and held her palm out to me.
“
Mai mwah.
”
“This is the last one,” I told the Minids. “This is the last habiline palm I'm ever going to read. Do you understand?”
They said nothing. Helen waited.
Clasping her arthritic-looking hand, I declared, “Helen, you're going to fall in love with a water-tank painter and live happily ever after. You'll have a few so-so days, of course, blah times when you're depressed by the international situation or the gloomy wood paneling in your mobile home. You'll like Florida, though, and your husband's the sort who'll try to let you, you know,
actualize your creative
potential as an autonomous person
. Every anniversary he'll, uh, take you sandblasting inside some little community's elevated water tank, where you'll pretend you're pioneers exploring the hollow core of another planet. This is one of the ways you'll continually renew your romance. All things considered, it'll be a decent, serene, unassuming life. You could do a helluva lot worse. You really could.”
Helen put Mary's tiny hand into mine, the hand of a hirsute alien. I abruptly let it go.
“
Mai mwah.
”
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“No, I said I wouldn't, Helen, and I won't.”
Helen shifted Mary from one hip to the other and wandered aimlessly away. The Minids—dear shadows all—watched me stagger several steps after her. They wanted something more of me, the Minids did, an epilogue or an exegesis. I halted and held up my palm so they could see its lines.
“This says I'll never betray you. I'm here to stay. I'm going to time-travel only one more time—by dying and leaving my bones for Alistair Patrick Blair to discover. Maybe he'll give me my own taxonomic designation.”
I was openly weeping, caught between two contradictory impulses, my affection for the habilines and a sudden powerful homesickness.
“I've come back to you from a tomorrow you're not yet capable of visualizing, but you must never assume that I'm the be-all and end-all of your development as a people. You must try to look beyond what you cannot yet visualize toward that which is absolutely inconceivable. Even if it's misplaced, you must have faith in your destiny. My .45's not solely what you're striving for, nor is my first-aid kit. The culmination of what you have begun, O my Minidae, will be a triumph that I am altogether incapable of imagining.”
* * * *
Our arrival near the mountain was highlighted by the appearance on the scrub-covered ridge above us of three or four hunters from another habiline “nation.” We had trespassed into their territory, and in a season of drought, when dispersal spells survival, our advent must have seemed a challenge to their dominion. Holding Mary and gazing up into the glitter of snow frosting Mount Tharaka's peak, I heard ...
well, I heard ancestral voices prophesying war.
Actually, Alfie, Jomo, and Ham were hallooing to the sentinels on the ridge, and the sentinels were hallooing back. These eerie how-d'ye-dos diddled the high dells of the mountain and loop-de-looped across the grasslands. They frightened Mary. She dug her toenails into my thighs and tried to climb me like a tree. She was strong, too, strong and persistent; I virtually had to squeeze the wind from her lungs to dampen her hankering for a howdah perch on my head. At last Helen noticed our struggle and relieved me of the imp. In her adoptive mother's arms, even as the hooting on the ridge modulated from threat into invitation, Mary quieted.
As we labored slantwise up the incline, I realized that Mary was not the only naturalized Minid who dreaded the impending encounter. I was as out of place among the habilines as she, a bran flake in a box of Cheerios. What kind of reception could we expect from the strangers on the ridge? Their faces took on specific identities as we climbed, but I still found it hard to think they were people in the sense that the Minids were people. They were attired no differently (a hairy sort of nakedness being the uniform of the epoch), and their weapons had a familiar look (cudgel, bludgeon, stave, and femur), but they reminded me of Yahoos rather than human beings. This was a visceral prejudice that I would have to uproot or sublimate. It was, I told myself, unworthy of Joshua Kampa.