Homo species
Huddled around the dancing tongues they watched the scarlet horizon stretch and disappear, pinpricked stars twinkled through a velvet draped vista, skeletal trees and plants seemingly absorbed by the quicksand of the black swampy night.
Once the fire was roaring, communication began. The pelt-clad people communicated to those near, those far, those alive and those past. Rituals helped pass information to the young. A handful of young of the right age sparkled around the fire like embers on the thermals, the long childhood gave time for speech and learning.
The day had been successful and the gatherers had brown nuts, swollen ripe fruits and berries in their simple woven grass baskets. Crimson pools domed, the deer carcasses hung from wooden struts held together by woven strips of tree bark, the beginnings of a basic rope. Some hung the deer head to the sky, some hooves to the sky. Hooves to the sky and the blood would drain, head to the sky to remove the intestines and internal organs, avoiding them falling into the chest cavity.
The elders showed the young both methods, how to use a flint and bones to scrape the hide, and then watched as the young practiced. They knew the environment and its dangers. Not specialists but flexible and adaptable, the Elders made sure that roots, plants and leaves were recognised so that no accidents occurred. They also knew where to find honey and how to weave fish traps .
The Elders also communicated with the plants and animals, the wind and the rain,the seasons and the dead. They knew that soon there would be babies, and the power to speak to the spirits would be granted to one, and the power to communicate through thought over great distances would be granted to another. These things were know through dances and drumbeats, and reputation. One female, Young Lake had been seen in their visions.
The elders had gathered around a fire and then danced. Special offerings and herbs were burnt and then the elders had gone to the biggest hut, the one paved inside and covered with the most skins covering the branches on the outside. All ten elders ate the special mushrooms, and sat in a trance. Their visions would lead the clan for the upcoming seasons. Young Lake would bear one of the special young, but the other was bounded in clouded mystery.
The females led the young to the hidden caves, with the trembling stone lamp brim full of burning animal fat, the paintings showing water, routes, others, prey, and abstract symbols with a specific meaning. The walls seemed to flicker and dance, preparing the youth to face large pray but also to read the symbols, to survive.
Dance and song echoed in the caves, the sacred rituals and marks, the passage to the sacred spaces. Footfall was muffled by the pelts and dried vegetation that covered most of the entrance of the cave. It was here that the women gave birth, in the shelter of the cave but near the entrance, protected from the elements and close to the fire. The group knew that only few children would survive , and even the pregnant females risked a messy death. More than half the clan were children. Playful children would break an arm or fall, get injured. Injured children lagged behind and were picked off by preditors.
Or their wounds would get infected, or they got infections from their milk teeth falling out and their infected gums would kill them. Or childhood diseases or bacteria would kill whole clans. The elders knew some plants could help with illnesses but also that many children would die before 5, from parasites, or diarrhoea, or infectious diseases like tuberculosis. There was no long childhood however and once puberty hit at around eight years old , most dangers would be removed, except predation.
Pictures seemed to dance across the cave face. Daubed by the clan, they hid animals, communication, pathways, waterways, food and other information. The clan was cyclically nomadic, staying put in places for a few months and then moved on. They built primitive benders, shelters of bent tree branches and covered by hides or leaves, with more hides on the floors, and even in the larger ones flat stones would be covered by pelts to soften the footfall.
Weaving the shelters together was done by song, to teach others. The tribe members also wove sticks together to make small baskets to carry things. All the clan taught the children the songs, the marks , the movements.
Over time, meeting with the Others had become less risky. Before Blue Jay, the young female was born, eight years ago, the clan had met the Others for the first time. It ahd been violent, bad tempered at first, but after the first fears, things settled; The others would give the clan some youngsters in exchange for some of the clan’s, and tools, knowledge, food and even a meal would be shared. But the meetings didn’t last long. Too many people in one place woàuld cause animalks to visit, and tempers to flair. Three moons was enough, as food would run out, or people would run out of patience. The Others hunted bigger animals, and were stro,nger so there was no ,point trying to fight them. A visit had to be fleeting a,nd of mutual interest.
They crouched close to the fire as the last red seam of sun sank behind the trees. Smoke braided upward and vanished into the thickening dark. One by one, stars pierced the sky. Beyond the ring of light the swamp swallowed shape and distance; tree trunks thinned to bone and dissolved.
When the flames steadied, voices rose.
Not speeches—bursts of sound, hands cutting the air, shoulders hunched and lifted. A hunter mimed the stagger of the deer; another snapped a twig and the children flinched, then laughed. An old woman leaned forward and drew a line in ash with a charred stick: river, bend, crossing. A boy reached to smudge it and she caught his wrist, squeezing once before letting go. Watch.
The gatherers tipped their woven grass baskets onto hides. Brown nuts rattled. Split figs bled syrup. Berries rolled like beads into waiting hands. Nearby, two deer hung from a wooden frame lashed with twisted bark. One carcass dangled head-down, dark blood dripping into a shallow scrape in the soil. The other hung by its hind legs; a man slit the belly carefully, easing the organs free so they would not spill back into the chest. Steam rose in the cooling air.
A girl knelt with a flake of flint and scraped hide from flesh. Her strokes were clumsy at first. An elder shifted her grip without a word, guiding her wrist until the blade found its rhythm. Beside them, someone worried sinew from a leg, rolling it against his thigh to make cord.
They did not divide the world into teachers and students. Knowledge passed hand to hand: which roots snapped clean and which bled white poison; which leaves soothed a sting; where bees nested in the hollow trees upriver; how stones, set just so, funneled fish into waiting baskets when the water fell.
Later, when the moon lifted pale and thin, a different quiet settled.
In the largest shelter—branches bent and tied, hides layered thick against the wind—several of the oldest sat close together. The air smelled of crushed leaves and something bitter burning in the coals. They swayed, eyes half-lidded, listening to the drumbeat thudded softly on stretched skin. Breath slowed. Shoulders loosened. In the morning they would speak of what they had seen: the herds turning early, the river rising fast, a child standing alone on a ridge. Patterns, not certainties. The band would weigh their words.
Young Lake sat near the entrance, fingers pressed to her abdomen. The old women watched her when they thought she did not notice.
At the caves, the children carried stone lamps cupped in both hands, fat wicks trembling. Light leapt across the walls and the painted animals seemed to move—bison lowering their heads, red deer stepping from shadow, handprints blooming and fading with the flicker. The women sang low, guiding the young along the narrow passage, showing them where the river bent, where cliffs broke, where strangers had once appeared out of the trees. Marks layered over marks. Memory held in ochre and charcoal.
Near the cave mouth, where air still moved and smoke could escape, a space lay cleared. Pelts softened the stone. Here women labored, gripping hands, biting leather, voices rising and falling with the contractions. Blood darkened the ground. Sometimes a newborn’s cry cut sharp and strong through the night. Sometimes it did not.
More than half the band were children. They tumbled over one another in play, chasing sparks, wrestling in leaves. A broken arm meant careful splinting with bark and hope. A deep cut meant watching for the heat and swelling that could follow. Some fevers burned out; some did not. Loose bowels could empty a small body in days. A cough might linger all winter. They knew plants that eased pain, leaves that slowed bleeding, clays that dried a wound—but they also knew the stillness that sometimes came despite all of it.
Childhood stretched long. Limbs lengthened slowly. Voices thickened years after the first hunt with a real spear. Only when hair roughened at the jaw and hips widened did new dangers replace the old.
Their shelters were bent saplings anchored in the earth, lashed with cord and roofed with hides and brush. Stones lined the hearths. Inside, the ground was layered with grass and skins. They stayed until the nearby stands thinned and the traps came up empty, until the river shifted or the wind changed its bite. Then they lifted what they could carry and followed remembered paths.
Songs stitched the work together—how to set the poles, how to twist fiber, how to shape a point. Every child learned the verses because every child would need them.
They had not always met the Others.
Years ago, before Blue Jay was born, shapes had appeared across the river—taller figures, heavier spears, unfamiliar calls. The first meeting had been a scatter of shouts and thrown stones. No one slept that night.
But hunger travels farther than fear. Later, at the edge of a clearing, they approached again. Gifts were set down and hands lifted empty. A flint blade changed owners. So did a necklace of teeth. They shared meat once, crouched in a wide circle, eyes never quite leaving one another.
Too many bodies in one place drew scavengers. Voices sharpened. After a handful of nights the Others drifted away, taking with them a young man who had been watching their toolmaker too closely, leaving behind a girl who did not look back.
Three moons was long enough.
Beyond the firelight, something moved in the reeds. The band tightened its circle. A child leaned into an elder’s side. The elder fed another branch to the flames and watched the sparks climb, measuring the dark.
Now it was time again Exchanges would be made, knowledge shared. At the highest sun they would leave, with new young , new goods and new knowledge.
Nomads made some innovations, the ones that were portable and that went with the herds they followed. They would have to live off the roots and plants as well as the carrion they found along the way, Things explained by clan members in flittering nights
Meeting the Others was always as close to, the highest sun as possible. It made it safer to travel and the days lasted longer, or at least daylight did.
Around the embers of the fire, gestures and chewing showed how to make cord, hide, stone tools.
Migration meant only light tools could be carried, or that tools would be made on the way.
Yellow Flower, and River Rushes were two females, aged about eight years old. Together with Blue Jay they ran and played, tugging at each other’s hair, the elder women watched. They knew Blue jay had felt this strange feeling for some moons now. Yellow Flower and River Rushes perhaps too. That night they took the three aside. Blue Jay felt the wetness of blood flowing on her legs. The elders had collected some wild flowers and placed them in Blue jays hair. They took Yellow Flower and River Rushes to see.
Blue Jay was standing in the glade, naked. They saw the blood, the elder women showed them. River Rushes and Yellow Flower thought it was an injury, blood was a bad sign. But this was a good sign. Another woman , older, stood next to Blue Jay. She too stripped, her breasts in the moon light. She too had blood.
The women used gestures to explain. This bleeding would happen sometimes, but not always. It lasted a few days, and not much blood was lost. Changes to their bodies, the breasts, and hips came. Males would see you differently. The time of play had ended.
They came back to the clan’s resting place, each girl had a flower in her hair. It was a sign to the others, the menarch had started. Not old enough to breed yet, but not a girl any more.
The Others
Lionel
Lionel moved through the village the way a man moves through a room he built himself — not looking, exactly, because he no longer needed to look. His face still held the softness of youth, though he was the oldest man on the island. Sun and salt had done that carving, not years.
He'd been thirteen, maybe fourteen, when the Shamans took him under the twenty-first full moon and looked at him with their clouded eyes until he understood something had already been decided.
Five children this year. He walked them to the rock pools at low tide, watched one crouch motionless for an hour waiting on a crab, watched another chase a shrimp too fast to ever catch. He didn't tell them what he saw. He never did. The Shamans would ask him later, and he would answer, and that was the whole of his teaching: watching, then naming what he'd watched.
The island spoke in spears. One planted outside a hut: stay out. Three set in a tripod by the long hut: safe. Two gaps in that tripod: another tribe was coming. Three gaps: nature had turned dangerous. Four: war.
That evening the gaps meant nothing he'd taught the children to read.
He was sitting near the gathering place when the rock pools clouded — not with the tide, but from underneath, sediment rising the way blood rises in water. Then a burst of fish, colours too bright for the hour, gone before he could be sure he'd seen them. The pool went still after. Too still. It held the first stars like a held breath.
The elders lit fires they hadn't planned to light. Spears went up in the two-gap warning before anyone had agreed there was anything to warn about. A chicken's throat was opened over the threshold of the long hut, and its feathers went into the fire, and the smell of that stayed in Lionel's throat longer than it should have.
He went out alone and gathered palm leaves and held them over embers until they curled. He said the words his teacher had said before him — not because he believed the words did anything, but because his hands needed the shape of the ritual to keep from shaking. He opened the coco stone. Five Shamans, five portions, Five children ; the smallest measure kept for the worst nights.
He knelt and drew lines in the dirt with one finger.
"We walk the maze tomorrow," he said. "The signs won't untangle themselves standing still."
By morning he'd salted the undergrowth against anything that might use the confusion to hunt, and they went in formation, spears out, until the trees opened onto the mud pool.
It was breathing wrong. Bubbles came up in bursts instead of the slow roll he knew, and each burst threw steam that smelled faintly of struck flint. He crouched at the edge and watched a shape move under the surface — not an animal's shape, not quite — and the men closed the circle tighter around him, spears turned outward like quills.
Mist came off the trees and swallowed the colour first, then the sound. Something crossed the edge of his sight and was gone before he could turn his head to it. He held still. He had learned, before he had learned almost anything else, that stillness was the only offering the island ever asked for.
Then the mist thinned on its own, the way it always eventually did, and the shapes went with it, and the danger — whatever it had been — passed the way weather passes.
The moon came up clean.
Lionel stood at the edge of the pool a long while after the others had turned back toward the fires. He had read the signs. He had done everything the reading required. And still he did not know what any of it meant — only that the island had troubled itself to speak, and that a man could spend his whole life being fluent in a language and still not know, on the night it mattered most, what he'd just been told.
He woke and headed to the village. He knew the villages half dreaded, half praised his visit. Another tribe was coming, it had been seen. He had time to select 5 children and train them, only just, before they came. A trade would happen, or a child would decide to stay.