sensitive to changes in pressure indicating noise or breath. Like that, he had felt things coming and he’d remained alive.
He got better with forelimbs. He didn’t need them to walk, so he carried. He took good plants. Then he carried branches that helped him forge ahead. He still heard things moving by the way the quicker air rose from the ground up through his feet, and he turned in time. He was better at hunting, using his hands, his sticks. He ate larger things and felt less tired. He was starting to think about things that weren’t this, here and now. Good things that had happened before, and warnings. He had to focus – smell, taste – so he didn’t float away into old things and imagined rewards. Dreams. Everything was bigger, wider and amazing. He saw details and colours clearer. He had to focus to see through excess. When he looked, there was what he saw, but also what it might have been before and could become.
He wanted protein. He wanted more of life.
When he saw things that weren’t there he grew hungry. He had a taste for eating life. His shoulders were stronger and broader, helping him look up. He repeated actions that led to pleasure and avoided those that hurt.
When he rested he saw lots of things. He always woke hungry. He understood that he had been hurt. He had lived in trees and moved on all limbs. It had taken a long time. He felt more comfortable floating. Particularly when he rested, he saw things indirectly. He saw lots of pictures he didn’t understand. Big things walking slowly, resting with their backs up and legs out in front and singing like birds into each other. He didn’t know why they were singing like that, like birds, close into each other. It must have been helping them stay alive, receiving that breath. It looked like reward, pleasure. Not a thing to fear. He saw one of them more than others. Around them were too many things he no longer knew. He sometimes saw the face of one, at night, when he rested. At other times he saw only the arms, held out before the eyes, reaching towards him, a skin that he could almost smell. He put his own arms out, but nothing was there.
He heard loud sounds directly over him, thumping, pulsing, vibrations shaking through him. He was in danger. It was better to be still and small in the trees until they passed. They pressed on the ground, moving as he moved, without forelimbs. He saw them: tall things expressing birdsong through their mouths, like the things he saw when he rested, only these ones did not feel safe. They would smell him where he lay. He breathed shallow breaths down into his chest and was calmed by the dark extension of his body into the trees.
They called and called. Their voices and their limbs waved the trees, the branches, the leaves around and covering him.
I thought I saw him. I thought we had him. He was right here.
Hello?
Wait. Let’s sit here. We have to wait a while.
You saw him? You’re sure?
Yeah, I think so. I saw something, heard something, and then it was gone.
XI
Ants moved in a line like sound. When there were lots of them together they had been told something. They heard through vibrations above their bodies that felt good or bad, then they moved in reaction. He picked them, had them moving separately over his palm, and listened to lines of them moving on his tongue.
When he woke he felt difference, origin. Light on him, information, warmth on his skin. Something that drifted away with the forest and came back in strange clarity every day. It was not constant. He ate before it went again. He looked for water, drinking what he could and imagining enough of it that it would be all he could see, covering the forest, drowning the trees and everything in them.
He thought of stepping into, then becoming almost weightless in the water. His own head breaking the water surface, covered by thick leaves and painted leaves, water that flooded his ears and his nose and open mouth and which he dreamed of every time he woke, every time it came back. Sometimes when it was getting dark he could watch the forest disappear and look up; he imagined a great and unobstructed distance and knew that he had felt it before.
He was remembering a little more