saber-toothed cats that might inhabit this terrain stayed on my mind, and I was glad for my .45, even if a larger-caliber weapon would have offered more real protection. You make do with what you have, and the logistics of my dropback had dictated our choice of the faithful and familiar Colt. It would easily kill a hyena or a baboon, and if I braced my legs and fired successive shots into the forehead of a charging lion, well, it would probably serve in that situation, too.
“Just don’t go walking in a forest of elephant legs,” Blair had cautioned me, “and you’ll probably be all right.”
To make myself less conspicuous, I thought of following Babington’s advice and strapping a bit of foliage about my middle, but dismissed the idea because none of the wildlife grazing or browsing within a hundred yards of me seemed especially agitated by my passage. For a moment or two I thought I might be invisible to the animals here, but a small herd of zebras (Equus grevyi, today a relatively rare species) blocking my way into a thicket of fig trees dispelled this idiot notion by pricking up their ears, flicking their tails, and stampeding away to the south. Because I was walking into the sun, they had seen me before I saw them, and my presence on the plain had moved them to exercise that immemorial escape clause, flight.
Cautiously I entered the fig-tree glade. No lions or cobras lay in wait, but I did find evidence that it had not always been uninhabited. A small midden of bones and lava-cobble flakes suggested that under one tree a group of tool-using hominids had butchered a small antelope of some kind and feasted on its carcass. Bits of fur snagged on the underbrush or ground into the sandy floor of the stream dissecting the thicket told me that the kill had taken place within the past year or so. I examined the stones scattered about. Obviously imported from elsewhere, they included lumpish core tools and the splinters fractured from them by the industrious bipeds. Hunger had prodded the creatures to this cunning labor, but so cheap and easily duplicable were its products that they had abandoned the implements upon abandoning the glade. I knelt beside the broken rib cage of the antelope and practiced knapping flakes from a polyhedral core tool.
This was something that Blair and Babington had taught me during my eight months in the Lolitabu National Park. The resulting tools—call them awls, or scrapers, or burins—were not so serviceable as the various scissors, toothpicks, tweezers, and corkscrews concealed in the bright red handle of my Swiss Army knife; however, they did not cost me thirty-five bucks, either. One of these tools was sufficiently acute to make an incision (accidental) across the toe of my left chukka boot.
Dutifully, I took out my transcordion: “Firm evidence of hominids only a half hour’s walk from the lake, Dr. Blair. Small midden with tool remnants and animal remains. Wish you were here.” And, this time, I put the instrument away without waiting for a reply.
Although not yet noon, it was very hot, and I was sweating feverishly from my work with the lava cobbles. At the eastern edge of the fig-tree thicket I looked across the grasslands at the hills I had seen from the lake. From these hills wooded corridors stretched out into the savannah like the spokes of an enormous shell. Although Blair, the expert, had made many of his hominid-related discoveries in the fossil beds near the lake, I decided that this modest upland region was as likely a habitat for protohumans as any other. I based my decision on my past spirit-traveling and on years of intensive reading to explicate my dreams. If Mary Leakey, Alistair Patrick Blair, and Don Johanson had made no important finds in the uplands, the reason was not that hominids had never lived in them, but that erosion, predators, and volcanism had more successfully obliterated the signs of habitation there. It would take a couple of hours of walking to reach the hills, but I intended to go there. If I wanted to explore the haunts of habilines—that is, representatives of the near-human hominid family known as Homo habilis, a species first named and championed by Louis S. B. Leakey—I would have to seek them out and demonstrate for them the full range of my charms and accomplishments.
Ladies and gentlemen, Beau Brummell is on his way.
How would I be