pygmies. All her subjects, though, were matrons, ingénues, or children, some of these last so small and downy that they resembled teddy bears or upright vervet monkeys. A couple of the younger women clutched infants in their arms. This was civilization of a kind, a civilization in miniature, and I hung back to keep from disrupting its workings. Having just named the village Helensburgh, I decided that Helen’s people needed a name, too, something descriptive but far less formal than Homo habilis. As members of the family Hominidae (of which all-conquering Homo sapiens is today the only surviving species), they led me willy-nilly to the nickname Minids.
During my childhood in Kansas and Wyoming, people speaking to my mother about me would often say, “Why, Jeannette, he’s no bigger than a minute.” I was still small, but Helen’s diminutive people were even smaller, and I relished the idea of confronting all my mother’s old friends with the news that, yes, I was finally bigger than a Minid. For the first time in my life, in fact, I was tall.
The Minids quickly disabused me of the notion that Helen was their queen. After ascertaining her identity, one grizzled matron waved an arm at Helen (revealing a ridge of hair from her armpit to the underside of her wrist), chattered high-pitched imprecations, and furiously shook her head and mouth. Bored, the children eventually wandered away, while the two mothers with infants sat down on the grass to poke and dandle them. Helen endured this scolding for two or three minutes, occasionally glancing at the gallery forest with a vacant expression, but finally tired of the game and lifted her club over the old woman’s shoulder to signal her weariness. Even though this gesture looked as much like a salute as a threat, the harridan ducked her head, turned sideways, and, bending deeply, exposed the enlarged labia minora of her genital region, a pink satin slipper.
Rather indifferently, Helen touched her club to the old woman’s tailbone, forgiving and dismissing her with the same gesture. Then she ambled off to another section of the clearing. Here she squatted and relieved herself. No one paid her any further mind, and the object of her parodic knighting went chattering back into her hut as if nothing had happened. By briefly assuming what primate ethnologists call the presentation posture, the harridan had both truckled to and appeased Helen. She had also underscored the ambiguity of Helen’s status among the Minids, for Helen was a female whom the other adult females treated both as a wayward sister (the scolding) and as an unattached adolescent male with formidable physical strength but no real community standing (the presentation posture). It was entirely possible that Helen had forgotten me the moment her back was turned, and that her disregard of my presence had enabled me to follow her back to Helensburgh. I did not like to think that her endocranial volume was so slight that it denied even a few out-of-the-way brain cells to a memory of me, but I could not ignore this possibility. Maybe I was nothing to her because I had literally made no impression on her understanding. A painful hypothesis.
Inwardly denying it, I watched her and the other habiline villagers go lackadaisically about their business—which seemed to consist primarily of half-hearted foraging and vigorous loafing.
The Minids—a band of approximately twenty-five, if I counted in the adult males who were probably out scavenging or hunting—had their capital at the overlap of two of the habitats of the East African mosaic: savannah and gallery forest. Because bush country, hills, and lakeshore territories also lay close by, the Minids were well situated to exploit a number of different food sources and survival modes. Still, I had not expected to find half of such a band taking its ease at midday without a single sentry.
Eventually I decided to withdraw from the encampment. If the males came back and found me ogling their women and children, I might find my visit to the Pleistocene cut short by their intolerance and outrage. At this early stage in my explorations, it was best to avoid arousing either suspicions or tempers. Moving from tree to tree, then, I renegotiated the path that I had followed to Helensburgh—but I had gone no more than thirty or forty yards when I spotted a small, hairy figure approaching the village from farther down the path.
My counterpart halted and glowered at me like an offended policeman or teacher. It—he—was a