celebrate my accomplishment, I would have to hunt up my own breakfast and down it with gusto.
That was when I heard an otherworldly singing reverberating over the steppe, like the cries of disembodied saints. It came from the hills to the east, the general vicinity of Helensburgh. I got to my feet and cocked my head to listen to it. A wordless canticle of untrained habiline voices greeting the dawn. An aubade, call it. It was heartbreakingly fervid, not sweet or pristine, but rough-edged and full of raw conviction. An anthem.
The habilines—humanity’s ancestors—were singing.
* * *
After ten or fifteen minutes the singing stopped. Although I should have returned to the lake, I kept waiting for it to resume. Yesterday, apparently, I had arrived too late to hear it. The impression this singing left on me—a kind of awe, a tingling in the nerve ends—took a while to wear off. Eventually, though, it gave way to the engines of appetite, my nagging hunger.
I kicked the remains of my fire off the kopje, stamped them down to keep them from starting a grass fire, and headed for a stand of fig trees to the east. In the red-oat grass bordering this glade a flock of guinea fowl strutted. To test my survival skills, I took the time to trap one of these birds noiselessly, after the fashion of the !Kung, and by stealth and patience managed to accomplish this feat without scaring off the entire flock until my trap had actually sprung. Even Babington could not have done better.
Using fingers and pocketknife, as the old Wanderobo had taught me, I plucked, dismembered, and cleaned the bird, then fell to and devoured its flesh raw. My time in Lolitabu had prepared me for this primitive approach, and I actively enjoyed my meal, the first real one since my arrival. A dry rivercourse divided the fig thicket, but I found water by scooping out a hole in the arroyo’s sandy bottom and watching underground moisture seep slowly into view. Down on my hands and knees, spurning the use of my water-purification tablets, I drank directly from the stream bed, then washed the sticky blood of the guinea fowl from my face and fingers.
After that I sponged myself down with yesterday’s T-shirt and dug into my shaving bag for my toothbrush, razor, and blades. In retrospect, much of this attention to dress and cleanliness seems ridiculous to me, but in spite of my survival training I had not yet broken completely free of the twentieth century. My most sinful indulgence that morning was changing my underwear. This feat (although detailing it may invite ridicule) I accomplished without taking off my chukkas, for it seemed imperative to me to be able to run if danger threatened. I had trained barefoot with Babington, but I still did not trust myself to negotiate a landscape littered with acacia thorns. Keeping my shoes on meant stretching the elastic around the leg holes of my briefs, but that was a lesser evil than having to flee a leopard in my stocking feet. Actually, I was more worried about having only two packages of Fruit of the Looms left in my pack, and I devoted a good ten minutes to washing out yesterday’s pair in the stream bed. These I placed on a euphorbia bush to dry.
I probably should have spent my sunrise on the shores of Lake Kiboko. If Kaprow had dropped the scaffold to me at dawn, I had not been there to witness the event or to confirm for him the fact of my continuing existence. However, I could not convince myself that I had missed anything, and the singing of the habilines was a phenomenon worth at least another day in the Pleistocene. Our contingency plan, along with our matched set of transcordions, had temporarily broken down. White Sphinx would find a way to retrieve me, surely, but for the moment I had to hold my own.
As I fetched my Fruit of the Looms from the euphorbia on the edge of the glade, I saw marching single-file across the savannah, north-northeast toward Helensburgh, a pack of hyenas. Prodigious creatures, they were good, if frightening, examples of the extinct Pleistocene megafauna. I froze, hoping that some of the laughter I had heard intermittently all night—the nerve-racking cachinnations of brigands—had signified a successful hunt.
I counted fifteen slope-backed hyenas in all, each of the eleven adults as big as the biggest male lion. It being July, the wind was blowing