first afternoon as a spy. Since that time I had developed a more favorable opinion of her. In fact, I had even begun to suspect that she was Helen’s mother. Emily, Genly’s wife, struck me as the inveterate sexpot among the distaff Minids, a lady with a roving eye and a wandering backside. She was Alfie’s favorite, although he too apparently appreciated a carnal smorgasbord. Miss Jane, Odetta, and Nicole had made a single distinctive impression on me: They were excellent mothers, tenacious in their children’s defense, and amiably feisty in their dealings with the menfolk.
As for the children, I had not yet familiarized myself with all of them beyond the point of assigning names. The oldest among them, probably Dilsey’s offspring, was an adolescent male whom I called Mister Pibb. Thereafter the children, toddlers, and babies got mixed up in my mind, but the names I eventually wrote on the genealogy page of my reduced-print Bible and field guide included Jocelyn, Groucho, Duchess, Bonzo, Pebbles, Zippy, Gipper, and A.P.B.
A.P.B. was Fred and Nicole’s baby. His initials stood alternately for Alistair Patrick Blair and All Points Bulletin, the latter earned by the shrillness of his demands to be given suck.
Twenty-three habilines in all (for I had been counting the Minids). I was their first cousin, two million years removed, come home for a visit, and they refused to acknowledge me. I was also beginning to wonder if I had become a nonentity to my colleagues in the dream territory of the twentieth century. Perhaps, for them, I had never existed. . . .
* * *
I, Joshua Kampa, was extinct on my feet. The invisible man, another country’s native son, cut off from his roots in the primeval Kane’an. A has-been, a may-one-day-be, a dreamfaring dodo bird, and I might have to stay.
Two days running at the end of a week, I returned to Lake Kiboko to see if Kaprow had lowered the Backstep Scaffold for me, and it still did not descend. But I was beginning to feel a part of both the Pleistocene and the habilines to whose band I now wanted to be admitted for more than solely scientific reasons. And at length I managed a minor breakthrough with Roosevelt, the young male who had reacted to my pistol shot by soiling himself. He did not lack courage in more commonplace bush-country situations. In fact, at catching birds and tracking small game such as hyraxes and hares, he seemed to me one of the most adept of all the habilines. Often, in the early evening, he did not scruple to carry out solitary hunting expeditions—as much for his own private pleasure as for the trophies he might bring home. For safety’s sake he kept these outings brief and did not venture very far from New Helensburgh, but by persistent observation I learned of his penchant for such trips and determined to act upon my knowledge by shadowing him.
Alert to my clumsy trailing tactics, Roosevelt usually made sure that I got no closer than sixty or seventy yards. On at least four occasions, after spotting me he gave up the hunt and sauntered home with a kind of wounded dignity. I was forever associated in his mind with loud noises and the terrible humiliation of independently functioning bowels. However, the terrain came to my rescue. The veldt below New Helensburgh abounded in kopjes, those granite outcroppings showing either bare rock or an austere covering of scrub. I began using them as blinds, as the Minids and other predators habitually did, and it is to a kopje and my own improving stealth that I owe my first successful tête-à-tête with Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had just caught a hare by a technique that Babington had tried to teach me in Lolitabu, a technique I had not yet mastered. It involves observing a spring hare’s half-cocked ears as you run behind it in full pursuit. As soon as the hare flattens its ears against its neck, you jump to either the right or the left and open your hands for a possible capture. The flattening of the ears is an infallible sign that the hare is going to “jink,” or turn, and by jumping to one side you give yourself a fifty-fifty chance of intercepting it. On this occasion Roosevelt’s intuitive leap to the right proved correct, and the hare forfeited its life to the Minid’s quick and brutal hands. I witnessed the denouement of this primal drama from the slope of a barren