in good order, the men encircling the women and children. Despite her recent pair bonding with me, Helen continued to play a masculine role. Like Alfie, Jomo, and Fred, she brandished a hefty acacia stave. Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Ham carried lovingly polished antelope bones for clubs, while I, relying on my pistol and the others’ martial skills, pulled my travois as if I were a member of the women’s itinerant sorority.
Once, far out on the savannah, I turned and looked back at New Helensburgh. Despite the distance I saw a number of two-legged beings swarming over the hillside and along the battlement in front of our abandoned huts. I pointed out these figures to Helen. She cocked her head to one side and for a good half-minute studied their activity. No one else seemed interested, and we moved on. At regular intervals, though, I would glance back at the hillside. Eventually the tiny apparitions scurrying about there came down into the grasslands and completely disappeared from view. I had the distinct, unsettling feeling that the creatures were following us.
We reached the baobab in which we had installed Genly. Ham sang a long, plaintive note in remembrance, frightening several of the children, but we discovered no sign of either our dead comrade or the leopard that had devoured his remains. I worried that in response to Ham’s call the leopard would return, thinking that we had brought it another offering. The other Minids apparently shared this fear, for we did not shelter under the baobab but continued our southeasterly trek toward the mountain.
* * *
That evening, then, I found myself reciting in my head—with alterations dictated by circumstance—a poem I had first composed in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, after an especially vivid spirit-traveling episode. At the time I had been working during the day for Tom Hubbard’s Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., doing research on the Pleistocene at the public library in the evenings, and dreaming my singular dreams every fourth or fifth night. I was nineteen when I wrote the poem, and I never showed it to anyone, not even Big Gene Curtiss, my trailer mate.
Now, though, I decided to speak it aloud to the Minids, who sat or lay among the fig trees and acacias bordering the little gully where we had stopped. “This is called ‘For the Habilines Who Have Won My Heart,’ ” I told them, and I walked back and forth along the bank, declaiming my 2,000,007-year-old poem almost as if I were Alistair Patrick Blair putting on his Richard Burton act at an American Geographic fundraiser. In my own defense, though, I projected my very soul into the words, and the Minids listened to me with rapt self-extinction:
“Your mothers drop you in the dust of
unnamed basins.
Your sires rove like jackals on the
periphery of extinction.
How I came to be among you is
anybody’s guess.
Your sun is a gazelle’s heart held
throbbingly aloft.
You are learning how to pick apart
its ventricles.
Scavengers, you speak to me only of
your appetites.
Heedless, I ask you of Pangea and its
postmitotic progeny.
Laurasia and Gondwanaland are orphans
to your understanding.
The incontinence of Africa sculpts you
to its needs.
Language begins to sprout in the left
brains of the females.
The males poach dexterous insights
from the dead savannahs.
Birth remains a labor insusceptible
to practical division.
The tools you make resemble plectra
for uninvented lutes.
My pocketknife is a triumph no less
complex than television.
What percussive music rings above the
barren of our rivercourse.
My awe goes ghosting at our austere
communal feasts.
Together we break crayfish and suck the
slip of birds’ eggs.
Our most lovely artifact is a fragile
group compassion.
What you make of me is what the
millennia have made.
My sophistication is a fossil from the
future’s coldest stratum.
Am I the last anachronism of what you
move toward?”
Yes, a rapt and scary self-extinction. There was no applause when I finished, but no one had heckled or walked out on me, either, and when I sat down beside Helen to pass the coming night, she put her arm around my shoulders and huddled near.
* * *
Dawn elicited no reverent hymns from the lips of the habilines. Groggy, we puttered about trying to forage up breakfast and get our blood moving. We found grubs, a scorpion or two, some desiccated fruit, and a few tiny rock lobsters in the eroded banks of the rivercourse. Although I missed the singing, I knew that this morning we did not want to give away our position or proclaim this poor place our temporary capital. We were in transit, and our rootlessness had affected us all with a subtle sadness.
A holdover complication from