floor with excrement, the droppings had attracted a species of coprid beetle dedicated to dismantling each and every pad. The beetles separated the grass-shot dung, shaped it into brood balls, and rolled the balls away for burial. Considering the scarcity of my fossil beasts, this variety of coprid was probably not exclusively adapted to chalicothere dung. No. These beetles were opportunists. They had moved into the bower with such speed and determination because pickings were slim elsewhere, and they had happened to be close by.
The reason for Helen’s herky-jerky finger movements had finally revealed themselves. She was trying to snatch a beetle out of a pad already broken down into fragments, but, rearing back on its four hind legs, the little demolitionist refused to cooperate in its own capture. It looked like a miniature triceratops with an additional pair of legs, and it used its horns, mandibles, and forelimbs to fight off Helen’s fingers. Between engagements it returned its full attention to the dung pad, as if my bride’s persistence annoyed rather than frightened it. At last, though, Helen got the beetle by its chitinous thorax and lifted it high into the air.
As I watched, the other Minids spread out through the bower to find dung beetles of their own. The young habilines—Jocelyn, Groucho, Bonzo, and Pebbles—sought to daze the insects by rapping them with their knuckles, the way I had once stunned and captured a scorpion, but everyone else tried to grab the beetles by the horny plates behind their heads. The competition for the biggest specimen was fierce, and the point of it all seemed to be to acquire the prestige of ownership rather than to satisfy a between-meals hunger. No one hurried to devour the coprids they found. Instead, the Minids pushed their captives along the ground, held them aloft, or flipped them over onto their carapaces to watch their struggles to get right again.
Eventually I overcame my scruples about digging in a dung pad—I had overcome nearly every other, after all—and sat down to fish for a beetle. I caught one a little smaller than Helen’s, one with blue-black armor and rakishly plumed legs. It swaggered in my palm, prising my fingers apart every time I tried to make a fist. If we ever got going again, the beetle would not be easy to carry, and I wondered if the habilines would give up their pets when we had to decamp.
Pets. Interesting word, and one that seemed entirely appropriate in context. In fact, I think a case could be made that our ancestors’ first nonprimate companions were not bung-sniffing dogs but dung-sifting beetles.
Subsequent activity in the bower told me that few of the Minids were going to relinquish their captives. Many of the adults and almost all of the children had beetles stashed in weaverbird baskets, clutched uncertainly in hand, or dangling from pieces of thread unraveled from the tops of my socks.
For Helen I took even greater pains. I cut a piece of tangled fish line from my survival kit and tied it about the thorax of her beetle. Scarabs, you see, were a habiline’s best friend, pets that could also be animate, iridescent jewelry. Helen wore her coprid from her left ear. Pendant from not quite two inches of doubled fish line, it twirled and grappled. Each time it caught her hair she shook the beetle loose again, glancing sidelong to watch its perturbations. I hooked my pet over the snap of my holster, but the other Minids were far more envious of Helen than of me. As we resumed our march, the intensity of their admiration apparently made up for the inconvenience occasioned by the beetle’s wiggling. Helen was the belle of our lackadaisical anabasis.
Although vanity of this sort has led to scarification, foot binding, bustles, and tuxedos, that afternoon I could not begrudge Helen her small triumph. Three or four hours later, however, when she yanked the beetle off its thread and popped it into her mouth like a bonbon, I was flabbergasted.
The habilines—Helen not least among them—never lost their disconcerting knack of turning my preconceptions upside-down.
Later that day I cut my beetle loose and tossed it out into the savannah. If it were industrious, it would survive. Those who derive their sustenance from others’ shit rarely perish. Ecologically speaking, they are the universe’s chosen creatures—there is generally available so much of what they need to perpetuate their lifestyles.
Chapter Nineteen
New York City, The Bronx
April 1979
HE AWOKE TO THE FAINT, UNCERTAIN CADENCES of