of my arms and set her on the ground between us. Then, embracing me, she patted my back with both hands, all the while gibbering a series of syllables that had little relation to any I had taught her. Their unintelligibility did not obscure their binding import. As surely as if we had conceived this child ourselves, Helen and I were the australopithecine’s mother and father. It was our responsibility to see that she grew into a healthy adult.
“This is crazy,” I protested. “Helen, she’s not a habiline. She’s a kidnapped southern ape. Even if we manage to shepherd her past adolescence, what kind of life do you suppose she’ll have?”
Still patting my back, Helen mumbled a string of incoherent sweet nothings. With foolish-fond eyes she looked down at our daughter, who appeared to be lapsing into an autistic trance.
“Who’s going to mate with her?” I continued. “She’ll be lucky if the Minids tolerate her presence, much less accept her as one of their own. Nor are her own folks going to want to take her back. She’ll be despised by habilis and africanus alike, Helen, just as if she were a half-breed. Can’t you see what folly this is, what potential disaster?”
Helen was having no part of my faintheartedness. She hunkered beside the tiny girl-child and tenderly groomed her head. Now I saw that on her raid against the australopithecines Helen had not totally escaped injury. Blood from a series of claw marks striated her inner arm. And yet she had stolen this child with no worse hurt than that, a feat of such competent derring-do that I could only shake my head. The look on Helen’s face said that I should tend to the child while she took a few moments to see to her wounds. Awkwardly I knelt beside the little hominid and went nit-picking through her scalp, a courtesy that her trance did not permit her to acknowledge.
On the other side of the water hole Emily awoke, sat up, and looked at us. After yawning sleepily, she rose and ambled around the pond to satisfy her curiosity. Were we real or only a midnight apparition? Squatting as Helen had, she touched the kidnap victim on the chin. Then, fascinated by the australopithecine’s passivity, she pulled her finger back and stared. Helen and I scarcely dared to breathe—as if Emily’s next decision would spell either life or death for the abducted child.
At last I said, “Her name is Mary.” I looked at Helen. “Is that all right with you? Mary?”
“Mai mwah,” Helen said. “My mirror,” I thought, was a reasonable approximation of “Mary.” Let it stand. Let it stand.
“Good. That’s settled.”
Satisfied that Emily intended Mary no harm, Helen left me in charge of the child and disappeared into the night again. When, ten or fifteen minutes later, she returned, she was carrying a good supply of ol duvai, wild sisal, with whose sticky balm she treated the claw marks on her arm. Emily helped her, smoothing Helen’s sparse forearm hairs aside and squeezing the natural anodyne of the wild sisal into her cuts. Why such solicitude? I wondered. Maybe it was the late hour, the presence of the child whose head I was still desultorily searching for lice, or the all-pervasive quiet. Whatever the reason, I too was at peace, my misgivings about adopting the australopithecine routed by an army of fatuous hopes.
* * *
Alfie roused us from sleep by banging his stave repeatedly against the bole of a tree. It was almost dawn. In clusters on the plain, like cowlless monks at matins, sat the vultures that had settled on the corpse of the hyena impaled by the female rhino and gutted by its own fellows. The other hyena—the one I had shot—had been dragged down to the water’s edge, out of the birds’ reach. Even so, the vultures kept their eyes peeled for an opportunity to move in.
Any troop of self-respecting baboons would have breakfasted before departing, but Alfie, along with Ham and Jomo, moved us out into the veldt with nothing in our stomachs but muddy water and the fluttery sensation that accompanies either doubt or encroaching illness. The idea was to get us going before the arrival of a lion or the return of the hyenas pinned us up for the better part of the morning.
Today Helen marched at the center of our procession, taking Mary with her. Now that she had a child she was indisputably entitled to give up her roles