Foragers

by Charles Oberndorf

  “Perhaps he will stay and father many girls.”

  “Maybe he should have nested near Crooked.”

  “Childless has stopped mating. She shared food with me and said she mated with each male from another place who came to see the boulder. She is sure she is pregnant.”

  “She will have to wait to see.”

  “She is very hopeful.”

  “She has been pregnant before.”

  “Perhaps if the one inside her is fed well and perhaps if Childless lets a good healer play good music to encourage the one in the womb to stay this time, then I might have to call her another name.”

  “There is said to be such a good healer far away from here.”

  “I know there is a good healer who lives close to me. When I was a child and she was a child, I used to hold her close and look into her eyes. I didn’t think that such a girl would become a woman who tried to heal an animal who killed a person.”

  I stopped tugging at the root in the ground. She stood up. Clear Eyes continued to pluck at leaves, as if she had said something about the nature of the rain or the moisture of the soil. “I heal anyone who can say ‘I am here; you are there.’”

  “Then why,” said Clear Eyes, still not looking, “do you heal the animal?”

  “Because,” said I, hesitating a moment, considering if she wanted to utter the lie that had taken shape in her mind, “he can say those words.”

  I had expected a reaction. Clear Eyes said nothing. The baby girl wanted to suck again, and Clear Eyes stood up to maneuver the child to her teat. She walked over to a nearby tree and used her flatrock to scrape some woodeaters into her palm. She ate those, then moved on to gather more, moving away from I, without any kind of word, just as when she had left I’s hut and hearth. I could have followed, but she did not. She watched Clear Eyes walk farther and farther away.

  Esoch awoke to distant pain, to the malaise of lying in one place for too long, and to the sound of digging. The sound wasn’t one of metal slitting dirt, but that of something hard scraping at the dirt. He listened, felt himself fade into sleep, hearing N!ai’s digging stick jam at the gray compacted sand around the giant !xwa root: fibrous, tasteless, but filled with water. It hadn’t rained in days. She tired and passed the digging stick to him, and he continued, clearing the sand around the root. His throat was dry. His body was coated with sweat. Soon the spring rains would start, soon the pans would be filled. But now it was hot and dry. While he dug, N!ai talked about going to N≠ama to visit her older brother, who was married and had two children. Her father had heard the waterholes weren’t so dry, that animals had meat on their bones. They had each been making beads from ostrich eggshells, shaping them into gifts to give when they arrived at N≠ama. “The thumb piano would make a good gift to my brother.”

  “I will make him one.”

  “The one you make will sound good when played by your fingers. My brother will play well only if he has one that makes good music on its own.”

  He said nothing. He had heard this before. If he said nothing, if he made another gift, if he made a nice one, no one could say he was lazy or stingy. He worked well with his hands, and he knew his arrows flew straight, that the two or three thumb pianos he had made played well.

  And he thought it was understood. He took a long time to choose the right wood, to twist the sinew, to trade for the metal keys. N!ai’s mother took some dried meat and some //gxa nuts she had saved and gave them to N!ai to give to him. She no longer complained about him to her daughter. And N!ai smiled at him when no one was looking, and if the nights were cool enough, she pressed her backside to him in their hut, and he covered their body with a chi!kan.

  A shadow crossed above him, N!ai was gone, the world sounded empty. He opened his eyes. He heard footsteps—he had to pay close attention because the footsteps were distant, their whisper fading. Beside him the warrior slept. His chest moved; his breathing made no noise. It was easy to close his eyes again.

  Esoch eased himself from sleep. Listening first. There was no music. There were birds calling. One set, no, two sets of animal paws probing the camp. He listened to them scurry about and knew they were small creatures. He opened his eyes, and it was harder to listen. The back of his eyes hurt. He lifted his head again. The pain didn’t explode, but it felt as if the back of his skull had been deadened by some numbing drug. The sky seen through the hole in the roof was perfectly blue. He felt as if he was being watched, but when he turned to look, the warrior was staring straight up at the hole in the roof.

  Esoch did the same. They were lying side by side, divided by a burned-out fire. Part of him had expected to be dead. But he was lying in a large thatched hut, along with the slazan warrior. A group of slazans had carried them here. How long ago? How long until the shuttle lifted off for orbit?

  The warrior said something. Esoch almost looked to him, but he remembered to keep his eyes facing the sky.

  The warrior said it again. Two words.

  They weren’t slazan.

  Nor Arabic.

  Nostratic.

  They meant: true people.

  They meant: human.

  Esoch said, in slazan‚ “I am here.”

  “You are there. Your words aren’t. Let’s speak Nostratic. You do speak Nostratic?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mouth is not shaped for human language. Can you understand me?”

  This time Esoch removed his mouth prosthetic and set it on his chest, on the leather blanket that covered him. For the first time he became fully aware of more than the core of pain in his left leg; he became self-conscious of the way the leather rested upon the skin of abdomen and thighs, the way it touched lightly upon his penis, of the oily sweat between scrotum and legs, of the thin layer of stink that coated his inner thighs.

  “Can you understand?” the slazan asked.

  “Yes. I speak Nostratic.” He hadn’t spoken it in ages, but the words came to him.

  “My craft was destroyed by your warship.”

  Esoch did not know what to say. He did not want to reverse subject and object, not yet, not until he knew what the warrior wanted.

  “You say nothing,” the warrior said.

  “I was not there.”

  The warrior was silent for a moment, perhaps contemplating the wisdom of discussing what had taken place in orbit. “On the closer of this planet’s two moons is a starship. It is the ship that brought me to this planet. It is berthed in an underground cavern so it would not be detected.” The warrior was silent for a moment. Then: “Tell me what I have said so I know we understand each other.”

  “Your ship is on one of the moons. Your shuttle craft was destroyed. You want to return home.”

  “No. I want to live. I am dying of some local disease that I am not immune to. The medicine I take compensates for the debilitations it causes, but it does not cure. There is equipment in my ship that will let me live. Tell me what I said.”

  “You are dying. There is medicine in your ship. You want to use my shuttle craft to get to your ship.”

  “I want the shuttle craft for you and me to go to my ship. I want to share resources. If you get me to your ship, you will save my life. I will take you to the edge of human space and save your life. You could not live out your life here among slazans. You need touch like a child needs touch, and you are not a child.”

  Esoch was silent. The warrior hadn’t mentioned Pauline. Did he want the slazan to know that there was a second human on this planet?

  “Tell me what I said.”

  “You want a deal. I take you to your ship, you take me to human space.”

  “You think I will kill you?”

  “My shuttle craft is a prize. I am a risk. For months I would be in your ship.”

  “You are a soldier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am always the enemy. That is why you tried to kill me even though I tried to save your life.”

  Esoch remembered: the warrior pu
lling the weapon from behind his back, the local slazan‚ a hole burned into his chest, falling to the ground.

  “The primitive,” the warrior said, “was coming for you. He held a knife. He meant to kill you. I shot him. You shot me. You did that because you are a soldier.”

  Esoch tried to see it all over again, but he couldn’t exactly remember it. The slazan had reached behind his back. The local had been running right toward Esoch. The warrior’s hand appeared, fist clenched, a weapon in it. Had the warrior been looking to the local, had his weapon been aimed in that direction, or was he just reimagining it that way, making the memory conform to what the warrior had just said?

  “You have no words to say. I am the enemy. But think on this: I need you to live. You need me to leave this world. If you let me die, you will be here for the rest of your life.”

  The following is an undated entry taken from the notebook Pauline Dikobe kept while studying the slazan foraging population on Tienah.

  In the history of hominid evolution, the history of hierarchy and violence forms a U-shaped curve. Nonhuman primates who live in groups establish easily observable hierarchies—with the alpha male and the alpha female at the top, while other group members establish various alliances to achieve what the alpha might oppose. Over time there are a number of challenges and responses, overtures and reconciliations, as the hierarchy is worked out.

  Among foraging cultures the hierarchy disappears.

  Then, during the course of cultural evolution, it reappears. As populations grow side by side, as free-ranging movement becomes limited, people must intensify what they can get out of the land. They may domesticate a fruit or a grain, then include its harvest as part of their seasonal gathering. The more they depend on domesticated animals or crops, the more the ad hoc decisions of foragers can only lead to open conflict. Now some form of leadership makes sense. It might be a headman, someone popular for generosity and thoughtfulness, someone who might lead a massive hunt or encourage by example, by harder work. But when it comes time to invest in weirs to catch fish, in irrigation projects or large-scale storage of crops, the headman becomes a big man, someone who can boast of his abilities, someone who can, with his allies, organize a feast that will outdo ail other feasts. The contributions to the feasts become contributions to chiefs, who are hereditary big men, who organize the farming, or the irrigation, who collect food as a kind of tax while, at the same time, fulfilling the obligation to be generous, to insure that everyone eats and no one starves. Because at this point any unhappy individual can still vote with his feet, can still walk off with his family to live with kin living under someone else’s more generous, more considered guidance.

  At some point there is no place to move. The ones who build the roads from farmland to market, from village to city, the ones who set up the irrigation works, and the ones who collect the taxes to fund this all are no longer chiefs and family and advisers, but kings and armies and priests, for agriculture is efficient enough that not all have to dedicate their life to daily subsistence. There are now great works of art, great works of writing, great developments in thought, and there is tremendous poverty.

  And the curve of the U swings back up, with greater strength, as hierarchy is no longer determined by daily encounters but is enforced by heredity, mandated by law. The nature of violence has changed. No longer is violence solely the product of anger, the reach for the arrow or knife. As groups compete, violence becomes something encouraged, trained for, as one group may have to force another group out of adjacent land to guarantee a sufficient supply of food.

  But when the state comes into fore, war is no longer waged to force a competing population from the land, but instead is waged to add another population and its land to the state. Violence is now a mechanism of government, a means of competition, a means of social control.

  Alongside this, foraging life looks like a paradise from which we were expelled when we bit the forbidden fruit of cultivation.

  The Ju/wasi are ruthlessly egalitarian. Meat from a big kill is always divided. The animal is not owned by the hunter who shot it, but by the owner of the arrow. The hunter who has killed the animal does not boast. He returns to camp to say he has found nothing of value, that it’s probably not worth going out to get what he shot down. The hunters cutting up the meat complain about the lack of fat, how old the animal is, how the meat will barely fill the belly.

  The Ju/wasi talk and talk. They talk about what wasn’t properly done* How the meat should have been divided up. How a gift was not generous enough. They tease each other mercilessly. But when there is anger, the talk can heat up, insults can fly, while others step in, ready to work out the problems, to talk out the anger before the fight comes to blows, before one man might grab his poisoned arrows.

  Such constant vigilance is required in order to fight the primate trend toward hierarchy, the trend toward violence.

  One thinks of the last few centuries, the struggle to define community and culture and the individual; the human need to create a group; the human need to be your own headman—forager egalitarianism, buried in civilization’s castes and classes, struggling to make its way up into the open air.

  But that’s too romantic. In the century when each country preached liberty, 50 million were killed in wars and 120 million were killed by their own governments. While we struggle to remove the violence from our own lives, we transfer the need, we sublimate it into the psyche of the state.

  And the slazans? As we try and fail to re-create our egalitarian past, what do they struggle to re-create: the control of masculine violence, to limit it so it’s only just the protection of territory? Is that why the captured slazan warriors have been men? And who sends out those men? Who cooperates to plan the slazan strategies of war?

  If humans withdrew from slazan space, announced the war was over, would the war end? And knowing that possibility, could human governments ever take the risk?

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Fifteenth Day

  When she was younger and had first felt desire, she had hunted men the same way her mother had hunted lightfoot. She was thoughtful in the hunt, careful in the approach, and passionate in the success. And as you can hunt a single lightfoot only once, so she consumed one man’s solitude only on one occasion, and then she sought someone else. She ranged farther than she usually did when gathering, farther than when hunting, because she had no interest in opening herself to an almost-a-man who had just discovered that his penis did more than rain upon the leaves. Her mother turned away from her. A daughter with child would be too busy offering her teat to concentrate on learning music. There was no child the first time, nor the second, and during her next desire she had to run from a man twice her size whom she didn’t want, and during the desire after that she was not quick enough to evade the blows and embraces of an almost-a-man who had trailed her for several days.

  By then she had taken an interest in the music her mother played, and certain afternoons, while her mother gathered and was too far away to hear, she played, liking the act of playing more than she liked what she heard or what she felt. Now that she cared for the music, I’s mother taught her the patterns to play to reduce, her desire, and I played them with greater and greater insistence. When I’s skin turned soft, her mother mixed water with bitter leaf and the juice of a thin stalk and gave it to I to drink. The bleeding came after a few days, and the desire was gone. Each time after that, I drank the bitterness and played against her desire, and she did not mate again until her hut and hearth had been made. Once the desire came, she mated with Long Call and she mated with Roofer, and then, when she felt that slight release insider her gut, like the snap of a twig, she mated only with Sour Plum, who had given a daughter to Flatface and to Wisdom’s eldest daughter. It had been a son, and it had died before her belly had become full with him, before her teats had begun to grow from her chest. Thereafter, she drank the bitterness and played the music. On one occasion and another, the bleeding waited
and the desire sounded louder than the music, and each time there had been pleasure and no pregnancy.

  This time she had gathered no bitter leaves or stalks, nor had she played against her desire with any insistence. So the desire started between her legs and filled the rest of her the way smoke fills a hut and never seems to leave it. She wanted a child; more than anything she wanted a daughter.

  The man—the one Clear Eyes had told her about—called out twice as the forest darkened and the shadows in the clearings lengthened, and he snapped branches to make his location clear. Roofer called out once, but his voice was distant. Old Sour Plum’s voice went unheard. A woman—Flatface? Clear Eyes?—might well have told the man that I had reached desire. Not only did he make a lot of noise for a man new to the river, he also had built his nest in a sturdy old tree that grew well within the area where only I gathered.

  He was a handsome man, half again taller than she. His eyes were round and clear. His hair had the soft color of freshly fallen leaves. There was a scar across his chest, another along his forearm, but there was no other sign of injury. He said nothing while she looked at him, and then he raised his hands into the air and spread his fingers. Each one was there, and each digit on each finger was there, and each finger had the well-rounded shape of those who worked well with materials.

  “I am new to these woods,” he said, “and I have made nothing for you.”

  The truth of those words gave her pause. She had not seen the skill of his work. He had not roamed through these woods, so no one knew how he reacted when he came close to a woman or another man. Desire now seemed like such a foolish thing to have brought her here.

  “I have nothing for you,” she heard herself say. “I have not hunted in days.”

  “I have no hunger for meat.”

  She did not know what to say, and she thought perhaps words were best shared between one child and another or one woman and another. Without averting her eyes, she placed her carry bag on the ground, then removed her pubic apron.