For a moment I cannot concentrate. She feels her desire more intensely. There is a sweet tension from the depth of her stomach to where she can open herself for a man, and she starts to play music that will once again help herself forget this desire, forget herself, remove her body from the world until all that remains are her fingers, the keys, and the music, when she feels the soft break inside her, like the snapping of a leaf off a bush, and she knows that tonight she will have to choose wisely who will be her mate if she wants a daughter, and once again she plays the music, tries to feel the music, tries to remove the sky, the surrounding trees, the cooking fire, the ground, her desire, the feel of the earth against her bottom, her feet, until she feels only the music, the way it journeys to him and back to her, the way she tries to ease him open so the blood flows the way it should, so that sweetness inside is released and pain falls away the same way pollen and dust fall away from leaves when the rain arrives after a long spell of dryness.
He remembers his own dancing. He remembers lifting each foot and stamping down hard, the way the foot hits ground and the feel of it journeys to where spine and head met. He remembers the rhythm, moving with the claps, the rhythm of the feet, stamp and step forward left, stamp right, stamp and step forward right, stamp left, the /khoni wrapped around his leg from ankle to knee, the many dried cocoons brushing against his legs, the little stones in them rattling, adding to the rhythm. His breath quick, sucking in the smell of smoke, the lightness of his head, the growing of the pain in his gut, the sudden wall inside and the fear of continuing, of the pain, of perhaps going too far and losing his soul. And his uncle is by him, rubbing in his sweat, snapping his fingers, shooting arrows of n/um into him. He is ready.
He trusts his uncle. He trusts everyone. The clapping is right. The songs are right. He is part of everything. The fear is still there, and he keeps breathing, he keeps stamping, and he can feel his own n/um‚ the pain in his belly, the heat of it boiling inside him, the shivering on the outside, the way it rises through him along his spine, until it is everywhere, in his feet, along his hair. Everything spins around, The people are small, distant. The tree tilts. He runs to keep balance. He runs until someone takes hold of him and leads him around, and rubs the sweat off his body while his blood boils, everything is fire, and he places his hands on someone, ready to heal.
The music touched the leg, and she played out the pattern, the rhythm first, then the melody, and tried to match it to the shape. What she felt in return jarred, so she changed the music, starting slow, like her first careful touches, then quicker, as if taking hold, then moving in, until her mind’s eye can see bone touching bone, marrow touching marrow, blood flowing through its own rivers, playing so that the body would ease into what it should know how to do, so the body would not fail the person who lived in it, so the body would not rob a person of his solitude, making him too aware of his pain, the pain taking away his chance to gather, to mate, to shape things with his fingers and his hands, to avoid what should be avoided, to be aware of the world in order to walk through it with the solitude of mind that makes life bearable.
He remembered the way the dance changed, how he rests by the fire, how he gets up to move his feet, but it is more like walking than like dancing, the clapping without energy, but now the women start to sing better again, now they clap more loudly, with a rhythm that makes sense to the legs, and now his feet dance to such clapping, and now the men dance again, and in some the n/um begins to boil again. Hands reach out. /gau’s world tilts and he plows his head into the fire, and his two brothers pull him out, his father talking to him. Someone else in !kia runs off into the bush, then back. Another man stands on the other side of the fire. He, too, is in !kia. He pulls sickness out of a child, ≠oma’s uncle is leaning over Kwoba, his muscles trembling, his body rigid; deep in !kia‚ he calls out, then falls to the ground unconscious. Another uncle and his mother and his grandfather are sitting by him, rubbing his sweat, talking to his ears while his soul leaves the body and travels into the sand. It goes through a long underground river to another place on earth. There he climbs a thread higher and higher, heading toward God’s place, when he meets up with !xam—≠oma and Kwoba’s father—and !xam is carrying Kwoba’s soul in his arms. His uncle tells !xam that Kwoba still has to live, that she has a child who is still nursing and another child who clings to her and is scared of men she doesn’t know, !xam says he misses his daughter, that he can’t bear to be without her. Let her go back, his uncle says. She will be up there one day, but it’s wrong to take her away while she still has children and a life to live.
And their father lets Kwoba go, lets her go back with her uncle, who comes awake back in the camp. Kwoba’s face is drenched with sweat. It looks like the fever has broken. And he wants so much to be like his uncle, but he can’t see the sickness he pulls, he can only pull it. He can enter !kia‚ but only for a while, because he fears the deeper pain, he fears dying as his uncle has, he fears losing his soul. And around him are his father and Ghazwan and Hanan and N!ai and N!ai’s father, and N!ai’s mother, and Pauline, his own //gangwasi‚ not all of whom are dead, and he tells them to go away, he listens to distant music that seems to coat his body, to seep into his body, and he tells them to go away, that he wants to watch his uncle, who is standing again, ready to dance again, because the sun is rising and this is when the dancing is at its best, this is when everyone wants it to be good because the dancing should always end with everyone excited and together.
And now there was just music. She listened, and the ugly sounds she had played for Broken Leg now seemed less ugly. There was a strange sense to them, the beauty of a distant land she had not seen, and she felt her fingers press keys with their own logic, she interwove the patterns of his music and the music she had always known, and she played and played, slowing down, the river becoming a stream, becoming a brook, becoming drops of water sliding along stone, across leaves, slipping into the ground. She played until one finger and another alternated keys, and the music was quieter and quieter, like rain at the end of a storm, then there were the last few drops, then there was silence. And she began to hear once again the birdcalls, the insects, the breeze in the leaves high up, and the crackle of the dying fire behind her back.
He remembered the sunup, the heat, a woman throwing sand onto the fire, people heading back to their huts or to find shade, children asking for food, a baby’s short cry and the offering of the mother’s breast. He remembered laying his palm on Kwoba’s forehead, her skin cool to the touch. He lay upon the ground, aware of the alien sounds around him, how the music had stopped, how nothing in the camp seemed to be moving, and he wanted badly now to go back.
He wanted to dance again, while other men danced, while women clapped, he wanted to learn to better bear the pain of n/um‚ so that when he entered !kia‚ when the energy boiled in him, he could reach out and see clearly the sickness he pulled, until he could clearly see the //gangwasi out in the darkness, until he could climb the thread up to where the Great God lives, to argue with him, to ask him to pull out his arrows of sickness so someone could be well, to promise that they would love better and share better so that the person who was sick was wanted, or to say why that person could not be lost to them, not yet. He wanted so much that was impossible that an unbearable sadness filled him, like no sadness he had felt before. He opened his eyes. The sky above could not be seen. There was the whiteness of a cloud above. The late-afternoon light had a certain clarity about it. He raised his head, and it didn’t hurt at all.
The following is taken from the notebook Pauline Dikobe kept during her 200 day study of the slazan foraging population on Tienah.
Day 153
The days are getting shorter. Late summer heat. The leaves are green throughout the day, and I miss springtime’s wealth of color.
Each morning I walk the same trails through the forest to make my presence predictable. Today a subadult slazan male awaits me at an intersection of one of the trails. He
stands there, watching me, then looks away. I stop the moment it becomes clear he won’t move from the path. What would a slazan woman do?
Then he turns away. He walks off, but just before I can consider this one more lost opportunity, he stops after several steps and casts me a backward glance. He does this several times. I decide to follow. He walks up one path and down another. He stops every now and then to pick some food, and he eyes me, then the infant in my chi!kan‚ while he slowly nibbles away at berries or leaves. I keep my distance, only walking when he walks, never staring. I wonder if he’ll take me anywhere special, show me anything new. I follow him for an hour before he runs up a trail and away.
Tamr says, “He’s just another coy male.”
Jihad says, “He’s playing with you.”
Day 156
It’s the fourth morning I have followed him. Today he waits until I arrive; then he leads me along for three hours before running off.
He never does anything when I follow him; he no longer gathers food; he just walks, once in a while looking back to see if I’m still there. It’s like he’s a lonely adolescent, just filling time.
Jihad tells me the intelligence has picked up a pattern. The subadult male stays within a single watershed. The only hut and hearth in the watershed belongs to the adult female we’ve ID’ed as !U. Is this !U’s son?
Does this watershed form a range? Does !U’s range overlap with other ranges? When !U’s (supposed) son becomes an adult, does he leave her range for others? Does he walk across several watersheds as we have seen other slazan males do? How far away will he go from his mother?
Day 158
Today he appears with a young female, somewhat smaller than he. She has come to !U’s encampment on a number of occasions. Sometimes she brings food to share; usually she takes what !U offers.
Together with the subadult male, we repeat the same process. I follow them and watch them exchange glances, an exchange that surprises me. At one point the female turns to face me, widens her eyes, and then lifts her pubic apron—surely an obscene gesture—before dancing away and running off. The male calls something unintelligible—perhaps it’s the slazan equivalent of hey!—and runs off after her.
It is this very social exchange of glances that holds the mind. Why do relatively solitary creatures use language, why do they have the self-conscious intelligence that created human society?
There are plenty of theories about how competition with another species may have been the engine that drove the development of intelligence. Slazans have the opposable thumbs and binocular vision of tree dwellers. Had they stepped from the trees to the ground like the apes? Had another slazan primate species also taken to the ground? The presence of one species would have set off a dynamic in the other, a leaning toward enough cooperation and sociability to provide the necessary edge to properly exploit the environment and enhance reproductive success. The other possibility is that there existed at the same time a completely different species of animal who was evolving toward intelligence, creating an arms race in intelligence, forcing slazans to give up whatever solitary behavior necessary.
But each theory implies that at one point or another, slazans had to rid their environment of remaining competitors, a kind of innate genocidal impulse. In spite of all wartime efforts, in spite of all propaganda to the contrary, that notion is unconvincing.
So what force drove the machine of evolving intelligence?
Day 163
I’m sitting against a tree nursing my plastic son when my coy subadult male appears and walks up to me. I find myself rising, as if we will enter conversation. “I am here,” I say.
He tilts his head to one side.
I hold the baby in my arms. Its lips have fallen from my nipple. It has not nursed the requisite time, so it starts to whimper.
The subadult male looks down at the baby. I look from the baby to him. What is he thinking?
Before I know it, he has taken the child from my hands and has disappeared into the wilderness. I run, I scream, and I almost catch up. But he is gone.
I shut down the shuttle, cut off the voices from The Way of God‚ and scream out my solitude. The baby was plastic. It had no life. It was a ruse.
It was stupid to have called it by my son’s name.
Day 164
I can’t get up.
I don’t mourn for plastic.
I think of the General—ibn Haj’s superior—the one who looked like my younger sister’s husband, whose charms resided only in his looks. I know how he will see things. He will be blind to all the conversations we have recorded, all the words slazan women have shared. He won’t see how !U and the other woman divided up the meat. He will see the subadult male, the way he stole the plastic child. The General will see a murderer of babies, and he will see all the justification he needs for the war effort.
Day 165
Captain al-Shaykh offers to cut the mission short, bring me back up. There’s nothing more we’ll learn in a month. I refuse. There’s so much more I need to know.
Day 166
I take my walk, and he is there again. He doesn’t walk away. He approaches with a piece of wood. He lays it in front of me and backs off. I ignore it, and I ignore him until he has left. Then I pick up the wood. It is crudely carved, shaped like a tiny flute. I raise it to my lips and blow. The tone is soft, like a whisper.
Jihad says, “It doesn’t make up for a kidnapped baby.”
“Dead baby,” I say.
Day 167
Today he brings a basket crafted from dried reeds. The basket contains freshly ripened summer fruit. Not a single piece is bruised in any way.
Day 168
Today the gift is a knife, finely shaped from bone. The wooden hilt, however, is as crudely made as the whistle.
Day 170
After a day’s absence he reappears. This time he has brought what appears to be a belt, with a sheath for the knife. It is not at all well made. I hold it in my hands and look at it. He steps forward and runs his hand over my shoulder. I step back and look up. His eyes are intent on me. He steps forward again. His hand presses against pubic apron, and I stand there, held by curiosity and surprise, as he firmly curves his hand along my vulva. I drop the belt and flee.
* * * * *
The gifts were mating effort.
Why he thought he could mate with me, I don’t know.
But I know the age-old game: kill another male’s child, then mate with the freshly receptive female and conceive a child of your own.
A woman would have to develop an effective counterstrategy to safeguard her children. The hominid strategy was to choose solicitous males, ones whose kindness was its own kind of mating effort, a measure to insure, but not guarantee, the life of your children. But ancestral slazan woman, who preferred solitude, would not have chosen sociable mates, mates who would feed their children in the dual effort to propagate their genes and be allowed to mate once again. They would have preferred large, aggressive men who could survive, men who would maintain their solitude. But how to preserve their children against infanticide? Like lions, they could mate with a number of men, so no male would risk destroying his own child. But that would not be enough. Slazan males new to the area would still have a motive for infanticide. Slazan women needed something more. The woman who had intelligence—the woman who cooperated through language—gained an edge and had more children who survived to reproduce.
I have no data to support the idea; I have only intuition. But I believe that slazans did not compete with another species, nor did slazan groups compete with each other. The engine of change was the need for women to cooperate with each other against solitary but powerful men.
Day 185
Al-Shaykh does not want me to be far from the shuttle, especially after the incident with the subadult male. Still, I stuff a change of clothes and other gear into a pack. After a moment of hesitation I add the pistol. I head for the village site thirty kilometers away.
&nb
sp; And I return both enthusiastic and depressed. I have sneaked up on a couple mating, and I used an imaging pin to record the moment. I came upon a male soaking reeds and twisting them together to make one of the elaborate nests, his attention focused so intently on the work that he never seemed aware that I was watching. And I have walked through the village.
The number of shelters is amazing, over fifty. The paths wind around in serpentine fashion, just as in slazan cities, so people can be close by without being seen. Each shelter contains some kind of artifact. The older huts contain extensive paintings. I think of them as structures of knowledge, cultural knowledge made evident. It seems odd for primal Utopians, purposeful hunter-gatherers‚ to maintain such a tradition. No; maintain is the wrong word. Hence, my depression. There are signs of evident decay: runoff ditches filling, scattering of leaves, grasses, and shrubs sprouting up between huts.
Near the village are fruit trees. A round, beautifully red fruit that contains a soft yellow pulp. It takes a while to notice among the disarray of time—the fallen trunks, hollowed and lined with moss, the new shoots vying for sunlight, the immense quiet and shade—but you do become aware of how all the trees of similar age are arranged in rows. Orchards. I now look through images of other overgrown clearings, and we record signs of what may have been agricultural plots several generations ago.
These slazans are not primal Utopians.
Foragers Page 44