That would be soon, Clare thought. She had to finish up her work with Brad soon. And where was Brad? She had agreed that the odd dark man could stay in the foothills with Luke and Dog only if he came into camp every day for the rest of his lessons, to consult with her and, more importantly, with the elders. What a mess this was. Brad’s quest in doubt and the bushkie a prisoner—in restraints, guarded—something that no one in the tribe liked. No one wanted to take care of a bushkie. Especially no one wanted to deal with these problems when it was past time to pack up their solarcomps and everyday goods, store the rest, load up the travois, load up the kids, and start walking.
Pushing the closed tent flap from the inside, the elder emerged, a stocky eighty-year-old woman with two long silver braids. She carried a gathering basket. Only Brad was still missing.
“I’m sorry, Grandmother …” Clare used the honorific title. In this case, the woman was also her mother’s mother.
Her grandmother waved the air. “Don’t waste time apologizing. I’ve read all the files. Listen, sweetheart, it’s not you. This guy has been missing his appointments with elders all his life.”
“He promised he would be here …”
“This guy makes promises. But I’m not waiting for him. There are some things I want to get, a half hour from here. Upstream.”
“Watercress?” Clare guessed.
“It’s fresher in the morning. We’ll be back by noon. We can talk on the way.”
Clare thought they should take another hunter with them, but her grandmother was headstrong and already walking. Clare followed like a sullen child. This final assessment—what the student had learned, what he or she had done as part of that learning, what he or she would do differently now—was the least favorite part of any quest. Of course, usually the guide didn’t have to do any of the talking. Usually this was the student’s job, evaluating his or her actions and answering any questions from the elder.
Behind her grandmother, Clare tried to see inside the tents they passed. Maybe Brad was hiding in one of them. She scanned the kitchen area and trail to the latrines. She walked slowly, hoping still to see him in camp, perhaps with Luke, perhaps cadging some food.
How could she justify a successful quest? She had counted on Brad’s arguing his case. He was charming when he wanted to be. He was clever. He was persistent. And she had already coached him on what to say.
“You’re slow as a turtle,” her grandmother stopped and waited, but kindly, in full elder mode.
Clare caught Jon’s eye as he approached them carrying a skinned rabbit. His braid of brown hair had been wrapped into a bun, like a topknot, and his muscled chest glistened as though oiled. He looked happy to be alive on this beautiful morning, happy to see her, lifting the rabbit slightly in tribute. Clare shook her head. She felt chagrined, not happy to be alive on this beautiful morning. It was embarrassing. The quest had been cut short. Maybe the elders would count the week traveling back to the tribe, but that was complicated by the presence of the bushkie, bound and then gagged, not to mention Luke and Dog. They hadn’t reached the mountains or worked on Brad’s relationship with water. She hadn’t had time to prepare the peyote and stop for a vision. After that one javelina, Brad hadn’t done any serious hunting. Inevitably, her grandmother would declare the quest a failure, and the Council would ask Brad to repeat it. But not with her.
“Begin at the beginning. Tell me everything that happened,” her grandmother said as she nodded at Jon. Everyone liked Jon.
They walked farther, to the privacy of the stream area, away from anyone who could overhear. Clare thought back. What had been her first mistake? Certainly that was when she had followed the human footprints. The lizards were unnerving, and she had sought the comfort of a tribe, not focusing on the present and what her student needed to learn. And then—her second mistake? Should they have not interfered at the stone circle? Let the bushkies kill Luke? Clare sighed loudly. This was unfair. Brad should be here, too, answering these questions, facing up to her grandmother.
Sheltered from the wind under a juniper, Clare sat by the peyote as it boiled, the round half-dried buttons turning the water dark brown. She would strain this water, save it, boil the buttons again, combine the two solutions, and reduce that to a cup of darker brown, a bitter liquid with enough mescaline to open the door.
A branch sagged in a whoosh of wings, sending down a scatter of hard purple berries. The raven barked a ka-ka-ka as it jumped from the tree to the ground near the small fire. Confidently, the bird waddled toward her, ruffling one black shoulder and opening its black bill. Clare knew that Jon would be close behind. People had started to complain about this newest pet, especially since pets were more or less against the rules. Dogs were the exception, but just a few, carefully bred and trained. Most wild animals were manageable only when young and became a nuisance as soon as they started growing up, never fully domesticated but never wild again either. This was not Jon’s first offense. Clare could remember the raven before this one—a very loud bird—and the crow and scrub jay before that.
“May I join you?” Jon asked rhetorically, ducking under the tree and sitting cross-legged. Now the raven waddled toward him, opening and closing its beak. Predictably, Jon took out a handful of pine nuts and began tossing them to the bird, one by one. The hunter gave a knocka-knocka-knocka, a passable imitation, and the raven gave a knocka-knocka-knocka back. The bird got a pine nut. Jon gurgled. Clare had to widen her eyes. He was getting good. The raven cawed in response. Jon cawed, too, but this time he seemed to be saying the wrong thing, for suddenly the raven flapped its wings, croaked, and hopped until it could get enough lift away from the juniper and up into the sky. Jon was left with his handful of pine nuts.
Clare raised an eyebrow. Jon shrugged. He nodded at the clay pot, the peyote, the boiling water. Clare nodded in return and asked him to sing.
He had such a beautiful voice. She melted a little, as she always did when Jon performed alone before the fire or sat next to her when they sang as a group. His range was extraordinary, surprisingly high as he pretended to speak in the peyote button’s voice, the spirit of the plant promising inspiration, welcoming the human into its world. In this song, the peyote spoke first and then the human, and now Jon dropped a register, deeper and stronger. Peyote, human, and next a sparrow. Then a saber-toothed cat. Then a tiger beetle. Jon knew the making-peyote-tea song better than Clare, and she was content to let him take the lead while she came in on the chorus or echoed his words in the parts that were a round.
The hunter swayed as he sang and Clare stirred the tea. How strange, really, that Jon was a mute, that he had never heard the Paleos whispering emotions in his head—I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m eating you up. Somehow this hadn’t made him less sensitive to the world around him. In fact, he was a true animist, believing in the unique consciousness of peyote in this song just as he believed in the unique consciousness of the human, consciousness everywhere and in everything, an essence in each pine nut and lice-infested bird. In each louse.
Clare, herself, believed in chemistry. For a short amount of time, the hallucinogenic properties of the peyote button shifted brain waves. Synapses sparked. Neurons fired. It was a new kind of reception. Clare stirred the tea and thought that Brad’s animism was probably much like Jon’s. Ironically, as different as they were in other ways, the physicist and the hunter had this in common.
She helped end the song, harmonizing with the final chorus, and felt Jon’s stare on her lifted breasts. Actually the two men had another common interest. If she were younger and more susceptible, she would be blushing—the notes of sex so strong in the air.
“Can we meet tonight?” Jon exhaled, as if still singing.
Clare thought and nodded yes. But she wasn’t excited about making love outside, in the cold, on the ground. “In my tent,” she amended. She had been gone weeks, first to fetch Brad at the lab and then the aborted quest and back. Her tentmates owed her some private time.
Whoosh. The raven returned, flapping nearby. It knocked. It gurgled. Someone else was coming up the trail to the tree. Clare watched as Jon scrambled out from under the juniper branches and then straightened and stood, his compact body seeming to expand. The muscles of his arms flexed, and he lifted his head, his reaction just short of being silly.
As usual, Brad and Luke were talking as they walked. Dog wasn’t with them, and Clare felt relieved. The direwolf made people nervous.
She was still annoyed at Brad, although naturally he had explained away his earlier absence. By not coming to see the elder with Clare, he had pointed to himself as the irresponsible party, the person at fault. He had turned Clare into another one of his victims. She couldn’t be blamed for whatever had happened. She couldn’t control such an aggravating man. This condescending strategy—getting the elder to pity Clare—was bad enough. Almost worse, it worked, and Clare’s grandmother had decided that the quest didn’t have to be repeated, for this would only shame her granddaughter. Only the peyote ceremony still had to be done. Also, Brad had to agree to another quest in three years. On this point, the elder was stern. No more tricks! No more trickster!
“Ah!” Brad looked a little startled at Jon’s pose and the sight of Clare stirring tea. The tall loose-limbed man also ducked under the juniper branches to sit beside her, and Luke came, too, so that Jon looked foolish standing apart from them and by himself. It would have been natural for the hunter to take his leave now. But stubbornly Jon bent down and rejoined them around the clay pot of liquid.
The aroma of peyote mixed with burning wood mixed with the smell of the three men, especially Luke. The hermit was fastidious in many ways, brushing his teeth and keeping his hair braided, but he did not, surprisingly, bathe very often.
“Have you heard about the bushkie?” Brad asked. “The elders made their recommendation, and the Council agreed.”
Something squeezed in Clare’s chest. Killing the bushkie was a reasonable solution although it was something her tribe had never had to do before. Still, a Colorado tribe had executed such a man, and there had been many such executions in the Russian tribes. Naturally the Russians did things differently—gambling excessively, for example, but forbidding fermented drink. Naturally the three populations had their varying cultures. The Quakers, of course, had never “murdered” anyone and would vigorously protest. Emails would be sent around the world.
Luke seemed to guess what she was thinking, and not for the first time. The old man reminded Clare of her grandmother. “They are only going to banish him again,” Luke assured her. “But this time they are taking him farther south, to the peyote fields. It’s unlikely he’ll meet up with other bushkies or live very long. But he will have that chance.”
Brad said nothing.
“It’s the right decision,” Jon spoke.
“So he can kill someone else?” Brad asked.
Jon answered as if the lab rat had said this out of fear. “Don’t worry,” he soothed in the imitation of someone talking to a child. “He’ll be very far south.”
Brad didn’t even bother to reply. There was an awkward pause—the raven knock-a-knocking from a branch, the branches moving in a wind—and then Brad spoke to Clare. “I’ve asked Luke to be there when I take the peyote.”
She felt another internal squeeze. Brad had turned to Luke as his mentor. They talked together often. The man was clearly the preferred teacher. She stirred the tea again. “If you want. It’s not customary.”
Luke coughed up a wad of phlegm, turned, and spit it at the base of the tree. This helped relieve some of the tension. Clare recognized it as an elder’s trick, suddenly farting or blowing a nose. A good reminder. We are all just bodies, mucus and gas.
So she put her jealousy aside, explaining where they should meet the next day, a sweet sandy spot by the stream. They would be close to camp, safe from predators. The water would be musical, the afternoon warm under the yellow trees, the willow tips blushing pink. Later, Brad could walk to a nearby hill to watch the sun set and the rise of Venus. Clare wasn’t hoping for any dramatic revelation. Since Brad had missed so many quests, this would be his first experience with peyote, and she preferred something mild and unexciting. She explained the process. The tea would taste awful, but he should try to not vomit.
Now Jon did get up, for this was quest business. He left with a meaningful look at Clare and a nod at the other men. The raven flapped and cawed and followed the hunter, who walked with triumph in his straight back and shoulders. The black bird soared into the blue sky, high and higher like a totem spirit, like the man’s twinned half. Clare shook her head. The bird was a pest they would have to live with. No one could make Jon give him up.
The Mute Mammoth, submitted by Dimitri Wu
My subject in this paper is how The Return was influenced by the Paleos. Everyone knows the story of the first cloned teratorn and the first scientist who could hear him and how that scientist clapped his ears and said, “For God’s sake, give that bird something to eat!” After that, they cloned a lot of Paleos and established the Pleistocene Parks and did a lot of new scientific experiments. Paleos were a popular subject which some scholars have described as a cultural obsession. The idea that we could listen to what animals were thinking and feeling gripped the human imagination. Pleistocene scientists like my great-great-great-great-grandparents were revered and they were also very strong-minded. They insisted on cloning the giant shortfaced bear, for example, even though no one wanted them to do that. Then the supervirus happened and these same Pleistocene scientists emerged from their antique bunker outside St. Petersburg and were practically in charge. What would have happened if this had not been the case? If only the computer scientists in North America had survived? Or only the Costa Rican Quakers?
One interesting thing to remember about the conference in St. Petersburg is that the majority of the people who attended from around the world were receivers, not mutes. Most people think that receivers were especially drawn to Paleolithic research because it was so new and exciting to be able to communicate with a saber-toothed cat or a direwolf. In this way, the Paleos themselves influenced who was at this conference. Later this conference influenced everyone else and that is why we have The Return. The Paleos are why we are who we are today.
Here is one more thing to think about. Many thousands of years ago, as the Pleistocene came to an end, human beings hunted the Paleos to extinction—killing off the small groups struggling to survive the newest climate change. When the big game died, many of the predators and scavengers like the teratorns died with them. There are many questions around these extinctions. How did we kill these animals when they could hear us and we could hear them? Did we learn tricks of keeping silent? Did we have more mutes then, and did the mutes alone hunt these animals? Did some animals learn the trick of not being heard and are those the animals that survived? We will never know. My grandfather believes, however, that killing off the Paleos was the first big mistake humans made. Suddenly no one could hear each other anymore. Our lives changed after that. We turned to agriculture and civilizations rose and civilizations fell and civilization almost destroyed us. For this reason, out of regret, we do not hunt these animals now.
I will end this paper with a personal story about my relationship with mammoths. Last summer I was watching a herd as they ate grass in the big meadow near Blackhorn Mountain. The big females twirled their trunks around a clump of dry stems, kicked at the base, and pulled. Then they beat the clump against their knees to knock off the dust and chaff. As they chewed, they twirled their trunks around a new clump, kicked, and pulled. I could hear their dissatisfaction. This grass was dry. The younger females and the adolescent males also ate the grass and found it dry, while the very youngest mammoths just kept playing. They were still nursing and didn’t care much about grass. They wanted only to bump against each other and see how far they could explore before their mothers called them back. Sometimes the mammoths rumbled out lou
d and sometimes they called out with their minds, and I could hear both. It was like being in a roomful of people, hearing all kinds of conversations. With Paleos, of course, I didn’t hear words so much as feelings and ideas like come-back-immediately or here’s-some-really-good-grass-at-the-base-of-this-little-hummock.
I also lay in some tall dry grass on a nearby hill and watched for a long time. Just when I was about to leave, a bachelor bull came trumpeting and flapping his ears through the spruce trees. Everyone got very excited, flapping their ears and trumpeting, too, even the younger females who could not breed yet. The male dribbled urine down his legs. His penis was swollen so that it looked like a fifth leg, and his face was also swollen from the glands in his cheeks. His smell was so sharp it almost made me cough in my hiding place. This bull began to chase some of the females who could breed and they kept outrunning him or, if he did catch them, they would turn and twist so that his long penis could not reach their vulva. I realized then that the bull was mute. That I couldn’t hear him. I saw then that the females did not want to mate with him. They only wanted to mate with other receivers. The big bull roared and trumpeted and squirted urine. His penis whipped back and forth like a snake as he came closer to where I lay watching. Finally, he lowered his head, his penis drooping on the ground, and he seemed very unhappy. Truthfully, I felt sorry for him.
Bachelor bulls sometimes act crazy, destroying everything they can reach, trampling trees and living creatures. The mammoth herd suddenly seemed worried about this since the females began to move, even though they really wanted to keep eating. My friends laugh at me and say that mammoths do not like or care about humans, but I think the matriarch of the herd sent me a warning now to go away. She sent me this thought: go-away-stupid-boy. Go-away. The matriarch was sending out her hurry message, hurry-hurry, to all the herd, to the females and calves and adolescents, but she was also talking to me. Go-away-stupid-boy. She didn’t want me to be trampled by the big mute mammoth.
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