by Wil McCarthy
And here he felt his fist real glimmer of fear. Not the theoretical fear of attempting something unprecedented, but the more literal fear of spotting an actual danger whose scope he had no way of measuring. He responded by kicking faster and harder, which seemed to work.
His next problem came when the wind picked up. No longer quite so mild, and no longer blowing in quite the right direction, it tore the tops off of the sea’s gentle waves, turning them to froth and spray. This got into Ba’s eyes, where it stung, forcing him to blink rapidly. Waves that had been no taller than his hand were soon as tall as his shinbone, and then taller, and while he knew perfectly well how to steer a raft into an approaching wave, he found he was spending more and more of his energy on this. And whether it was because of this wind or simply because the water out here was more restless, he began to feel that he was being drawn eastward more quickly.
His heart beat faster, and it became hard to tell how much of that was from exertion and how much from fear. Still another problem came when his legs and his heart and his lungs began, yes, to feel tired.
Among his people he considered himself the most accomplished swimmer, which mostly meant that he was capable of treading water for a short time with a gaff in his hand, and swimming short distances without a fishing raft, and also capable of holding his position on a fishing raft for a substantial fraction of the day, just beyond the surf line, neither being swept in nor swept out by the ocean’s fickle tides and currents. He was also capable of walking all morning and all afternoon, and indeed he enjoyed a good walk, and the explorations that came with it. And he could run! He could outrun half the tribe, sprinting until they dropped back or even fell over with exhaustion. But this kind of endurance swimming was like nothing he’d ever attempted before; it was like walking really quickly through mud, with a heavy load in his arms, without ever stopping. It was strange, and strangely exhausting.
Still, he was making visible progress as he went. Already, the beach he’d started from was so distant that he could no longer tell if Mar was still standing there or not. He allowed himself a brief rest before continuing, and soon allowed a longer one where he actually hauled himself up fully aboard the raft and chopped open a melon with his hand axe. He hadn’t eaten very much of it, though, before he began to get alarmed at how far off course he was drifting.
And so, with that same blend of exertion and fear, he rolled back into the water. He then experience a moment of real terror when he felt the raft drifting away from him, and realized that if he didn’t have its buoyancy to support his weight, he wouldn’t be able to avoid, for very long, sinking and drowning out here in the empty ocean, far from his people. He kicked his legs and paddled his arms furiously, closing the distance and then grabbing the raft firmly with both hands and hauling his torso up onto it. That wasn’t a mistake he’d make again!
Wearily but with little choice, he simply resumed kicking. The sun rose higher in the sky, becoming hotter. This would not ordinarily have been a problem for Ba, but the wind had died back down again, and even with the cold water on his legs and buttocks and genitals, he found the combination of hard work and sunlight was roasting his head and shoulders and back. He paused several times to splash cold water on them, which did provide some relief, but never for long enough.
Then the sun began to sink lower in the sky, and because he was drifting eastward, and compensating by kicking in a northwesterly direction, this meant the sun was glaring directly into his left eye. Ugh. He tried closing both eyes for a while, but this quickly resulted in his veering off course, and when he tried closing only the left one, he found it only added to his sense of fatigue. So this was another thing he simply had to endure, squinting and blinking his way across the ocean.
And yet, the far shore was now looking distinctly closer than the near one. He was more than halfway across! Significantly more!
Overcome with thirst, he climbed back onto the raft and resumed eating his melon, now warm and partially dried out in the sunlight, and vaguely salty from the ocean spray that had gotten onto it. Nothing had ever tasted so good. He dared to eat a second melon, and then take some additional time to check his knots again.
The only knot he knew—the only knot that existed in all of the world—was what future generations would refer to as a “granny” knot. And as those future generations could tell you, the granny was a knot that readily worked itself undone. They could also tell you that jute twine wasn’t particularly strong when it soaked in water for too long. Especially if it was crude twine spun together by hand! Ba knew these things as well, and so he had compensated by knotting each strand of twine many times, and then wrapping it several times around a log, and then knotting it several times more, and wrapping it around another log, and so on. For redundancy, he had used nearly twice as much twine as he would have for an ordinary fishing raft, and yet he still had good cause to worry. Fortunately, for now things appeared to be holding together.
Taking a bit more precious time, he unlooped a bit of twine from one of his spindles, cut it with a stone flake, and then tied his own left hand to one of the raft’s logs. The horror of floating free in the ocean had been dogging him ever since it happened, and here was something he could do to minimize the chance of it happening again. Then, finally, he lowered himself back into the water again, and resumed wearily kicking his way toward shore.
At one point he began to hear clicking noises, and then moments later a cloud of flying fish (or bird fish as he sometimes thought of them) swarmed past him, and moments after that there were gray, man-sized, smooth-skinned fish leaping out of the water all around him. These bore a passing resemblance to the man-eating fishes that had probably killed Kaa, but their tails and faces were different, and when they briefly cleared the water they almost seemed to be smiling or even laughing.
But then they were gone, and shortly after that a flock of seagulls arrived in all their shrieking, squawking glory. Some were grabbing bird fish out of the water—no doubt separated from their school as the bigger fish tore through it—and some were simply settling down onto the raft as though Ba had brought it here for their benefit.
One landed right in front of Ba’s face and turned its head this way and that, eyeing him curiously. Ba’s people had been known to eat seagulls when they got hungry enough, but mostly the birds were considered a nuisance, harassing fisherpeople and shitting on picnics. Ba reached out to swat the bird off his raft, but it simply hopped back out of the way, joining several others on the far side of the raft, and still eyeballing Ba as if trying to figure out what he was, or why he was so far from shore.
“Nnngh!” he said to the birds. They ignored him, preferring to cluck and squawk among themselves, and so he decided to ignore them as well. The shore was getting close, and he could now see individual trees and bushes. The shore was mostly rocky, but he angled toward a stretch of beach where he could comfortably land the raft, and as he altered course he could begin to pick out the pale spirals of seashells lying in the sand, just above the line where the surf was breaking.
With a final burst of effort, he kicked toward this foreign beach, reaching the outer edge of the surf zone and then angling his way onto a decent-sized wave that could carry him in without breaking over his head. And then suddenly his feet were kicking wet sand down beneath the wave, and then his knees were dragging, and the birds were noisily scattering, and then he was crawling, pushing the raft forward up onto the beach as the wave retreated behind him with a faint sucking sound. Another wave came from behind, pushing him further up the beach, and then he was on his feet, hopping around to the front of the raft and grabbing it by the birdshit-stained twine wrapping, and he was pulling and pulling until it was above the stripe of seaweed and driftwood that marked the high water line. There was a big, frondy tree here, just at the base of some grassy sand dunes, and with the last of his strength he pulled the raft into its shade.
And then he collapsed, rolled onto his back, looked up at the sky a
nd called out, “Wooooooh!”
He’d done it. He’d traveled across the ocean to visit an unknown land. Now it was time to get up and explore the place, if only he could move.
4.4
Ba rested deeply and then napped lightly, with the sea breeze blowing over him, and with one arm on the raft and the other thrown across his eyes to block the daylight. He was hot and sticky and sand-covered, and his dozing had a feverish quality for a while, until the breeze and the shade finally began to cool him off. But then the sun emerged from behind the tree, and he snored himself awake.
He sat up and looked around: it was late afternoon—almost time for the sun to begin igniting the clouds in fiery color.
He quickly realized he was fiercely hungry and even more fiercely thirsty, so he grabbed a melon from his wicker nest and bit straight through the rind, sucking the juice and pulp right out of it and then swallowing and taking another huge bite. The structure of Ba’s vocal cords made choking unlikely, so he munched and munched, stuffing most of the melon into his mouth and swallowing great gulps of it.
When he was done, he grabbed another melon and did the same thing, and then he grabbed and ate the final one. Only then did he feel like getting (unsteadily) to his feet. Standing on his legs was like trying to balance on two blades of grass; they wanted to buckle and collapse underneath him. The ground seemed to slither and move and shift its mass beneath him. He was no stranger to landsickness, though, so he fought his way to a sort of rhythm, and started getting his land legs back.
Across the water, he could see the place he’d come from. The place he’d lived his entire life. The place where Mar and Guh and Cheek-click still went about their normal business. Were they thinking about him? Did they wonder if he’d made it across? If he’d died? The place didn’t look like anything special; in fact it looked a lot like this place, which Ba had seen across the ocean nearly every day of his life.
The beach here was fairly small as such things went, with sharp, rocky ridges coming down into the water on either side. The middle led straight back into a mess of grassy sand dunes, and behind that a waist-high sand cliff. Sighing, Ba climbed the dunes and the cliff and crawled up onto grass.
“Aaauglhh!” said a human voice, and Ba looked up to see he was surrounded by hairy people.
“Maaahh!” he said back to them, stepping away and then, to his dismay, falling backward down a sand dune. He got to his feet as quickly and as gracefully as he could, and then loped toward the raft, where he stooped and retrieved one of his fishing gaffs, then spun back around to face these humans.
Ba’s people sometimes encountered strangers, and he knew enough to be wary. Strangers sometimes wanted to eject you from your fishing spots or camping spots. Sometimes they wanted to mate with your women, whether or not the women agreed. Sometimes they just wanted to push you around, or break your things.
Of course, sometimes strangers were perfectly friendly, and shared their food and their tools. If they were women, sometimes they just wanted to mate with somebody new. If they were men, sometimes they also just wanted to mate with somebody new, the polite way, or sometimes they were just passing through on their way to somewhere else. Exploring their world, always searching for good places. But Ba had learned to be careful, and to expect nothing in particular from encounters like this.
“Maaawrgh!” he called out, waving the gaff in an arc in front of him, defining his personal boundaries.
Cautiously, heads began to peek over the edge of the cliff. Two woman and a man.
“Mmm?” one of them said to him.
And then they were stepping over the cliff, walking slowly down the dune face, making soothing gestures with their hands. Easy, friend. We didn’t mean to startle you.
These gestures would still be in common use a million years hence, and from them Ba suddenly realized these people had seen him sleeping. Curious, they’d retreated to a respectful distance and, apparently, waited for him to wake up.
One of the women was holding a half-finished wicker nest. Now she pointed to the middle of her chest and said “Nga.” She pointed again, and repeated the sound.
Ba, beginning to calm down, introduced himself in the same manner.
“Mmm?” asked Nga, pointing now toward Ba’s raft. She’d clearly never seen anything like it, and wanted to know what the deal was here.
Thinking hard, Ba pointed to himself, and then to the hills and beaches on the far shore of the ocean, and then to the raft, and then spread his arms to encompass this beach. I came from there to here, using this raft.
Nga took a moment to drink that in, and then she gestured toward the far shore.
“Ba?”
“Mmm,” he agreed.
“Mmm,” she said, thinking that over. “Mmm.”
“Joh,” said the man, pointing to himself.
“Lih,” said the other woman, gesturing similarly.
And now that they all knew each other, Ba tossed aside the fishing gaff, slightly embarrassed with himself. Even in a fight, he wouldn’t ever actually jab a person with that, any more than Guh would throw actual hunting stones at a person. It could cause a terrible injury! But he’d found it could intimidate bullies, far better than a hand axe or his fists.
“Uuuh,” he told Nga and Joh and Lih. Sorry.
“Mmm,” Nga said, accepting his apology. Then she gestured for him to follow her. “Mmm?”
“Uuuh,” he answered uncertainly. He’d come here to see what there was, and he supposed he should have expected there to be people here. What had he imagined—a whole empty country waiting to be walked and fished and camped on, by just himself?
Finally, he shrugged and nodded. Yes, okay. You seem like nice people. And although he left his fishing gaffs behind, he did go to the raft to pick up his hand axe, because to an H. erectus man, going around without a hand axe—especially among strangers—would be a source of embarrassment. Like announcing he didn’t plan on doing any work or helping anyone out.
“Ooh,” said Lih when she saw the axe in his hand. Then: “Mmm?” May I take a closer look?
“Mmm,” Ba assented.
She peered at the spiral imprint of that impossible little seashell, making appreciative noises, and then she waved over Nga and Joh so they could have a look as well. They all seemed quite impressed, which was a relief to Ba, after the indifference of his own people. This axe was special, and he enjoyed being among people who understood that.
When they were done looking, they led Ba back up over the dune and the cliff, across a pleasant stretch of grass and trees, over some rocks, past another somewhat larger, somewhat hidden beach where Ba could see a man and a woman fishing in the waist-deep water of a small cove or lagoon. The fish were big and slow enough, and the water clear enough, that Ba could see them from up here. This looked like much easier pickings than raft fishing beyond the surf zone, though not nearly as much fun.
Interestingly, although these people’s fishing gaffs were about the same length as Ba’s—slightly longer than a human arm—they were not as straight. Perhaps they didn’t know where to find good wood here, where the baby trees crowded together in the shade, growing straight up, with few branches. Ba had always thought that isolated saplings were lonely, and spread their leaves out instead of up, in the blind hope of touching another of their kind. By contrast, the crowded ones grew straight and fast, as if racing one another.
The fishing gaffs here also had four prongs instead of two. Ba couldn’t count that high, but he could certainly tell the difference between a stick that had been split at the end and propped open twice instead of only once. This made sense to him, as each prong improved the chances of stabbing a fish. The prongs were also jagged (or barbed, as the thought suddenly occurred to him), which he immediately understood would make it harder for wounded fish to wriggle off the tip and get away. Of course, Ba didn’t need that kind of assistance, but still these were good ideas that he might just bring back home with him.
On the other hand, the gaffs did not appear to be twine-wrapped or fire-hardened, which meant they were not going to last very long. One false jab and the whole thing would crack into two long pieces. Or even four! How much time did these fisherpeople spend chopping and splitting fresh wood? Sheesh.
The fisherpeople, intent on their task, did not look up, and Nga led Ba and the others past the beach, over another hill and into a little depression with a stream running through it, emptying down over rocks and gravel and into the sea. There was another man there—a short, stocky one with a balding scalp, and graying hair on shoulders and the sides of his head.
“Orr!” Nga called out. The man looked up and saw Ba, though he didn’t seem particularly surprised.
“Ba,” she said to Orr, pointing her finger in Ba’s direction.
“Mmm,” Orr said, only mildly interested.
Nga paused for a moment, holding her hands up and trying to gesture something. Then she pointed across the water, at the hills and beaches Ba had come from, and said his name again.
Orr shrugged and shook his head, not getting it. Nga looked briefly frustrated. She thought it was really interesting that Ba had crossed the water in his oversized raft, but she had no way to convey this. Not without the actual raft in front of her. Perhaps not without Orr actually seeing the landing for himself. Did these people even know how to make rafts?