No Enemy But Time

Chapter Twenty

Helen was the one who finally made a clear sighting of the creatures that had been following us for the past two days, and she informed the rest of us by throwing back her head and emitting a single ear-splitting bark. To the east, not more than two hundred yards away, I saw three small figures looking at us from the lip of a wedge-shaped kopje. They scrambled out of view as soon as Helen’s cry reached them, but I no longer had any serious doubts about the identity of our pursuers.

A large band of gracile australopithecines—A. africanus—had been moving almost parallel to our own line of march, using the high patches of savannah grass and the oasis-like islands of thorn trees and acacias as blinds. Since my arrival in the Pleistocene I had seen only a few representatives of this supposedly well-distributed hominid species, always at a great distance. Although I had seen members of the allegedly rarer A. robustus at closer range, circumstantial evidence suggested that both species were rapidly dying out.

Alfie and the other Minids wasted no pity on the australopithecines. Now that they understood how close our tag-tails had drawn, they seemed to be considering the wisdom of a sally against them. A nervous alertness informed everyone’s behavior; the men kept exchanging glances and making noisy feints in the direction of the graciles, who, after skeedaddling to deeper cover, remained altogether out of sight for the next hour or so. As I had not wanted to shoot a chalicothere, neither did I wish to join a war party against our hobbity shadows to the east.

Helen came to me and peered into my eyes as if trying to communicate a profound or frustratingly complex notion. We had paused for a moment on the edge of an arroyo, and I stared down into the cracked stream bed trying to arrange my intuitions into a sensible pattern. What did Helen want to convey? I had no idea. She, as if to prompt me to comprehension, patted one lean, hairy breast and made a mewling sound. Again, shrugging my shoulders and opening my hands to demonstrate my bewilderment, I wished fervently that she could speak. Charades have never been my forte.

“Helen—Helen, I don’t know what you want.”

Helen retreated from me, leapt down into the stream bed, and began following it northward, back the way we had come.

“Helen, what are you doing?” I cried. “Where are you going?”

The other Minids seemed unperturbed. I jumped down into the gully and trotted after her, but she waved me back without ceasing to retreat from us. When she clambered up the eastern bank, plunged into a thicket some thirty or forty yards farther on, and completely disappeared from my vision, my heart sank. I was astonished and hurt. Later, with more facts at my disposal, her departure made sense, but at the moment it struck me as arbitrary, erratic, and maybe even suicidal. The last glimpse I had of her was a flash of vivid red from the bandanna about her neck, and that red seemed frighteningly portentous.

Reluctantly I followed the others.

Afternoon sloped into evening. What was going on? How had I offended Helen? By failing to understand her? By refusing to make bellicose gestures at the band of A. africanus shadowing us? Had Helen’s disillusionment with me sent her off across the savannah in search of another husband?

Pathetically egocentric, these questions pinched at my forebrain and hung on like angry crayfish. Reason would not shake them loose. I began to wonder if I could survive without Helen.

Toward twilight we approached a water hole on whose opposite bank stood a female black rhino and her hairy calf. They snorted at the water, nuzzling it with vaguely prehensile lips. The evidence of their hides—splotched, mud-caked, rubbery-looking—suggested that they had already enjoyed a good wallow and were now just fooling around, keeping other thirsty animals at bay by refusing to depart.

Swarms of bot flies danced about their impervious bodies, looking for dry places to alight.

Ham led us down to the water hole to drink, and the rhinoceroses’ piggy eyes strained after our outlines while their big purse-shaped ears absent-mindedly tracked our chatter. Much to my relief, they did not attempt to chase us off.

When the Minids and I had finished drinking, Malcolm took up watch in a tree.

The darkness had a tincture-of-iodine quality about it, and my anxiety over Helen’s desertion had begun to take on a hysterical edge. Unable to sit still, I paced the western shore of the water hole. Alfie and the others divided their attention between me and the rhinos, which finally lumbered up the opposite bank and out onto the evening grasslands.

Suddenly Malcolm hooted a warning from his tree, an urgent warning, and I hurried to join him aloft. All the other Minids took cover, too. Soon I was installed in a pale, polished tree fork higher than Malcolm’s lookout, and I saw that a pack of giant hyenas was approaching the two departing rhinos. Above Mount Tharaka the full moon—a huge, luminous brood ball—heaved into view, spotlighting the confrontation on the veldt.

The hyenas’ joint purpose was to induce Junior to charge, thereby separating him from Mamma and making it possible to gang-tackle him. To this end, two of the hunger-crazed hyenas danced in, swatted the calf on his fuzzy fanny, and darted away. Mamma blustered from place to place, trying to disperse the hyenas, but because they saw far better than she or Junior did, they could easily skitter out of her path. In fact, her huffy offensive maneuvers seemed to be wearing Mamma down. Junior jostled along in her lee whenever he could, but his mother’s increasing frustration and bad temper kept deflecting her into stupid games of tag with their tormentors.

Most of the hyenas, I noticed, were sitting some distance away, watching. Their eyes were yellow agates in the moonlight. The dog work of harassment they left to a pair of agile bullies who stood nearly four feet high at their shoulders. The noise from this scrimmage—the lunges, snorts, and foot feints—seemed somehow remote. Abstractedly I wondered if a kill on either side would take my mind off Helen, and if the Minids could get in on the spoils. So far the contest had engendered only sound and surliness, most of it from Mamma.

This changed. When the female thundered to her left to rout one lean hyena, Junior rashly attacked the renegade nipping at his flank on the right. His charge took him forty or fifty feet toward the hyenas lounging in the low grass east of the water hole. Several of these creatures sprang up to capitalize on his folly. Almost before I could blink, the calf was down, thrashing and squealing as a pair of his assailants dragged him along by his skinny tail and one hind leg. The remaining hyenas rushed in to rip open Junior’s belly.

The calf’s high-pitched protests turned Mamma around. Stampeding to his rescue, she bayonetted one monstrous hyena with a dip of her snout. With a resounding crack that probably signaled a broken spine, the wounded animal flipped brains over butt to its back. As the other hyenas scurried for safety, Junior was able to regain his feet. He trotted to Mamma for consolation. The set-to was over, for the hyenas had lost the will to test the huge female again. Secure in their triumph, Mamma and Junior angled off into the bush. Their departure was dignified, even lordly.

Once they had gone, the hyenas moved in to tear the guts out of their fallen mate. Jockeying for position, they nudged the carcass, quarreled viciously with one another, and fed.

Alfie, in the tree next to mine, periodically hurled a piece of debris at the hyenas—a fruit husk, a scab of bark—but with more symbolic than real effect. The hyenas went on gorging themselves. As they were finishing up, several of them broke away and crept down to the water hole to drink. Stranded aloft, we intensified our efforts to drive them off, hurling whatever came to hand: rotten limbs, nuts, berries, old birds’ nests, the works. We also assaulted the hyenas vocally, carrying on like banshee divas at an operatic wake.

This aggressive strategy boomeranged. The hyenas—the entire pack, at least a dozen—withdrew from the roiling water hole without really surrendering it to us. They either prowled the edges of the thicket or lay in the grass out of missile range. Our dissonant abuse did not greatly upset them. They were prepared to wait us out.

Vultures settled out of the air, as if from the mother-of-pearl uterus of the moon, and the night kindled with insect song and lethargic wing beats.

We were under siege, the Minids and I, and it occurred to me that in times of trial a resourceful people nearly always finds a means of allaying its fears and bolstering its courage. Usually either an acknowledged leader (F.D.R., say) or a person with a special attention-focusing talent (Betty Grable, for instance) steps in to nerve, comfort, and cheer the demoralized multitudes, by oration or tap dance.

None of us was in a position to tap dance. But because the Minids required this kind of psychological boost, I decided that I must speak to them in the forceful and reassuring tones of a storytelling patriot. Or maybe I simply needed to reassure myself. In any case, I told them a tale, a spur-of-the-moment tale, that probably ought to be called “How the Reem Got Her Horns.”

“Once upon a time,” I declaimed, furiously free associating, “the rhinoceros had no horns at all. Further, in those distant days she was known by her Creator, Ngai, as the reem rather than as the rhinoceros.

This later word, O habilines, implies the possession of a horn that the reem did not yet have.

“I want to tell you how she got it.

“Yes, in those days the reem was a miserable, defenseless creature whose great size was her only seeming asset. In truth, she could seldom use her size to good advantage because she was slow, hard of hearing, and near-sighted to boot. All the other animals, including even the hares and the hyraxes, taunted her with impunity. It had not taken them long to discover that her armor plating was something of a sham, for her skin was thick only at the underlayer. Provided one knew just where to strike, the reem could be made to bleed like a hemophiliac.

“One day the dog, an ill-bred jackanapes, amused himself for several hours at the reem’s expense. He nipped her flanks, chewed her toes, and, every time he took a turn beneath her belly, tickled her teats.

By late afternoon several more animals—the behemoth and a retinue of lesser bullies—had joined this game, and the poor reem was soon a rucksack of tears and shapeless fatigues. Slumped on the ground, she waited for darkness to drive her tormentors to their beds.

“Later, when they had departed, the reem resolved to petition Ngai for aid. He had overlooked her when distributing such self-protective necessities as speed, cunning, ferocity, and camouflage, and she was determined to upbraid him for his carelessness, to shame him into playing her fair. Despite her weariness, then, she set off before dawn to visit the Creator in his dwelling on the slope of Mount Tharaka.

“Many days elapsed between her departure and her arrival, and the Creator, disguised as a highlands blue monkey, saw her coming even before she had reached the foot of the great mountain. He remembered how he had inadvertently slighted her on the Sixth Day of Creation, and his irritation at being reminded of this negligence prompted him to climb into a tree. From this vantage he hurled a fusillade of fruit at the ugly creature lumbering up the wooded draw toward his dwelling.

“The reem endured the Creator’s fit of pique. Eventually he stopped flinging missiles and asked her in an aggrieved tone what she wanted of him. The reem was glad to be asked. She explained her predicament—the shame of her defenselessness—and demanded a boon to offset the handicaps with which he had so pitilessly encumbered her life.

“‘Very well,’ said Ngai. ‘Go back down to the plain and practice your running.’

“The reem did so. She discovered that the Creator had given her speed of a kind. In short bursts she could run as fast as the antelope. However, she tired easily, and it struck her that animals with more endurance would still be able to trifle with her, to treat her as meanly as they liked. She returned to Mount Tharaka and bearded Ngai in a garden of fragrant succulents.

“‘It is a help,’ she said, ‘but it is not enough.’

“‘Not enough?’ the Creator demanded, scandalized. ‘Not enough?’

“‘No, Your Godship. And I do not intend to leave until you have made it possible for me to do so without fearing for my safety among the other animals of your creation.’

“Scowling, the arrogant little blue monkey picked a pair of nearby palm leaves, shaped them into funnels, daubed them with silt from his sacred stream, and stuck them into the reem’s open ear holes. What a difference! Full of wonder, the reem listened to the wind, the lyric babbling of the water, and the plangent cries of tiny, cloistered birds. She rotated her ears to catch every quiver and frequency of sound. Her augmented hearing pleased her greatly. Nevertheless, another objection took shape in her mind, and she hurried to intercept Ngai, who was busy climbing to a nest of woven twigs and colobus fur.

“‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘Wait! Some of those who torment me are as silent as the stars. The leopard and the dog still have power over me. Please, O Mighty One, have pity on my helplessness.’

“The Creator was so angered that he took his own name in vain, but his exasperation did not alter the fact that the reem had spoken truthfully. Ngai calmed himself down by degrees.

“Night had fallen by this time, and a horned moon floated above Mount Tharaka like a weapon. Seeing it, the Creator gathered so much air into his monkey lungs that the reem was left gasping for breath. He thereupon grew into his primordial incarnation as Big Gorilla Ngai. In this awe-inspiring form he strode to the top of Mount Tharaka and ripped the gleaming moon from the sky.

“This was not easy, however. The moon did not want to come down from the sky and so put up a struggle. Gorilla Ngai nearly had to herniate himself to achieve his goal. When the moon finally came unstuck from the heavens, his anger was such that he snapped the horned moon across his hairy thigh and carried the halves down the mountain in heavy-footed disgust. As he descended Mount Tharaka, he grew smaller and smaller. By the time he reached the astonished reem, he was no bigger than an adult baboon and still shrinking.

“‘Here,’ he said peremptorily, and he fixed the halves of the moon to her snout, one behind the other. ‘Now, my impertinent bicorn, I beg you to leave me—so that I may sleep and, sleeping, recover my godly strength.’

“He had dwindled to the size of a tree mouse.

“This display, besides literally taking her breath away, thoroughly impressed and chastened the reem.

Indeed, she forgot to petition the Creator for better eyesight. Considering his current disposition, though, that was probably just as well.

“Down the mountainside she galloped, scything her head this way and that. Her heart, like a gemsbok melon, was brimming with sweetness, and the world seemed altogether lovely, one glorious, balmy wallow.

“Alas, several hours from home the reem found herself face to face with the pestilent dog. After circumnavigating her great bulk and gazing scornfully at her snout, he began to snigger.

“‘Horny toad will be envious,’ he declared. Then, disdainfully, he trotted past the reem. Once behind her, however, he whirled and nipped at her backside. The reem also whirled, so quickly that the dog was dumfounded. His snout was inches from her warty face.

“‘Have a care for my feelings,’ the reem admonished him. ‘If you do not, I will be forced to deal harshly with you.’

“This warning, from such a notorious weakling and blunderer, infuriated the dog. Determined to put her in her place, he leapt for her throat. He did not come down alive. The reem impaled him on both her horns, shook him loose, and kicked him into a gully like a pancake pile of steaming dung. So much for the dog.

“Upon learning of his death, the other animals fell into a lengthy round of debate and recrimination. How had the reem become so powerful? All were outraged that the butt of their merciless merrymaking had suddenly acquired strengths comparable to, or greater than, their own. Who could be behind this heinous betrayal? Why, only the Creator, of course, and he must be made to pay.

“‘We must annihilate Ngai,’ the tusk-bearer told the behemoth and the other animals. ‘We must kill the Creator.’

“Soon everyone on the plain had taken up the cry ‘Kill the Creator!’ And so aroused, they shambled off in unruly ranks toward his dwelling on the mountain.

“The reem, alerted to their intentions by their cry, hurried to warn her unsuspecting benefactor of the mischief afoot. In his dwelling on the slope the reem found Ngai febrile and shrunken, no bigger than a dung beetle. Quickly apprised of his subjects’ intentions, he begged the reem to take him aboard (he would sit between her horns) and give him passage to the safety of an uninhabited southern desert. The reem readily acceded to this request.

“When the tusk-bearer, the behemoth, and the others found the gardens on Mount Tharaka bereft of Ngai and saw the dust clouds billowing from the southern plains, they deduced that the reem was assisting the fugitive. Still, a vigorous pursuit would accomplish their capture, for she had insufficient stamina to maintain her pace and the Creator himself could hardly be at his best if he had chosen this unorthodox method of escape.

“Indeed, the reem soon began to tire. She halted in the broad vacancy of the savannah to recover her wind. Instead she lost a little—for at that moment she felt the necessity of relieving herself and let fall several droppings. Almost at once a coprid beetle that had been sleeping nearby awakened and scurried over to make use of this unexpected windfall.

“‘Hurry,’ the Creator squeaked, peering over the reem’s brow at their pursuers. ‘They’re nearly upon us.’

“‘Yes, oh yes,’ the reem acknowledged, holding back tears. ‘And the next time I stop they will certainly overtake us. Even though I am willing to die with you, Ngai, I would far rather die for you—but I’m exhausted, almost at my limit, and whatever befalls us, befalls us.’ She tactfully did not mention that Ngai might have solved this problem by granting her stamina along with his other tardy favors, but she was sensible of the irony of their plight.

“The dung beetle, who was not blessed with a sense of the ironic, had overheard this exchange between Ngai and the reem. He forsook the reem’s droppings to circle the beast and address her from a point just below her drooping snout.

“‘I love the Creator well,’ he piped, ‘for he has provided for me abundantly. The world is full of manure.

Tell the Sacred One to come down from your horns. I will then enclose him in a concealing brood ball.’

“‘A brood ball?’ exclaimed Ngai and the reem together.

“‘At your service, O Mighty One,’ replied the coprid. ‘By this expedient the reem may run ahead as decoy while you husband your strength and purchase enough time to reestablish your rightful rule.’

“The Creator, won over by the beetle’s sincerity, agreed. It was not pleasant being plastered up inside a dung ball, but it was preferable to being murdered.

“The reem, meanwhile, trotted off to the south, drawing the Creator’s enemies after. When next she stopped, they surrounded her—rather warily, she noted—and vilified her as both a traitor and a trollop.

Surely, they implied, she had done beastly things to entice Ngai to bestow such lethal armament upon her. Where was he, anyway?

“‘I have no idea why he equipped me with these horrors,’ the reem asserted, craftily scything her snout this way and that. ‘I asked him only for the birthright withheld from me on the Sixth Day of Creation—better eyesight or more gracefully turned ankles. After killing the dog with these horns—accidentally, you understand—I realized what a cruel trick the Creator had played on me, depriving me of my peaceful nature and equipping me with these abominations. I determined to use his evil gifts to wreak my vengeance upon him, for in that, I felt, there would be a great deal of justice.

However, Ngai saw me coming and fled Mount Tharaka toward the south. If you, my friends and fellows, will join me in this crusade, I am certain that very soon we will run the rapscallion to ground.’

“This speech much impressed the animals, most of whom followed her southward for three more days. I should add, however, that many of the dogs’ relatives demurred. Grumbling without much conviction about their comrades’ gullibility, they began the long trek home. On their way they chanced upon the brood balls of the beetle who had confined the Creator in some of the reem’s aromatic waste.

“‘Look,’ said one of the dogs. ‘See how large this ball grows. And the beetle does absolutely nothing to help increase its size. This demands our undivided and most reflective attention.’

“The dog’s many kith, kin, and kind sat down to observe the strange brood ball, while the coprid, who had begun to regret his involvement in the entire affair, stayed out of sight.

“Ngai was sweating in his little prison. He knew that, outside, the dog’s family sat in a suspicious ring, waiting for a fateful revelation. Although his strength and size were slowly returning, he was still no match for a pack of dogs. Therefore, making the best of a bad situation, he nourished himself on the surrounding dung (just as would the larva of a coprid) and mixed his sweat with the remaining material to provide the ball with an ever thinner and more transparent rind. This labor cost him much effort, and its sacred heat imparted to the brood ball’s surface a silver-gold glow.

“‘Ah ha!’ cried the dog’s family. ‘Here is the culprit, here is the Dastardly One responsible for our brother’s death.’ And they immediately came forward and began nosing the brood ball, which had by now attained the size of, say, a tsama melon.

“As it happened, all the other animals were returning from their unprofitable Wily God Chase when they saw the dog’s relatives playing ball with a luminous sphere. To winkle out the secret of the ball’s remarkable contents took them only a moment—that glow was a dead giveaway—whereupon they joined in the game.

“The Creator was kicked and pushed from one end of the bush veldt to the other, and in a short while his head ached fiercely. It had been all he could do to keep the expanding brood ball from splitting open and spilling him out on the ground—to be trampled, bitten, pecked, and gored. Probably to death.

Undoubtedly to death.

“And then the reem appeared. She narrowed her piggish eyes in an attempt to follow the action, but twilight had come and all she could really tell was that the animals were scurrying about in pursuit of an incandescent ball. My god, she thought, my God! Those animals have rooted out the truth.

“Shaking off her weariness, the reem charged. What she could see best, of course, was the glowing brood ball, and she rushed toward the shapes shoving it about.

“Ah, what a collision!

“The reem lifted the Creator into the sky with her horns. Upward and away he whirled, there to replace the moon he had broken.

“So that is how the reem acquired her horns, and likewise how the moon was restored to glory after a brief dethronement. Much is taken, but much abides.”

And, surrounded by hyenas, we continued to abide in the trees beside the water hole. Ah, but Helen had taken herself from me, I remembered, and my story had not really helped me to disguise this unsettling fact from myself.