Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

Even after several months in the Pleistocene I was surprised when I found out.

Roosevelt and Fred clubbed three of the kittens to death, showering blood and gray matter all over the grass. The fourth kitten tried to run, but Alfie booted it in the butt and fell upon it with his knee, cracking its ribs and pinning it to the ground. He killed it by biting through its neck. When he next looked up at me, blood was running from his mouth and there was a tuft of beautiful, wintry fur caught in his beard.

I retreated with Mary to the edge of the Minid gathering. As if the child were a magic shield or an inflatable life jacket, I clutched her to me for the comfort she afforded. Together, neither of us quite comprehending the other’s dismay, we watched the eaters eat.

As soon as every gut had taken on a load of kitten loin, torpor descended. No one wanted to leave.

Although we could have traveled several more miles that afternoon, the satiated habilines had decided to make camp where we were.

A more vulnerable spot it would have been hard to find. There was not a tree or kopje within two or three hundred yards. Setting up housekeeping in that open place was a little like pitching a tent on an interstate highway. You were asking to be run over. But, gorged and insouciant, the Minids either did not recognize or blithely dismissed the possibility of peril. Fortunately, we were able to while away the late afternoon without having to defend ourselves against roving predators.

The sun went down like a Day-Glo bob in the mouth of the Primal Perch. There, then gone.

A logy habiline is a bad insurance risk. Because I did not trust any of the men to keep their eyeballs peeled past moonrise, I decided to build a fire. Helen kept Mary beside her while I roamed the plain gathering the brittle, prickly limbs of gall acacias and the whorly, friable Frisbees of dried elephant dung. I soon had a homey blaze crackling in our midst.

My spirits began to improve. Maybe I had been suffering from hesperian depression or evening melancholy. Watching the ants on the thorn branches curl up into weightless clinkers revived my sense of camaraderie with the habilines. Insects, unlike cheetah kittens, were not mammals. You could consign them to perdition with lighthearted hallelujahs, then stand back from the roaring hellfires and gleefully watch them burn.

Fred—feckless, reckless Fred—returned, not with kindling, but with a weaverbird basket full of fuzzy little fruits. Where he had found them I had no idea. They were lavender-yellow ellipsoids with a sour-sweet musk. I did not eat one until Dilsey, who had taken charge of Fred’s basket, consumed six or seven with steadily increasing gusto and no conspicuous ill effects—when, by rights, she should have been stuffed to the jowls with cheetah flesh. Fruits, I told myself, watching Dilsey, were even farther down the evolutionary ladder of sentience than ants, and by now I was hungry enough to demand my share. Helen brought me a handful.

My first taste of one of these fuzzy ellipsoids inspired me to name them. I called them puckerplums.

Puckerplums inebriate.

Indeed, I got drunk on puckerplums. I was not the only one, but I was by far the most maudlin of all the maudlin Minids reeling about our fire in ambulatory contemplation of the nastiness, brutality, and brevity of life. Why, in only umpteen hundred thousand years, I reflected aloud, all my habiline acquaintances—never, oh never purged from mind!—would be as Phoenician sea wrack on the condominium sands of Miami Beach. No one would ever know— really know—the living details of how they had steered their course toward the serendipitous disaster of our survival. How much we owed them, I thought, and how little most folks cared about what they had suffered for us. It was a goddamn shame, I told the Minids, that latter-day ignorance of their courage and sacrifice had pretty much denied them a place in the Annals of Great Human Heroes. They deserved better, much better, and maybe, when White Sphinx retrieved me, I would rectify this ignoble oversight.

And then, striking one of my waterproof matches and lifting its impudent head against the travertine streaks of the horizon, I searched my memory for a haunting snippet from Yeats:

“In the days of the chalicothere,” I said, “there came unto you a chiromancer—that is, a diviner of palms—and I am he who will riddle the life lines in your secretive hands.”

I went first to Dilsey, only a yard or so from the fire. Taking her scarred old hand into my own—the habiline hand with the abbreviated, crooked thumb—I tried to tell her who she was in order to predict what she would become and what would befall her.

“Dilsey, long ago you met a small, dark man who swept you off your calloused feet and rose to a position of influence among the Minids. His name was Ham. Upon you, with your complicity, he begot the son whom we know today as Alfie. Alfie is the gemsbok melon of your eye, but your daughters Miss Jane and Odetta are also well beloved of you and your consort. In this savage place, Dilsey, you have lived a good and useful life. Though your body crawls with vermin and your mouth frequently vents the stench of rotting meat, in dignity and honor you are immaculate. Your life is as lengthy as the Nile, but you are already near the fathomless ocean into which it and all other lives inevitably pour.”

I dropped Dilsey’s hand and stared around at the shadows staring back at me. Not quite spellbound, the old woman pushed another puckerplum into my mouth. I ate it, realizing that I had prophesied Dilsey’s death. What everyone wanted from me now was the details. Taking up her hand again, I tenderly rotated its palm into view. My saliva, I noticed, was ropy, ropy and bitter.

“Dilsey, my dear Dilsey, you will be decapitated when the Toyota in which you are riding slips beneath the tailgate of a logging truck. Ham, your driver, will suffer the same grisly fate, but the sheriff’s report will absolve him of culpability because of local weather conditions and the failure of the logging vehicle to display a flag on the end of its projecting cargo.

“Odetta will enter a multimillion-dollar suit against the implicated pulpwood company on your family’s behalf, but the litigation will drag on for years, in part because the coroner’s inquest has revealed an unacceptable percentage of alcohol in Ham’s bloodstream at the time of his demise. Puckerplum intoxication, apparently.

“As for your and Ham’s funeral, Dilsey, it will be a grand event, with many hyenas and vultures in formal attire gathered together at graveside. Oh, yes, a grand event. The talk of the savannah for weeks. None of this posthumous notoriety will matter to you, however, because in addition to being dead you are a deferential and unassuming lady who does not permit such silly flapdoodle to set her head spinning.”

After kissing Dilsey on her bony brow ridge, I reeled away into the darkness beyond the fire, which the children were continuing to feed with twigs and dung pats. Jomo caught me and led me back into the semicircle of adults. Insistent, he shoved the fingers of his open palm into my chest.

“What do you want me to tell you?” I demanded. “Dead of cancer, of gunshot wounds, of radiation poisoning? No, sir. No, ma’am. To hell with that. Gone with a bang or a whimper, I don’t want to prophesy our end, and I won’t . Tonight I’m not going to think any more about it.”