---Raala’s perspective---

  My feet pound through the snow as I run after the stag.

  I’m still not entirely well but I’ve got a belly full of the last of the fish and that will have to do!

  Ksem fished every night of my recovery without ever again having the luck he did with that giant huchen at the start.

  If this deer can be brought down, we’ll be sitting fairly pretty for a while, foodwise.

  We are about to run out of charcoal though, so we’ll have to spend a day or two topping that off soon… Always something!

  The stag briefly stumbles through the snow and I seize the chance!

  I bring my spear up and align it behind my left shoulder before hurling it forward, begging it to hit true!

  A last moment recovery allows the animal to dodge just enough to cause my thousand knap spearhead to shave its right shoulder rather than plunging into its chest.

  Mammoth damn it!

  The chances of me bringing down this prey just dropped to nil!

  With how much strength I’ve lost to my illness and how long I’ve been running, I just spent my last opportunity.

  Nonetheless, I keep chasing it, sticking out my hand to yank up my thrown spear (now at least once again able to defend myself in case it turns around and tries to gore me with those antlers!)

  It starts veering left… which is not where it needs to go!

  I summon my last burst of energy to aggressively jink left, startling it right, towards the trees.

  Panting heavily, I watch the prey bound gracefully away from me as my feet cease moving.

  Then, I see a small, fast object fly from the woods and dart across the open ground for a third of a breath before diving back down and burying itself in the deer’s eye.

  It gives no shriek of pain or alarm, its legs immediately forgetting the motion to run as it crashes down into the snow, dead.

  Walking to the kill, my eyes scan the treeline for the moment he emerges.

  I know roughly where he is (necessarily to drive prey to him) but he’s hidden well enough that I don’t know exactly.

  He, of course, has the advantage to hiding in trees that he’s shaped like one(!)

  My eyes snap to where the tall, slim, sable skinned man emerges from beneath the evergreen canopy, dragging our sledge behind him with his right hand.

  He approaches, brown eyes fixed on my greens, looking apprehensive.

  Alright Raala, don’t think of that moment you almost kissed him over that huchen, just ask “What?”

  “I’m… just wondering if you’re going to get upset at me for being the one to get the kill?”

  I sigh and answer “Ksem! Please give me some credit! I’m happier that we got the kill at all than I am worried about who gets the points for it! And, besides… we both knew the deal! I chase prey to you, you shoot it! I’m not gonna get upset with you just ’cause you scored the killing blow any more than you would if I’d got it before you had it in range!… Juuuuust so long as you don’t start dancing around gloating about it!”

  He gives me a mirthful frown and quips “I’m… still not entirely convinced I didn’t somehow swap my Raala for you at Speartooth(!)”

  He’s going to give me a heart-attack if he keeps calling me ‘his Raala’!

  “Hardy har har(!)… You want to start on the butchering and I’ll get to work on the antler tines?” I suggest.

  “Sure. Sounds good.” he smiles with an easy going shrug.

  We both draw our knives and kneel down over our kill, me at the head, him at the belly.

  It’s really a shame just how much of this is going to go to waste!

  This is a nice rack of antlers and such a fine pelt!

  It’d be so good to be able to take them with us to use or trade.

  Unfortunately, space in the sledge is not unlimited and neither is my strength to pull it.

  An unprocessed hide will be heavy and bulky, so will an entire rack of antlers.

  The tines are useful enough, light enough and small enough that taking them makes sense… Other than them, though, all we can really justify taking are the choicest cuts of meat.

  I start scoring around the base of the finest tine on the right antler as Ksem slices into its belly.

  The carcass jiggles and jostles from his work in pulling back the skin to expose the muscles and organs beneath.

  I kneel on the neck to hold the head steady as I saw out the groove I’m working on.

  Just two or three handwidths from my fingers, the shaft of Ksem’s arrow juts out from where it struck the animal’s eye.

  “Hey, Ksem…? *snap*” I say, aiming a strike at the first tine to break it off at the score line.

  “Yes, Raala?” he answers without looking up from his work.

  “How did your people… get so skilled?”

  He stops in his tracks and looks up at me.

  He leans an elbow on the unflayed haunch and cocks an eyebrow, saying nothing, just chuckling.

  “I stand by what I said.” I defy “You say you think my people are generally more intelligent than yours (or at least more creative and better problem solvers) but you guys have so many ideas, so much knowledge, so many skills that you treat as facile and commonplace that none of us had ever thought of! How do you reconcile that?”

  “Skills like?” he smiles, extending a long fingered hand to me.

  “Charcoal making…” I start “…tent making, pyrite striking, bow carving, arrow shooting, thousand knap blades… all the thousands of skills you’ve got to have in order to live together in hundreds including the social skills necessary to manage all those relationships. All of it!”

  He jiggles his head up and down, resuming the butchering as he answers “Well, regarding tents, charcoal and all the social skills… I’d say those are skills we have as a function of our lifestyle. Tsazel and I can design and produce a better tent than you would be able to as a consequence of us being people who’ve lived our entire lives from tents… The same way you could almost certainly design and build a better permanent structure than we could! Same for charcoal, something we needed to figure out from being travellers and your people just didn’t… Likewise, the social skills to manage hundreds of relationships comes with being a people who live in groups of hundreds. There’s no mystery to those.”

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  “Alright, but… *snap*… bows, pyrite and thousand knaps are all things that seem like they’d’ve been just as useful to us as they were to you, so why was it you came up with them and we didn’t?”

  Shrugging and momentarily raising his bloody knife to gesture it around vaguely, he says “I, of course, can’t answer that for certain, Raala… but I have a guess…”

  “What’s your guess?”

  Instead of answering me immediately, he asks “Tell me, Raala… Before my people arrived on the Plateau, how many people do you think you’d ever met or seen in your life?”

  Still sawing a groove into the third tine, I frown, thinking “Well… more or less everyone on the Plateau… so that’s a little more than a hundred… then, maybe… six or seven people from elsewhere a year, so… two or three hundred? Probably closer to two hundred if we’re only counting the ones I spoke to, closer to three if we’re counting everyone I saw.”

  He bobs his head and asks “And how many times did someone you just met teach you a really good idea you hadn’t known before?”

  I consider that.

  “Maybe… four or five times since I became an adult?” I guess.

  “Hmmm… If you had to say, how many people do you think I’ve met and seen in my life?”

  “Oh, thousands?”

  He nods “Yes… tens of thousands if we’re counting all those I’ve ever seen but my guess would be four or five thousand whom I’ve actually shared words with… What’s the furthest you ever travelled from your place of birth before this journey we’re on now?”

  “Elk Hearthstead… about ten days from Bison.” I answer immediately.

  “And what’s the furthest you think I ever travelled from the Delta before I came North?”

  “Five Moons? Six?”

  “Good guess! Four… Now, would you say that you’re above, below or about average for your people in how many you’ve met and how far you’ve travelled?” he asks, lifting free a large cut of red meat to place into the sledge.

  I shrug “Don’t know… I’d guess about average for the Plateau, maybe a little below average for elsewhere?”

  He bobs an acknowledgement before saying “I think I was moderately above average for my people given that I was a leader’s son and a regular trader… but not, like, crazily outside the norm… So tell me, how do you think my people’s exposure to new ideas is affected by the fact that we travel so much more, see so much more and meet thousands in the same time it takes your people to meet hundreds? Higher, lower or the same?”

  “Well, it’s got to be higher, right?” I frown.

  “Exactly…” he smiles, pulling out the liver “…I think that’s all it is! No magic. No superiority in generating ideas. Just the way we live equips us with the facility to meet more people, more people met means more ideas and more ideas means more good ideas!”

  “Alright, but then-?”

  “Why don’t you live that way? If it’s such a good idea to live in such a way as exposes you to so many people and their good ideas, why didn’t your ancestors do it as well?” he interrupts, exactly preempting my question.

  “Yes! Or, like, why didn’t the Korkwehi learn it from you, all the people between them and here learn it from them and, eventually, it make its way to us! Or why didn’t any of your people make their way to us to…*snap*… teach us directly?”

  He looks up at me, smirking, opens his mouth and draws a breath.

  “Alright! Yes… your people did make their way to us… I heard it as soon as I said it!” I cut him off.

  He chuckles and returns his eyes downward, observing “Of course, it might be that what works for us wouldn’t have worked for you. It might be that what works in the South doesn’t work so well up here in the North.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” I ask, trying not to dwell on the nightmare image of him flying backwards with the South horizon behind him.

  “Well, I think we’ve touched on this before but our mobility is a knife with a sharpened handle-”

  “What does that mean?” I interrupt, frowning.

  “It means it has upsides and downsides… It can cut the way you want it to but can cut your hand just as easily if you’re not careful!”

  “How so?” I probe.

  “So, you understand that, with a number so great, moving on periodically isn’t optional for my people? That we deplete the food and fuel resources within a reasonable striking distance from our camp far faster than your clans do? Faster than they can recover. Even with our stamina making ‘reasonable striking distance’ further for us than it would be for you, if we don’t cycle through campsites with some regularity, we will just find ourselves out of food and fuel before too long!… Living in small groups on clearly defined territories that can be traversed in a matter of a few days at most, which either already have or are reasonably positioned to get everything you need might work better for further North where the Sun is weaker and the plants grow slower… Thousand knaps might be better for travellers than for settled folk because, when your blade breaks, there’s no guarantee you’ll be anywhere near useable stone, so it makes sense to knap them in such a way as makes them more reliable at the cost of their sharpness… Old Red and I use to speculate about that kind of thing a lot.” he explains.

  “So… what does that mean for you? What will you do if it turns out that your whole way of life doesn’t work here?”

  “We’ll adapt…” he answers with sombre confidence “…I hope it isn’t necessary… but I’ve given it thought of course. We can’t live exactly like you, the speed and strength that allow you to live in forests and other close environments isn’t something I think it’s possible for my people to ever learn or train… the same way I don’t think it’s possible for your people to learn our endurance… but I definitely think there are other ways we could try before we resort to abandoning the North.”

  “Ways like what?” I prompt, hating to hear him say that my people and I can never learn his people’s stamina… even though (and perhaps especially because) I absolutely agree.

  “Well… when my people needed to stay somewhere less productive back home, we usually wouldn’t stay there as long as normal, then we’d give it longer to recover before we returned to it… We may need to do something like that in the Basin. I’m really hoping that the Eastern and Western plains can recover fast enough that we can just migrate back and forth between them but, by the time we’re heading to the West, I’ll have an idea of whether that’s true… If it isn’t, I’ll need to start sending out scouting parties to look for suitable places outside the Basin to include in our cycle… It’ll maybe mean we go from seeing eachother for a year or two at a time every four to six years to maybe every ten or twelve… which I’m sure you won’t complain about(!)”

  “And… if that doesn’t work? If you’re just too many to be able to live together like you want to? What then?” I ask, supressing my misery at the thought of not seeing him for a decade.

  “In that case, we’d need to fracture. Divide ourselves into groups of a size we think reasonably could survive alone and spread out.”

  “Hmmm.” I hum, neutrally.

  “That’s probably what your ancestors did if they came from the South… Alternatively, if mine come from the North, it’s probably something they used to do before they went South.” he muses.

  That stops me dead as I struggle to comprehend what he’s just implied.

  Looking at him across the carcass, I say “Waitwaitwaitwaitwait! What do you mean!? Do you… do you think you and I… share ancestors!?” incredulously.

  He shrugs his shoulders, smiling “I can’t see why we wouldn’t?”

  “When was the last time you saw any of your people(?) When was the last time you looked into still water(?) When was the last time you looked down(?!) We’re nothing alike! Mother Mammoth clearly birthed the first of your people and the first of mine separately!” I challenge.

  “And yet we can breed, can’t we?” he smirks, causing my heart to beat twenty times in the length of a breath before my mind catches up to that being an observation, not a suggestion “I don’t think our differences are as great as they seem. We both have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, ten toes, one mouth, one nose with two nostrils, we both bleed red, we both need food, fire, shelter, clothing (even if we need slightly different amounts of that(!)), we both make tools, we both speak languages and (we know from Eshker’s existence and Tsazel’s pregnancy) when we bind ourselves, we can have children… It seems like it would’ve been an enormous waste of effort for the world to create Humans twice, don’t you think?… And, if it did, the two Human kinds having the ability to make children seems like too much of a coincidence, doesn’t it? Seems like the crafters of your kind and those of mine must’ve communicated to make that possible!”

  I don’t answer, scrutinising him for any sign that he’s not being serious.

  He continues “I’ve seen several sets of clans whose people look noticeably distinct from one another but whose history records once being one single clan that split in parts… I think, probably, our people’s were once one in the same way… It would have to have been so long ago that no oral history of it has survived, though… I don’t know how long that would be. I don’t know how long it would’ve taken ancestors who looked like me to have descendants who look like you, ancestors who looked like you to have descendants who look like me or ancestors who looked like neither of us to have descendants who look like both of us.”

  “I’m…” I say, weighing up the idea he’s just posed against my prior assumption that our peoples had been separate from the birth of the world “…not fully convinced.”

  His black eyebrows flash up his medium brown forehead as he observes “Well(!) ‘Not fully convinced’ is definitely a step up from the reaction I expected there, Sunbeam(!) I thought you were going to tell me that was the ‘stupidest thing you’d ever heard’!”

  “It’s not stupid. It’s interesting. I just… I don’t know if it’s true.” I say, reticently.

  “Neither do I…” he admits with a smile “…just what I think(!) I’ve been wrong enough times in my life to understand that just because something makes sense, doesn’t necessarily make it true… Still, I can be your cousin in spirit even if our peoples were created separately(!)”

  I groan internally but manage to resist the urge to tell him his ‘cousin’ is not what I want to be!

  Stag | |