Evolution (58 page)

Rocha was still an inexperienced canoeist, and the cylindrical craft would capsize at the slightest opportunity. But it would right itself just as easily, and Rocha learned to extend her sense of her own body’s balance down through the canoe’s center line, so that she and Ejan were able to keep the canoe upright with small muscular counteractions. Soon— at least on the still waters of the river— they were able to keep the canoe balanced without thinking consciously about it, and with their paddles they were able to generate good speed.

After the trials on the river Ejan spent more days working on the canoe. In places the wood had cracked and split as it dried. He caulked the flaws with wax and clay, and he applied resin to the inner and outer surfaces to protect against further splits.

When that was done, he judged the craft was ready for its first ocean trial.

Rocha demanded that she be allowed to accompany him. But he was reluctant. Although she had learned fast, she was still young, unskilled, and not as strong as she would eventually become. In the end, of course, he respected her opinion. Young or not, her life was her own to spend as she wished. That was the way of hunter-gatherer folk like these, and always would be: Their culture of mutual reliance bred mutual respect.

At last, for the first time, the canoe slid out of the river’s broad mouth toward the open ocean. Ejan had loaded the canoe with boulders to simulate the cargo of food and water they would have to take with them for the real ocean crossing, which would likely be a journey of some days’ duration.

As they passed, fisher folk on rafts and canoes stood up and yelled, waving their harpoons and fishing nets, and children ran along the bank, screaming. Ejan flushed with pride.

At first everything went well. Even when they had emerged from the river’s mouth the water remained placid. Rocha gabbled excitedly about how easy the ocean was, how quickly they would make their crossing.

But Ejan was silent. He saw that the water around the canoe’s prow was stained faintly brown, littered with bits of leaf matter and other debris. They were still in the river’s outflow, where it pushed into the sea. If he tasted the water, probably it would be fresh. It was as if they had not yet left the river at all.

When they did hit the true ocean’s currents, as Ejan had feared, the water suddenly became much more turbulent, and sharp, malevolent waves scudded across its surface. The simple cylindrical canoe rolled, and Ejan was immersed in cold, salty water. With practiced coordination they threw their bodies sideways to right the boat, and they came up gasping and soaked. But almost immediately the canoe capsized again. As the rolling went on, the bindings of their dummy cargo broke, and Ejan glimpsed the boulders he had stowed falling away into the deeper water.

When at last the boat stabilized he saw that Rocha had been thrown out. She quickly came up, spluttering and gasping.

He knew that the experiment was over. He dumped out the rest of the rocks, briskly paddled the canoe to his sister and hauled her out, and they began to make their way back to the river’s mouth.

When they got back to their camp, their reception was subdued. Torr helped them berth the canoe, but he had little to say. Their mother was nowhere to be found. They had been close enough to the shore for their antics to be visible to everybody, painfully reminiscent of what had become of their brothers, Osa, Born and Iner.

Still Ejan was not put off. He knew that the crossing was possible in the canoe; it was just a question of skill and endurance— and he knew that determined as she was, poor Rocha did not yet have those qualities. If he was to reach the southern lands, he needed a stronger companion.

So he approached Torr.

Torr was working on a new canoe of his own, an elaborate construction of sewn bark. But he spent most of his time now gathering food and hunting. His back was bent from stooping over bushes and roots, and a great gash over his ribs, inflicted by a boar, was slow to heal.

Ejan thought his brother looked much older. In Torr he saw the solid, earthbound sense of responsibility that he took from the great-grandfather who had given him his name.

“Come with me,” Ejan said. “It will be a great adventure.”

“To attempt the crossing is not— necessary,” Torr said awkwardly. “There is much to do here. Things are difficult for us now, Ejan. There are so few of us. It is not as it was.” He forced a smile, but his eyes were flat. “Imagine the two of us out on the river in your magnificent canoe. How the girls will holler! And I pity any crocodile that breaks its teeth on our hull.”

“I did not build the canoe for the river,” Ejan said evenly. “I built it for the ocean. You know that. And to reach the southern land was the reason our brothers gave their lives.”

Torr’s face grew hard. “You think too much about our brothers.
They are gone.
Their souls are with Ja’an until they return in the hearts of new children. I have tried to help you, Ejan. I helped you bring back your log. I hoped all this work would clear your head of your troubled dreams. But now it has gotten to the point where you are prepared to let the ocean kill you, as it did our brothers.”

“I have no intention of being killed,” Ejan said, his anger burning deep.

“And Rocha?” Torr snapped. “Will you lead
her
to her death for the sake of your dream?”

Ejan shook his head, baffled. “If Osa were alive, he would come with me.” He slapped the sewn hull of Torr’s new canoe. “Two canoes are better than one. If this were Osa’s canoe, he would strap it to mine and we would sail side by side across the ocean, until—”

“Until you both drowned!” Torr cried. “I am not Osa. And this is not his canoe.” His anger and frustration were visible in his face now, Ejan saw, shocked— as was his fear. “Ejan, if we lose you—”

“Come with me,” Ejan said evenly. “Strap your canoe to mine. We will defeat the ocean together.”

Torr shook his head tightly, avoiding Ejan’s eyes.

Sadly Ejan prepared to take his leave.

“Wait,” said Torr softly. “I will not go with you. But you will take my canoe. It will ride alongside yours. My body will be here, digging roots.” He grinned now, wistfully. “But my soul will be with you, in the canoe.”

“Brother—”

“Just come back.”

The use of Torr’s canoe gave Ejan a new idea.

The second canoe, though it would be laden with food and other supplies, would not be manned. That meant it would not be as heavy as Ejan’s, and to lash the canoes together side by side would not be the best solution for stability.

After a little thought and much experimentation, Ejan attached Torr’s sturdy bark canoe to his own with two long crosspieces of wood. With this arrangement, the two canoes connected by an open framework of wood, it was almost as if he was building a kind of raft, founded on the canoes.

As his concept developed he became excited by the idea. Perhaps with this new way he could combine the best of the two designs. The rowers and their possessions would be tucked snugly inside the body of the dugout canoe, rather than being exposed on the surface of a raft, but the second canoe would give them the stability of a raft’s wide platform.

With Rocha he took the new arrangement out for trials, in the river and skirting the ocean shore. The double-hull design proved more difficult to maneuver than a single canoe, but it was far more stable. Though they progressed farther out into the ocean than the first time they had tried out the dugout, they didn’t capsize once. And because they didn’t have to work constantly to keep the craft upright as they had the simple dugout, the journey was much less tiring.

At last Ejan felt he was ready.

He tried one last time to dissuade Rocha from coming with him. But in Rocha’s eyes he saw a kind of hard restlessness, a rocky determination to meet this great challenge. Like Ejan’s, her name had been handed down from the past; perhaps somewhere in the line of Rochas before her there had been another great traveler.

They loaded up the canoes with provisions— dried meat and roots, water, shells and skins for bailing, weapons and tools, even a bundle of dry wood to make a fire. They were trying to be prepared. They had no idea what they would find on that green shore to the south, no idea at all.

As they set off this time, there was no sense of celebration. People turned away, attending to their chores. Even Torr was not there to see the double canoe sliding smoothly out of the estuary. Ejan could not help but feel oppressed by their disapproval, even as he felt the smooth rocking of his craft as it cut through the deepening water.

But this modest expedition was the start of a great adventure.

All over the peninsula, Ejan’s outrigger design was being derived independently. In some places the design evolved from double canoes, like Ejan’s, with the eventual outrigger float descending from a degenerate second canoe. In some, the design was more like an opened-up raft. Elsewhere people were experimenting with simple poles lashed across a canoe’s gunwales to improve its handling. Whatever its disparate origins, the outrigger design was a solution to the instability that before now had confined canoes to the rivers.

And in the generations to come the descendants of these folk in their outriggers would spread out across Australasia, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. They would reach as far west as Madagascar off Africa’s coast, east across the Pacific to Easter Island, north to Taiwan off the Chinese coast, and as far south as New Zealand, taking their language and culture with them. It was an epic migration: Indeed, it would take tens of thousands of years.

But in the end the children of these riverine folk would travel around more than two hundred and sixty degrees of the Earth’s circumference.

Their smooth crossing of the strait to the new land was so easy as to be almost anticlimactic.

Ejan and Rocha followed an unknown coast. Eventually they reached a place where they could see a stream of what must be fresh water cutting out of the inland tangle of vegetation. They turned their craft to face the shore and paddled hard, until they felt the canoes’ prows grinding into the bed of the shallowing sea. They had landed on a strip of beach, fringed by dense, tangled forest.

Rocha cried, “Me first, me first!” She leapt out of the dugout— or tried to; after a couple of days at sea, her legs gave way under her, and she slipped and fell on her backside in the water, laughing.

It wasn’t a very dignified landing. Nobody made a speech or raised a flag. And there would be no monument here; in fact, in another thirty thousand years, this first landing site would be drowned by the rising sea. Nevertheless this was an extraordinary moment. For Rocha had become the first hominid ever to touch Australian soil, the first to set foot on the continent.

Ejan clambered out more carefully. Then, knee-deep in the warm, coastal water, they dragged their canoes until they were firmly grounded.

Rocha ran straight to the freshwater stream. She threw herself into it and rolled, sucking up great mouthfuls of it and scraping at her skin. “Ugh, the salt! I am caked in it.” With the exuberance of youth, she scrambled up the stream and into the fringe of forest, seeking fresh fruit.

Ejan took a tremendous drink of the cold, crisp water, and immersed his head for long heartbeats. Then, his legs trembling, he walked up the beach. He studied the jungle. He recognized mangroves, palms; it was much as it had been at home. He wondered how far this new island stretched. And he wondered if there were, after all, people here.

Rocha squealed softly. He hurried to her side.

Through the tangle of vegetation something was moving. It was massive, yet it moved all but silently. It had a terrible reptilian stillness about it that evoked deep primal fears in their hearts. And now it came slithering out of the undergrowth. It was a snake, Ejan saw immediately, but a snake of a size he had never seen before. It was at least a pace across, and seven or eight paces long. Brother and sister grabbed each other and hurried from the forest, back to the beach.

“Beasts,” Rocha whispered. “We have come to a land of mighty beasts.”

They stared into each other’s eyes, panting, sweating. And then they started to laugh, their fear transmuting into exhilaration.

They limped back to the canoe to retrieve their wood and make a fire, the first artificial fire this huge land had ever seen.

But not the last.

Northwestern Australia. Circa 51,000 years before present.

On a spit of rock-strewn beach, Jana had been gathering mussels. He was naked save for a belt from which dangled the net sacks containing his haul. His skin was deep brown, and his curly hair was piled on top of his head. At twenty-one he was slim, strong, tall, and very healthy— save for one slightly withered leg, the relic of a childhood brush with polio.

Sweating, he looked up from his work. To the west the sun was making its daily descent into the ocean. If he shaded his eyes he could make out outriggers, and silhouettes made gaunt by the light off the sea: people, out on the water. The day was ending, and the bags at Jana’s waist were heavy.

Enough. He turned and made his slow way back along the spit. As he walked, he limped slightly.

All along the coast the people were returning home, attracted like moths to the threads of smoke that already climbed into the sky. People were crowded here, living in their dense little communities, feeding off the resources of the sea and the rivers.

It had already been some fifty generations since the first human footfalls in Australia. Ejan and Rocha had returned home, bringing news of what they had found, and more had followed. And their descendants, still largely keeping to their shore-based and riverine economy, had spread around the coast of greater Australia, and along the rivers into the crimson plains of the interior. But Ejan and Rocha had been the first. Still their spirits were handed down from generation to generation— Jana himself bore the name and housed the soul of Ejan himself— and still the story of their crossing, how they had flown over the water on a boat lined with gull feathers, and had battled giant snakes and other monsters on landing, was told by the shamans in the firelit dark.