Evolution

CHAPTER 5

The Time of Long Shadows

Ellesmere Island, North America. Circa 51 million years before present.

I

There was no true morning during these long days of Arctic summer, no authentic night. But as the clouds cleared from the face of the climbing sun, and light and warmth slanted through the trees’ huge leaves, a mist rose from the swampy forest floor, and Noth’s sensitive nostrils filled with the pleasing scent of ripe fruit, rotting vegetation, and the damp fur of his family.

It felt like a morning, like a beginning. A pleasing energy spread through Noth’s young body.

His powerful hind legs folded under him, his fat tail upright, he squirmed along the branch to get closer to his family — his father, his mother, his new twin sisters. Together, the family groomed pleasurably. The nimble fingers of their small black hands combed through fur to pick out bits of bark and fragments of dried baby shit, even a few parasitic insects that made a tasty, blood-filled treat. There was some loose fur, but the adult adapids had already lost most of last year’s winter coat.

Perhaps it was the gathering light that inspired the singing.

It began far away, a thin warbling of intertwined male and female voices, probably just a single mating pair. Soon more voices joined in the duo’s song, a chorus of whooping cries that added counterpoint and harmony to the basic theme.

Noth moved to the end of the branch to hear better. He peered through banks of giant leaves that angled south toward the sun, like so many miniature parasols. You could see a long way. The circumpolar forest was open, and the trees, cypress and beech, were well spaced so their leaves could catch the low Arctic sunlight. There were plenty of broad clearings where clumsy ground-dwelling herbivores rummaged. Noth’s eyes in their mask of black fur were huge — like his remote ancestor Purga’s, well adapted to the dark, but prone to dazzling in the daylight.

The song’s meaning was simple: This is who we are! If you are not kin, stay away, for we are many and strong! If you are kin, come home, come home! But the song’s richness went beyond its utilitarian value. Much of it was random, bubbling, like scat singing. But at its best it was a spontaneous vocal symphony, running on for long minutes, with passages of extraordinary harmonic purity that entranced Noth.

He lifted his muzzle to the sky and called.

Noth was a kind of primate that would be called notharctus, of a class called adapid, descended from the plesiadapids of the early millennia after the comet. He looked much like a small lemur. He had a high conical chest, long and powerful legs, and comparatively short arms with black, grasping hands. His face was small with a pronounced muzzle, an inquisitive nose, and pricked-up ears. And he was equipped with a long, powerful tail, laden with fat, his winter hibernation store. He was a little more than one year old.

Noth’s brain was considerably larger than Plesi’s or Purga’s, and his engagement with the world was correspondingly richer. There was more in Noth’s life than the urgencies of sex and food and pain; there was room for something like joy. And it was a joy he expressed in his song. His mother and father quickly joined in. Even Noth’s infant sisters contributed as best they could, adding their tiny mewling voices to the adults’ cries.

It was noon, and the sun was the highest it would travel today, but it was still low in the sky. Shafts of low green-filtered light slanted through the trees, illuminating the dense, warm mist that rose from the steaming mulch on the floor, and the tree trunks sent shadows striping over the forest floor.

This was Ellesmere, the northernmost part of North America. The summer sun never set, but merely completed circles in the sky, suspended above the horizon, as the broad leaves of the conifer trees drank in the light. This was a place where the shadows were always long, even in high summer. The forest, circling the Earth’s pole, had the air of a vast sylvan cathedral, as if the leaves were fragments of stained glass.

And everywhere the adapids’ voices echoed.

Emboldened, the adapids began to clamber down the branches toward the ground.