Falling Star

                  John Albert Robinson

                            1

His day had started out so peacefully.

It was early and the smell of the previous night’s campfire still hung in the air in the crude hut he shared with his mate and their first-born child, now lying newly awake in her mother’s arms.

He chucked the infant under the chin and smiled at her gurgling laughter. Then he grunted a short farewell to his mate and stepped out of the hut.

He stretched and yawned. The freshness of the morning air tickled his nose. He sneezed once then breathed deeply to rid his lungs of the slight remainder of the night’s festivities.

He felt his head clear and sighed: some one of the adolescent boys had, no doubt, mischievously thrown a handful of forbidden items onto the fire, secret things known to alter the mind. No wonder, he thought, my sleep images had been so wild. He gazed at the horizon and considered that boys will ever be boys.

The sun was still low in the east but already there was the smell of heat in the air. The recent monsoon rains had ended and the leaves of the once-thirsty trees had grown full and fat with water. Life was abounding and though it would be a hot day it would be a good one.

He would join his clan-kin on the hunt today. Here, deep in a period that a much later age would call the Neolithic Subpluvial, they would stalk their prey, a small, flightless fowl that proliferated on the edge of the broad Saharan grasslands in the summer. It was a harmless bird but canny and fast and he expected its capture to be a sweaty and exhausting challenge.

His spear is leaning against the hut. He has rubbed a stone against the shaft countless times to smooth it and it feels good in the hand when he grasps it.

One end has been sharpened and then hardened in the fire but is only to be used when the hunting point on the other end breaks off as it sometimes does.

The hunting point is his pride and joy. Beaten into rough triangular shape and hammered into the end of the shaft, it is made of rare metal found by the clan after a frightening night of stars showered upon the land. The man remembers the warmth of the metal when he first dared to reach out and touch it. It had still been hot from its journey across the sky. God-stuff, he thought.

He is sure that with such a fine weapon it will be a good day for him… and perhaps not so good for the fowl! He smiles.

And as for the larger animals that also prowled the land? They had learned to avoid the smell of well-armed packs of men-on-the-hunt and the man expected no particular danger.

Thus, in the midst of the hunt, it is a great surprise to him when the huge cat leaps from the tall grass.

The man screams, first in fright and then in pain as the beast’s jaws clamp around his rib-cage. His spear is shattered and flies from his hand. His narrow frame is no match for the bulk and brawn of the animal and he is thrown to the ground, senseless.

The other hunters converge and with their spears and clubs fend off the beast. They drag their wounded comrade away from the grass and back to the clearing that in this season they call home.

The man’s injuries are gruesome: he is destined to be disfigured for life. But he will not die. The ancient crone of the clan will concoct poultices from the surrounding plants and minerals and cover the man’s wounds. The poison of the animal will be drawn; the man will survive.

Here at the dawn of human time, the clever hand of humanity will drag him back from death. He will live to father yet more children and tell the tale of his escape to their bright, upturned faces, flickering in the light of many future camp-fires.

                          2

Millennia later, in the centuries before Christ, towns and villages dot the eastern coastal reaches of the Amazon. A young woman carries a basket slung across her back and walks steadily onward in a line of First Peoples snaking among the trees. Her destination is one of the many gardens and orchards surrounding the village in which she was born.

Reaching her assigned patch of ground, she will patiently till into the soil the contents of this and many other baskets. Ultimately, billions of pottery shards, tiny pieces of hardened clay created for the sole purpose of building up and aerating the thin tropical soil, will be mixed with village refuse and laid down on burned-over land. The final result, called ‘terra preta’ by a future age, will allow her people to live here in spite of the heavy rains that weaken the soil.

In the western mountains, the very same rain washes minerals off the eastern face of the Andes, naturally enriching neighboring parts of the forest. But here, much farther to the east, there is no such advantage and the soil’s original nutrients have been drained away into the river by the constant rains. She must toil with the others in her village if they are to have fertile soil here in the leached out bottom-lands of the Amazon basin.

                            3

Far to the north, the Mississippi river makes its stately way through a riverine landscape of oak- and hickory-covered bluffs teeming with animal life.

To the east of the river, a squirrel cautiously watches a group of people step quietly through a forest so dense that the squirrel could walk across the crown from the great river to the eastern ocean and never touch ground.

As he watches, the people separate and each finds the plum or walnut trees, grape arbors or raspberry bushes that they are tending on this day. Since time immemorial, First Peoples have nurtured the forest, knowing what would grow best in each pocket of soil or on each sun-kissed hillside. Their hands and minds turn the eastern forest into a cornucopia suited to the tastes and needs of the humanity that lives there.

                            4

West of the river, other First Peoples enlarge and maintain what a drier environment has started: at a shouted signal, a long line of humanity sets torch to the tall prairie grass and the fires burn away any saplings that volunteer the rich, prairie landscape. The ground is thus kept clear for the thundering millions of bison that feed, clothe, and arm the peoples of the seemingly ‘natural’ American grasslands.

                            5

And centuries later, on the edge of a nondescript crater, lost among the thousands of other craters on the nearside of the Moon, Nathaniel Taylor, late of Earth, sits in a lunar buggy, staring vacantly into space and worrying about his woman.

To be continued.

Other stories in the 'Moonlight' trilogy:

Other stories: