“Coke!” said Ponter, with delight. “Yes, please.”

Dieter disappeared. Mary helped herself to some of the Bits & Bites sitting in a small wooden bowl on the round table.

“So,” said Angela, to Ponter, “I hope you don’t mind some questions. You’ve been turning our field upside down, you know.”

“That was not my intention,” said Ponter.

“Of course not,” said Angela. “But everything we hear about your world challenges something we thought we knew.”

“For instance?” asked Ponter.

“Well, it’s said that your people don’t practice agriculture.”

“True,” said Ponter.

“We’d always assumed that agriculture was a prerequisite of advanced civilization,” said Angela, taking a sip of whatever mixed drink she was having.

“Why?” asked Ponter.

“Well,” said Angela, “see, we thought that only through agriculture could you be guaranteed a secure food supply. That allows people to specialize in other jobs—teacher, engineer, government worker, and so on.”

Ponter shook his head slowly back and forth, as if he were stunned by what he was hearing. “We have people on my world who choose to live according to the ancient ways. How long do you think it takes one of them to provide sustenance for itself”—Ponter’s language had a gender-neutral third-person pronoun, Mary knew; this was Hak’s attempt to render it—“and its dependents?”

Angela lifted her shoulders a little. “A lot, I presume.”

“No,” said Ponter, “it does not—not as long as you keep your number of dependents low. It takes about nine percent of one’s time.” He paused, either calculating for himself or listening to Hak provide a conversion. “About sixty of your hours a month.”

“Sixty hours a month,” repeated Angela. “That’s—my God—that’s just fifteen hours a week.”

“A week is a cluster of seven days?” asked Ponter, looking at Mary. She nodded. “Yes, then, that is right,” Ponter said. “All the rest of one’s time can be devoted to other activities. From the beginning, we have had much surplus time.”

“Ponter’s right,” said Henry Running Deer. “Fifteen hours per week is the average work load today for hunter-gatherers on this Earth, too.”

“Really?” said Angela, setting down her glass.

Henry nodded. “Agriculture was the first human activity for which rewards were directly proportional to effort. If you worked eighty hours a week plowing fields, your yield was twice as much as if you worked forty. Hunting and gathering isn’t like that: if you hunt full-time, you’ll kill off all the prey in your territory; it’s actually counterproductive to work too hard as a hunter.”

Dieter returned, placing glasses in front of Mary and Ponter, then sitting back down.

“But how do you get permanent settlement without agriculture?” asked Angela.

Henry frowned. “You’ve got it wrong. It’s not agriculture that gives rise to permanent habitation. It’s hunting and gathering.”

“But—no, no. I remember from school—”

“And how many Native Americans taught at your school?” asked Henry Running Deer in an icy tone.

“None, but—”

Henry looked at Ponter, then back at Mary. “Whites rarely understand this point, but it’s absolutely true. Hunter-gatherers stay put. To live off the land requires knowing it intimately: which plants grow where, where the big animals come to drink, where the birds lay their eggs. It takes a lifetime to really know a territory. To move somewhere else is to throw out all that hard-won knowledge.”

Mary lifted her eyebrows. “But farmers need to put down roots—umm, so to speak.”

Henry didn’t acknowledge the pun. “Actually, farmers are itinerant over a period of generations. Hunter-gatherers keep their family sizes small; after all, extra mouths to feed increase the work that an adult has to do. But farmers want big families: each child is another laborer to send out into the fields, and the more kids you have, the less work you have to do yourself.”

Ponter was listening with interest; his translator bleeped softly now and again, but he seemed to be following along.

“I guess that makes sense,” Angela said, but her voice sounded dubious.

“It does,” said Henry. “But as the farmers’ offspring grow up, they have to move on and start their own farms. Ask a farmer where his great-great-grandfather lived, and he’ll name some place far away; ask a hunter-gatherer, and he’ll say ‘right here.’”

Mary thought about her own parents, living in Calgary; her grandparents in England and Ireland and Wales, and—God, she didn’t have a clue where her great-grandparents had been from, let alone her great-great-grandparents.

“A territory isn’t something you abandon lightly,” continued Henry. “That’s why hunter-gatherers value the elderly so much.”

Mary still stung from Ponter thinking her foolish for dyeing her hair. “Tell me about that,” she said.

Henry took a sip of his beer, then: “Farmers, they value the young, because farming is a business of brute strength. But hunting and gathering are based on knowledge. The more years you can remember back, the more you see the patterns, the more you know the territory.”

“We do value our elders,” said Ponter. “There is no substitute for wisdom.”

Mary nodded. “We actually knew that about Neanderthals,” she said, “based on the fossil record here. But I didn’t understand why.”

“I’m an Australopithecus specialist,” said Angela. “What fossils are you referring to?”

“Well,” said Mary, “the specimen known as La-Chapelle-aux-Saints had paralysis and arthritis, and a broken jaw, and most of his teeth were gone. He had obviously been looked after for years; there was no way he could have fended for himself. Indeed, someone probably had to pre-chew his food for him. But La Chapelle was forty when he died—ancient by the standards of a people who usually lived only into their twenties. What a storehouse of knowledge he must have had about his tribe’s territory! Decades of experience! Same thing with Shanidar I, from Iraq. That poor fellow was also forty or so, and was in even worse shape than La Chapelle; blind in his left eye and missing his right arm.”

Henry whistled a few notes. It took Mary a second, but she did recognize them: the theme from The Six Million Dollar Man. She smiled and went on. “He, too, was looked after, not out of some sense of charity, but because a person that old was a fount of hunting knowledge.”

“That may be,” said Angela, sounding a bit defensive, “but, still, it was farmers who built cities, farmers who had technology. In Europe, in Egypt—places where people farmed—there’ve been cities for thousands of years.”

Henry Running Deer looked at Ponter, as if appealing for support. Ponter just tipped his head, passing the floor back to the Native American. “You think Europeans had technology—metallurgy and all that—and we Natives didn’t because of some inherent superiority?” asked Henry. “Is that what you think?”

“No, no,” said poor Angela. “Of course not. But…”

“Europeans had that sort of technology purely by the luck of the draw. Collectible ores right on the surface; flints for making stone tools. You ever tried chipping granite, which is mostly what we’ve got here? It makes lousy arrowheads.”

Mary hoped Angela would just let it go, but she didn’t. “It wasn’t just tools that the Europeans had. They also were clever enough to domesticate animals—beasts of burden to work for them. Native Americans never domesticated any of the animals here.”

“They didn’t domesticate them because they couldn’t,” said Henry. “There are just fourteen large domesticable herbivores on this entire planet, and only one of those—the reindeer—is naturally found in North America, and it only in the far north. The five major domesticates are all Eurasian in origin: sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and pigs. The other nine are minor players, like camels—geographically isolated. You can’t domesticate the North American megafauna—moose or bear or deer or bison or mountain lion. They simply aren’t temperamentally suited to it. Oh, you can perhaps capture them in the wild, but you can’t rear them, and they won’t take riders no matter how hard you try to break them.” Henry’s voice grew cold as he went on. “It wasn’t superior intelligence that led to Europeans having what they did. In fact, you could argue that we Natives here in North America showed more brains by surviving and thriving in the absence of metals and domesticable herbivores.”