Jana reached his home. His people lived in a cluster of lean-tos in the shelter of a heavily eroded sandstone bluff. The ground was crowded with the detritus of a seagoing folk: canoes, outriggers, and rafts had been hauled up on to the beach for the night, a dozen harpoons were stacked up against one another teepee-style, and nets, half-manufactured or half-repaired, lay heaped everywhere.

In the open space at the center of the settlement, a large communal fire had been built of eucalyptus logs. Smaller fires burned in the cobble-lined hearths of the huts. Cooking stones had been placed in the big fires, and men, women, and older children were busy scaling and gutting fish. Younger children ran everywhere, making trouble and noise as children always did, acting as a glue of good humor that bound everybody together.

But Jana couldn’t see Agema.

Clutching his string bags, he made his way to the largest of the lean-tos. Agema shared this shelter with her parents — second cousins to Jana’s own parents — and her wide brood of siblings. Jana took a breath at the darkened entrance to the hut, gathered his courage, and then stepped into the lean-to. Inside there was much activity and a rich mixture of scents, of wood smoke, cured meat, babies, milk, sweat.

Then he saw her. She was cleaning an infant, a tangle-haired little girl whose face was encrusted with snot.

Jana held up his net bag. The mussels within glistened. “I brought you these,” he said. Agema looked up, and her mouth twitched in a smile, but she averted her eyes. The kid was staring at him, wide-eyed. Jana said, “They’re the best, I think. Maybe we could—”

But now a foot shot out of the dark, catching his withered leg. It crumpled immediately, and he fell to the hard-trodden ground, spilling the mussels. He was surrounded by laughter. A strong hand grabbed his armpit and hauled him back to his feet.

“If you want to impress her you shouldn’t try to walk, not with a leg like that. You ought to hop like a kangaroo.”

Jana, his face burning, found himself staring into the deep, handsome eyes of Osu, Agema’s brother. More of her siblings surrounded him. Jana tried to control his anger. “You tripped me.”

When Osu made out the genuine anger in Jana’s eyes his face clouded. “I didn’t mean disrespect,” he said gently.

His decency only made it worse. Jana bent to pick up the mussels.

Osu said, “Here, let me help.”

Jana snapped, “I don’t need your help. They’re for—”

“Ah. For my sister?” Osu looked up at the girl, and Jana saw him wink.

Another of the brothers — Salo, impossibly tall, impossibly good-looking — stepped forward. “Look, fellow, if you want to impress her, this is what you ought to bring home.” And he showed Jana a mussel shell — a huge one, so big he needed two hands to hold it.

Jana had never seen a mussel of such a size, not in a lifetime of gathering the mollusks — in fact nobody alive had seen such a giant. “Where did you find this?”

Salo nodded vaguely. “Along the beach, in an old midden. I’m thinking of using it as a bowl.”

Osu nodded. “Giant mussels, eh? Ejan and Rocha must have eaten well in those days. All gone now, of course. Bring back one of those, little kangaroo, and Agema will open her legs faster than a mussel on the fire opens its shell.”

More laughter. Jana saw that Agema was hiding her face, but her shoulders were shaking. Again that uncontrollable anger surged, and Jana knew he had to get out of there before he behaved like a child by displaying his anger — or, even worse, by striking one of these infuriating brothers.

He gathered up his mussels and got out with as much dignity as he could muster. But even as he left he could hear Osu’s gently mocking voice: “I hear his dick is as bent as his leg.”

Jana got very little sleep that night. But, as he lay awake, he knew what he had to do.

He rose before dawn. He gathered up his ropes, fire-hardened spears, bow, arrows, and fire tools, and crept out of the encampment.

Following the bank of a river, he worked his way inland.

As Jana stepped silently across the dead matter of the forest floor, he disturbed a cluster of scurrying, rodentlike creatures. They were a kind of kangaroo. They peered at him with large, resentful eyes before fleeing. He barely noticed them as he pushed on.

Many of the trees in the sparse riverbank forest were eucalyptus, wreathed by strips of half-shed bark. These peculiar trees, like much of the flora, were distant descendants of Gondwanaland vegetation, stranded when this raft continent had broken away from the other southern lands. And through the river water, shaded by the trees, cruised more relics of ancient times. They were crocodiles, rafted here like the eucalyptus — but unlike the trees, and like their cousins elsewhere, they were barely changed by time.

He came to a clearing.

A family of four-legged creatures the size of rhinos was working its way across the clearing. They had small ears, stubby tails, and they walked on flat feet, like bears. They were making a mess of the forest floor: With their tusklike lower teeth, they scraped steadily at the ground, seeking the salt bushes they favored. These herbivorous marsupials were diprotodons — a kind of giant wombat.

There were many kinds of kangaroo here. Some of the smaller kinds searched for grass and low vegetation on the ground. But the larger ones were much taller than Jana; these giants had grown so tall so they could browse at the trees’ foliage. As they searched for food the kangaroos levered themselves forward using their forelegs, tails, and those powerful hind legs, a unique means of locomotion. They were slow and oddly graceful despite their size.

But now, from the forest on the far side of the clearing, there was a roar. The kangaroos, large and small, turned and fled, bouncing away with their extraordinary elastic leaps. The originator of the roar loped casually into the clearing. It looked like a lion, but it was not a close relation of any cat. It was a thylacoleo — another marsupial, like the diprotodons and the kangaroos — but this one was a carnivorous predator, molded into its leonine form by identical opportunities and roles. The catlike creature moved with silky stealth around the clearing, its cold eyes studying its prey.

Jana moved cautiously around the fringe of the clearing, eyeing the thylacoleo.

While in the rest of the world the placental mammals had become dominant, Australia had become a continent-sized laboratory of marsupial adaptation. There were carnivorous kangaroos that hunted in ferocious, high-bounding packs. There were strange creatures unlike any elsewhere: huge relatives of the platypus, giant tortoises the size of family cars, land-going crocodiles. And in the forests walked immense monitor lizards — related to the komodo dragons of Asia, but much larger — an eerie Cretaceous memory, one-ton carnivorous lizards big enough to take out a kangaroo, or a human.

Jana moved on, his thoughts far away.

Jana had known Agema all her life, as she had known him; here in this tight community everybody knew everybody else. But it was only in the last year, as she had passed seventeen, that he had become so attracted to her. Even now he could not have said what it was about her that had so enthralled him. She was not tall, not very shapely, with breasts that would always be small, hips and buttocks too wide, and her face was a wide moon of flesh with a small nose and downturned mouth. But there was about her a quietness, like the quiet of the sea when your canoe was far from land, a stillness masking depths and richness.

He had barely spoken to her of this. He had barely spoken to her at all, in fact, for a year, since becoming aware of her in this way.

What really hurt was that Osu and those other braying idiots were right to goad him, to point up his limping, his unsuitability as a husband for Agema. They were trying to protect their sister from a poor match. He knew that his damaged leg was no real impediment to his making a living, to his being able to help Agema raise the kids he wanted to share with her so badly, but what he had to do was convince her and her family of that.