To reach the bird’s nest, Roamer would have to leave the cover of the trees. But the open sky today seemed very bright — bright and washed-out white — and there was a peculiar electric stink to the air. She would be exposed out there; she hesitated, uneasy.

Clinging to the edge of the forest, she tried to work her way closer to the eggs.

She skirted a marshy area, part of the mighty river’s floodplain. She could see the water: Clogged with scummy vegetation, it glimmered, utterly flat, under a high sun. But there was a smell of salt in the air. Here, not far upstream of the river’s delta, she was close to the ocean, and occasional floods and high tides had laden the soils with brine, making the vegetation sparse.

Animals moved through the clearing, seeking the open water. In low scrub a group of gazellelike stenomylus cropped, moving in a tight, nervous cluster and peering about anxiously as they chewed. They were trailed by a smaller herd of cainotheres, like small, long-eared antelope. Other deerlike browsers worked through the forest itself. But the stenomylus were not gazelles but a kind of camel — as were the cainotheres, with their oddly rabbitlike heads.

Close to the shore clustered a family of bulky herbivores reminiscent of rhinos. These were not true rhinos, and the sad curve of their upper lips gave a clue to their ancestry: They were actually arsinoetheres, creatures related to elephants. In the water itself wallowed a mating pair of metamynodons, very like hippos; wading birds stepped cautiously away from their clumsy passion. The metamynodons were actually more closely related to rhinos than were the arsinoetheres.

Where herbivores gathered, so predators and scavengers came to watch with their calculating eyes, as they had always done. The strange protorhinos and camel-gazelles were followed by cautious packs of bear-dogs — amphicyonids, predators and scavengers, walking like bears with their feet flat on the ground.

So it went. For a human observer it would have been like a fever dream — a bear like a dog, a camel like an antelope — shapes familiar if seen through half-closed eyes, and yet eerily different in detail. The great mammal families had still to find the roles they would occupy later.

But this age could boast its champions. At the forest’s edge Roamer saw a shadow moving through the trees, immense, lumbering, menacing. This was a magistatherium. It walked four-footed, like a bear — but it was immense, twice the size of a Kodiak bear. Its canine teeth, five centimeters thick at the root, were twice the size of a tyrannosaur’s. And, like the tyrannosaurs, it was an ambush hunter. For now it ruled these African forests — and it would prove to be the largest carnivorous mammal ever to live on land. But its shearing teeth, essential tools for a meat eater, came in pairs, unlike those of the true carnivores of the future, and more prone to damage. That slight design flaw would eventually doom the magistatherium to extinction.

Meanwhile, through the largest of the pools cruised the stippled back of a crocodile. She didn’t care about any of this strangeness. As long as you were stupid enough to approach the crocodile’s domain, as long as you had flesh that filled the belly and bones that crunched in the mouth, you could be any shape you pleased: Your fate would be the same.

At last Roamer came close enough to the nest. She dashed out of cover, attracting blank stares from the rooting herbivores, and reached her eggs.

The nest was partially covered by fallen fern fronds, and so she had some shelter to work in. With saliva flooding her mouth she picked up the first egg — and was baffled. Her hands slid over the egg’s smooth surface, finding nothing to rip or tear. When she squeezed the egg against her chest, she did no better; the thick shell was too tough. There was no branch nearby against which she could smash the eggs. She tried cramming the whole egg into her mouth to bring her powerful back teeth into play, but her tiny lips could not reach around more than a fraction of its volume.

The trouble was, her mother had always cracked eggs open for her. Without her mother she had no idea what to do.

The light in the sky seemed to grow brighter, and a wind picked up suddenly, ruffling the surfaces of the ponds and scattering brown fronds across the ground. She felt a rising sense of panic; she was a long way from her troop. She dropped the egg back into the nest and reached for another.

But suddenly the sweet, sickly smell of yolk reached her nose. The egg she’d dropped, falling against the others in the nest, had broken. She jammed her hands into the jagged crack and pushed her face into the sweet yellow goo, and was crunching on half-formed bones. But when she took another egg, she couldn’t remember how she had opened the first. She fingered the egg and tried to bite it, starting the whole trial-and-error process over.

Dropping eggs onto each other was how her mother had opened them before. But even if her mother had been here to demonstrate how to do it, Roamer would not have learned the technique, for Roamer was not capable of reading another’s intentions, and so she couldn’t imitate. Psychology was beyond the anthros, and every generation had to figure everything out from scratch from basic raw materials and situations. It made for slow learning. Still, Roamer soon got into another egg.

She was so intent on the food she wasn’t aware of the lustful eyes that studied her.

Before she broke into a third egg the rain started. It seemed to come out of nowhere, huge droplets falling out of a blank, bright sky.

A great wind swept over the marshes. Wading birds took flight, heading west toward the ocean, away from the approaching storm. The big herbivores turned to face the rain, stoic misery in their posture. The crocodile slid beneath the surface of its pond, preparing to wait out the storm in the changeless depths of its murky empire.

And now clouds fled across the sun, and darkness closed in like a lid. To the east, at the center of the continent where the storm had brewed, thunder clattered. It was a storm of a ferocity that lashed the area only a few times in a decade.

Roamer cowered in the wreckage of the nest, her fur already plastered to her body. The droplets hammered into the ground around her, battering the dead vegetation and digging tiny pits into the clay. She had never known anything like it. She had always ridden out storms in the comparative shelter of the trees, whose foliage diffused and deadened the falling water. But now she was lost, stranded out in the open, suddenly aware how far she had come from her troop. If a predator had found her in those few heartbeats, then she might have lost her life.

But as it was, she had been found by one of her own kind: an anthro, a large male. He dropped to the sodden ground before her and sat still, studying her.

Startled, whimpering, she approached him cautiously. Perhaps he was one of the males who dominated her own troop — the loose, fissioning band she thought of as a kind of composite father — but he was not, she quickly saw. His face, the white fur beaten down with the rain, was strange, and a peculiar patterning of coloration gave him white drips down his black-furred belly, almost like blood.

This male — Whiteblood — was twice her size, and a stranger. And strangers were always bad news. She screeched and scrabbled backward.

But she was too late. He reached out his right hand and grabbed the scruff of her neck. She twisted and fought, but he lifted her easily, as if she were a piece of fruit.

Then he hauled her without ceremony back into the forest.

Whiteblood had spotted Roamer — a juvenile female wandering alone, an unusual opportunity. He had stalked her carefully, a fruit eater moving like an experienced hunter. And now the cover of the storm had given him the opportunity he needed to take her. Whiteblood had his own problems — and he thought Roamer might be part of the answer.