But soon, very soon, she ran out of forest. She stood on the fringe of the open savannah, clinging to the forest’s green shade.

And a bat came drifting across the sky, a great black and white bat with blue wings.

She howled and lunged back into the green mouth of the forest.

Emma Stoney:

After getting away from Fire’s Runner group, Emma had followed the beckoning Ham woman into the forest. It was an arduous trek, through increasingly dense foliage. But after perhaps a mile they came to a small clearing.

There were shelters here, made of skins stretched out over saplings driven into the ground. There was an overpowering stench, of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement and burning fur. Even the walls of the huts stank, she found, a musty, disagreeable odour of a kind she associated with the clothing of old people who didn’t wash or change enough.

But, stench or not, it was a kind of village.

A Ham village.

A village of Neandertals. She approached cautiously, following the Ham who had found her.

The Hams barely seemed to notice her. They were utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children plucked at her clothing with their intimidating, strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams stepped around her, their eyes sliding away.

But however coolly the Hams greeted Emma, they did not expel her.

She dug out her own hearth and built a fire.

Nobody shared food with her that first night. But the next day she managed to catch a rabbit with a home-made snare, and she brought the meat back to the camp and cooked it, even sharing a little with the adults. They took the meat, sniffing the burned stuff gingerly, but ignored her.

So it went on.

There were many of them, she soon learned, perhaps eighty or ninety, in shelters that faded into the dense green forest background.

With their hulking bodies and broad bony faces the Hams seemed like extras in some dreadful old movie to Emma, wrapped up in their animal skins, knocking their crude tools out of the rock. Everything they did, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air — was suffused with strength — they seemed much more powerful even than the Runners — and Emma quailed before their brute power. But it was apparent that such strength was not always wisely applied, for she saw evidence of a large number of injuries, bone fractures and crushing injuries and scarred skin.

They were humans, of a sort, but humans who made a living about the hardest way she could imagine. Their favoured hunting technique, for example, even for the largest prey, was to wrestle it to the ground. It was like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.

But they cared for their children, and for their ill and elderly.

And they spoke English, just like Fire’s people, the Runners. Who could have taught them? That central mystery nagged at her — and she sensed her own destiny lay in unravelling it.

The forest, like the savannah, was full of predators: cats and bears and dogs, not to mention snakes and insects, some of them giant-sized, that she didn’t trust at all.

But the most dangerous creatures of all were the people.

There seemed to be many types of homimds wandering around this globe. She knew there were Hams and Runners and Elf-folk and Nutcracker-folk, and presumably others. The vegetarian Nutcrackers seemed content to chew on bamboo and nuts in the depths of the forest, following a sleepy, untroubled, almost mindless lifestyle that Emma sometimes envied. The Runners conversely generally stuck to the plains.

The forest-dwelling Elf-folk — three or four feet high, like upright, savage chimps — were, for Emma, the most dangerous factor in the landscape. Having glimpsed what that troupe of Elf-folk had done to the Runner child, to finish her life as a living food source in the hands of Elf-men remained her abiding nightmare.

But everybody pretty much left the Hams alone.

For one thing, with their clothing and comparatively elaborate tool kit and distorted English they were a lot smarter than the rest. And they were beefy besides, even the women and children, more than a match for any Elf.

For all the Hams jabbered their broken English, Emma knew she could never become part of this inward-looking, deeply conservative community. But she also knew she was a lot safer here than wandering around, alone in the forest.

And so she stayed, inhabiting a rough lean-to on the edge of the community, bit by bit building up her own survival skills and recovering her strength, and waiting for something to turn up.

The Hams” technology was more advanced than the Runners’, but still, considering those big brain pans, remarkably limited. They had more advanced knapping techniques, manufacturing a range of flakes and points and burins in addition to the ubiquitous hand-axes. They fitted stone tips to their thick thrusting spears.

But that was about it. They had no piece of technology with more than two or three components. They didn’t have innovations even Emma could think of, such as spear-throwers and bows.

Other gaps. If they weren’t interested in something — a type of plant, for instance, which had no use for food or medicine or tools, nor carried any threat as a poison — they simply ignored it. If it didn’t matter, it was as if it didn’t even exist; as far as she could tell there were whole categories of such “useless” objects and phenomena which had no names.

There were no books here, of course — there was nothing like writing of any kind. And no art: no paintings on animal skins, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child’s face.

Indeed, the Hams seemed to loathe symbology of any kind. The Hams tolerated the odd colours of Emma’s skin and hair, her slimness of build, the way she spoke, even the garish blue of her clothes — but they could not bear the South African air force logo that adorned the breast of her flight suit, and she had to cut it out with a stone knife. (Loath to throw away anything that had come from home, she had tucked the patch into a pocket on her sleeve.)

She came to suspect that what disturbed them wasn’t the symbols themselves as much as the response of herself to them — and other Skinny-folk, a class which seemed to include herself and the mysterious “Zealots” and “En’lish’. The Hams would jabber about how Skinnies saw people in the rock, as if the symbols themselves were somehow sentient.

As a result, the Hams” world was a starthngly drab place, lacking art and religion and story — save, of course, for their one great central myth of the Grey Earth, where they had come from. They didn’t tell jokes. The children played only as baby chimps might, exercising their muscles and testing their animal reactions against each other.

And to them, death appeared to be a genuine termination, a singularity beyond which an individual, leaving no trace, had no meaning. To the Hams, today was everything, yesterday a minor issue — and if you weren’t here tomorrow, you wouldn’t matter.

In many ways, they were like the Runners, then. But, unlike the Runners, they talked and talked and talked. They seemed to have a wide vocabulary, much of it English, and they would hold long, complex conversations around their fires.

But it was only gossip. They never talked about how to make a better tool. Just about each other.

Emma thought she had gotten used to the Runners, who were a strange mixture of human and animal. If these Hams were still not quite human as she was, nevertheless they had their own gaps in their heads, barriers between the rooms. As she watched them jabbering of who was screwing whom while their hands worked at one tool or another, apparently independently, she found it hard to imagine how it must be to be a Ham.