Darwin 02 Darwin's Children by Greg Bear

Author:Greg Bear [Bear, Greg]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-16T11:45:05.444000+00:00

If she was going to die, she could at least be as dignified as old Shamus.

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30

OREGON

Mitch got up before sunrise, dressed without waking Merton, and left the tent they shared to stand at the rim of the Spent River gulley. He watched the early-morning sun try to spread light over the shaded landscape. He could clearly see Mount Hood, twenty miles away, its snows purple in the dawn.

He found a twig and stuck it between his lips, then bit it with his teeth.

Mitch had never thought he was prescient, sensitive, psychic, whatever name one gave to having second sight. Kaye had told him, years ago, that scientists and artists shared similar origins for creative thinking�but that scientists had to prove their fancies.

Mitch had never told Kaye what he had gotten out of that conversation, but in a way it had helped him put things in perspective�to see the artistic side of how he came to his own, often logically unsupportable conclusions. It wasn�t ESP.

He was just thinking like an artist.

Or a cop. Nature was the world�s most efficient serial killer. An anthropologist was a kind of detective, not so much interested in justice�that was entirely too abstract in the face of time�s immensity and so many deaths�but in figuring out how the victims had died and, more important, how they had lived.

He wiped his eyes with one finger and looked north along the gulley, to the deeper gorge that had long ago been cut through alternating layers of mud and lava and ash. Then he turned and peered at the L-shaped site with its array of canvas and plastic covers, concealed by camouflage netting.

�Shit,� he said, almost in wonder at the way his feet began to walk him along the rim of the gulley, away from the main dig.

That bear. That damned, enigmatic bear that had started it all.

The bear had come down to the river to do some fishing and had been suffocated by a fall of ash�but several days before the humans had arrived. The humans typically tracked bears, he was almost sure of it, relying on them to find good fishing. Someone had claimed the skull, but had not butchered the carcass�there were no cut marks on the bones�which meant it was probably in an unappetizing condition by the time they found it.

Salmon came back in the spring, summer, and fall to spawn and die, different groups and different species at different seasons. Nomadic bands had timed their journeys and arranged their settlements to take advantage of one or more of these returns, when the rivers ran thick with rich, red-fleshed fish.

Leaves changing color. Water running crisp and cold. Salmon wriggling over the rocky streambeds like big red pull toys. Bears waiting to march across the stream and grab them.

But most of the bears had probably left with the first ash fall, leaving behind one old male too sick to travel far, maybe chewed up in a fight, waiting to die.

Guessing. Just guessing, goddamnit.

Why would people walk

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