Reincarnation

78,000 BCE – East Africa

She came back to camp with a steenbok across her shoulders and the smell of blood worked deep into her hair.

The group had settled for the night already. She could hear the children before she saw the fire, their voices dropping as the dark came on and the bush pressed in close around the overhang the way it always did at this hour, patient and enormous. She ducked under the low shelf of rock and let the steenbok slide from her shoulders to the ground near the coals.

That was when she saw him.

He sat apart from the others, his back to the rear wall, his legs drawn up. The firelight caught one side of his face and left the other in dark. He wasn’t from this group.

The space around him had stayed empty, none of the others had pulled in close. He was reading the fire and reading the people around it, and she knew that look because she’d worn it herself three seasons ago when she’d first come to this place.

She stood with the blood cooling on her neck and looked at him.

He turned his head. Not quickly. The way you turn when you’ve already known something was there.

His eyes found her across the fire and her hand came up, not fully, not reaching, just lifting, her right arm rising from her side until her palm was level with her ribs and angled toward his face, toward the space between them. She didn’t know she’d done it until she felt the cooler air on her palm and saw the firelight on the back of her own wrist.

She lowered her arm.

He’d gone still. Not the stillness of a man deciding something.

His hands lay open on his knees and he looked at her and the fire moved between them and the man beside him said something and it took him a moment to turn his head. She crouched by the fire and began working on the steenbok’s belly and didn’t look at him again for a long time.

* * *

He stayed three days.

She learned this about him: he’d come from far to the north, from where the grassland ran flat for more than a season’s walk. He’d a word for elephant she’d never heard. He moved around the edges of the camp the way a man moves when he’s been alone long enough that he’s not sure yet whether company is good.

He watched everything. He caught her watching him twice on the first day and looked away without embarrassment. That meant he wasn’t pretending he hadn’t been looking at her too.

She watched him the way she watched things she was trying to understand. The way his hands moved when he ate, efficient and without waste.

The particular quality of his attention when something crossed the flat, a bird, a change in the grass, the way his whole body oriented toward it without deciding to. He laughed once, at something one of the children did, and the laugh was quick and real and gone before she could look directly at it. She looked anyway. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She thought it was something she had been looking for a long time.

She went back to her own fire after that and didn’t think about the laugh.

On the second morning she was scraping an old hide near the water when he came and sat on the rock above her. Not close enough that it was anything, but he stayed.

She kept scraping.

After a while he spoke. She caught most of it, his words were almost the same as hers, just bent differently in his mouth. He was asking about the country to the south.

“Rains,” she said. “Too much.”

“The river?”

“Over its banks. The whole low ground went under.”

He said a word she didn’t know. She touched her temple with one finger, the gesture for she-doesn’t-follow.

He tried different words and when she still didn’t catch it he stood up and came down from the rock and crouched beside the water and drew with one finger in the wet mud. A shape that meant flooding, land going under.

“Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

He studied the drawing. “How long ago.”

“Before the last cold spell. Maybe before.”

“Still like that now?”

“Gone down,” she said. “Mostly.” She scraped at the hide. “You came a long way.”

He wiped the mud drawing away with his palm and stood. He looked south the way men looked when they were measuring a walk in their heads.

“There’s nothing left to the north,” he said.

She waited. He didn’t add to it.

“For how long,” she said.

Something moved behind his face. He looked at her a moment longer. “Two seasons,” he said. “Maybe three.”

She scraped at the hide. The sound of it was the only sound for a moment.

“You’re not going back,” she said.

He was quiet long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I don’t know,” he said.

He stood. The mud was still on his fingertip. He looked at it like he’d forgotten it was there.

She went back to scraping. He didn’t leave.

The hide was done before midday. He was still on his rock, watching a pair of hornbills working a dead tree across the flat. She rolled the hide and gathered her things and walked back toward the overhang and didn’t invite him along, but when she looked back from the entrance he was following at a distance, unhurried, as if he’d meant to come this way regardless.