It was bones that counted. Too damn right. In the field of paleoanthropology, there were many more scientists than there would ever be fossils. But fossils were everything. Of course the trick was in getting hold of them. Until then all you had were theories and nearly all of them based on other people’s finds.
Not that theories couldn’t be rewarding too.
In search of some theories of her own she had spent the previous winter working with Byron Cody, helping him elaborate some of his ideas for his now best-selling book about gorillas. It was an experience she still remembered with pleasure.
There had been one particular moment that Swift believed she would always treasure, when she had been sitting in a cage with a young mountain gorilla. She had found herself looking deep into the animal’s eyes and instead of looking away, as normally happened, the gorilla had held her stare, leaving her with the most profound, albeit ineffable sensation. She had felt both question and assent, and the nearest comparison she could ever make was that it had been like meeting the unflinching gaze of a small child. Even now she could hardly recall ever feeling a greater sense of empathy for any other living creature.
A gorilla was also capable, like a child, of shedding tears. And Swift had come to the conclusion that man was not about emotion so much as language. It was certainly true that there were plenty of animals that could communicate at a rudimentary, symbolic level. Like Chomsky however. Swift believed that what made man uniquely human was his limitless capacity for self-expression and, as a corollary, his limitless capacity for imagining and thought.
She was fond of asking her students the following question; If you had a dog that could talk — a dog that was every bit as articulate and funny as Robin Williams — would you continue to treat it like a dog, or would you treat it like a human?
Sometimes, to underline the importance of human speech or signing in defining what it really meant to be human, she also reminded her class of cases involving feral or wolf children — wild boys who had never learned to speak and who could only communicate within a finite number of symbols. And then she would ask the class whether it would treat a wolf boy more like a human or more like a dog?
Consciousness, she argued, must surely have evolved as a direct corollary of language, and language was merely the most portable means available to ancient man of transferring a culture from one place to another as the climate changed and the hominid population exploded out of the African heartland during the late Pleistocene period, from 70,000 BC to 8000 BC.
It had been Swift’s greatest ambition to find a fossil that would provide some indication of early linguistic ability and, hence, of an emerging human consciousness.
The Dawn of Man.
Except that now she wondered if perhaps she was in possession of something better than just a bone. Bones were always a matter of contention. She had a feeling that this might just turn out to be something of the past that was not gone, something lost that was not irrecoverable.
Seven
‘Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.’
The Campanile clock had struck six o’clock when Swift climbed into her Chevy Camaro. Feeling that she was probably wasting her time and that the reason his phone was off the hook was because Jack was with some girl he had picked up while climbing in the valley, she drove inland, heading east along the interstate toward Mount Diablo State Park and Danville, and hoping that she could see Jack and then be back in Berkeley before lunchtime.
The smoothness of the highway contrasted with the intolerance of Northern California drivers, for although it was early morning and there were only a few trucks on the road, their drivers seemed to regard a woman at the wheel of a bright red, two-seventy-five horsepower coupe as some kind of challenge to their masculinity. On several occasions she found herself involved in a bitter war of middle digits.
It was at times like this that Swift thought men were little better than apes, capable of fighting about the least important thing. She wondered how it was that the human species was not as rare as that great reproductive dud, the giant panda.
Danville was a small town surrounded by rolling ranch land and campsites and a short ride on the Contra Costa County bus from Mount Diablo. Sixty years before, the town’s most famous resident had been the playwright Eugene O’Neill. But O’Neill was largely forgotten by the locals and now Danville’s most famous resident was America’s number one mountaineer. Jack Shackleton Furness.
Like O’Neill, Jack lived several miles outside of town, in a small ranch situated on the lower slopes of Mount Diablo. Twice, Swift drove past the anonymous-looking road that led to Jack’s house before seeing where it diverged obliquely from the main highway and dropped down a steep slope into a short ravine wherein a small creek meandered its way back to the East Bay and, beyond, the ocean.
Mounting the other slope on the far side of the creek, the track suddenly levelled out and Swift caught sight of Jack’s house and the black Grand Cherokee parked on a gentle slope facing the Devil’s Mountain to the west.
Swift got out of the car and looked around. There was not a soul in sight, not even the signposted ‘Mean Dog.’
She walked up the front steps, knocked at the door, and waited a minute or so. Then she tried the handle. The door was not locked.
‘Jack?’ she called, leaning inside. ‘Are you there? It’s me. Swift.’
Advancing toward the bedrooms at the rear, her glance took in the empty bottle of Macallan on the floor and the overflowing ashtray and half-eaten dinner that lay next to it. She heard the sound of something hitting the floor in the next room and then a man coughing with resolve.
‘Jack? Is this a good time? Am I interrupting something here?’
He arrived in the bedroom doorway, puffing a cigarette and naked but for the Rolex GMT Master he still advertised in pages of National Geographic, and a pair of battered docksiders on his feet.
Perhaps it was because he hadn’t shaved in several days, but somehow he was even hairier than she remembered. And he had also put on some weight.
‘God, you look awful.’
Jack snorted loudly, scratched his balls absently, chewed over the bad taste in his mouth, and then glanced at his watch.
‘Swift. What the hell are you doing here so early?’ he yawned. ‘Comes to that, what are you doing here at all?’
‘The phone. You left it off the hook.’
‘Is that so?’
‘I’ve been trying to reach you for days.’
‘You’re not so easy to get hold of yourself,’ he sniffed. ‘Tried calling you a couple of times after you disappeared that morning. Left voice mail and other shit all over the place.’
He went over to the empty bottle and retrieved it from the floor.
‘I was worried about you.’
‘Like hell you were,’ he said, inspecting the empty. He grinned and shook his head. ‘I know you, remember? You want something. That’s why you’ve driven all the way out here. I can tell. Why else would you look so sexy?’ He nodded at her clothes as if this was obvious. ‘Honey, you be stylin’.’
Underneath her long wool coat Swift was wearing a pink miniskirt, a plain white shirt, and a red-and-gold-coloured toile de jouy waistcoat featuring scenes from the frieze in some Pompeiian villa of mysteries.
‘Jack, that’s not true.’
‘I mean, that waistcoat. If I could see straight I’d bet there’d be a guy with a hard-on somewhere thereabouts. And you’re wearing a miniskirt.’ He licked his lips feverishly. ‘You only ever wear a miniskirt when you want something.’