Poul Anderson excels at descriptions of beaches. We see Manse Everard with Janne Floris on a Northern European beach and later with Wanda Tamberly on a North American one.
In 13,212 B.C., II, the Cloud People arrive at what they call "...the Great Water..." (p. 154):
"Surf brawled, ran up the sands, hissed back. Gulls soared on a sharp salt wind. Bones, shells, plants, and driftwood lay strewn." (p. 155)
They sees sources of sustenance:
stranded fish;
shells that would have held meat;
seals;
crowds of cormorants;
otters;
sea cows.
Coming from inland, they do not know how to hunt such food but they can learn and Red Fox is gestating another idea. There are already other people here...
2 comments:
I had problems with that story. The Tulat are implausibly primitive. Hominids (Homo Heidelbergensis) were hunting big game with spears 400,000 years ago, before the emergence of either Sapiens or Neanderthals -- that's been proven by archaeological discoveries of the spears and thousands of butchered game animals in mines in Germany.
And Neanderthals used hafted weapons, not just hand-axes and clubs. The Tulat would be primitive for 1,500,000 years ago, much less 13,000.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You raised good points, ones I wish I had thought of when I discussed that part of THE SHIELD OF TIME in a letter to Anderson. He might have responded to such comments by saying he was hypothesizing on what might have happened assuming a small, widely scattered group of people with access to fairly easy means of getting food and shelter. AND also being cut off from the rest of the world for many thousands of years before the Proto-Indians arrived.
Ad astra! Sean
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