Rochefort tells Eyath that an Avalonian boat identified by three gilt stars was destroyed. Recognising her fiance's boat, she screams and flies. Right on cue, weather changes. Night falls. Wind rises. Clouds break. Morgana flees. Stars blink. Surf threshes. Trees roar. Air chills. Humans go fully clothed.
When Rochefort gives Hrill his parole not to use certain intelligence against Avalon, waves hiss behind him. He is lying.
Eyath spends the night aloft in the weather, then perches on a crag for hours. Wind drops. Clouds regather. Rain falls, like tears. Laura rises. The sky is deep blue. Leaves and blades are jewelled. Eyath is cold, wet and stiff but air enters nostrils and antlibranchs. Flight in wind and rain has burned, buffeted and washed away despair. Now hungry, she stoops and kills live prey with claws, not with dagger. Arinnian had thought that she could be the sun, the wind and everything wild. Imagine intelligence in a body retaining an animal oneness with the elements.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Well Ythrians are carnivores, not omnivores, as humans are. That will make for differences.
Ad astra! Sean
Tho' in a 'state of nature', as hunter-gatherers, humans don't eat much vegetable food except when pushed into marginal habitats where they have to migrate down the food chain.
I thought it was the other way round: nuts and fruit gathered every day as the "daily bread"; meat as an occasional luxury.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I should have remembered "The Little Monster," where Anderson shows us the very early humans subsisting as much as possible on meat, even if it was only carrion left over from lion kills.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: not according to the stable bone-isotope ratio analysis done lately.
Eg., Neanderthals in Europe apparently ate nothing but the flesh (and organs, etc.) of large grazing animals. Including mammoths, which they routinely hunted.
Early humans in Europe got about half their food from large animals and about half from smaller animals, birds and fish.
Neanderthals had about the same "signature" as lions. Humans were more like wolves.
Of course, that was an ice-age steppe environment. But hunting large animals is extremely effort-efficient if there are lots of them around.
Note also the physical differences between humans and chimps, and between post-homo erectus hominins and earlier ones like the australopithecines.
Humans post-h. erectus have much-reduced guts, which is why we have barrel-shaped ribcages while australopithecines and other early hominins have ones splayed out at the bottom, like (but not as much as) chimps.
That structure in chimps and early hominins is adapted to a large gut with bigger intestines capable of digesting coarse vegetable foods. Ours is smaller and needs richer foodstuffs like meat.
Also, the modern human body plan -- which emerged with h. erectus nearly 2 million years ago -- only makes sense for a cursorial predator.
We have one specialty at which humans are physically the best in the mammalian world: we're super-efficient at long-distance running at moderate speeds.
This is useless for evading predators -- all of them are faster over short distances than we are.
But it's extremely useful for -chasing prey-. It enables humans to exhaust them so they're easier to kill.
Our only rivals in that respect are canines like wolves and African 'jag hond'. We're a bit better at it, though.
It's extremely unlikely that either of these traits would have emerged except as part of an adaptation to a predator's diet.
Note that even chimps eat as much meat as they can get; they're just not very good at getting it.
Mr Stirling:
Doesn't cooking make "coarse vegetable food" easier to digest with the smaller gut that humans have?
How much of the change was due to eating meat and how much to cooking the plant matter?
Jim: the change emerged long before hominins controlled fire routinely. Control of fire is generally accepted to be no more than 1 million years old; the anatomical developments I mentioned are twice that old.
Plus, of course, being champion long-distance runners has nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with -chasing-.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating! And disillusioning for those who disapprove of eating meat and thinking it's somehow bad for humans to eat flesh. Vegans, take note!
Ad astra! Sean
OK
So human ancestors shifted to meat eating, thus needing a smaller digestive system.
Then control of fire allowed cooking of plant matter, allowing a shift partway back to a more omnivorous diet, without needing to regain a large elaborate digestive system.
Kaor, Jim!
I like bread, but I also like my Hebrew National hot dogs! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Jim: the isotope ratio analysis indicates that generally speaking hunter-gatherers had an overwhelmingly meat diet.
We probably retained our omnivorous capacities because it helped see us through disasters -- prolonged droughts, animal plagues, that sort of thing,.
Kaor, Mr. Stkrling!
I recall Nicholas van Rijn, possibly in SATAN'S WORLD, touching on that when mentioning humans could survive if they had to on Brussels sprouts--and shuddering with horror! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
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