The party was getting loud, and Mattie needed to get away from the noise, so she walked out into the night. Onto the porch, where a few people stood around talking, and then down the steps to the river path. She followed the path past the concrete patio with the big stone fireplace, under the tall umbrella trees and down to the riverbank. There was a small sandy beach, with a few big rocks here and there. She sat on one that was far enough from the water to be away from a crocodile’s deadly lunge and looked out over the water. The surface of the river was smooth as glass. You could barely tell it was running - it was more a sense of movement than something you could see. It was definitely moving, though, and she could see something slowly drifting down from upstream. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, but as it came closer, she could see it was a boat of some kind. She stood up and moved closer to the water’s edge to get a better look, and as she did it seemed to catch a current that brought it toward her. Now she could see it better; there was no moon but the stars were bright in the African sky. It was a small circular boat, made of cloth or hide. A coracle, she thought, where did that come from? She had never seen one around here; in fact she didn’t think she’d ever seen one in Africa. It floated right up to the beach and stayed there as if it had run aground. Just to be sure it wouldn’t drift off, she pulled it further onto the sand, then walked back to sit on the rock again and ponder the situation. She had the strangest inclination to climb into the coracle and push off into the river, and she needed to think about this for a minute.

 

    The river was flat and still-seeming, the stars were twinkling in reflection on the surface, and the sounds of the party were softly coming through the trees. Across the river she could hear a Mozambique nightjar make its frog-like call. Somewhere in the distance a jackal was yapping. She picked up a large red leaf from the umbrella tree off the sand and studied it for clues. This party was for her, a sendoff on her new adventure, how could she just take off down the river in some strange little boat? Well, she could, she knew she could. It’s not as if she hadn’t disappeared before, wandering off on her own, following her star, or whatever it was that called to her. She’d been doing it all her life, ever since she could walk. When she was five years old she would wrap up her snack in a bandanna, hang it on a stick, throw it onto her shoulder and head into the woods. That’s just the way she was. But… this was her party, and this was Kipling’s “great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo” she was about to drift onto, a river full of crocodiles and hippos, in a fragile little coracle. For at that moment she realized that she was going to get in the boat and go, wherever it would take her.

 

    Tomorrow she was supposed to take the bus to Gaborone, get on a plane and fly back to the States, where she would spend a week with her family and then head to the university to work on her thesis and write grants. This was her least favorite part of what she did, but it had to be done to keep the funding flowing. The project was going well, so it shouldn’t be a problem to continue, as long as she did the necessary paperwork. In fact, things had started to get pretty exciting with the latest discovery. The cave was reluctantly giving up its secrets, and the story it told was going to be controversial to say the least. If she was right, the study of prehistory and human evolution would be turned on its head. One discovery would not prove her hypothesis but it would add an undeniable new dimension to the whole field. We are not alone, she thought, we never really have been. It is our own stubbornness and refusal to believe millennia of stories that has made us so isolated. The stories have always been there – almost every culture has them. These days they are mostly told for the benefit of children, a fairy tale to stir their imaginations. Ah yes, but there is often a kernel of truth to many old tales and maybe more than just a kernel when it comes to tales of those ubiquitous beings – the little people. Leprechauns, Chickcharnies, Tsvdigewi, Yv-wi tsun-sdi, Pixies, Menehunes – they have been known by many names. The first real evidence of the existence of small people were the fossils of Homo floresiensis found in a cave on Flores Island in Indonesia in 2004. The “hobbits”, they were dubbed, because the finding came shortly after the release of the Lord of the Rings movies. It took a few years before the fossils were widely accepted as evidence of a new hominin species. Still, the prevailing theories are that the fossils represent a marginal species that evolved and remained in a limited area for its entire existence.

 

    She had a different idea. The cave she had found held fossils not just of Homo floresiensis but of Homo sapiens, side by side in a way that indicated a life lived in tandem. The concept of two species of hominins, living together in apparent harmony in southern Africa, 200,000 years ago, was revolutionary, to say the least. Her idea was much more than revolutionary; most people would call it pure fantasy. To be fair, her extrapolation from the evidence of the cave to a hypothesis that changed the whole view of human history was reaching a bit far. In her mind, it was based more on an unshakeable feeling, a certainty that would not be recognized by the scientific world as any kind of justification. She would have to move slowly, and work to find the pieces to fill in the puzzle, not an easy task when you’re trying to prove the actual existence of mythological creatures. Because that was her hypothesis – that the species known as Homo floresiensis was not some isolated, short-lived, dead end of hominin evolution; instead they were, and maybe still are, our companions in this journey. They evolved with us, and together we traveled, out of Africa, exploring this world of ours and becoming what we are today. She believed that it had been a long time since we lived together openly, because our species is so determined to be dominant. We like to think we have evolved on our own and are something special, not just another species of mammal on Earth. But she had always felt that we lived our lives in a great loneliness. She loved to read science fiction stories about distant planets and galaxies where there were many different species of intelligent beings, and her recent work in paleoanthropology was driven by a fascination with the period when there were more than one species of hominin roaming the savannah. She had studied primate behavior as an undergraduate, and her interest in the great apes in particular was fueled by that need to connect with another intelligent being; to bridge that gap of loneliness and isolation between the species.

 

    So she was headed back to start working on a way to present her findings and lay the foundation for the gradual building of her case, starting gently so as not to be dismissed out of hand as a kook. It was going to call for restraint and patience, a methodical and scientifically rigorous compiling of physical evidence. She knew she was right but she tried not to think about the impossibility of persuading other scientists, considering the fantastical nature of her hypothesis. Hah! How she ever expected to succeed she didn’t know. She had been ready to try, though, until tonight, until this little coracle floated down the river and presented itself to her and somehow she had to take what it offered. With a sigh and a glance back through the trees towards the house, she turned and quickly scanned the riverbank and shallows for crocs, then pushed the coracle out into deeper water and gingerly stepped in. She had expected it be difficult to climb into the little boat, kind of like trying to get back on an inner tube when you’ve fallen off in the rapids, but it was very stable. She hadn’t even settled in when the current caught the coracle and drew her out into the middle of the river. She situated herself on her knees as if she was paddling her canoe in fast water, and held onto the sides with her hands. As she slowly drifted downstream she looked back as the lights from the house and the last, faint strains of Bruce Cockburn playing “Rumours of Glory” faded away. She rounded the bend in the river and floated into the unknown, alone with the sounds and stars of the African night.

 

    She had been feeling that something was going to happen, something big. Ever since the night they had found the H. floresiensis skull in the cave. Actually, Francisco had found it in the afternoon but it was well after dark when he finally lifted it out of the floor of the cave and into the light of the lanterns. Then everyone could finally see, what many of them had been whispering about and why Peter went and searched his boxes until he found the old National Geographic with a picture of a H. floresiensis skull. There was no doubt, that was what this skull was. As she walked back to her tent that night, she had felt that tingling, raised hairs on the back of her neck kind of hyper-awareness. She knew she was being watched but she couldn’t hear anything or make out a shape in the darkness to give her a clue as to what kind of animal was out there. As silently as she could, but with an upright, purposeful stride, she made her way to her tent, stepped in and zipped up. Taking a deep breath she stood quietly in the tent, listening again, hoping to catch a sound. Hearing nothing, she lit her lantern and sat down on the chair to untie her boots. Her heart was pounding with excitement, and a little fear; there was something else, though, an anticipation. She could feel that some change was coming, no idea what or when, really, but there was a deep certainty in the feeling. And both the feeling and the certainty had stayed with her since then. Occasionally, in the weeks since the discovery, the sensation of being watched had returned but she had eventually managed to tune it out. It faded into the background and those moments just became like the countless times she thought she saw someone, or something, out of the corner of her eye. Just a fleeting glimpse, it was there then it was gone. What she thought was movement was probably just some visual artifact, a trick her eye was playing on her brain.

 

    All of these things were going through her mind as she floated down the river. That feeling of anticipation, of something about to happen, was so intense she could hardly breathe. She forced herself to take slow, measured breaths and to relax her muscles. Drawing the energy of the released tension into her center, she held it there and shaped it into a perfect sphere. Letting the energy focus on keeping her center strong, she tried to relax and think about her situation. It had been an hour, two at the most, since she had left the shore by the river house. It was quiet and still, just the usual background noise you always hear at night in the African bush. The coracle was floating along at a good speed and mostly holding a center course. Now the river was taking a wide bend to the right and as she came around it she could hear rapids ahead. Before she completed the bend, though, the current shifted and the coracle drifted into the far bank. Grabbing hold of an overhanging tree branch, she pulled up and brought herself to shore. Cautiously and quickly out of the coracle and into the shallows, she dragged the coracle up onto the sandy bank behind her. Setting it off to the side she surveyed the scene. Beyond the narrow sandy beach was a wall of darkness that towered up fifty feet or more. A little to her left she could see a break in the trees, a trail leading into the forest, and somewhere down that way a low light flickered. Drawing a breath, and feeling for her center, she started down the path.