Front Dust Jacket Flap
Perhaps one must travel to the future to hear the voice of our generation via a parallel civilization at the end of the Solar System. The book is about the power of words and the ability of love and brotherhood to conquer and thrive in an exotic, uncharted world.
Tophero®
Son of Smilodon
Jungle Lord of the New Millennium
By
W.W. Ni
Copyright 2007 Top Hero®, Inc.
5425 Carpinteria Avenue #10
Carpinteria, CA 93014
USA
Smashwords Edition
Cover Art & Illustrations by: Lloyd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic of mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or on the Web—without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, please contact Top Hero, Inc., 5425 Carpinteria Avenue #10
, Carpinteria, CA 93014.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The use of “Tophero” and other characters created by Wayne W. Ni has been licensed and authorized. All rights reserved. TOPHERO® and TOP HERO® are Registered Trademarks of Top Hero, Inc.
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Jacket Design and Illustration by Lloyd
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To my parents whose tireless education made me the man I am;
To Kassandra whose sunny smile made those uninspiring moments bearable;
To Kameron whose embodiment of Tophero inspired the creation of the indomitable character;
To Lois whose enlightenment made my storytelling fluid;
To Carol who graciously admitted me into her sphere of creativity;
To Ed, the greatest artist in our galaxy;
To Ella who made me believe that I had the wherewithal to pursuit my lifelong dream to write.
From the Author
To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.
—Karen Sunde, b. 1942, American actor and playwright
When you were a child, did you ever gaze up into the sky and wondered if there could be prehistoric saurians living in one of the mysterious planets far above us, and if there were, what sort of savage, heroic lives they might lead? Did you ever gaze into the sparkling heaven in a serene night and wonder whether romantic legends were unfolding somewhere in the celestial heights at the distant corner of the galaxy?
This saga will take you back to those nights when you imagined extraordinary tales of adventure in the Cimmerian darkness above, lit only by the fading starlight.
Prologue: The Bouquet of Spring
Whatever hope is yours
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world.
— Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
My eyes opened instantly.
The faint smell of the unknown quietly awoke me from a deep and dreamless slumber. It was a scent I had never encountered in my jungle life. A scent of intrigue, a scent of glory, perhaps a scent of wildest beauty. Somehow this mysterious scent stirred up within me years of buried yearnings for female companionship.
What is this intoxicating aroma?
Gazing out at the towering forests, I propped my front paws on a protruding boulder inside the cavern I had called home since the beginning of my sojourn. I extended my front limbs, flexing the thick mass of muscles banding my back, enjoying their power. This great collection of muscles enabled me to bring down nearly any prey. Next I stretched my rear limbs. The numbing venom from the greenhorn bite had dissipated almost completely from my extremities. I licked my front paws and cleaned my face with them, since my siblings were not here to groom me. I did not know how long I had been in this part of the woods, nor did I care; time had little meaning here.
I emerged from the cavern, drawn in equal parts by the unidentified scent and my terrible thirst. I sniffed again. What is it? Curiosity often kills in the jungle, I knew. But combat was the way of life here on the grand canvas of Opalon. My whole existence had been a daily battle against death, so search I would.
As soon as I moved to the open, I felt the radiant heat of the distant volcano. A relative of the pterosaur that had carried me to this strange land shrieked above the canyon. I recognized the screech as an announcement of its presence rather than a declaration of hungry intentions. But one look at the giant flying reptile reignited the pain in my shoulder blades left by its sibling’s powerful talons.
I leaped onto a nearby tree and ascended, using solely the strength of my forepaws to grapple onto its great trunk. I scaled the tree with short spurting jumps. It provided a good workout, mounting a tall tree this way. When I reached the level where the tree intermingled with the middle terrace of the jungle, I bounded from tree to tree with more resemblance to a lemur than to my feline brothers. Unlike my brothers’ short powerful hind legs, mine were longer than my front limbs. The longer hind legs gave me greater leverage to leap from tree to tree, but became a hindrance when I swung from vine to vine in the dense foliage.
My rapid passage in the middle terrace sent packs of lemurs, birds, and snakes scattering to the safety of the upper terrace. Wind, leaves, and boughs passed by with great velocity as I traveled through the treetop passageway, until I smelled the moisture in the air coming from a meandering stream and heard the transparent flow bouncing off the shallow streambed beneath its course. I descended from the trees with a single bound, seizing a thick vine with my forepaw to reduce the speed of my landing. I crept through the underbrush noiselessly, just in case there was quarry nearby, until the stream was fizzing in front of my thirsty tongue.
Silently, I let the cool water quench my dry mouth and throat. Then, itching from the old, crusted stripes of mud covering my body, I scratched and washed them off with the fresh spring water. When I was done, I opened my jaws wide to suck in the floating scent in the air.
Alluring!
But the foreign whiff I had been trailing was suddenly overtaken by the delicate scent of a deer. My unfilled stomach churned as I prowled low along the muddy stream bank. Since I was downwind from my intended prey, it had no idea that I approached. Leisurely, it raised its head from the stream just before I sprang onto its back. My weight, added to the force generated from my pounce, crushed my victim to its flank. With my fangs ripping into its jugular, I gripped its antlers with my front paws and wrenched them sideways.
The reverberating sound of bone snapping faded in the canyon, and all fell silent again. With my forepaw, I peeled back a large piece of the warm hide and sank my teeth into the still-pulsating flesh. The juicy meat’s tender texture was exceedingly satisfying; I’d lain immobilized in the cavern for days. After I washed the dripping blood off my muzzle in the sparkling watercourse, a light breeze again brought me the exotic scent I had tracked to the stream. It was an indescribable bouquet that was both riveting and feminine. I crept deeper into the forest, crossing the brook and entering a clearing. The scent grew stronger; the peculiar source could not be far off now.
Observing the freshly trampled ground, I noticed unfamiliar spoor. And what a bizarre pair of hooves! I had never seen tracks like them before—seemingly those of an upright creature walking on two feet. The hooves appeared to have ridged bottoms. The beast was lightweight and weak, for its struggling steps were small, uneven, and close together. It paused often to look around or feed.
Inquisitiveness got the best of me, and I rushed ahead toward the strange beast. At last, through the newly grown branches of verdant starfruit trees, a paralyzing scene unfolded before me. I saw a slim bipedal figure moving slowly while picking passionfruits one by one from the foliage. Her delicate face was ringed by a pale golden mane. A series of pleasant, rhythmic sounds came from this mystifying creature’s mouth as it moved. Its arms danced in a carefree fashion, in time with its cadenced steps. My body swayed to the gentle lilt of her song.
I felt a sense of familiarity with this creature in my racing heart. Suddenly, I felt myself a stranger in a foreign land, overtaken by troublesome thoughts: Why did I, the most fearsome cat of the jungle, look not so much like his brothers but like this outlandish two-legged creature?
Who am I?
Chapter I: Pinnacle of Carnivory
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes
Less than themselves.
—A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962)
By the time the torrents of spring lifted, they had changed the tapestry beyond Tyra’s doorstep from canary yellow to emerald green.
As the searing temperature of the day gradually subsided, a gentle breeze spread the sweet perfume of flora mingled with the light stench of a great feline. The scent wafted from the edge of the jungle to the feet of the imposing cataract. An opalescent prism of sunlight cast a shimmering, fleeting rainbow on the ceiling of magenta clouds. The reconfiguration of the landmasses from the ancient tectonic shifts had piled red-hot volcanoes on top of their siblings and cobalt-blue quartz trees above their rivals.
Feeling the sultry zephyr in her face, Tyra watched lazily as her mate, a majestic sabertooth, prowled in the tall-grassed savannah beneath the eagle-shaped cliff. The orange twilit sky camouflaged his golden fur in jaguaresque rosettes. His object was a foraging giraffid grazing behind a stand of jade shamrocks large enough to cover its stunning coat.
Stealthily the carnivore moved; the scent of his prey intermixed with a powerful whiff of the sprouting buffalo grass reluctantly accepting his passing. His padded paws silently flattened the meadow while his raised ears took in only the sound of his quarry’s grazing. He took his time until he was merely body-lengths from his prey. Then, with a devastating bound, his long saberteeth pierced its windpipe and the herbivore collapsed under his momentum.
Rearing up on his hind legs, the sabertooth gave a thunderous roar. He scouted the area for any scavengers or enemies, then hefted the carcass in his powerful jaws and headed toward Tyra at the edge of the grassland.
The expectant mother purred in the simple language of Opalonian felines, elated by her mate’s return. The two commenced to feed peacefully, enjoying the fleeting happiness of the moment. Suddenly, Tyra raised her bloodied snout and her ears twitched in alarm at the sound of the peculiar shuffling gait of a cave bear. There followed the unmistakable scent of a stalking predator. Reading the wind, her nostrils quivered as her eyes turned ruthless, and she stood.
The shaggy omnivore ambled into view, its appetite for meat awakened by the scent of the bloody carcass. With a roar, the cave bear reared to its full height, taller than a fully-grown mastodon’s shoulders. Tyra saw the juggernaut’s fearsome claws extend ominously from his mighty forearms. The spiky tools he normally used to spear flying fish from the nearby stream, he planned to use to slash open his challenger’s belly today.
Tyra growled a warning as her mate snarled ferociously. The brown bear replied with his own gruff, low-pitched bellow and maintained his lumbering, stern advance.
As Tyra’s fear overcame her desire to feed, she backed away grudgingly from the giraffid’s carcass. However, her mate stood his ground. To protect her lifeblood, he flashed his saberlike fangs, raised his hackles, and charged at the intruder.
With stunning velocity, the cave bear flicked his right paw at Tyra’s leaping mate. The deadly claws stung the airborne smilodon across his shoulders. As the badly injured sabertooth struggled to retreat, his enemy pounded him with his unforgiving front limbs. When the brutal assault ended, the merest thread of life remained in the once-fierce cat’s battered body.
Watching her mate die defending her, the half-dazed she sprang onto the cave bear’s back and buried her sabers into his short neck. Perhaps she was taking a suicidal revenge, but she would not die alone. Taken by surprise, the cave bear tumbled to all fours. In his death struggle, the giant dislodged Tyra with an enraged jolt, breaking one of her saber fangs a third of the way down, with the tip still embedded inside of his neck. The cave bear’s horrid cry of agony reverberated across the plains, and his enormous body collapsed into the overgrown buffalo grass.
Exhausted and grief-stricken, Tyra slowly limped away from the scene of three large carcasses. She settled in the grass as the settling sun glided behind the golden peaks it ignited in the south. Later she would return to feed; she still had her unborn cubs to nourish. But for now, her only appetite was for unremitting keening. Her mournful howls echoed long into the night.
As the leaves turned amber, Tyra had her first litter of four. Although dainty for her race, her shattered canine signaled her ferocity and made her easily recognizable to the inhabitants of the plains. The broken sabertooth caused her constant pain, but she refused to let it impede her hunting. Moments earlier, she had struck down a zebralike grazer.
The brown buffalo grass behind her rustled, and three cubs wobbled out one by one. Warily, Tyra looked around and saw a fourth cub straggling behind in the tall grass, playing with a brightly speckled butterfly. “Koko!” She gently picked up the distracted cub in her jaws and carried it, wriggling in dismay, all the way to the zebra’s still-pulsating flesh. The cub’s displeasure with her mom quickly evaporated when she tasted the warm chops. The cubs fed spiritedly, rolling one on top of another, constantly jockeying for position. They were heavily spotted, nature’s protective camouflage, and had not developed their saberteeth. They barked and grunted, shoved and pushed each other to seek dominance among themselves.
What is that strange scent? Tyra’s hunger was sated, but she opened her mouth wide, using the sensitive scent receptacles inside her mouth and throat to suck in the odor of a hyaenodon cub—and something else. Earlier that day she had thought of finding a little plaything for her cubs to run after and on which to practice the art of slaying, for the killer instinct must be honed early. It often meant the difference between life and death on the verdant plains.
The thirst for water after a big meal brought the single mother to the stream, leading her little family behind her. As she slowly approached, camouflaging her stunning fur in the tall brown grass, she could not believe what she saw. A young hyaenodon with a peculiar baby lemur dangling from her jaws ran across her path. Tyra had never seen anything like it. The strange scent had to have come from the hairless lemur covered in giraffid hide.
Not surprisingly, the hyaenodon froze the moment she saw Tyra’s imposing frame, and sat cowering in fear for her own life. The tiny lemur, however, remained unimpressed. He adamantly struggled to pet the hyaenodon’s heaving chest while flopping upside-down from the jaws of his captor. His curious fondling proved to be too nerve-racking for his captor in the face of a huge feline. The young hyaenodon dropped the lemur, backed away from Tyra, and disappeared into the dense foliage with her stumpy tail tucked between her legs.
The hyaenodon held no interest for Tyra; the little hairless cub was what she was looking for. He was soft and plump, his smiling face cuddly in a way not dissimilar to her own cubs. She picked him up gently, for she did not want to impede his ability to crawl away from her brood before they were ready to seize him and bury their tiny fangs into his flesh.
“Reeoooar!” Kobu, the oldest cub, gave a squeaky snarl as Tyra dropped the little lemur to the ground in front of her litter. But the hairless lemur was not perturbed. He promptly wiggled his way toward Kobu and grabbed the wrinkly skin on top of his neck with his little hands. He forcefully pulled Kobu toward him as Kobu’s snarl turned into a whining complaint. The lemur then placed himself in the center among Tyra’s cubs, petting Kota’s nose good-naturedly. “Ooo… ooo…” he cooed, tousling Kota’s ears while making curious baby sounds to his newfound chums.
His playful overtures did not go unanswered. Tyra’s cubs seemed equally fascinated with their new playmate, who was roughly their size. They sniffed and poked at him, and allowed his affectionate petting.
Suddenly Koko reared up and pushed the tiny lemur onto his back. “This is it; say goodbye!” Tyra murmured out loud. But the wobbly she-cub who loved butterflies merely sniffed the lemur’s body all over and then applied the finishing touch by gently licking his face. Even the normally shy Kody came over and rubbed his cheek on the lemur’s robust chest.
The harmony perpetuated, and at nursing time, much to Tyra’s consternation, the little plaything joined right in with her cubs to suckle on her engorged nipples. “Go away!” she snarled at him. He stopped and cried a little, and then he joined in again. He was relentless in getting the milk he wanted. This went on repeatedly until Tyra finally gave in to her nursing mother’s instinct and took him in as one of her own.
“Okay, little plaything, you can stay as long as you survive.”
After nursing, the cubs dozed off. Tyra, too, lay down for a moment of peace. As soon as the cubs woke up, the rough play commenced again. This time the five of them aggressively bit and slashed at each other. Moments later, the newcomer’s giraffid hide was completely torn into shreds and lay next to the bloody remains of the zebra. Tyra gazed in wonder at the cub. This was one strange lemur.
The smilodon family gradually included the hairless cub in all its daily functions. Tyra named him Gora, not because he was so different from her other cubs, but because like a rock, he was simply not edible. In the limited vocabulary of the smilodon language, Gora literally meant “a mountain, not slayable, unstoppable.” The little creature was well named: stubborn, indomitable, and lovable at the same time.
Chapter II: Sabertooth of Opalon
Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? And what dread feet?
—William Blake (1757-1827) Songs of Experience, “The Tiger”
One spring morning, five years after Tyra had found the strange, hairless cub, the monsoon stopped its rampaging downpour in the night, and pearllike dewdrops sparkled in the morning’s glory. Tyra’s cavern traded gloom and thunderclaps for sunshine and birdsong.
The riotous profusion of colossal boulders that formed her abode, now coated in moss, was stacked in disarray as though tossed down from heaven in a heated storm. Attracted by the crystal-clear air accentuated by the perfume of blooming flowers, Tyra took a deep breath outside of her cavern. It had been hard to keep her lively cubs in line within the claustrophobic cave during the rainy season. It would be downright impossible now that the cubs had exhausted all the flesh left behind from their last quarry.
The sun was brighter than usual in the cloudless sky. Tyra methodically stretched her limbs, rolling her shoulders high into the thin air. Then, one by one, with Gora leading the pack, Kobu, Koko, Kota, and Kody trotted out of the cave, lackadaisical from a fortnight of inactivity. As soon as the fresh air filled his lungs, Gora was ready for an adventure. Tyra and Gora’s newfound energy was contagious, and the six smilodons set off to their hunting grounds.
As they passed the waterfall, Tyra’s hackles raised, for she smelled the fresh scent of a cave lion passing through her territory.
“Stay close behind me. There’s danger ahead,” she warned the cubs.
“Okay, Mommy.” Although Gora was the youngest of the litter, he answered for the pack. He had mastered the smilodon language long before the other four cubs. Sometimes he even made up new words.
Following the cave lion’s scent, Tyra tracked his spoor beyond her territory to a muddy waterhole where the opaque jungle ended and the lush grassland began. Tyra smiled and let out a deep breath. She had anticipated a deadly combat, for the feline carnivore might have intended to take over her territory. With five cubs, it would be impossible for her to grab another territory to make it her own, and her chance of triumphing over the full-grown male was slim, for she had no mate to fight for her.
Tyra turned to retrace her steps. Suddenly the ground beneath her gave way, and she tumbled into a tar pit that had been blanketed by a carpet of leaves and broken branches from the deluge of the monsoon. She struggled with all her might; but her body sank rapidly into the hungry pit of death.
“Mother!” Kobu cried desperately while trying to reach her with his short forelimb. He nearly fell into the pit himself.
“Stay away! All of you! There is nothing you can do for me now,” groaned Tyra. “Go home and take care of yourselves, my dearest children.” She wept hopelessly.
To her amazement, little Gora sprang up to grasp a stout branch nearby, breaking it with the leverage generated by his bodyweight. He then raced to the edge of the tar pit and pushed the branch toward her rapidly disappearing torso.
“Bite the branch, Mommy! We will pull you out. Kobu, you bite this end.” Gora, too, clamped onto the branch with his puny mouth, as well as his flexible paws.
Tyra locked her jaws onto the extending branch for dear life, and little by little her shoulders reemerged, covered fully in sticky black tar.
“Gora!” she exclaimed, dragging herself from the pit. The mother and son cried out their triumphant roars in harmony, letting their hearty bellows penetrate the surrounding plains. Incredulous, Tyra eyed the scrawny five-year-old lemur she had taken from the jaws of the hyaenodon. This cub of unknown origin was more cunning and fearless than her own much bigger cubs. In him she saw qualities incomprehensible to her, abilities that did not exist in any wild beasts she had ever known.
Thereafter, Gora no longer felt so timid or embarrassed as a young hairless smilodon. He discovered two contradictory elements in his unique character: insecurity and ingenuity. He may be weaker than his sleek, furry siblings; but if a simple tree branch turned into a life-saving tool in his hands, what couldn’t he create with the multitude of objects provided by nature? That day he glowed with a feeling of belonging and worthiness he had never felt before. Kobu, the eldest and strongest, had been the leader of the pack from the beginning; but after accomplishing the grand task of saving Tyra, Gora came up from behind, and the weakest, youngest, clawless brother became the leader.
Three more years passed like moving clouds. Ever since he could remember, in order to look and act more like his bigger, stronger brothers, Gora had smeared wet mud in the pattern of tiger stripes all over his face and body, and had crawled on all fours. Now he was facing all the usual problems of a young sabertooth: how to adjust to his changing body and how to fit in with his peers.
Although he was much smaller than the others, he made up the difference with his intelligence, inventiveness, and agility. His favorite pastime was to break open a rotted tree stump and feast on the termites within. These juicy little critters were delicious and seemed to provide even more nutrients than the massive quantity of flesh he consumed, for he always felt energized thereafter.
Hunting was the least of his tribulations. He had developed into a masterful hunter, along with his three brothers and sister. One hunting method that impressed his siblings was stone throwing. His uncanny marksmanship brought down giant birds and small herbivores without his having to reach them physically. Once, Gora’s well aimed stone blinded a colossal mammoth’s right eye and enabled Kobu to pounce and puncture its neck from that side.
“No one can do that other than you, my brother!” Kobu marveled.
Gora learned to repeat the technique and introduced the concept of hunting in coordinated teams to the sabertooth cats. Before, the cats had hunted alone and relied solely on the prowess of their front limbs and their gigantic neck muscles to pounce and puncture. After Gora’s success with the mammoth, a new era of pack hunting dawned for his smilodon family. Now the three brothers could chase down a herd of wooly mammoths and plant a surprise at the end, where Gora and sister Koko executed an assault. The strength of five smilodons made hunting and territorial defense an easy chore. Occasionally they even ventured together to challenge larger reptiles, perhaps a wildly unpredictable triceratops or a heavily armored ankylosaurus.
Besides playing roughhouse with his siblings, Gora’s favorite activity was to let them lick his back. A smilodon’s tongue felt delightfully rough to him, for it was covered with spines. He loved the feel of the raspy, comblike tongue cleaning away the dried mud or blood that always coated his jungle-worn skin. Grooming in the form of licking was an irreplaceable family activity for smilodons, and all family members spruced up the others with tender loving licks.
Many routines he’d performed as a young cub got tossed away as he grew older, however, as his ability to reason began to take hold. Like his siblings, he used to mark his territories by spraying trees with urine or by leaving his scat. But the most common method of scent marking was by scratching the bark of a tree. This process also sharpened the smilodons’ claws and prepared them for their next battle. Kody, the jealous one of the family who always tried to find ways to deflect Tyra’s attention from Gora, suggested one morning that the brothers have a contest to see who could scratch a tree and leave the strongest scent. He was well aware that Gora had the shortest and most inadequate claws. Tyra was asked to be the judge. The four brothers scratched away to the best of their abilities under their respective trees. Without any scent glands in his nails, Gora scratched long and hard until all his fingernails were broken. Kody smirked as he awaited his mother’s verdict. She declared Gora the winner by far. The blood he had smeared all over the tree trunk created the strongest scent.
Sabertooths ran on all fours and were capable of jumping up to several times their own body length. Young Gora pondered long and hard to figure out a way he could beat his siblings, given his own inadequate forelegs. His weakness merely gave him a challenging objective to conquer. He loved running. To have clouds racing over his head as he ran, to have plains lying flat before his feet—these joys liberated him from all his needs to understand his differences, if only temporarily.
In the dense Opalonian jungle, he first observed, and then copied, the lightning-fast travel methods of the giant lemurs. The adults were three of his foot-lengths taller than he was when erected. Tyra sometimes still called Gora “my little lemur,” but could he be one? These tree dwellers had bizarre toothcombs, and they groomed each other lovingly with these unique tools. Am I a lemur? No, Gora reasoned. I don’t have toothcombs. I don’t hibernate, and I don’t store fat in my tail. I don’t even have a tail. Once, he saw a magnificent male beating his chest proudly and roaring with anger while the others bowed timidly to his dominance. That’s a powerful gesture! he realized. He adopted chest-beating and roaring as a ritual whenever he triumphed over a formidable enemy.
Although missing a long tail, Gora jumped from tree to tree easily, swinging on the vines with his forelegs. His unrelenting quest for excellence made him a perfect tree-traveler, with skills even a real lemur would envy. With his vine-swinging secret weapon, he managed to keep up with his siblings in the jungle.
Another lazy summer afternoon, the five siblings raised the subject of who were the deadliest and the nimblest cats in the jungle. They crouched near the bedrock of the little stream where they drank and frolicked.
“A jaguar could claim the fastest title,” Kobu announced, his eyes slotted open the width of a single blade of buffalo grass. “But any one of us could chase it away and force it to give up its quarry, unless it had the foresight to climb onto a skinny branch of a skyhook tree before we got to it.”
“Cave lions can pounce like lightning, but only for a short distance,” Kody said while licking his paws and cleaning his face for the fourth time that day. He was obsessed with cleanliness.
Partially copying the demeanor of a giant lemur, Gora attempted to tame his recalcitrant long black mane from covering his face by brushing it backwards with his stalwart fingers. “Hyaenodons are too slow, for they’re pack hunters,” he said. “There’s something to be said about the moment their ancestors decided to hunt in a pack. But apparently from that point forward, they lost the amazing speed they once possessed.”
“That leaves only us, the smilodons,” said little sister Koko. “The fastest among us would be the speediest demon in the jungle.”
Upon hearing that insightful remark, a light sparked in Kody’s eyes. It might have been glee. He pushed to his feet, showing off his lanky body while stretching his long limbs. He was the leanest and the lightest of the family, except for the smaller Koko, who none of them considered a serious contender.
“How far should we run to determine who’s the fastest?” asked Kobu, the most powerful of the three male cats, his eyes suddenly open wide.
The uncharacteristically silent Kota chimed in to determine the marathon course. “What if we commence at the bottom of our cave, pass the woodlands, cross the Zemootan River, race through the jungle, and meet on top of the giant pterosaurlike boulder at the foot of the Kanji Mountain range, by the waterfall?”
“Whoever gets there first wins the title?” Gora asked.
“That’s it,” Kobu said, rubbing his front paws eagerly on some tree bark. “Finally I can prove to all of you that the strongest smilodon is also the fastest one.”
Mother Tyra announced the commencement of the race from the opening of her cavern high above the jungle floor. “Ready. Get set. Go.”
Kobu and Kody shot out in front of the pack and maintained their lead throughout the woodlands. Kobu fully relied on his powerful limbs, while Kody utilized his liquidlike torso to squeeze through the dense foliage. Gora and Kota stayed at their heels, and Koko remained last.
Plump. Kody was the first one into the rapid currents of the Zemootan River. But the mighty strokes of Kobu’s muscular limbs overtook him before they reached the other side of the bank. As the racing smilodons dashed into the thick jungle, streaming droplets from their wet coats, smaller creatures scattered for cover. Kobu maintained the lead, Kody dogging him in a close second. Kota was third, and Koko was a distant fourth. Gora had disappeared into the thick air of the tropics.
As soon as Kobu pounced his way toward the edge of the jungle, he saw the grand boulder at the foot of the Kanji Mountains, protruding proudly like a fully wing-spanned eagle ready to lift off. “I’ll show them that I’m the all-around champion in both strength and speed,” he roared with exhilaration. But to his surprise, just before he mustered all the power left in his exhausted giant muscles for the final bound onto the rock of champions, he heard an ominous whistle of the wind above his head. Raising his eyes, he saw Gora, laughing wildly; fly by on a long vine. Letting go at the last instant, he landed squarely on top of the forbidden rock.
“Don’t be such a sour puss, Kobu!” Gora called heartily. Kobu groaned in a bitter response, jealous of Gora’s cleverness and leadership but admiring nonetheless.
The Opalonian smilodons customarily gave a long booming victory roar after downing a prey, claiming a home range, finding a mate, or eliminating a competitor in the food chain. The roar could be heard across the savannah and seasonal marshland. The purpose was to scare away any potential encroaching scavengers. Although unequipped with a sabertooth’s thick vocal cords and flexible voice box, Gora could roar with the best of his siblings, for he practiced persistently whenever he was alone in the jungle. His victory cry had a bit less bass resonance than the cannonade roar of the giant felines, but was enthusiastic and exalting.
With all his efforts and competitiveness, Gora had become in every sense a true Opalonian sabertooth warrior. There was only one arena in which he couldn’t quite compete with his siblings. He could never feed as fast, for he didn’t have their serrated teeth, and his stomach wasn’t designed to generate a quick-digesting liquid to dissolve the partially chewed raw meat. But even with his smaller stature, he gained strength unparalleled by other creatures his size. He was growing up fast.
Chapter III: Boy Wonder
Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations;
Knaves, fools, and murderers they may be;
Men may have mean and meager faces;
But man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling,
Such a grand and glowing creature,
That over any ignominious blemish in him
All his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
As time stood still in the primeval land of Opalon, an eight-year-old boy riding on the back of a nearly full-grown smilodon stalked the jungle perimeter, casting a fearsome shadow on the herbivorous residents. But as a young smilodon, Gora still felt deficient in many ways. Lacking saberlike canines or big retractable claws, he depended on his cleverness to come up with various weapons. His first hunting tool was the canine from a dead smilodon’s skeleton he found buried in the jungle floor. He used the sabertooth as his extended claw, hacking away with his right hand.
One afternoon, Gora and Kobu went for a leisurely swim in the cool stream. Afterward, as the two shook the water droplets from their hides, a large structure nestled against the cliffside caught Gora’s eyes. He studied the strange sight. In the depth of the recess beneath a wide ledge of rock overhanging the towering cliff, he saw a dark, cavernous mouth, covered by an imposing barrier. He had no doubt that the cave-dam was made of wood—but the structure was unnaturally flat, made of planks sliced from the trunk of a tree and somehow fastened together. He had never seen anything like it before in the jungle: here was something nature’s hands could not have created.
His curiosity revivified him in the heat of the lazy afternoon. He scaled the upright cliff as swiftly as a giant lemur by grasping crevices between the rocks with his nimble fingers. Kobu clawed his way up as high as his weight would allow; then he retreated with his full stomach. Waiting below, he was too sluggish to try again.
Gora paused before the barrier. The wooden walls were held together in the center by a strange object that looked like a square tortoise shell. To his utter amazement, the object split open in the middle after he jiggled and yanked on the small protruding part on top of the shell. His instinct told him to push on the large wooden walls, for the shell appeared to be the only thing holding them together. The wooden barriers swung open slowly with a loud creak, revealing a large cavern.
Sunlight streaming through a maze of spiderwebs heavy with dust created a blinding mist, disturbed only by the light breeze from the sudden opening of the wooden walls. Through the web-mist, Gora saw colorful scenes decorating the interior walls of the cavern. They appeared to show figures—animals of some kind—but they, too, were as flat as the wooden walls, and as unmoving. He growled, but none of them responded. He drew closer and touched the vivid colors. He felt only cave wall. Ah, he realized, they were made of mud-paint.
One of the life-size murals depicted what appeared to be two hairless male lemurs and a female battling a ferocious hyaenodon. The lemurs were all dressed in giraffid hides—as he had been, Mother Tyra had told him, when he was found. In another painting, the taller male of the two struggled to slay a huge cave lion with what seemed like a strange tree branch, while a hyaenodon cub snatched his baby in its jaws. The figures all stood on two legs—as he sometimes did, without even thinking about it.
Why did the taller male’s face portrayed on the wall look faintly familiar? The female’s sorrowful face was beautiful and kind, and familiar as well. In another scene the other male cuddled and played with the baby as if it were his own. The painted walls not only amused Gora; they aroused his curiosity about his own origins, for he had never seen another creature like himself in the jungle. But he did not linger over the murals, for below Kobu was already calling, complaining about how long he was taking inside the cave.
As he moved through the cavern, Gora noticed several objects that could serve as the sharp claws and elongated teeth he lacked. He found the device the tall male used to kill the cave lion in the picture on the wall: a long, arched branch with a flexible strip of deer tendon fastened at both ends to maintain its curve. He also found several shorter branches with pointy tips that painfully poked his finger upon a light touch, and a long silvery tooth, much sharper than his splintered sabertooth. What big, effective canines, much finer, harder, and farther-reaching than a smilodon’s fangs, he thought.
As Gora danced around with his shiny new fang, he accidentally scraped his left elbow on the rock wall. He dropped the big tooth to the ground and started to lick his wound. The tooth fell with an unfamiliar clang, expelling thick layers of dust from its surface. Amazed, Gora saw his own reflection in the dust-free blade, more clear than any he’d seen in the rippling water. He grinned with delight, envisioning using the big canine to hunt with his brothers and achieving miraculous results. Thus armed, Gora would not think twice about struggling with a larger carnivore, for the only thing that had held him back before was his lack of effective teeth and claws.
This is a fascinating cave, he mused, tempted to linger and explore the place further. He wished that he could identify all its mysterious contents. Suddenly he sensed his inadequacy to comprehend. For the first time in his life, he felt that he was weaker than his brothers and dumber than the lemurs pictured on the cave walls. Intuitively he felt a bond with what he saw, yet he failed to understand it—and this fact caused him torment. Nonetheless, he vowed to return.
Chapter IV: Pupil of Loneliness
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
—Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “When Lilacs last in the dooryard,” Leaves of Grass
Silently suspended on a horizontal vine, Gora moved swiftly hand over hand between two sturdy rockfaces, his stoic lips pinched tightly, purposefully oblivious to the pain. In his quest to develop the ultimate pouncing power, he had collected dozens of thick vines and fastened them to the two lofty cliffs in front of Tyra’s cavern. As he swung above the verdant jungle, he calculated the distance between the towering cliffs to be roughly one hundred lengths of a full-grown smilodon. Each morning, rain or shine, he performed ten sets of the monkey-on-the-vine exercise without stopping for a break, hoping to build chest, shoulder, and back muscles as strong as those of a sabertooth in its prime.
He considered the increasing pain an exigency to his jungle life. When the giant lemurs that lived nearby uttered their challenging cries, he invited them to join him, but even the strongest of these treetop dwellers could only match a fraction of his strength.
As he negotiated the difficult passage with the agility of an ape, he thought, Isn’t that what I am—a hairless monkey without the long tail? The idea made him uneasy; for he was sure he was of the same origin as the strange upright lemurs depicted on the walls of the painted cave. Since he’d found the cave the day before, his thoughts had rarely strayed from it, and his stomach churned with anxiety.
I must go back.
He finished exercising and retraced his steps through the jungle to the stream and beyond. The sun’s sweltering rays heated the rock, driving away hunting herds of grasshoppers as he ascended the vertical cliff. The doors were open, as he had left them. He searched through the piles of rotted wood on the floor, but found no more tools or weapons. Then he turned to examine each frame of the mural. A sense of deep melancholy seized his heart, an emotion he had never felt before, nor could he explain what it was. Quietly, he squatted on the cave floor and cried. He did not know why. Finally he decided that the weapons he already brought to Tyra’s cave were the only things of interest, and he felt ready to bid farewell to his newfound cave for good.
As he took one last look, however, he noticed an inner cave, opening into the blackness at the rear of the cavern. It did not take long for his carnivore’s eyes to grow accustomed to the subdued light within the second chamber of the cavern. Here, too, strange objects had been constructed of wood. He felt drawn to a flat black box lying on a wooden table. He played with the little latch in the center until the lid popped opened. A creature sprang to life before his wide eyes; Gora leaped backwards and screamed in terror.
The creature made no move to attack, however. Cowering warily, Gora watched. A young female lemur’s smiling face appeared inside the box. This was no ordinary lemur! She was tailless just like him, and wore only a loincloth on her waist. Her complexion was similar to his own, though much paler and not striped with mud. Her large eyes mirrored emotions he never saw in any of his siblings: strange, familiar feelings he knew only in himself.
Could there really be another creature like him in the jungle? She looked so clean and fragile. Surely this cub could not survive even for a day in the jungle. But she was so vivid, so full of life that Gora could almost smell the honeysuckle on her hair. He couldn’t help but to touch her face. His fingertip met a cool, flat surface.
At his touch, the little brown-haired cub began to make strange sounds: “Daddyy, I wwove you!” Gora instinctively jumped back from the black box, ready to fight for his life. “Have a safe trip, Nick. There’s nothing to worry about back home.” An adult she-lemur appeared, her kind but sad voice trailing off as moisture welled up in her eyes.
What are they talking about? Are they talking to me? They must be talking to me, for there’s no one else around. But why don’t I understand a word they are saying? Gora shook his head in confusion. From mimicry over the years, he understood all the languages of the citizens of the jungle, including that of the regular lemurs.
The adult female was fully dressed in strange but colorful hides, a light blue top and a white bottom. She puckered her fine-looking lips and blew some air toward him after she finished the sentence. She likes me, thought Gora. Perhaps she could cuddle with me in the shade near the little creek. But she, too, looked too clean and too gentle to safely live in the jungle.
“A mouse runs from a cat,” the box said. Colorful little pictures came out and jumped up and down. One image, the smaller one, looked like a gray palm rat, and the other like a baby jaguar. A row of little black sticks arranged in a funny pattern ran beneath the pictures.
Gora was startled, but fascinated by the strange images. He watched with intense concentration as the little rodent spun around and raced away from the jaguar. After a moment or two, Gora started to follow the voice. “Ahh moose wuns from ahh cahht,” he repeated with considerable difficulty, for the sounds were not of the growling vocabularies he used with his brothers.
“A cat chases a mouse,” the gentle female voice said from the box.
“Ahh cahht chases ahh moose.” Gora felt tongue-tied, but he mimicked the voice as the jaguar ran after the rat on the screen and the black sticks rearranged themselves. This is strange, but fun, he thought. Recalling the little female’s smiling face earlier, he thought perhaps he could speak to her after he learned her language from the black box.
Time flew by, and the next time Gora looked up, he noticed that the light outside had dimmed. Carefully he closed the box, and the lights and voices disappeared. He suddenly felt the need to see if the little female and the adult were still there, so he opened the box again, and the woman’s voice came back. He looked forward to seeing them again when he returned.
Before descending the cliff, he made sure the heavy door latches were engaged so that no intruders could get in, even if they scaled the cliff; for he felt that the painted cave and all its contents were his, including the little female and the big one. He wanted to protect the little one and the sad but kind adult with her sweet voice, for they looked so vulnerable in the jungle.
Thereafter, Gora diligently searched throughout the jungle, hoping to find strangers like him, but to no avail. He secured his first loincloth, made from the hide of a jaguar he and Kobu killed in a territorial dispute. He returned to the cave daily to learn the language of the tailless lemurs and speak to the little female in the black box.
Armed with perceptiveness, he completed the lessons in a short time through pure determination and mimicry. To his surprise, he found he was readily capable of repeating and even thinking in the new language. One day his fumbling fingers mistakenly touched several keys at once inside the black box, and a new screen appeared instead of his learning program.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” it said.
Some of the black stick-words looked familiar to Gora, but others did not. Recognizing happy from the little girl’s smiling face, he moved on to families. Somehow this word seemed recognizable, yet unknown. The word family meant Tyra and his siblings, he knew, but what was families? As he touched the words he did not recognize, more words appeared to teach him their meaning. That’s right! One cat, two cats. So families just means more than one family. He clapped his hands together joyfully and continued.
a•like, adv. 1. in the manner, form, or degree; in common; equally. adj. 2. having resemblance or similarity.
Another female’s voice slowly read the meanings of the new word, and then she put it into a sentence for him. Of course, now he needed to tap on the words manner, form, degree, common, equally, resemblance, and similarity in order to understand the definition. This was a lot of work, but Gora found it extremely rewarding. He spent a whole afternoon just figuring out the phonics and meaning of the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” the naked boy of the forest read out loud in his heavy animalistic accent at the end of the day. He repeated the new sentence again and again, proud of his learning.
Thus, day after day, following his cliff-to-cliff strength-training regimen, Gora came to the painted cave to study the collection of the Greatest Five Hundred Books Ever Written that were stored inside the black box.
One day, after he exited the reading, he tapped a picture he hadn’t noticed before. An image appeared of a boy learning to fight from an old man dressed in black. The boy’s face resembled the tall man on the wall, except that he was merely a cub. Being an active cub himself, Gora methodically followed the lessons step by step. First he learned to punch, to throw a hook, and to kick while leaping into the air. Then he followed the ancient Taoist kung fu master’s teachings to meditate.
The old man’s fighting forms reminded Gora of various predators of the jungle—short-faced bear, anaconda, pterosaur, giant lemur, and cave lion. Interesting stuff, he thought. I never saw any of my siblings fight like that. Soon he had added the martial arts he learned to his strength-training regimen each morning.
“The way to acquire the ability to see the unseen and hear the unheard is to learn the reflective vision and internal hearing,” said the kung fu master.
During his daily meditation in front of the thundering waterfall, Gora practiced the lost art of channeling his vision outward to the periphery and then returning it inward to see the unseen. Within months of concentration, he could focus and see the slightest flutter of a buffalo grass beyond the grassy plains. Using the same method, he studied the Taoist way to listen to his internal breathing and gather his energy in a constant state, which enabled him to hear a fallen leaf far beyond the abilities of a great cat.
The long and arduous passage of time saw an impressive maturation in both Gora’s intellect and physique. Many a time, his frustration with his inability to comprehend the essence of his reading took hold of his senses, and he felt an irrepressible desire to quit. However, a voice within him kept on urging him to continue, for his learning made the only difference between him and the beasts. Many a night his loneliness took him nearly beyond the border of sanity. He had no one to talk to, no one with whom to share his thoughts or his newfound knowledge. But he had faith in himself.
Tyra and his siblings reacted to his strange new behaviors with suspicion.
“Why do you spend all day hanging between two cliffs and looking at a strange black box?” Kobu demanded. “If, as you say, there are merely little wormlike things in the box, what’s the big deal?”
“You help us hunt much less frequently now,” Koko chided. “And you are the best hunter among us.” She gulped, noticing Kobu’s angry glare. “One of the best, that is.”
One evening, as the sun made its southerly descent, Gora returned from an afternoon in the cave. “A-di-adya-adooga!” he said to his mother and siblings.
“We wish we could say the same back to you, but hunting has been bad,” Tyra growled. “I can’t even remember the last time we said ‘Good Hunting’ to each other, since you’re away all the time now. We have been worrying about you, Gora.”
Gora shrugged, surprised. “Why? I’m perfectly okay.”
“We miss you on the hunting grounds,” Koko said in a sulky voice. She scratched her neck with her hind paw, then gave Gora her “I’m adorable” look. “It’s hard to hunt the larger game without our big brother, you know. We rely upon your unmistakable instincts and good sense.”
“We want you to take up your share of hunting around here. Why do you go to that cave, anyway?” Kobu asked sternly.
“I’m trying to make myself better,” Gora answered. “Stronger and smarter. Both will make me a better hunter. I know that I am different from all of you, but I love you all the same, for you are my only family. I’m sorry that I’ve neglected my duties to hunt, thereby making all of you work much harder. I will try not to let it slip my mind from now on.” Gora licked his hand, and then methodically cleaned his face with it.
“Don’t let it happen again, my creepy brother,” Kobu said. He laughed good-naturedly; but Gora knew he meant it.
With the bow and arrows he found in the painted cave, Gora transformed his uncanny stone-throwing abilities into a mastery of the art of archery within two years time. He consistently hit a marked leaf on a bouncy willow branch one hundred paces away, and then split his own arrow with another, lodging both in the tree trunk.
To counter enormous predators, Gora knew he must back up his accuracy with power. He came upon a dead ankylosaur after an allosaur had stripped its meat clean, and created a target so he could practice piercing the beast’s armor. At first, his arrows would break before they could penetrate even a single layer of the ankylosaur armor; but with relentless practice he honed his skill until he could pierce seven overlaid armored plates from one hundred paces away. To do so, he had to locate the hardest wood on the summit of Mount Kanji and carve it into the straightest arrows. He also upgraded his bowstring by using much thicker leg tendons from large herbivores he killed.
Anna Karenina took him nearly two years to read and understand fully. He deciphered War And Peace, which followed, in only six months. In the jungle his heart was free from mundane distractions, and his mind joyfully opened up to boundless learning. Once the light of knowledge shone through his eager, uncluttered mind, nothing could stop the momentum of his progress. As his photographic memory exhausted the voluminous dictionary inside the black box, reading got easier, and he no longer had trouble pronouncing the new words he encountered.
Not surprisingly, Gora learned from the box that he was a human being, a man, not a strange species of tailless lemur as Tyra had thought. The little female and the big female in the black box were called “a girl” and “a woman.” He did not understand why the girl in the black box stayed so small, however, since he had grown tremendously. His study of the ways of men filled him with curiosity. He longed to know his identity and find others like himself in the jungle. Most of all, he yearned to uncover the mystery of his origin. He came to realize that Tyra couldn’t have given birth to him, and he wondered who his mother had been. I am a man, he thought. Who is the author of my existence?
Four years later, Gora was nearly halfway through the five hundred classics. He came to know unparalleled bravery from Homer’s Iliad to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. He lamented over the soul-searching tragedy of Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra. He was torn by the grief-stricken love triangle of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and fascinated by the intriguing adventures of Greek Mythology and the Arabian Nights. He became a strategic thinker after studying Fuller’s expeditionary saga Alexander the Great and Carthaginian general Hannibal’s unimaginable crossing of the Alps with his army of elephants to conquer his archrival, Rome. From Kissinger’s Diplomacy, he conceptualized and understood the deep irony of the forces that unite and sunder states. In a virtual sense, he learned to command an army on the field, lead an invading armada to enemy lands, and fight alongside his troops at the hour of crisis. He believed that empires rise and fall, but heroes live on forever.