Historical short fiction by Samuel Stephen

More than 50,000 years ago, a small group set out across open water towards a coast they could not know. One woman must decide whether the signs around her are enough to risk everything.

The bad knot was on the underside of the big raft, where nobody but Oka would have thought to look. She lay on her back in the wet sand with the bamboo a hand’s breadth above her face and ran her thumb along the lashing until it found the place where the cord had gone soft. Bark fibre did that when it was twisted green and never properly dried. She cut the soft length out with a shell scraper and began to rewind it, working the new cord hard against the old, and cursed whoever had made it. It had been herself.

“The water’s dropping,” Berru said above her. “Slack is nearly here.”

“I can see the water.”

“Then you know what I’m going to say.”

She did. She finished the turn, pulled it until the poles creaked against each other, and slid out from under the raft with sand in her hair.

There were two rafts on the beach. Each was a dozen thick bamboo poles bound side by side in two layers, with split lengths lashed across the top for a deck. The big one was Berru’s. The smaller one, which Oka had built over the dry months with Yem sitting beside her passing up cord, would follow on a tether and carry the water, the fire basket and the children who would not keep still on anything larger. The sun was not yet over the ridge. Beyond the rocks the whole camp called the Elbow, the sea was making the sound it made twice a day when the tide drained out through the gap, a long tearing hiss like cloth. In a little while that sound would stop and the water would stand still for about as long as it takes to eat a meal. Then it would run the other way. Anyone who wanted to get past the Elbow without being thrown onto its teeth went through in that stillness or did not go.

Oka’s husband had gone through on a rising tide two seasons ago, because the tuna were running on the far side and he had thought the tide would wait for him. They had found the raft. She did not say this now. Nobody on the beach needed it said.

Berru was fifty, thin as a spear, with a left shoulder he held slightly lower than the right. For as long as Oka had known him he had climbed the ridge behind the camp at the end of each dry season and sat there until the light went. Everyone knew why. On clear evenings, far out past the last of the islands, a thin grey line stood up from the edge of the sea and leaned over and faded. It came every year when the grass was driest. Berru’s younger brother Aro had taken a single raft and two companions out toward it a year ago, and none of the three had come back.

“Tell me again why it can’t be four days,” Berru said. He asked it plainly. He wanted the answer to be good enough.

“Because the tide gets weaker every night until the half-moon. In four days we could take the gap at any hour and nobody would die of it. Today we take it on the last of a hard tide, with a raft I’m still mending.”

“In three days the men from the river camp come over the ridge. They’ll want the rafts and they won’t ask.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know two of them are dead over a seep that gave one cup an hour.” He kept his voice level. “I’d sooner lose a few of us to the Elbow than all of us to that.”

The river camp had been the largest of the camps along this coast, and in one dry season it had split in two over water. Berru’s people were the smaller half. They had the fish traps, the rafts and the tubes, and most of the children. They did not have a seep.

“And after the gap?” Oka said. “You’ll steer for his fire.”

“I’ll steer for the smoke.”

“Aro’s smoke.”

Berru looked at the sea. “It comes at the same time every year,” he said. “It was there before he went.”

“Yes,” Oka said. “It was.”

He heard what she meant and let it go by. She was sorry, and she did not take it back.

Her son Dem sat on the sand where she had put him, holding a water tube as long as his own arm. The tubes were bamboo sections with the joints left in at one end and the other end stopped with a wad of leaf and sealed with pitch. A child holding a thing could not wander toward the surf, and the tube was not full enough to be worth stealing. He was six. He had been told the far side had a great many fish, and he was weighing this against the fact that nobody had said how far the far side was.

“Is it past the island with the white rocks?” he asked.

“Further.”

“Past the one with the noisy birds?”

“Further than that.”

He considered it. “Then I’ll want a lot of fish.”

Yem laughed from the second raft, where she was sitting with the fire basket between her feet. It held a clam shell packed with ash and a smouldering plug of dried fungus, all wrapped in leaves and bark and tied. Yem was Oka’s mother’s sister. She had taught Oka every knot she knew, and over the last two months she had begun to tell the story of each one to anyone who stood still, as if she were handing them over before a journey. Oka had noticed this and had not asked why.

The roar at the Elbow faltered. It dropped to a mutter, then a hiss, then nothing.

“Now,” Berru said.

They ran the rafts down the sand. The water in the gap lay flat and brown and perfectly motionless, like a hide stretched out to dry, and they paddled through it in a silence so complete that Oka could hear the tether line creaking between the rafts. Dure sat in the bow of the big raft with her baby tied to her chest. Her man Hesh, beside her, was already green about the mouth. Tolo, Berru’s nephew, who was seventeen and as strong as two men and had been talking since sunrise, was not talking now. Berru’s daughter Marra, who was twelve, sat on Oka’s raft with a paddle across her knees, because the small raft needed another pair of arms and she had insisted. On the rocks a heron lifted its feet and put them down again. Then the point was behind them, and the water began to move.

By the time the sun stood overhead the ridge had become a smear, and when Oka looked for it again in the afternoon she could not tell it from the haze. After that she stopped looking.

The sea was kind to them that first day. It rolled long and low from the south-east, and the rafts rose and settled with it. Paddling went in shifts. Water went in an order that nobody had needed to agree on: first to the children, then to whoever was paddling, then to the rest. At midday Oka caught Yem passing the tube along without wetting her lips. She took it back and held it to the old woman’s mouth.

“I’ve had mine,” Yem said.

“You’ve had spit.”

“I’m too old for water to improve me.”

“Drink it anyway. I need you to be right about the knots.”

Yem drank, and made a face as if it had been something worse.

Tolo was sick over the side at the third hour, and Marra said loudly across the gap that he had gone the colour of a boiled root. He told her where she could put her paddle. For a moment the whole crossing felt like any fishing trip with the wrong sort of company, and Oka kept hold of that feeling because she knew she would want it later.

They did not sleep much. Berru’s raft showed a lamp of banked embers in the bow, which she could watch over the black water, and about the middle of the night his voice came across, low and carrying.

“There.”

She looked where he was looking and saw nothing for a long time. Then she saw a thread of dull red, very faint and very low, lying along the bottom of the dark. It was too low for a star. It flickered, then thinned. It might have been fire. If it was, it was much further off than the ridge had made it seem.

“There,” Berru said again, very quietly.

The second day came up in haze. The thread was gone, and so was every sharp edge. The sky and sea were the same pale colour, and the sun was a white coin you could look straight at. Berru kept the bearing by the way the sun rose over his shoulder and by a set of lines in his head that he had made on the ridge, and he did not once ask whether anyone doubted him.

Oka had been feeling the swell through the deck of the raft since dawn. It had come all the first day from the same quarter, steady as a heartbeat. At some point in the morning it began to change. A second, shorter set was coming in from the left, small and sharp, and where the two met the water jumped. She had seen that off the Elbow, where swells came back from the rocks. Water bounced off things. It did not do that in open sea.

“We’re being pushed,” she called across. “The current has us. We’re further toward the sunset than we think.”

“The current runs both ways,” Berru called back. “It’ll push us back.”

“Not in two days.”

He did not answer. In the afternoon something floated past that did answer.

It was a branch, longer than a man, bleached on one side and still green on the other, with a cluster of hard seed-cases on it that she had never seen. Marra fished it in with a paddle. The leaves were long and narrow, grey-green and stiff, and when Oka crushed one between her fingers it gave off a sharp clean smell like nothing in their own forest.

“Rivers carry branches,” Berru said, when she showed him across the gap.

“Our rivers don’t have this tree.”

“Then some other river does. There are other islands.”

“This was alive a few days ago. Look at the cut end. It’s torn, not rotted.” She held it up. “It came from somewhere close enough to still be green.”

He looked at it for as long as he could. Then he told her to put it away, and she tucked it under the lashing of the deck. She did not throw it away.

Late that afternoon a culm split on the small raft. It was one of the thick poles in the lower layer, the one Oka had been uneasy about when she cut it, and it opened along the grain with a sound like a knuckle cracking. The raft sagged on the left. Water came up through the gap in the deck and ran toward the fire basket. Yem had the basket in the air before Oka reached her.

They spent an hour mending. Yem held the pole closed with both hands while Oka bound a splint over it with the last of the good cord, and neither of them said how long it would hold. Afterwards the small raft sat lower in the water and answered slowly to the paddles. They moved most of the water over to Berru’s raft by hand, tube by tube, on the swell, and kept only one on their own.

The third day gave them nothing. The haze held, the sea rolled under them, and the water in the tubes sank lower with every turn. They paddled, rested, paddled again. By evening nobody bothered to argue about the bearing.

On the fourth morning the baby stopped crying. Dure was feeding him sips from her own ration out of her cupped hand, and Oka saw this across the water and saw how little there was in the tubes behind her. She saw that the baby’s eyes were open and not looking at anything. Nobody told Dure to stop. Nobody had the right to.

The birds came in the evening.

At dawn they had been few: a handful going out in the long straight strings that sea birds fly when they are going somewhere. Now at dusk they were coming back, big white-bellied birds, tired and low over the water, dozens of them in loose lines. Oka stopped paddling to watch.

They were all going the same way, and it was not the way the raft was pointed. It was to the left of the bow, a good hand’s width of arm held out, and well to the left of the line Berru had held for four days. They had not wandered or circled.

“Berru,” she called.

He had seen them. He kept his eyes on the water in front of his bow.

“Birds roost on rocks,” he said. “They’ll sit on a rock the size of this raft.”

“Not that many. Not in lines like that, coming from that far. They aren’t looking for somewhere to sit. They’re going home.”

“And you know where it is.”

“No. I know it isn’t there.” She pointed along his bearing. “And I know it is there.” She pointed left.

The two rafts ran on for a while with the tether between them. Dure had turned to look at her. So had Hesh, grey in the face, and Tolo with his mouth a little open. The water in the tubes stood in finger widths.

“If I turn,” Berru said, “and you’re wrong, I’ll have crossed the current with a baby and no water, and nothing at the end of it.”

“Yes.”

“If I don’t turn and I’m wrong, the same.”

“Yes.”

“Then give me something that isn’t a bird.”

She had nothing. She had the branch, and the way the water jumped, and a feeling in her hands that she had learned off a dead man’s raft. She could say none of it in a way that would stand against four days of holding a line and one night of a red thread in the dark.

“I don’t think it’s Aro’s fire,” she said instead. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s. I think it’s the grass, burning because it’s dry, like ours, and nobody lights it and nobody puts it out. I’m sorry.”

Berru did not speak for a long time. A bird went over so low that she heard its wings.

“Then I’ll go on,” he said finally. “You do what you think.”

“Then I’m turning. I’ll keep the fire and the boy. You keep the water. If I’m wrong you’ll find your land in the morning and you won’t have to look at me. If I’m right you’ll see smoke.”

“You’d cross the whole current on one tube.”

“Yes.”

“With my daughter on that raft.”

“She wanted to be on it.”

He looked at her then, and Oka understood that he was not angry. He was working out whether he could stand it.

He drew the tether in with his good hand until the line ran taut between the rafts, and took the shell blade from his belt with the other, the bad one. He cut it himself. It parted with a small dry sound.

Marra was silent. She watched her father’s raft draw away along its old line, and her hands shook so badly on the paddle that Oka put a hand over them.

“He used his bad arm,” Marra said at last, to nobody.

Night closed in. They paddled with a short, tight stroke, Oka and Marra on either side and Yem in the stern holding the broken pole closed with her feet. Dem lay in the bottom of the raft with his head on his mother’s knees. For a long time he did not sleep. Then he did.

Sometime in the dark Yem said, “Quiet.”

They lifted their paddles. The raft slid on, rocking, and the water ticked against the poles. At first there was nothing. Then, beneath that sound, from a long way off, there came a slow heave and drag, heave and drag, regular as someone breathing in a room next door.

“That’s a beach,” Yem said. “Rock doesn’t sound like that. Rock bangs.” She let out her breath. “That’s sand, and a lot of it.”

Nobody said anything else. The sound did not grow for a very long time.

At first light the land was there. It lay low and dark along the whole of the sea’s edge, much lower than any island Oka had ever seen. She followed it with her eyes to the left until the haze took it, and then she looked right and followed it the other way. It did not end. There was no far side to it and no gap where the sea came round. The coast simply went on, under a sky that had just started to go pale, like the flank of something asleep.

“That’s not an island,” Marra whispered.

“No,” Oka said.

The surf was heavier than anything off their own shore. It came in over a bar of sand in rolling lines, and it picked the raft up on the third line and turned it side-on. Oka had Dem by the back of his shoulder strap and the paddle in her other hand. She dropped the paddle. A poled corner struck her hard across the thigh and she heard the splinted culm go with a crack. Then the water had them, and they were all in it. She had Dem and Yem had the basket, and somehow Marra had both of them by the cord at their waists, and the sea dragged and let go and dragged again until her knees struck sand and stayed there.

They crawled up past the line of weed and lay in a row.

Oka was the first to move. She counted heads: Dem coughing, Yem on her side with the basket clutched to her chest like a child, Marra spitting. The raft had broken up in the shallows. Poles were rolling in the wash, still lashed in pairs, and the tube she had kept had split from end to end and was draining away into the sand.

“Water,” Dem said. His voice was a rasp. “Mama. Water.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

She sat Yem up and took the basket out of her arms. The leaves were soaked through, the bark wrap sodden. She tore it open with her teeth and tipped the shell into her palm, and at first she saw only ash, grey and wet. Then she bent her face close. Right at the bottom, in a crease of the fungus plug, there was a red dot no bigger than an eye in a fish.

She did not breathe on it. She folded her fingers over the shell, held it against her ribs under her arm, and turned to the land.

Behind the beach the sand rose in a low dune, pale, scattered with tough grey grass. Behind the dune were trees, thin and widely spaced, with leaves like the one she had pulled out of the sea. There was no river and no green. She stood and walked up the dune on legs that were not working properly and looked inland, and saw trees to the edge of seeing. She had a mouthful of water in the whole world, and it was inside her son.

So she did what her husband had taught her to do on a beach at the end of a long dry day. She went along the base of the dune above the tideline, where the sand began to darken, and dug. Her hands were raw by the time she had a hole as deep as her forearm. The water that crept into it was grey and tasted of salt. She filled in the hole and went forty paces back, to the foot of the first trees, and dug again. The sand there was colder. It came up in wet clots. The water that seeped in was cloudy, and it tasted only of earth.

She carried it to Dem in her hands. Then to Yem. Then to Marra, who drank and wept, and then to herself. For a while there was nothing else to do but dig and carry.

It was past midday before she let herself look at the sea. It lay empty from end to end, with no raft on it and no sail of any sort, only the long lines of surf and a white bird sitting on the water.

She sat down beside the hole in the sand and thought it through. Berru’s raft had the water. It also had a baby that had stopped crying, and it was somewhere on that grey water going the wrong way, or the right way, or neither. If it was close, he would see the land. If he saw the land he would not know where on the coast she was. A coast that went on like this one, with no end in either direction, could hide a raft the size of a man’s palm, and it could hide a column of smoke from anyone not already looking in the right place.

She had one live ember, and it was small. She had a wet beach, and wood that would not burn. She had a pile of bamboo in the shallows, the dry lengths of the raft she had spent two months building.

She went and found Yem, who was sitting very still under the nearest tree with her hands in her lap.

“I’m going to break the raft,” Oka said.

Yem looked at the poles in the surf. She did not ask why.

“It’s the only way back,” she said.

“It’s the only way back for the people who would die trying it.” Oka stopped. She had not known she was going to say that. “He means to go back for the others once we’ve found water. I know he does. If there’s a raft on this beach he’ll want to use it. If there’s no raft, he’ll want to live here.”

“That isn’t yours to decide.”

“No,” Oka said. “It isn’t.”

Yem was quiet for a time. A pale wind moved in the grey leaves. Then she put her hands on the ground and pushed herself up.

“Start with the bow end,” she said. “That’s the dry end. And don’t cut the cord. You’ll want the cord.”

They worked through the afternoon. Oka cut the lashings that held the broken raft together, one by one, and Yem coiled each length as it came away, running it round her elbow and thumb the way she had taught Oka to do when Oka was younger than Dem. The old woman untied the knots slowly and with care, as if each of them were being asked to forgive her. Marra dragged the poles up the sand and split them with a stone. Dem sat in the shade with his arms wrapped round his knees and watched the poles come apart. He did not ask what it meant.

Bamboo, when it is dry and split, takes fire the way tinder does. Oka laid a nest of the thinnest strips on a bed of dead grass above the high-tide mark, put the shell against the nest, and bent down and breathed. Once. Again. The red dot went orange. A thread of smoke wavered up off the grass. She breathed a third time and the grass caught.

She fed it carefully, split stem on split stem, until the fire stood as high as her knee and popped as the bamboo burst. Then she threw on green branches from the grey trees, armload after armload, until the smoke came up thick and white. It stood almost straight for a long way. Then the wind laid it over to the right, and it thinned into the same pale haze that had hung over the sea for four days.

She sat back on her heels and watched it go. From the water it would look as if someone had lit it.

They came in at dusk.

Marra saw them first. She stood up with a cry and ran down the beach into the surf, up to her waist, shouting. The raft came through the bar sideways and slowly, with Tolo and Berru both working one paddle, and it hit the sand hard enough to throw Hesh onto his hands. Dure was on her knees, bent over the baby at her chest. When Oka reached her the baby opened his mouth and made a thin, furious noise, and Dure looked up at her, and Oka took the baby for a moment in both hands, because it seemed a thing that should be passed from person to person.

Berru had come up the beach behind them with his daughter held against his side. He stopped when he saw the heap of bamboo at the foot of the dune. It was neatly stacked, split and half burned. Beside it lay the coils of cord, laid out on a leaf to dry.

“You took it apart,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I was going to send it back. For my sister. For the rest.”

“I know.”

He looked at the smoke, which was still rising above the dune, now a thin stalk, thickening toward the top.

“That’s how I found you,” he said. “We lost the thread. We lost everything. Then I saw that.” He turned his head to look at the bamboo, and then at her. “Well,” he said. “Where’s the water?”

She took him to the second hole at the foot of the trees. He knelt and drank from his cupped hands. When he had finished he stayed where he was, with his hands hanging between his knees. Then he got up and climbed the dune without a word, and stood on its crest with his back to the fire.

She watched him from below. He stood there as the light went. He stood a long time facing inland, toward the trees, and the dark land behind them that went on and on, and she knew exactly what he was looking for. It was a red thread along the bottom of the sky, or a second smoke, or any sign that something there had a fire and was tending it.

He came down after the first stars were out. He sat beside the fire without speaking, and Marra leaned against him, and nobody asked him anything.

Dem slept with his head on Oka’s leg and his mouth open. Dure and the baby lay on the other side of the fire with Hesh’s arm over both of them, and Tolo, who had talked all the way to the Elbow and not much since, was asleep sitting up with his chin on his chest. Yem lay on her back with her knees drawn up. Her eyes were open and she was looking at the sky, which was thick with more stars than any of them had ever seen from the beach at home.

The fire had burned down to a bed of red bamboo. Oka reached out and set another length across it, and it caught slowly.

She had not heard the sea for some time, and she realised it was because she had stopped listening for it. It was still there, heaving and dragging on the sand a little way below, but it was no longer a thing between them and somewhere else. She tried to feel the direction of the old shore and found she could not tell it from any other direction.

Beyond the firelight something moved.

It was large, and it was not walking the way anything she knew walked. There was a heavy soft thud, and a pause, and then another, evenly spaced, as if a thing were setting both feet down at once. It came closer along the edge of the trees and stopped. She heard it breathe, a slow, wet, thoughtful sound. She did not look. She kept her eyes on the fire, with her hand flat on Dem’s chest, feeling it rise and fall, and she listened until the thud began again, and went away.

She laid another piece of the raft on the fire and settled it with her foot, the way you do when you mean it to last until morning.

Author’s Historical Note

Archaeological evidence. Modern humans reached Sahul, the Pleistocene landmass joining Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania, by at least about 50,000 years ago, and probably earlier. The age of the Madjedbebe rock shelter in northern Australia, put at around 65,000 years, is debated. Reaching Sahul required crossing open water beyond the Sunda shelf, even at Ice Age sea levels. Offshore fishing, including tuna, is documented at Jerimalai in Timor by about 42,000 years ago. Australia’s Pleistocene fauna included giant marsupials and large flightless birds.

Reasonable reconstruction. No Pleistocene watercraft survives, so the craft are assumed. Bamboo rafts are one proposed option. Robert Bednarik’s experimental Nale Tasih 4 crossed the Lombok Strait in 2000 using a simple bamboo platform and paddles made with stone-tool-compatible technology, although the experiment does not demonstrate what craft the first settlers of Sahul actually used. Voyage modelling by Bird et al. (2018) suggests purposeful crossings from the Timor-Roti region could have succeeded over roughly four to seven days, with emergent islands potentially visible from high points; dry-season smoke from natural fires has been proposed as a further cue. The cord, water-tubes, carried fire, night fire-glow, seabird and swell reading, and digging for water behind a beach are all reconstructions based on later practice or practical inference, not direct evidence for the first Sahul crossings.

Deliberate fictional invention. All characters and their names, the Elbow, the river camp conflict, Aro, the lost brother, the specific crossing and the landing place are invented. The animal in the final scene is deliberately unidentified. I have given the characters no ritual, kinship system, belief or cultural practice from recorded Aboriginal or Papuan traditions.

Scholarly uncertainty. The date of first arrival, the route (northern via New Guinea or southern via Timor-Roti), the craft, group size, and whether arrival was a single event or many are all debated. Whether people deliberately set out for visible land or were swept there is unknown, and the story takes the former view as a dramatic choice. The role of humans in the extinction of Australian megafauna is also contested.

Selected sources. Clarkson et al., “Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago,” Nature 547 (2017); O’Connor, Ono & Clarkson, “Pelagic fishing at 42,000 years before the present and the maritime skills of modern humans,” Science 334 (2011); Bird et al., “Palaeogeography and voyage modeling indicates early human colonization of Australia was likely from Timor-Roti,” Quaternary Science Reviews 191 (2018), 431–439; O’Connell et al., “When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(34) (2018), 8482–8490; Bednarik, “The Beginnings of Maritime Travel,” Advances in Anthropology 4(4) (2014), 209–221, doi:10.4236/aa.2014.44023.