sinews that
night.

_... Point of sequence. Causality in action. An atom is dissected, a
belly rumbles in hunger, a star blooms into brief nova; a bird wheels in
futile escape, an ice-flow impacts, an equation is expressed in awesome
mushrooming shape. These are multitudinous, apocalyptic. They are
timeless and equal. These are things whereby suns wheel or blossom or
die, a tribe vanishes, a civilization climbs or a world decays._

Or an earlier sun, hot and soft-stroking against leaves. Or a
Pleistocene man, smallest of all the males, whose supine acceptance had
devolved into laziness....

Gral would not have called it laziness; his crude synapses could not
have contained the thought, much less given it relevance. Even later--as
Gral-the-Bringer--his only point of relevance was to the Place where the
great thing happened.

The Place was a small rocky cleft above the river, not easily
accessible.... Gral found it one day because he dearly loved to climb,
though all to be found here were the lizards, stringy and without
substance. But this day he found more. It was _warmth_, a warmth
immeasurably more satisfying than the caves-above-the-ledge. Here for
perhaps an hour the late sun stroked directly in, soft and containing,
setting the narrow walls aglow with bright-brushed patterns.

To Gral it was an hour apart. He gathered leaves and placed them here,
and here he paused in the lateness of each day though his bring was
frugal and his belly would rumble that night. But to _that_ he was
accustomed, and this was pleasurable.

* * * * *

It was the time of the thaw. Gral huddled in his Place and welcomed the
stroking warmth. He was weary, his forage had been fruitless, his
throw-stones wasted ... would he never master them as Otah and the
others? He had confronted a wild-dog and pinned it snarling against
rock, he had employed his shaft and got it fairly into flesh, only to
have the beast slip off the smooth point and escape. Smooth points--they
were useless! Briefly, his mind groped with that but could not sustain
it.

So Gral burrowed into the leaves, his anger diminished as he watched
with drowsy delight the sun-patterns stroking. And his eyes must have
closed, half closed....

It was no snarl that brought him back--it was a tread, soft-shod and
cautious, very close. The snarl came an instant later, deep-throated
with anger and meaning.

Another had found this Place, this warm