Chapter 1: The Dawn of Media

When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will change.


They lived in groups of 40 to 50 on a dry coastal plain crevassing down from mountains and then low foothills across open space to the sea.

They knew about the sea. Water reaching to the rim of the world. But they couldn’t live down there by it. They couldn’t drink the water. They tried, because the water was there and they knew they needed it. All that water, but it did not satisfy their thirst and it made them sick.

So they lived inland, along streams that came down from the mountains and gave them good water that they could drink. Most of the people gave it no thought but occasionally one of them, usually the leader, would look up from drinking this sweet water and look off toward the sea and wonder about the two waters that were the same but so different.

Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight.

People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 40 to 60 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them. There were deer and small animals everywhere foraging with the people and the people saw them as a nuisance. They were competitors for the food.

When two groups came close together there was tension. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.

Then something happened. The ground shook and rolled and heaved. Cracks opened in the earth, trees fell, hillsides and mountain faces collapsed. People were terrified and many were killed or hurt. When the land was still again a leader looked at his shadow on the ground and wondered. He had no doubt the shadow had life. It moved as he moved. It was his brother in the earth. And his brother was much stronger than he and held him to the earth. He tried to leap free but his earth brother always pulled him back. Was it this power with which an angry earth brother shook the earth? The leader thought it must be important that the people respect their earth brothers to keep their anger away and he showed his people how to stamp out images of the earth brothers into the earth, and not normal size but huge, to acknowledge the earth brothers’ power.

Another leader in a group near a mountain face as the earth shook saw rocks fall and hit a deer. The deer fell and was still. Above all else leaders were cautious and to see a deer lie still even as he approached was new and frightening. It took courage to kneel and reach out a hand and with just the tips of his fingers touch the animal and still it did not move. He felt a need to look at the rocks and wonder how they did what they did to the deer. But at the same time he became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the deer. He took his hand away and there was red on his fingertips and from it the scent. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat a growl gathered and grew into a roar of discovery. He looked at the deer where he had touched it, found the wound the rock had made, lifted the deer toward him and with equal care and helplessness sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled and the flesh came away and a new circuit in humankind was closed.

It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply and at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways.

It also made groups different in a new way. Groups emerged that were better at finding the deer and other animals and in bringing them down. They lived nearer the mountains because that was where the animals were. They discovered that a small, sharp rock could kill as easily as a larger blunt one and had the advantage of distance. But there was danger because in the mountains were the animals that had always hunted the people and whose shrieks in the night terrified the adults huddled around their young. The mountain groups tied sharp rocks to the tips of slender long branches and with these could discourage the big mountain cats. From there it took only an accident of impulse to discover the effect of throwing one of these devices at an animal and hitting it.

Leaders were very careful about the sky and watched it constantly for signs. They watched it both when they could see the sky and when they couldn’t see it. The time of seeing the sky had been very hot even though the time had been growing shorter before the time of the sky they couldn’t see. They sky they couldn’t see was coming nearer when a leader and the adult males in a mountain group crept through thick undergrowth nearer an animal – a bulky javelina – busy feeding on manzanita at the foot of a slope. A hunter threw a spear and missed and the javelina rumbled away. The sharp point of the spear struck a rock face and a spark fell away into brush. The hunter, retrieving his spear, saw a wisp of smoke and looked back at his leader.

The leader was watching the sky and judging the time before vision would disappear. He did not want his people in the open during the time of the cats and he called them back and down the slopes toward the rest of the group encamped on a series of rock ledges and sheltering crevasses. The hunter gave another glance at the cylinder of smoke and trotted back toward the others. They had just enough time to carry back the kill, go to the stream and drink and settle into the rocks with their mates and young ones before vision disappeared.

Ten miles toward the sea, down on the plain, another leader watched and listened. Even though the blinding circle of fire in the sky had been consumed by the rim of the world behind him, as he watched the mountains disappear into blackness he recorded a strangeness in the air. In blackness the air was still hot and did not move at all. His skin felt taut and it tingled as he knew it did when the blackness brought no cool feel of water into the air. In the blackness though he could not see the mountains he saw a red glow and he knew what it was. The people knew about fire at times when the sky sent down angry blinding rockets – the earth always seemed to be angry about something – that exploded in land-rattling booms against the earth. The leader had seen fire many times after the booms but then water would fall from the sky into which the fire would disappear.

But this time there was no water in the sky. The leader settled back and rested and listened for the wind he knew could come in air that was hot and still and dry. People watching him knew he was alert and they knew something could happen without knowing what. They looked back and forth among themselves for reassurance and tried to sleep.

The leader was dozing when the wind woke him up. He stood up and judged it. Not strong but he knew it would be. The glow in the invisible mountains was much larger but what fascinated him was the sky. In the blackness there was a heavier blackness. A cloud. A massive cloud but not the kind that brought water from the sky. Not in this air. He sniffed the wind but couldn’t smell the smell of the cloud that he knew came off fire. Very strange and new. The hair on his neck stood up. He watched the glow and the cloud and with all of his senses straining waited for vision to come. In his face the force of the wind grew until he had to lean against it. He thought about awakening the group but looked and saw that most of them already were.

On the mountain ledge the mountain group’s leader had had no time to wait. He saw not black but red sky and did all he could do. He ran. Ran with the others through a red tumult of wind-blown burning missiles shot at them by a 150-foot wall of fire directly at their backs. The young and swift stayed ahead of the wall. Others were failing and the leader took them beneath a rock outcropping where they hugged the rock and each other as the wall of fire closed over and around them.

On the plain, his first vision told the leader there everything he needed to know. He motioned to his group to get up and follow him. The glow was now a wide red wall of fire that appeared to the leader to be moving toward him with the speed of the wind. He took his people toward the sea but also in a direction that both paralleled the wall of fire and took them toward the river. The leader did not see any fire beyond the river. In the distance he saw the movement of other groups moving out of the way of the wall. Groups arrived at the same position on the river where it was possible to walk most of the way without swimming and this time among the groups there was only cooperation and the instinct to survive.

Most did, as the fire surged through and sped toward the only obstacle that could stop it: the sea. It was days before the ground was cool again but the plains leader didn’t even bother going back. The group moved south of the river and eventually settled into a new encampment on a mesa at the top of a long canyon.

In the mountains, 17 of that group survived and did go back and found the others where they had died under the outcropping. The survivors, 10 males and seven females, didn’t understand the heaviness that came upon their hearts but they understood fear and they were very afraid. In turn they knelt by the leader’s body and rested hands on him as if to draw strength and guidance.

One of them lifted his eyes toward the sea, where the light was disappearing and pulling the darkness over them. But getting through the darkness, he knew, the light would come again. In his throat rose a low, compelling cry of defiance, and of pure interest.
© Michael Grant 2006

Try this: In reading “The Dawn of Media,” look for events you would expect to be reported in the next day’s newspaper, if newspapers had existed at that time.