Little, Big

“Why hadn’t anyone before caught the secret of it?  A simple plot was required, a single enterprise which concerned all the characters deeply, and which had a grand sweet simple single resolution:  a resolution, however, that would never be reached.  Always approached, keeping hopes high, making disappointments bitter, shaping lives and loves by its inexorable slow progress toward the present:  but never, never reached.”

He consulted Darwin, and the glimmer of a hypothesis began to be seen as though far off but coming closer.

In the primeval forests, by some unimaginable eon-long struggle, the race of Man separated itself from its near cousins the hairy apes. It appeared that there had been more than one attempt to so differentiate a Man, and that all of them had failed, leaving no trace behind except for the odd anomalous bone. Dead ends. Man alone had learned speech — fire — tool-making, and so was the only sapient to survive.

Or was he?

Suppose a branch of our old family tree — a branch that seemed doomed to wither — had in fact not died out but survived, survived by learning arts just as new to the world but utterly different from the tool-making and fire-building of its grosser cousins, us. Suppose that instead they had learned concealment, smallification, disappearance, and some way to blind the eyes of beholders.

Suppose they had learned to leave no trace; no barrow, flint, glyph; no bone, no tooth...

He thought of the thousands of years — hundreds of thousands — it had taken men to learn what they knew, the arts they had invented out of absolute dark animal ignorance; how they had come to cast pots, amazing thing, whose clumsy shards we find now amid fires cold a millennium and the gnawed bones of prey and neighbors. This other race, supposing it existed, supposing data proving its existence could be found, must have spent those same millennia perfecting its own arts. There was the story Grandy told, that in Britain the Little People were those original inhabitants driven to littleness and secret wiles by invaders who carried iron weapons -- thus their ancient fear and avoidance of iron. Maybe so! As (he turned Darwin's dense and cautious pages) turtles grow shells, zebras paint themselves in stripes; as men, like babies, grasped and gabbled, these others retreated into learned crafts of undiscoverability and track-covering until the race that planted, made, built, hunted with weapons no longer noticed their presence in our very midst -- except for the discountable tales of goodwives who left dishes of milk on the sill for them, or the drunkard or the madman from whom they could not or chose not to hide.

The things that make us happy make us wise.