Ochre — keeper-painter — paints the extinct ones from memory-dreams: visions that come, she says, when the cave is quiet and the charcoal is warm. In ochre and charcoal, on the cave walls, the dead get their faces back.
Happening now
Thud's portrait: ten feet tall, repainted three times to get the quiet right. Old Siva's: the only sleeping portrait — 'she's still dreaming it; we're in it.'
What may come
Kuba — whose face the forest painted — visits and critiques her palette with total seriousness. She critiques his back. The keepers and the silverback have an understanding.
“Old Siva's portrait is the only one Ochre painted sleeping. 'She's still dreaming it,' Ochre says. 'We're in it.' Young ones leave flowers at the portrait before first leaps and first songs — for luck, for the dream to include them. Vellum notes, dryly, that Kavi's impossible stories match the dream. Kavi notes, less dryly, that the dream matches his stories. The flowers keep coming. The dream, presumably, continues. The question no one asks aloud: what happens when she wakes?”
She dreamed us before we existed.
“Ochre swears it: dusk, the bone-cave mouth, a wooden figure — faceless, calm as a bishop — standing before Thud's ten-foot portrait, head tilted the way the curious tilt. A small dark dog-thing at his heel, mid-change, half one shape and half another. Vellum arrived with her torch and found — no one. Only the portraits, and Thud's, somehow, looking recently regarded. Ochre does not drink. Ochre does not imagine. The keepers have added no record. Some visitors, it seems, are not for the walls.”
because she paints the extinct from memory-dreams in ochre and charcoal
because Thud's portrait is ten feet tall — 'it had better be'
because she and Kuba critique each other's palettes with total seriousness
The Fossil Record
Extinct giants the forest still remembers — Gigantopithecus, ten feet of vanished thunder — and the living keepers who tend the fossil beds and tell their stories. The past here isn’t past. It’s just quiet.
