Southeast Asia, 50,000 years ago
A high-pitched scream pierced through the jungle. Ungu stopped in her tracks, stunned by the noise, and plucked out her ivory knife from under the deerskin bands around her thigh. She darted her eyes over the surrounding undergrowth, searching for the source, while chilled perspiration collected on her brow. She could mistake it for nothing other than a human cry.
The rattling of leaves and branches, the cracking of twigs, and the scuffing of little feet on the damp earth followed another scream. To her left, Ungu could see a nearby tree-fern’s feathery fronds slap a short, dark shadow that ran past it. Close behind shot a larger, orange blur that leaped and fell upon the former figure, with both disappearing behind a screen of thrashing foliage.
Ungu dashed toward the disturbance to find a little boy pinned beneath a tiger’s paws. The poor child yelled and squealed as he flailed his fists at the striped cat’s face. Undaunted by his pathetic efforts to keep it at bay, the huge feline opened its drooling maw, lowering its fangs to his gullet, while its claws cut into his body.
Shrieking her huntress’s cry, Ungu launched herself onto the tiger. She squeezed her arm onto its thick furry neck and pulled it away from its victim while drawing her knife overhead. Before she could stab the beast, it bucked her off, throwing her onto the jungle floor. Ungu rolled back to her feet and jumped to cut the cat off from the boy, who had in the meantime scurried to hide behind the buttress root of a tapang tree.
Woman and tiger walked in a circle with eyes locked on each other. Ungu brandished and jabbed her knife back and forth, baring her teeth in a snarl much like her feline opponent. The tiger threw a paw at her, and she dodged it by a mere hand’s breadth. With a second swipe, its claws drew four dark red streaks across her shoulder. The flash of pain forced Ungu to stumble back while the beast turned to face the cowering boy once more. It lowered itself with rippling shoulders in preparation for a pounce.
Suppressing her pain, Ungu flung herself at the tiger and grappled its neck as before, puncturing its breast with her knife in a furious flurry. The cat’s roaring shrilled into yowling and then broke up into a croaking rattle until its black-striped body fell limp in Ungu’s arms. It was dead.
From behind the tree’s buttress root, the shuddering boy stared at his rescuer. His skin was dark brown like Ungu’s own, but the resemblance ended there. His thick and stocky body, protruding brow, and low sloping forehead gave away that he was one of the Oni, the people who had come down from the mountains northwest of the jungles. The shock of black hair on his head was also more loosely coiled in texture than that of Ungu’s people.
She knelt and extended a hand to the child with a gentle smile. “Don’t worry, little one, I won’t hurt you. Can you understand me?”
The boy nodded. “You Batek?”
“Yes, I am of the Batek people. You may call me Ungu. And you?”
“Me Tomtuk. Why you kill tiger, save Oni? Batek no like Oni!”
“No, that isn’t always true. We can trade with the Oni anytime, and some of us even form couples with your people. The problem is that the children of Oni and Batek cannot themselves have children. I don’t know why, but that is the way it is.”
The boy blinked at Ungu and scratched his head.
“Even if you are Oni, I could not let that tiger kill you,” Ungu said. “You may not be Batek, but you are still a person. Now, where is your family, Tomtuk?”
Tomtuk’s eyes glistened with welling tears. “Me father dead. Bad Oni kill me father, kill me family men. Bad Oni steal me mother, steal me family women. Me run from bad Oni.”
As broken as his Batek may have been, Ungu had no difficulty piecing together what the Oni child meant. It tugged onto her heart to imagine him out in the jungle alone, robbed of both a mother and a father, the enemy clan having all but wiped out his own. No child should be forced into such a fate.
“Where you family, Ungu?” Tomtuk asked.
Ungu sighed. “I got cast out. Our shaman wanted me for his wife, and I refused. Then a crocodile killed another man in my band—what you might call my family, and the shaman blamed me for bringing bad luck upon them. They shouldn’t have, but the rest of the band believed him.”
“Why you family believe ‘shaman’? You no kill man. Crocodile kill man.”
“What you need to know is, a Batek shaman can make almost anyone believe what he says, and I couldn’t just kill him. All I could do was run.”
Ungu placed an arm on the boy’s shoulder. “I guess we’re both without families now.”
Tomtuk looked up at her with wide, gleaming eyes. “You become me mother, Ungu? Me become you son?”
Ungu chuckled. “I don’t know if I would make the best mother for you, little one. I’ve never had a child before. Besides, might your mother not still be alive out there? You never said the bad Oni killed her.”
“No, bad Oni no kill women. Bad Oni make women Bad Oni women.”
Knowing exactly what Tomtuk would have meant by that, Ungu’s stomach knotted up with nausea. Those ‘bad Oni’ sounded every bit as terrible as the shaman she had known. “Then what we should do is save her, and the other women in your family, from those bad Oni.”
“You no think good? Bad Oni many! Ungu one. Who you think win?”
“You are right, it won’t be easy. But, if your mother still lives, we must try. We’ll figure out a way to free her. First, though, we must find out where the bad Oni went. Do you remember where they attacked your family, Tomtuk?”
Tomtuk pointed toward the east. “Me family live by other side of river to east. You follow me.”
“But be sure to stick close to me. Don’t go where I can’t see you. Understand?”
The Oni boy nodded, and Ungu gave him a soft pat on his head.
After a morning spent trekking eastward through the forest, Ungu and Tomtuk arrived at the bank of a meandering river fringed with thick reeds and swaying palm trees. They stopped for an hour to treat themselves to cool water from the river and smeared wet clay over their wounds to block out the lingering malicious spirits known to cause sickness. Once refreshed, Ungu followed the boy alongside the river upstream, always keeping an eye out for crocodiles and other dangerous creatures.
A fallen tree trunk lying astride the river led them to a clearing in the undergrowth on the other side, where trampled piles of blackened leaves and branches lay in a circle surrounded by scattered ash and bones. Ungu recognized the piles of charred matter as the remains of temporary shelters not too dissimilar from those her own Batek people would build. Many of the bones still had morsels of decayed flesh clinging onto them, effusing a rancid odor that mixed with that of smoke to pervade the entire camp.
Tomtuk knelt over one of the skeletons, placing his hand on a skull with the same sloping forehead and prominent brow ridge that he had. Tears streamed from his eyes and dripped onto the bone. “Me father. He good Oni. He love me all time.”
Ungu rubbed the boy’s shoulder, absorbing his grief as if it were her own. She too had lost her father when she was a girl on the cusp of womanhood, although it was malaria rather than violence that had sent him to the ancestors’ realm. To see the little Oni child mourn was like seeing herself mourn all those monsoons ago.
She noticed the skeleton’s lower arms were missing, with straight cut marks streaking the humeri. “What happened to his arms?” Ungu asked.
“Bad Oni cut off arms, legs, eat them.” Tomtuk said. “Oni eat Oni all time. Oni taste like boar.”
Ungu forced herself to keep down the vomit rising in her throat. “By the spirits, your people can be disgusting!”
The boy pouted at her. “Oni eat all meat. Same as tiger, crocodile, leopard, dhole, all eaters of meat. If you hungry, you see meat, why you no eat meat?”
“I…guess I can’t argue with that. Sorry for hurting your feelings, Tomtuk.”
Searching the ground around the camp’s edges, Ungu found weathered human footprints in the earth that led out toward the east away from the river. She could find at least five trails of prints, all laid by large grown men, and she could tell by their depth that they had to have each carried a heavy burden. It could have been the meat of their victims, or the hapless women if the brutes hauled them onto their shoulders. Or both.
“Tracks of bad Oni,” Tomtuk said as he stood beside Ungu. “Cave of bad Oni that way. You think you able fight bad Oni?”
“Not all at once,” Ungu replied. “What I want to do is sneak your mother out. Maybe attack the bad Oni from a distance if I must.”
She picked up a bamboo spear lying on the camp floor and used her knife to chop off its ends, both of which she further cut into sharp, slender darts which she then slipped into the thick coils of her hair. Inserting one of the darts into the hollow bamboo shaft, Ungu placed her lips on one end while aligning the other with a myna bird flitting overhead. With a hearty puff, she blew the dart into the bird, knocking it from the air down to the earth.
Tomtuk stared at her with mouth agape. “Whoah, how you do that?”
“We call this a blowgun,” Ungu said, tapping her new weapon with her finger. “My father taught me how to use them. I would have preferred poisoned porcupine quills for the darts, but we must make do with what we have here.”
The Oni child picked up the fallen bird and licked his lips. “Me hungry now.”
Ungu gave his head a playful rub. “So am I. We’ll have that for our midday meal before we go tracking down those bad Oni who took your mother.”
After treating themselves to roasted myna bird and then resting for another hour, the pair sneaked down the trail of footprints going eastward. Although the tangled treetop canopy got in the way of a clear view of the sun, the jungle underneath darkened over time, with the rays of sunlight that arrowed between the leaves and vines dimming with their source’s descent toward the west. Instead of leading Ungu as he had earlier, Tomtuk huddled close behind his Batek protector, whimpering with building dread. As much as she wanted to comfort him, she too could feel her heart fluttering within her as they went on.
It was almost sunset when they came upon a vine-festooned cliff that rose twice as high as a bull elephant, with a black cave yawning into its face beside a hissing waterfall. A flat table of rock rolled out of the cave’s entrance like a monstrous tongue, with a stream flowing from the waterfall around its curved edge. On top of the stony platform sat four hunched, thickset shadows around a dancing pillar of smoke, the orange firelight giving their wide and beetle-browed faces the look of malignant spirits from the underworld.
Ungu and Tomtuk crouched within a patch of elephant-ear plants, with the woman gently pushing the boy’s head underneath the cover of the plants’ broad triangular leaves. The scent of cooking meat floating from the campfire would have made her mouth melt into drool had she not remembered what her new little friend had said about the Oni’s appetite for their own kind’s flesh. She did not want to know what these men were gnawing on as they laughed and bantered with one another.
One of the Oni men, who reared half a head taller than the rest, had a tiger’s striped hide draped around his shoulder as well as the skin and horns of a water buffalo on his head as a headdress. Tomtuk pointed to him. “That man Akar, big man of bad Oni.”
Akar, the ‘big man’ of the clan, raised to his lips a limb of meat with the hand still attached and bit off a mouthful of it. Ungu shut her eyes with a grimace, praying to herself that it was the arm of an orangutan, gibbon, or macaque that he was eating instead of what she thought it was.
Out from the cave walked another Oni man toward his clan-mates, carrying on his shoulder the body of a stocky woman with long, curly hair hiding her face. Ungu would have thought the woman dead at first, but after the man dropped her onto the rocky surface before his friends, she propped herself up with her hands with a dejected frown on her face. She had the same prominent brows and other facial features as the Oni men, but judging from her expression, she did not seem like she wanted to be among them the way one of their own clan would.
Tomtuk started to yelp, but Ungu muffled his voice with her hand and a shush.
“That woman me mother,” the child whispered. “Akar want her!”
Akar rose to lumber toward the captive woman, grinning and smacking his greasy lips. He grunted in the guttural Oni language while his mates guffawed in a gleeful uproar. The poor woman looked away with gritted teeth while the big Oni brute pinched and lowered the thongs of his loincloth.
Ungu could not let that happen. Even less when the captive’s own son was watching. Loading her blowgun and holding it to her lips, Ungu blew as hard as she could in the monstrous man’s direction.
Akar roared to the twilit heavens, with blood trickling from his neck. He and his four companions all turned to face where Ungu and Tomtuk stood, curling their lips back to expose their teeth in provoked rage. Grabbing their bamboo spears and clubs, the Oni warriors hurtled off the table of rock toward Ungu, brandishing their weapons with bestial yells.
She blew another dart at the incomers, but she only grazed one of the Oni men’s thick necks. He caught up to her and swatted a bone club at her. Ungu parried it with her blowgun and ducked under another Oni’s thrust of his spear. Behind her, Tomtuk cried out in terror as a third brute swiped his club at him. Ungu smashed her blowgun onto that Oni man’s forehead, splintering the weapon, but at least her friend’s attacker collapsed to the ground unconscious, with a red rivulet cascading from his injury.
A big hand grabbed Ungu by the neck and lifted her off her feet. It was Akar who had her in his clutches, his cruel laughter showering spittle onto her face. “Me like this Batek woman. Make her me second woman!”
Little Tomtuk ran up to Akar and hurled a fist into his crotch. The big Oni hollered again, with Ungu slipping out of his loosened grip. She reached for her knife on her thigh, but another Oni fighter seized her wrist and dragged her away. As she struggled to wrest herself free from her captor, she saw Akar slap Tomtuk with the flat of his hand, toppling the boy onto the jungle floor.
Standing over the fallen child, the Oni named Akar held up his weapon, a buffalo jawbone with a chunk of sharpened obsidian glued to its tip. He growled in the Oni language as he swung his weapon down onto the boy. Before he could cut through flesh, Ungu smacked her other hand into that of the Oni who had grabbed her wrist, tearing herself free so she could ram her head into Akar’s hip. He staggered aside with his hatchet chopping through empty air as Ungu yanked the boy away from the brute, lifting Tomtuk onto her shoulder.
She turned to face where the child’s mother lay on the tongue of rock before the cave, but another Oni warrior blocked Ungu’s way. Drawing out her knife, she sliced across his eyes and shoved the crumpling man out of her path. A third Oni man, the one who had caught Ungu’s wrist earlier, lunged his spear at her, but a ball of rock flew into his temple, punching a hole in it. Looking in the direction where the stone had flown, Ungu saw Tomtuk’s mother smirking with defiant triumph.
That was when Akar sneaked up behind his captive and wrung his arm around her neck, choking the Oni woman. “We make deal, Batek woman! Go back, or we kill her!”
“How about we kill you instead?” Ungu countered.
She chucked her knife at Akar. It spun through the air until the point of its ivory blade buried itself into his brow. The big Oni slipped off Tomtuk’s mother and fell without any more life onto the rocky floor beneath him. Only one Oni man remained within sight of the cave, but he had dropped his spear and fled into the darkness of the jungle beyond, yelping like a panicking dhole.
Beneath a moonlit and star-sprinkled sky, Ungu laid little Tomtuk in his mother’s arms. The Oni woman and her child hugged one another tightly, both of their cheeks glossed wet with tears.
“More good Oni women in cave, one Batek woman too,” Tomtuk’s mother said. “You save me son, Batek woman, me cannot thank you enough.”
“You are welcome, mother of Tomtuk,” Ungu said. “May your ancestors watch over you and your son.”
Picking up a stick of burning tinder from the Oni men’s campfire, Ungu entered the cave behind them. Her torchlight revealed four other Oni women, and one Batek woman like herself, kept within a pen fashioned from bones. After cutting out an opening in this cramped enclosure, Ungu got all the captives out, with each of them thanking her for coming to their rescue.
“Ungu? Is that you?” the one Batek prisoner asked.
Ungu blinked twice, realizing she did indeed recognize this woman. “Jurong, my sister! What are you doing here?”
“I got separated from our band, and those Oni men captured me. Wait until the band hears about this!”
“Wait, what about the shaman? Am I not still cast out?”
Jurong wrinkled her nose. “Oh, don’t worry about that old son of a mangy dhole. As soon as he tried to go after me the way he did you, we had him thrown to the crocodiles. Everyone misses you now, especially Mother. Please come back to us, my sister!”
Ungu embraced her sister with all the strength she had not already exhausted that night. “Of course, I will!”
After she and Jurong walked out of the cave, they waved the regrouping Oni family farewell. The moment before she left with her sister, Ungu gave the boy Tomtuk one final rub of his head.
“Looks like we both have our families back, little one,” she said.
In the fifty millennia since, the Batek people would spread all over eastern Asia, and then to the Americas, Australasia, and the isles of the Pacific. Over the centuries, their myriad descendants would continue evolving to adapt to the many different environments they colonized, much as humans did elsewhere on the globe. On the other hand, it is unfortunate to say, the Oni would fade out of existence, perhaps crowded out or absorbed by humans of the Batek lineage.
Yet the Oni, remembered today as the Denisovan hominins, would not leave history without a legacy. Despite what Ungu may have believed, some of them could in fact produce fertile offspring with humans on occasion. Geneticists estimate that, to this day, between 0.2 and 6 percent of the ancestry of modern East Asian, Native American, and Oceanian people comes from the Denisovans, in addition to the 1 to 4 percent ancestry all human beings outside of Africa have that comes from the Neanderthals.