In that still, dark night, lit by ancient stars, a few men experienced visions impossible to describe. They did not see them, they were them. They felt the sensations, saw with the eyes, and remembered the unfathomable beginnings. From the depths of their minds they found the undeveloped brains of creatures of the sea floating in their warm, saline environment. They survived the pain of their first breath of air and became amphibians sharing both elements.

Because they venerated the cave bear, Mog-ur evoked a primordial mammal-the ancestor who spawned both species and a host of others-and merged the unity of their minds with the bear’s beginning. Then down through the ages they became in succession each of their progenitors, and sensed those that diverged to other forms. It made them aware of their relationship with all life on the earth, and the reverence it fostered even for the animals they killed and consumed formed the basis of the spiritual kinship with their totems.

All their minds moved as one, and only as they neared the present did they separate into their immediate forebears and finally themselves. It seemed to take forever.

In a sense it did, but little actual time elapsed. As each man reached himself again, he quietly got up and left to find his sleeping place and a deep dreamless sleep, his dreams already spent.

Mog-ur was the last. In solitude he meditated on the experience and after a time felt a familiar uneasiness. They could know the past with the depth and grandeur that exalted the soul, but Creb sensed a limitation that never occurred to the others. They could not see ahead. They could not even think ahead. He alone had a bare inkling of the possibility.

The Clan could not conceive a future any different from the past, could not devise innovative alternatives for tomorrow. All their knowledge, everything they did, was a repetition of something that had been done before. Even storing food for seasonal changes was the result of past experience.