INTELLIGENCE IS ONGOING, INDIVIDUAL adaptability.

Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

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A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may,

Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God.

Or a victim of God may,

Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim,

God’s plaything, God’s prey.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2025

WE HAD A FIRE today. People worry so much about fire, but the little kids will play with it if they can. We were lucky with this fire. Amy Dunn, three years old, managed to start it in her family’s garage.

Once the fire began to crawl up the wall, Amy got scared and ran into the house. She knew she had done something bad, so she didn’t tell anyone. She hid under her grandmother’s bed.

Out back, the dry wood of the garage burned fast and hot. Robin Baiter saw the smoke and rang the emergency bell on the island in our street. Robin’s only ten, but she’s a bright little kid—one of my stepmother’s star students. She keeps her head. If she hadn’t alerted people as soon as she saw the smoke, the fire could have spread.

I heard the bell and ran out like everyone else to see what was wrong. The Dunns live across the street from us, so I couldn’t miss the smoke.

The fire plan worked the way it was supposed to. The adult men and women put the fire out with garden hoses, shovels, wet towels and blankets.

Those without hoses beat at the edges of the fire and smothered them with dirt. Kids my age helped out where we were needed and put out any new fires started by flying embers. We brought buckets to fill with water, and shovels, blankets, and towels of our own. There were a lot of us, and we kept our eyes open. The very old people watched the little kids and kept them out of the way and out of trouble.

No one missed Amy. No one had seen her in the Dunn back yard, so no one thought about her. Her grandmother found her much later and got the truth out of her.

The garage was a total loss. Edwin Dunn salvaged some of his garden and carpentry equipment, but not much. The grapefruit tree next to the garage and the two peach trees behind it were half-burned, too, but they might survive. The carrot, squash, collard, and potato plants were a trampled mess.

Of course, no one called the fire department. No one would take on fire service fees just to save an unoccupied garage. Most of our households couldn’t afford another big bill, anyway. The water wasted on putting out the fire was going to be hard enough to pay for.

What will happen, I wonder, to poor little Amy Dunn. No one cares about her. Her family feeds her and, now and then, cleans her up, but they don’t love her or even like her. Her mother Tracy is only a year older than I am. She was 13 when Amy was born. She was 12 when her 27-year-old uncle who had been raping her for years managed to make her pregnant.

Problem: Uncle Derek was a big, blond, handsome guy, funny and bright and well-liked. Tracy was, is, dull and homely, sulky and dirty-looking. Even when she’s clean, she looks splotchy, dirty. Some of her problems might have come from being raped by Uncle Derek for years. Uncle Derek was Tracy’s mother’s youngest brother, her favorite brother, but when people realized what he had been doing, the neighborhood men got together and suggested he go live somewhere else. People didn’t want him around their daughters. Irrational as usual, Tracy’s mother blamed Tracy for his exile, and for her own embarrassment. Not many girls in the neighborhood have babies before they drag some boy to my father and have him unite them in holy matrimony. But there was no one to marry Tracy, and no money for prenatal care or an abortion. And poor Amy, as she grew, looked more and more like Tracy: scrawny and splotchy with sparse, stringy hair. I don’t think she’ll ever be pretty.

Tracy’s maternal instincts didn’t kick in, and I doubt that her mother

Christmas Dunn has any. The Dunn family has a reputation for craziness. There are sixteen of them living in the Dunn house, and at least a third are nuts. Amy isn’t crazy, though. Not yet. She’s neglected and lonely, and like

any little kid left on her own too much, she finds ways to amuse herself.

I’ve never seen anyone hit Amy or curse her or anything like that. The Dunns do care what people think of them. But no one pays any attention to her, either. She spends most of her time playing alone in the dirt. She also eats the dirt and whatever she finds in it, including bugs. But not long ago, just out of curiosity, I took her to our house, sponged her off, taught her the alphabet, and showed her how to write her name. She loved it. She’s got a hungry, able little mind, and she loves attention.

Tonight I asked Cory if Amy could start school early. Cory doesn’t take kids until they’re five or close to five, but she said she’d let Amy in if I would take charge of her. I expected that, though I don’t like it. I help with the five and six year olds, anyway. I’ve been taking care of little kids since I was one, and I’m tired of it. I think, though, that if someone doesn’t help Amy now, someday she’ll do something a lot worse than burning down her family’s garage.

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Some cousins of old Mrs. Sims have inherited her house. They’re lucky there’s still a house to inherit. If it weren’t for our wall, the house would have been gutted, taken over by squatters, or torched as soon as it was empty. As it was, all people did was take back things they had given to Mrs. Sims after she was robbed, and take whatever food she had in the house. No sense letting it rot. We didn’t take her furniture or her rugs or her appliances. We could have, but we didn’t. We aren’t thieves.

Wardell Parrish and Rosalee Payne think otherwise. They’re both small, rust-brown, sour-looking people like Mrs. Sims. They’re the children of a first cousin that Mrs. Sims had managed to keep contact and good relations with. He’s a widower twice over, no kids, and she’s been widowed once, seven kids. They’re not only brother and sister, but twins. Maybe that helps them get along with each other. They damn sure won’t get along with anyone else.

They’re moving in today. They’ve been here a couple of times before to look the place over, and I guess they must have liked it better than their parents’ house. They shared that with 18 other people. I was busy in the den with my class of younger school kids, so I didn’t meet them until today, though I’ve heard Dad talking to them—heard them sit in our living room and insinuate that we had cleaned out Mrs. Sims house before they arrived.

Dad kept his temper. “You know she was robbed during the month before she died,” he said. “You can check with the police about that—if you haven’t already. Since then the community has protected the house. We haven’t used

it or stripped it. If you choose to live among us, you should understand that. We help each other, and we don’t steal.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to say you did,” Wardell Parrish muttered.

His sister jumped in before he could say more. “We’re not accusing anyone of anything,” she lied. “We just wondered… We knew Cousin Marjorie had some nice things—jewelry that she inherited from her mother… Very valuable…”

“Check with the police,” my father said. “Well, yes, I know, but…”

“This is a small community,” my father said. “We all know each other here. We depend on each other.”

There was a silence. Perhaps the twins were getting the message.

“We’re not very social,” Wardell Parrish said. “We mind our own business.”

Again his sister jumped in before he could go on. “I’m sure everything will be all right,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”

I didn’t like them when I heard them. I liked them even less when I met them. They look at us as though we smell and they don’t. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether I like them or not. There are other people in the neighborhood whom I don’t like. But I don’t trust the Payne-Parrishes. The kids seem all right, but the adults… I wouldn’t want to have to depend on them. Not even for little things.

Payne and Parrish. What perfect names they have.

Saturday, February 22, 2025

We ran into a pack of feral dogs today. We went to the hills today for target practice—me, my father, Joanne Garfield, her cousin and boyfriend Harold— Harry—Baiter, my boyfriend Curtis Talcott, his brother Michael, Aura Moss and her brother Peter. Our other adult Guardian was Joanne’s father Jay. He’s a good guy and a good shot. Dad likes to work with him, although sometimes there are problems. The Garfields and the Baiters are white, and the rest of us are black. That can be dangerous these days. On the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful, people stared, but they let us alone. Our neighborhood is too small for us to play those kinds of games.

Everything went as usual at first. The Talcotts got into an argument first

with each other, then with the Mosses. The Mosses are always blaming other people for whatever they do wrong, so they tend to have disputes outstanding with most of us. Peter Moss is the worst because he’s always trying to be like

his father, and his father is a total shit. His father has three wives. All at once, Karen, Natalie, and Zahra. They’ve all got kids by him, though so far, Zahra, the youngest and prettiest, only has one. Karen is the one with the marriage license, but she let him get away with bringing in first one, then another new woman into the house and calling them his wives. I guess the way things are, she didn’t think she could make it on her own with three kids when he brought in Natalie and five by the time he found Zahra.

The Mosses don’t come to church. Richard Moss has put together his own religion—a combination of the Old Testament and historical West African practices. He claims that God wants men to be patriarchs, rulers and protectors of women, and fathers of as many children as possible. He’s an engineer for one of the big commercial water companies, so he can afford to pick up beautiful, young homeless women and live with them in polygamous relationships. He could pick up twenty women like that if he could afford to feed them. I hear there’s a lot of that kind of thing going on in other neighborhoods. Some middle class men prove they’re men by having a lot of wives in temporary or permanent relationships. Some upper class men prove they’re men by having one wife and a lot of beautiful, disposable young servant girls. Nasty. When the girls get pregnant, if their rich employers won’t protect them, the employers’ wives throw them out to starve.

Is that the way it’s going to be, I wonder? Is that the future: Large

numbers of people stuck in either President-elect Donner’s version of slavery or Richard Moss’s.

We rode our bikes to the top of River Street past the last neighborhood walls, past the last ragged, unwalled houses, past the last stretch of broken asphalt and rag and stick shacks of squatters and street poor who stare at us in their horrible, empty way, and then higher into the hills along a dirt road. At last we dismounted and walked our bikes down the narrow trail into one of the canyons that we and others use for target practice. It looked all right this time, but we always have to be careful. People use canyons for a lot of things. If we find corpses in one, we stay away from it for a while. Dad tries to shield us from what goes on in the world, but he can’t. Knowing that, he also tries to teach us to shield ourselves.

Most of us have practiced at home with BB guns on homemade targets or

on squirrel and bird targets. I’ve done all that. My aim is good, but I don’t like it with the birds and squirrels. Dad was the one who insisted on my learning to shoot them. He said moving targets would be good for my aim. I think there was more to it than that. I think he wanted to see whether or not I could do it—whether shooting a bird or a squirrel would trigger my hyperempathy

It didn’t, quite. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t painful. It felt like a big, soft,

strange ghost blow, like getting hit with a huge ball of air, but with no coolness, no feeling of wind. The blow, though still soft, was a little harder with squirrels and sometimes rats than with birds. All three had to be killed, though. They ate our food or ruined it. Tree-crops were their special victims: Peaches, plums, figs, persimmons, nuts… And crops like strawberries, blackberries, grapes… Whatever we planted, if they could get at it, they would. Birds are particular pests because they can fly in, yet I like them. I envy their ability to fly. Sometimes I get up and go out at dawn just so I can watch them without anyone scaring them or shooting them. Now that I’m old enough to go target shooting on Saturdays, I don’t intend to shoot any more birds, no matter what Dad says. Besides, just because I can shoot a bird or a squirrel doesn’t mean I could shoot a person—a thief like the ones who robbed Mrs. Sims. I don’t know whether I could do that. And if I did it, I don’t know what would happen to me. Would I die?

It’s my father’s fault that we pay so much attention to guns and shooting. He carries a nine millimeter automatic pistol whenever he leaves the neighborhood. He carries it on his hip where people can see it. He says that discourages mistakes. Armed people do get killed—most often in crossfires or by snipers—but unarmed people get killed a lot more often.

Dad also has a silenced nine millimeter submachine gun. It stays at home with Cory in case something happens there while he’s away. Both guns are German—Heckler & Koch. Dad has never said where he got the submachine gun. It’s illegal, of course, so I don’t blame him. It must have cost a hell of a lot. He’s only had it away from home a few times so he, Cory, and I could get the feel of it. He’ll do the same for the boys when they’re older.

Cory has an old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver that she’s good with. She’s had it since before she married Dad. She loaned that one to me today. Ours aren’t the best or the newest guns in the neighborhood, but they all work. Dad and Cory keep them in good condition. I have to help with that now. And they spend the necessary time on practice and money on ammunition.

At neighborhood association meetings, Dad used to push the adults of every household to own weapons, maintain them, and know how to use them. “Know how to use them so well,” he’s said more than once, “that you’re as able to defend yourself at two A.M. as you are at two P.M.”

At first there were a few neighbors who didn’t like that—older ones who said it was the job of the police to protect them, younger ones who worried that their little children would find their guns, and religious ones who didn’t think a minister of the gospel should need guns. This was several years ago.

“The police,” my father told them, “may be able to avenge you, but they

can’t protect you. Things are getting worse. And as for your children… Well, yes, there is risk. But you can put your guns out of their reach while they’re very young, and train them as they grow older. That’s what I mean to do. I believe they’ll have a better chance of growing up if you can protect them.” He paused, stared at the people, then went on. “I have a wife and five children,” he said. “I will pray for them all. I’ll also see to it that they know how to defend themselves. And for as long as I can, I will stand between my family and any intruder.” He paused again. “Now that’s what I have to do. You all do what you have to do.”

By now there are at least two guns in every household. Dad says he suspects that some of them are so well hidden—like Mrs. Sims’ gun—that they wouldn’t be available in an emergency. He’s working on that.

All the kids who attend school at our house get gun handling instruction. Once they’ve passed that and turned fifteen, two or three of the neighborhood adults begin taking them to the hills for target practice. It’s a kind of rite of passage for us. My brother Keith has been whining to go along whenever someone gets a shooting group together, but the age rule is firm.

I worry about the way Keith wants to get his hands on the guns. Dad doesn’t seem to worry, but I do.

There are always a few groups of homeless people and packs of feral dogs living out beyond the last hillside shacks. People and dogs hunt rabbits, possums, squirrels, and each other. Both scavenge whatever dies. The dogs used to belong to people—or their ancestors did. But dogs eat meat. These days, no poor or middle class person who had an edible piece of meat would give it to a dog. Rich people still keep dogs, either because they like them or because they use them to guard estates, enclaves, and businesses. The rich have plenty of other security devices, but the dogs are extra insurance. Dogs scare people.

I did some shooting today, and I was leaning against a boulder, watching others shoot, when I realized there was a dog nearby, watching me. Just one dog—male, yellow-brown, sharp-eared, short-haired. He wasn’t big enough to make a meal of me, and I still had the Smith & Wesson, so while he was looking me over, I took a good look at him. He was lean, but he didn’t look starved. He looked alert and curious. He sniffed the air, and I remembered that dogs were supposed to be oriented more toward scent than sight.

“Look at that,” I said to Joanne Garfield who was standing nearby.

She turned, gasped, and jerked her gun up to aim at the dog. The dog vanished into the dry brush and boulders. Turning, Joanne tried to look everywhere as though she expected to see more dogs stalking us, but there

was nothing. She was shaking.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were afraid of them.”

She drew a deep breath and looked at the place where the dog had been. “I didn’t know I was either,” she whispered. “I’ve never been so close to one before. I… I wish I had gotten a better look at it.”

At that moment, Aura Moss screamed and fired her fathers Llama automatic.

I pushed away from the boulder and turned to see Aura pointing her gun toward some rocks and babbling.

“It was over there!” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “It was some kind of animal—dirty yellow with big teeth. It had its mouth open. It was huge!”

“You stupid bitch, you almost shot me!” Michael Talcott shouted. I could see now that he had ducked down behind a boulder. He would have been in Aura’s line of fire, but he didn’t seem to be hurt.

“Put your gun away, Aura,” my father said. He kept his voice low, but he was angry. I could see that, whether Aura could or not.

“It was an animal,” she insisted. “A big one. It might still be around.” “Aura!” My father raised his voice and hardened it.

Aura looked at him, then seemed to realize that she had more than a dog to worry about. She looked at the gun in her hand, frowned, fumbled it safe, and put it back into her holster.

“Mike?” my father said.

“I’m okay,” Michael Talcott said. “No thanks to her!”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Aura said, right on cue. “There was an animal. It could have killed you! It was sneaking up on us!”

“I think it was just a dog,” I said. “There was one watching us over here.

Joanne moved and it ran away.”

“You should have killed it,” Peter Moss said. “What do you want to do?

Wait until it jumps someone.”

“What was it doing?” Jay Garfield asked. “Just watching?”

“That’s all,” I said. “It didn’t look sick or starved. It wasn’t very big. I don’t think it was a danger to anyone here. There are too many of us, and we’re all too big.”

“The thing I saw was huge,” Aura insisted. “It had its mouth open!”

I went over to her because I’d had a sudden thought. “It was panting,” I said. “They pant when they’re hot. It doesn’t mean they’re angry or hungry.” I hesitated, watching her. “You’ve never seen one before, have you?”

She shook her head.

“They’re bold, but they’re not dangerous to a group like this. You don’t

have to worry.”

She didn’t look as though she quite believed me, but she seemed to relax a little. The Moss girls were both bullied and sheltered. They were almost never allowed to leave the walls of the neighborhood. They were educated at home by their mothers according to the religion their father had assembled, and they were warned away from the sin and contamination of the rest of the world. I’m surprised that Aura was allowed to come to us for gun handling instruction and target practice. I hope it will be good for her—and I hope the rest of us will survive.

“All of you stay where you are,” Dad said. He glanced at Jay Garfield, then went a short way up among the rocks and scrub oaks to see whether Aura had shot anything. He kept his gun in his hand and the safety off. He was out of our sight for no more than a minute.

He came back with a look on his face that I couldn’t read. “Put your guns away,” he said. “We’re going home.”

“Did I kill it?” Aura demanded.

“No. Get your bikes.” He and Jay Garfield whispered together for a moment, and Jay Garfield sighed. Joanne and I watched them, wondering, knowing we wouldn’t hear anything from them until they were ready to tell us.

“This is not about a dead dog,” Harold Baiter said behind us. Joanne moved back to stand beside him.

“It’s about either a dog pack or a human pack,” I said, “or maybe it’s a corpse.”

It was, as I found out later, a family of corpses: A woman, a little boy of about four years, and a just-born infant, all partly eaten. But Dad didn’t tell me that until we got home. At the canyon, all we knew was that he was upset. “If there were a corpse around here, we would have smelled it,” Harry

said.

“Not if it were fresh,” I countered.

Joanne looked at me and sighed the way her father sighs. “If its that, I wonder where we’ll go shooting next time. I wonder when there’ll be a next time.”

Peter Moss and the Talcott brothers had gotten into an argument over whose fault it was that Aura had almost shot Michael, and Dad had to break it up. Then Dad checked with Aura to see that she was all right. He said a few things to her that I couldn’t hear, and I saw a tear slide down her face. She cries easily. She always has.

Dad walked away from her looking harassed. He led us up the path out of the canyon. We walked our bikes, and we all kept looking around. We could

see now that there were other dogs nearby. We were being watched by a big pack. Jay Garfield brought up the rear, guarding our backs.

“He said we should stick together,” Joanne told me. She had seen me looking back at her father.

“You and I?”

“Yeah, and Harry. He said we should look out for one another.”

“I don’t think these dogs are stupid enough or hungry enough to attack us in daylight. They’ll go after some lone street person tonight.”

“Shut up, for godsake.”

The road was narrow going up and out of the canyon. It would have been a bad place to have to fight off dogs. Someone could trip and step off the crumbling edge. Someone could be knocked off the edge by a dog or by one of us. That would mean falling several hundred feet.

Down below, I could hear dogs fighting now. We may have been close to their dens or whatever they lived in. I thought maybe we were just close to what they were feeding on.

“If they come,” my father said in a quiet, even voice, “Freeze, aim, and fire. That will save you. Nothing else will. Freeze, aim, and fire. Keep your eyes open and stay calm.”

I replayed the words in my mind as we went up the switchbacks. No doubt Dad wanted us to replay them. I could see that Aura was still leaking tears and smearing and streaking her face with dirt like a little kid. She was too wrapped up in her own misery and fear to be of much use.

We got almost to the top before anything happened. We were beginning to relax, I think. I hadn’t seen a dog for a while. Then, from the front of our line, we heard three shots.

We all froze, most of, us unable to see what had happened.

“Keep moving,” my father called. “It’s all right. It was just one dog getting too close.”

“Are you okay?” I called.

“Yes,” he said. “Just come on and keep your eyes open.”

One by one, we came abreast of the dog that had been shot and walked past it. It was a bigger, grayer animal than the one I had seen. There was a beauty to it. It looked like pictures I had seen of wolves. It was wedged against a hanging boulder just a few steps up the steep canyon wall from us.

It moved.

I saw its bloody wounds as it twisted. I bit my tongue as the pain I knew it must feel became my pain. What to do? Keep walking? I couldn’t. One more step and I would fall and lie in the dirt, helpless against the pain. Or I might fall into the canyon.

“It’s still alive,” Joanne said behind me. “It’s moving.”

Its forefeet were making little running motions, its claws scraping against the rock.

I thought I would throw up. My belly hurt more and more until I felt skewered through the middle. I leaned on my bike with my left arm. With my right hand, I drew the Smith & Wesson, aimed, and shot the beautiful dog through its head.

I felt the impact of the bullet as a hard, solid blow—something beyond pain. Then I felt the dog die. I saw it jerk, shudder, stretch its body long, then freeze. I saw it die. I felt it die. It went out like a match in a sudden vanishing of pain. Its life flared up, then went out. I went a little numb. Without the bike, I would have collapsed.

People had crowded close before and behind me. I heard them before I could see them clearly.

“It’s dead,” I heard Joanne say “Poor thing.” “What?” my father demanded. “Another one?”

I managed to focus on him. He must have skirted close to the cliff-edge of the road to have gotten all the way back to us. And he must have run.

“The same one,” I said, managing to straighten up. “It wasn’t dead. We saw it moving.”

“I put three bullets into it,” he said.

“It was moving, Reverend Olamina,” Joanne insisted. “It was suffering. If Lauren hadn’t shot it, someone else would have had to.”

Dad sighed. “Well, it isn’t suffering now. Let’s get out of here.” Then he seemed to realize what Joanne had said. He looked at me. “Are you all right?” I nodded. I don’t know how I looked. No one was reacting to me as though I looked odd, so I must not have shown much of what I had gone through. I think only Harry Baiter, Curtis Talcott, and Joanne had seen me shoot the dog. I looked at them and Curtis grinned at me. He leaned against his bike and in a slow, lazy motion, he drew an imaginary gun, took careful

aim at the dead dog, and fired an imaginary shot.

“Pow,” he said. “Just like she does stuff like that every day Pow!” “Let’s go.” My father said.

We began walking up the path again. We left the canyon and made our way down to the street. There were no more dogs.

I walked, then rode in a daze, still not quite free of the dog I had killed. I had felt it die, and yet I had not died. I had felt its pain as though it were a human being. I had felt its life flare and go out, and I was still alive.

Pow.