Stronger Together

The woodcrafters and the gravediggers had a history intricately intertwined since their shared beginnings. The hunting pressure of early gravediggers millions of years ago encouraged the development of higher intelligence in their antlear prey, leading to countless generations of mutual distrust and avoidance when said prey began to cooperate and retaliate, and in doing so became too dangerous to hunt for the pragmatic predator. By roughly 265,200,000 years PE, the tables turned entirely, as the antlear people had now mobilized a movement to end predation outright, making their world a safer place for all - or so they believed.

The antlear people however were falling into an ideological trap. Removing all predators from the ecosystem, without an alternative solution to limiting prey species populations, left their young safer but increased their crop losses to wildlife considerably. Reluctance to harm other prey, even as they harmed the woodcrafters indirectly through crop loss and housing damage, compounded the problem. The antlear people believed herbivores to be morally good, with predators corrupt and monstrous, with little nuance. As the most intelligent of all the herbivore animals the woodcrafters themselves thus sat upon the very top of the hierarchy of life, and over time reaffirmed their place through the hunting of all the so-called monsters not only in self defense, but for sport and glory. The woodcrafters did not understand their world fully, approaching its management through the eyes of children - at first full of good intention, but with no concept of consequence - and later corrupted by a desire for power. And as not only the megafaunal hunters that once threatened them were exterminated from their territory but also increasingly small mesopredators, small molodonts once kept in check only by high mortality from predation now frequently approached plague-like population levels in forests and during such booms the woodcrafters suffered substantial losses as these animals often girdled the trunks of their trees feeding on the bark, killing them. Yet this alone was not enough to make them reconsider. It took a major blow not just the woodcrafters’ livelihoods, but to their perception of themselves to instigate the winds of change.

The realization that they were not alone at their arbitrary pinnacle of life, that those they knew as monsters and sought to destroy shared in common the capacity for art and thus self-awareness and intelligent thought, was the catalyst. The discovery of gravedigger artistry and its value to convey complex ideas exactly as it was used by the antlear people was as major a discovery to them as would be humanity discovering the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but even more poignant because the gravediggers had already been slaughtered wholesale for sport, like savage and mindless beasts, for centuries. For a creature deeply endowed with a capacity for empathy toward others, from which the very movement to end the threat of predation stemmed, it was a hard, cold fall from grace. The worldview upon which they laid their lives was fatally flawed. When it fell from under them, not all could adapt.

It was impossible to refute that the gravedigger was far more like themselves than they had ever wanted to believe, and that antlear people were not as special as they wanted desperately to think. This didn’t mean every antlear person wanted the knowledge to be widely known. Woodcrafter warriors gained fame and notoriety through their slaying of wild beasts; they would lose all of their glory and perhaps even become outcasts with this revelation, and so some immediately sought to suppress it by destroying the boundary trees. But the woodcrafter’s social structure, lacking central authority and favoring independent competence, made enforcement of doctrine virtually impossible. Most woodcrafters were too strong-willed and righteous to fall in line with a minority intent to deny reality, however uncomfortable said reality was. What had occurred between the antlear people and the gravedigger began as predation among wild animals, but it had become a genocide among people. It could not - and would not - carry on.

Woodcrafter civilization was small and contained. Information spread quickly across the forest refugia. Their heel-face-turn on a societal level came quicker, however, as a result of a very special child who gained great notoriety among the woodcrafter people at this time. In their own language they knew him first as “Little-Monster” and similar variations, often highly disparaging, but it was not very long before he was re-christened - in good faith now - as “Bridge.” A young, orphaned gravedigger, he would come into their lives to forge a bridge of commonality between two widely different peoples, and lay the first steps toward a mutualistic way of life between predator and prey.

~~~

They say that Bridge’s mother was the last gravedigger hunted by the woodcrafters for sport, but it is unlikely that the barbaric practice ended that very day - information travelled fast in their land on the paws of the messengers, but not that fast. It was true however that Bridge broke all prior ground when, after being discovered helpless and traumatized by one particularly empathetic adolescent woodcrafter warrior-to-be, he was taken into their fold. Raised by woodcrafters from the age of roughly four months, he was adopted at a highly impressionable age yet had already learned enough from his mother that he was not a totally blank slate. When he was found, Bridge was roughly similar in development to a seven or eight year old child; gravediggers leave their mother’s care around twelve months of age and are functionally adult at that time. He thus had already learned some gravedigger culture and the skill to produce simple snares and pit traps to catch small animals. But he was still very young and naive, and would not have been able to survive on his own. Bridge, initially shy and understandably fearful of strangers, at first bonded to only a single individual, the young stag which first discovered and brought him back to the village and adopted a parental role, as it was highly abnormal for a gravedigger to interact with any other individuals than a single parent. Yet gradually as a result of his novel living situation, he habituated to the antlear people as a whole and over the months after his mother’s death showed an insatiably curious personality, eager to learn and to demonstrate new skills to his new social group. He dissolved the prejudices and misconceptions of all woodcrafters that came from far and wide to see what they arrived calling a “savage” and left referring to them as a fellow person not all that different from themselves. For Bridge, the singular gravedigger socialized to the woodcrafters, demonstrated a normally hidden personality and emotional complexity otherwise hidden from outsiders.

Though at first reactions to the little orphan were often poor, with mothers rushing their young away when he appeared with harsh warnings that he would grow up and eat them all, soon the young predator was just another accepted facet of village life. He was fed at first with small fishes, sieved from the nearby streams by his caretaker who understood that a diet of trees like nourished himself would not sustain such an animal, but soon was growing well on smeerps and molodonts that infested the tree groves, which he caught on his own accord using techniques already learned from his parent and later modified on his own for efficiency. The woodcrafters did not object, realizing the benefits that a “village cat” like this could suddenly provide their groves to keep away pests while still allowing them to keep their own hands clean. Bridge was a perfect predator to share the village with; taught to view the woodcrafters as his friends, but adept at hunting pests, he now filled a vital and important place in their society.

The gravedigger chick lived with the antlear people for more than a year - far longer than he would have stayed with his mother, and adopted many of their customs. He also influenced his adoptive people; he taught the woodcrafters the principles of drawing, an artistic venture they had not previously considered but soon found themselves very fond of, and which would in the years following even pave the way toward the woodcrafter’s first writing system. But eventually, his innate nature told him to distance himself and leave their land, to find a place of his own, and one day he disappeared, leaving a hole in the lives of everyone that had known him, and in the ecology of the antlear village.

Bridge had changed the antlear people forever. But they, too, had changed the gravedigger. For Bridge was, among his kind, now abnormal. He no longer spoke a recognizable language to them, having forgotten his mother’s tongue and instead learned to speak fluent Woodcrafter, albeit gutturally and slowed down. He also lacked the territoriality his species’ society depended on; raised by the woodcrafters, who moved freely and without bounds among one another, he had unlearned any concept of it and was frequently accosted by other gravediggers for constantly breaking societal norms by lingering in other territories for long periods. Something more fundamental was different about him than just misunderstanding social norms, however. Bridge was not inherently hostile toward the sight of others of his kind. Was he a freak mutant? Or had an unnatural upbringing in a large, supportive social group that he would never experience in a wild setting permanently altered the structure of his brain?

~~~

Gravediggers are supposed to be highly territorial. Their evolution over millions of years has favored it. Yet even though they do not need social bonds to function and their lifestyle prevents close bonds within their species after adulthood, even settled, adult gravediggers retain latent social instincts learned in youth and sometimes seek out transient social interactions in other ways. Though they are carnivorous, their reliance on tool use and trapping to procure food instead of active hunting means that they do not take particular joy in hunting other animals as even humans often do; they are pragmatic, trapping animals to keep themselves alive, but also generally quite ethical, and do not take joy in causing suffering even to animals very different to themselves. Despite its solitary nature, the gravedigger has a well developed concept of theory of mind and the capacity to understand that other animals also have their own minds and perceptions different to their own. They rely on understanding the thoughts of other animals to predict what they will do in order to catch them. Yet their attention to it goes beyond filling their stomachs. When not seeking food, gravediggers rarely harass other animals and may take interest in other species for no reason than to satisfy their own innate curiosity. The gravedigger eats the circuagodonts and the trunkos to survive without guilt, but it does not hate them. Gravediggers frequently spend much time with supposed prey species, perhaps at first simply to learn the best way to trap them but eventually for no discernible functional reason except for company. They may seek out these tangential interactions with other animal species as a way to maintain some semblance of a social bond, which as adults is largely impossible for them among their own species. The gravedigger is not usually perceived as a predator by other animals because it lets its tools do the dirty work, and so it can often move freely among the herds and watch them closely without them being frightened. At times gravediggers, even if they could use to eat, will even act in a manner inconsistent with their own best interest and guide certain individual prey animals away from traps - a fairly clear example of social bonding instincts, albeit misplaced, latent for millennia but not yet lost.

It could be reasonably assumed that the gravedigger’s hostile, solitary lifestyle is predetermined by its genes, and the gravediggers themselves believe this. Their young are told from infancy of their ways of life and expected to leave their mothers after their first year. They are never exposed to other gravediggers or allowed to develop further social connections. Thus when they grow up and their once impressionable brains trim up their synapses, they have learned no concept of sociality and so continue this cycle with their own young. Gravedigger’s solitary lives are in reality as much cultural as they are biological.

Bridge, raised by a social species in his formative period, broke the gravedigger mold. Even after settling, a period in which the gravedigger’s brain fully matures and becomes much less open to new learning, Bridge did not become a hermit because, perhaps for the first time among his species, he wasn’t told to do so. There was never any instilled expectation to leave and be independent - rather, his adoptive people who fear isolation above all else strongly encouraged cooperation and enduring social bonds. It is how their kind survive. Instinct and physiological changes in his brain told Bridge to leave the antlear people and set out on his own, yet his upbringing pulled him toward a new and different path. And so, after several months of wandering and self-reflection, a bruised and battered Bridge returned to the village and the only life he knew, catching pests in the groves, and there underwent the settling process, molting into an adult black and white coat. The woodcrafters, in stark contrast to what would have been their reactions less than two years before, were now overjoyed to see the predator in their midst.

Over the following years, as they were no longer persecuted, other gravediggers recolonized the lands around the antlear people’s villages. They were, as expected, aggressive toward Bridge even though he was not to them, and established their boundaries well outside his regular haunts, but also shared symbols and drawings with him on mutual boundary lines, to the antlears’ great interest as well as they now understood their functions. Yet they also observed the strange gravedigger directly from afar, seeing his close and amicable interactions with the woodcrafters and lack of either fear or aggression toward them, and they were very curious about this other species with which he associated. For gravediggers had long recognized the antlears’ intelligence before the woodcrafters saw it in the gravediggers, their curiosity only dominated by fear of them and their inconceivable strength in numbers. Without need to fear them any longer, they encroached closer. Most certainly not all had good intentions; once a larger, older male gravedigger attempted to ambush and kill Bridge over his territory, and would have succeeded if not for being confused and overwhelmed when the woodcrafter villagers immediately responded in his defense in a mob far too powerful for the intruder to handle. Bloodied and bewildered, this place was too strange for him and he moved on far, far away soon after. But other gravediggers, still younger and thus more open minded, were drawn to this curious place, rather than repelled. To a creature struggling to survive in a harsh, wild world, the relative peace and safety afforded to Bridge by living among the woodcrafters may have seemed highly alluring - enough even to overcome previously ingrained social learning.

~~~

One day several years after Bridge’s return, another gravedigger child, no older than Bridge when he was taken in, came into the village. She mumbled in a quiet, gravelly voice, at first hesitant as if struggling to recall her words, but soon with confidence. Speaking the woodcrafter language, she said to them “hello.” Yet she struggled to think of any further words, and so the antlear people quickly brought over Bridge on assumption he could translate. Bridge, learned only in woodcrafter and having forgotten most of his native tongue, barely understood any better than they. But the young gravedigger child ‘s confidence grew upon seeing another like herself.

Very atypically, this child didn’t fear Bridge. She had been watching the woodcrafters as well for weeks, hidden on the outskirts of the groves, and had begun to pick up bits and pieces of language. The woodcrafters never saw her, yet a more observant Bridge had. She quickly determined for herself that Bridge wasn’t like other gravediggers. He had seen her several times and demonstrated only soft, purr-like greeting calls, never threat postures or harsh growls that would be expected. Greeting calls were rare in males, primarily being used by mothers to their own young, but in this way too a much younger Bridge had early on learned to use these gentle calls to communicate with the antlears as they were better received and more alike the sounds of their own infants. The lost child was thus reassured, not threatened by Bridge… and another gravedigger began to break the mold. Communication between she and Bridge was slow, but over weeks she learned to speak more fluently until she could begin to ask her own questions and give both he and the woodcrafters answers to theirs. She eventually revealed that she was an orphan too, but her mother was not killed by the woodcrafters; rather, she merely fell ill, forcing the youngster to fend for herself until coming across the village. She revealed her name eventually, but it was mostly incomprehensible to the antlears, spoken in the gravelly gravedigger voice. She did not know what if anything it meant, or whether gravedigger names have inherent meanings, for she was too young. And so with her support, they gave her a new name in their tongue; it translated roughly to “Brings Good Luck”, or Lucky for short.

Bridge continued to break conventions by adopting a parental role to Lucky. This was among gravediggers unheard of; males were considered self-serving and opportunistically cannibalistic and so inadvertently brought up to become just that. But this one was brought up himself primarily by an adolescent male woodcrafter and observing the normalization of male parental care in the species, in which both sexes are equally valued in bringing up young, and so had learned differently. Lucky thus had an advantage over Bridge in that she had a role model of her own kind, with her own capabilities and who looked like herself. Bridge taught her to catch smeerps and other pests to protect the gardens and instilled the values he himself learned from the woodcrafters, of social bonds and cooperation to survive. She made friends, something gravedigger young are normally denied, with the woodcrafter children and so thoroughly normalized interspecies interaction with the next generations.

Over the next year she grew up and became more independent, as even socialized gravediggers will. Adult gravediggers even when raised among others are inherently introverted, preferring to watch from the sidelines and valuing their own company much more than any antlear. But she had also learned the value of a large, extended family, and unlike Bridge she never left the village to find herself because unlike him, she already knew where she belonged. Bridge was the first step to peaceful cohabitation between the two species, but Lucky would carry on the torch. As she grew, she bore children, and raised them as she was raised, and her children didn’t leave either. She bore many more surviving offspring than usual, as she also ended a long-standing gravedigger tradition of killing all but the strongest newborn at birth, the primary reason gravediggers rarely had siblings. For as influential as he was changing the woodcrafters' and the gravedigger's shared world, Bridge never had offspring, having imprinted upon the antlears and so finding little interest in taking a mate like himself; a pitfall of growing up without same-species role models. But he played the role of a supportive uncle to the growing number of gravediggers growing up in the village throughout his lifetime, and when at last he breathed his last, he did so in a world where the younger generations would never know a world where the antlear and the gravedigger were enemies.

Cooperation between woodcrafters and gravediggers became normalized over the following centuries, spreading across all of the antlear people’s lands in the forest refugia, as socialized gravediggers further reached out to others of their kind and bit by bit got them used to a more connected life. The gravediggers fed upon the pests that reduced the productivity of the woodcrafter’s groves and also sometimes, with permission, consumed their dead, returning them to the earth in a way that meant little was wasted, and a mutualistic civilization dawned between predator and prey. Grown adults not raised among one another may never be comfortable living with others, content to communicate long-distance over boundary markets, but their young would, and each generation the gravediggers of the forest became less isolated, less violent, and more peaceful. The world around them all was becoming harsher, but the best chance the two species found was to work together to get through it.

The trajectory of not one but two species’ progress was shifted forever because of one small choice. Even in a story as long as that of a history of an entire world, the little moments are just as important as the big ones.