I Only Have Two Hands

Two million years ago, a boy and a girl live with their small band in an East African forest where the stream has shrunk to a chain of muddy hollows. When the adults leave to search for water and fail to return, the children follow baboon tracks to a spring beneath a steep bank, carrying a sharp stone flake and a folded piece of bark. The girl digs until water gathers, but the collapsing bank traps the boy’s foot as elephants push through the trees toward the same wet ground. She must abandon their only vessel to dig him free or carry water back to the younger children waiting beneath the empty sleeping branches.