First impressions count. I mean, what happens afterwards MATTERS, of course, but they really do change how you look at all that other, later stuff.
Take these two, for instance.
It’s back a long ways and you’ve got some primates wandering around. Hairless (mostly) intelligent (partly) bipedal (badly) apes, just loping through the grasslands and forests and valleys and hills. Checking things out, taking a look around, getting their shit together and taking a peek at the planet to see what peeked back. Sometimes they got chewed on, but they’d learned a bit and they could chew back, small teeth though they had. They were problem-solvers, and good ones, and they knew it.
And one day, as a bunch of them were sitting down by a river murdering fish with clubs, one reached into the water and smacked at it and hit something that was a lot less slippery and a lot more furry than she was expecting.
She pulled it out, and was puzzled to see it was also breathing more than was usual.
“Huh!” she said. “Well now! What are you, hmm? No fish – no fins on tail or legs, and not a scale to be seen! No fowl, you’re not full-feathery enough. Certainly hairy enough for a mammal, though. What are you, some sort of overgrown water-rat?”
“I am a beaver,” said the furry, fatty thing, with the special kind of mumbled you get when half your mouth is incisor, “and I would like it very much if you let go of my tail. I am busy.”
“Sure, whatever,” said the human. She dropped the beaver head-first. “Busy with what? Not busier than we are, I bet. Nobody’s a busier body than us folks. All day and all night we busy ourselves. Whatcha busy with?”
“Building,” said the beaver. “Beavers build.”
“Hah!” she said. “Build? We’re builders too! Here, check out this club – check the heft, check the handle. See that handle? That’s a wrapped grip of leather thongs around a fire-hardened wooden shaft. That’s some mother-fuckin-multi-material-toolmaking right there, that is, it’s no lie. Even the chimps and crows don’t pull this shit off! We build like crazy, you know it!”
“So do we,” said the beaver. “So do we! I bet you we build just as good. I bet you that.”
The human grinned, and its teeth were much smaller than the beavers and sparkled like damp pebbles inside its pink mouth. “I bet you back we’re better, sure. I bet you we can out-build you like crazy. Go on, name a thing, and we’ll outbuild you at it. Go on, go home and get all your relatives and go for it, get it done.”
“Then we will build a means to store dinner,” said the beaver.
“Great,” said the human. “I can do that dead-simple.”
So they both went home, and they both talked to their relatives about the bet, and everyone chipped in on both sides, and the next week the human walked up to the river where she’d been fishing and found herself up to her waist in water.
“BEAVER!” she yelled out. “You out there? This place is a damn mess!”
“Here,” said the beaver, bobbing to her side like a cork in a creek. “I have finished building.”
The human looked around. Nothing but water, water, water. “Right,” she said. “Here, I got this sack. Check it out: tanned leather taken from deer stitched together with sinew using a bone needle cut with flint and fire-hardened, with resin to caulk it up good. I can carry it by this loop on the top or string it on my back. I can hold all sorts of dinner in here, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“That’s nice,” said the beaver.
“That IS nice,” agreed the human zealously. “Now, whatcha got?”
“I chewed down trees and piled them up and flooded this entire creekbed, then hid branches on the bottom covered in mud,” said the beaver.
The human looked at the beaver.
“What did you do with the branches?”
“I ate them.”
A still closer look, an attempt to see if sarcasm exists outside her species. Big brown eyes looked back at her. Her own itched gently, as if ants were crawling on them.
“Oh.”
“What’d I win?” asked the beaver.
“Double or nothing,” said the human. “That’s a nice trick, I bet. But look: I bet you can’t make yourself a good solid place to keep safe, eh? I bet you can’t make yourself a home that’ll stand against bear, breeze, and winterburn. I bet I can build a better house.”
“Okay,” said the beaver. “I bet you that.”
The human hurried home fast that night. She had big plans that needed big talking.
So they both talked to their relatives again and they worked hard, hard, hard. And the human came back to the edge of the beaver meadow, and she found that the new edge was a lot farther away than before. She had to wade in up to her neck this time.
“Look at this, fuzzy!” she yelled, brandishing her prize.
“That’s what you brought last time, isn’t it?” asked the beaver.
“Yeah, but guess what’s inside!”
The beaver considered this. “Food?” it inquired, suspiciously.
“No! A HOME! I tanned leather from all sorts of bits and took poles by chopping down saplings and drying them out and I waterproofed it with tar and I can put this down anyplace and if anything rustles it in the night I can grab up my spear and give them a poke in the posterior! How’s that, stumpy? What’d you do?”
The beaver blinked in confusion at the wordtorrent, then shook itself, gathered its thoughts. One. Two. There they were.
“I chewed down trees and piled them up and flooded this entire meadow, then piled up more trees into a mound and burrowed into them for shelter.”
The meadow was silent, but for the quiet, flat grinding of human teeth. The beaver, a rodent by trade, figured this was just normal behavior.
“A third time,” she said at last. “That doesn’t count anyway. You cheated. You used the same trick twice. I’m sure that’s against some rules.”
“One trick works pretty well,” said the beaver. “I think so.”
“Well here’s one last thing to build,” said the human. “Because I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you one bit. How about this: you build a way to relax. To kick back. To have fun. I don’t think you can do this because you can’t even kick with those stubby legs. You’d fall over. Deal?”
“Okay,” said the beaver.
That night the human not only walked home fast but stayed up the whole night ruthlessly canvassing every member of her family, hyperextended family, and practically-part-of-the-family on what precisely might count as fun, frivolous, humorous, or amusing.
In the end, everyone was a in a bad mood, but she damned well had it.
The edge of the forest was a fast-murking swamp, but the human was in such a rush she practically skipped from stump to stump, hopped snapping turtles with a cackle, made rude gestures at passing bears.
“Who is the finest builder in all the world!?” she demanded of the world, who ought to have known. “I! I am! I have done it! I have done it! I have done this! Behold!”
“Okay,” said the beaver. “Didn’t you bring that before?”
The human tore the sack open and held up her prize, arm quivering with excitement. “BEHOLD!”
The beaver sniffed it. “It doesn’t look like food to me,” it said, “but maybe you eat things I don’t.”
“This is not food!” yelled the human. “This is purest entertainment! Behold! The string is connected to the thong for maximum bobble! The shiny object beckons to the eye while the squeaky one harkens to the ear! It smells nice because I rolled it in a berry-bush! It tastes okay too! It is the ultimate in amusement value!”
The end of the ultimate in amusement value squeaked and fell off.
“It’s very nice indeed!” said the beaver. “Good job.”
“And what,” whispered the human, “did YOU come up with for a good time, oh fuzzy, dumpy, nibbly little barkbiter?”
“Umm…” said the beaver, and it scratched itself. “Wellll. Weeellllll. Well.”
“Well WHAT?!”
“I chewed down trees and piled them up and flooded this entire forest.”
“And?”
The beaver’s tiny brow furrowed. “It was fun? I think? I’m not really sure. It’s just what I do, you know?”
The human’s eye twitched.
“That looks funny,” said the beaver. “You know what I do when I feel badly? I chew down-”
The coat was indeed comfortable enough to soothe anyone’s spirits, all agreed on that – wonderfully warm and it kept out wet like nobody’s business. And hey, what could be more comforting than one for everyone?
That said, first they’d have to find them. Hey, daughter of mine, cousin, friend, pal, wife, mother, you know how you’d go about finding these little coat-makers? Got any idea what sort of thing you’d keep an eye out for.
And the human smiled, and the human’s eye twitched again, and it said:
“Well.”
“First you go and find some chewed-down trees…”