TEBO1 · The Cave of Firsts

Mist on black water. A line of narrow dugout canoes pushes upriver through a gorge of drowned limestone. We ride low, at the waterline.

HIGH AERIAL, LOOKING DOWN: a narrow river snakes through unbroken rainforest and karst, five dugout canoes loose and staggered, working their way upstream.

OVER ALBERT'S SHOULDER, low and tilted up: a big black Pelican case stencilled LIDAR DRONE fills the foreground, MAXIME seated in front, bald, gazing forward and up at the cliffs, and giant jungle-covered karst cliffs tower over the canoe into the mist.

INSERT: in the back of a support raft, a pile of caving kit, a dry-bag, coiled rope, racked carabiners, scuffed helmets with headlamps.

THROUGH THE TREES, low from a mossy log: a big monitor lizard watches the canoes slide past on the river beyond. The jungle, watching.

By headlamp, MAXIME leans across the gear and shows ALBERT a rugged tablet. On the screen, a cave wall, and on it, painted in red ochre, a wild pig.

Albert looks at the painted animal. The screen glow fades.

The same pig. Alive. Bristled and heavy, rooting in the leaf litter, unaware. It is warm now.

CLOSE ON: a young woman's eyes, amber, unblinking, sighting down the shaft of a nocked arrow. This is BULAN.

Her eyeline: the pig, oblivious, further off through the leaves. She looses.

We ride the ARROW, fletching to stone point, the jungle tearing past. It strikes.

The arrow only wounds it. The pig wheels, and from its own low eyeline BULAN is already coming, fast and low and fierce.

She is closer to the animal than SERO can reach. He throws, tracking the pig as the blade leaves his hand. His stone knife spins across the gap, and she takes it out of the air without breaking stride.

She is on the pig, and finishes it by hand.

SERO reaches her, a third hunter close behind. No words. With gestures and a look, the three lash the dead pig to a stout wooden pole.

INSERT: hands binding the pole with plant-fibre cord, a knapped stone blade resting against the wood.

INSERT: SERO's face, close. An old healed scar. He has done this a long time.

They carry it home, three under the pole. TEBO runs to meet them, breathless and grinning.

TEBO watches the three butcher the kill, imagining the hunt.

SERO jerks a hand toward the river and pushes a bottle-gourd on TEBO. Fetch. A hard command, an alpha worn out by children who do not carry their weight. The child takes it, glad to be of use, and runs.

PULL BACK, WIDE: the whole camp, the shelters and the fire and the small band, held in a vast world of karst and rainforest and cloud.

High above the valley, under the Milky Way, the band eats by a fire. BATU lifts his hand to the pale wall and draws the pig in red ochre. The first mark. The children watch.

EXTREME CLOSE: red ochre pressed into pale limestone, up close and slow. A mark laid down to outlast everything.

PULL BACK, and back, past the cave and the valley, out beyond the turning Earth and its moon, and time runs, thirty-one thousand years of it.

Black water again. MAXIME and ALBERT paddle the last of the river in the dark, a single dugout, headlamps low. Ahead, a huge karst cliff rises out of the night, and high in its face, a cave mouth. MAXIME looks up at it.

The same cliff, the same cave mouth, empty. Hornbills cross the valley. Far below, small on the river, the canoes come on.

INSERT: a carbon-and-titanium PROSTHETIC LEG rests against a stack of black Pelican cases. River water beads on the metal. The story is in the ground here, waiting.

WIDE. Night comes down over the karst, the towers going to silhouette, the first stars out, mist settling in the valleys. Timeless. We could be anywhere in thirty-one thousand years.

True dark, hours before the light. The band sleeps in family clusters on mats under the rock overhang, the fire burned down to grey ash. Above the black jungle, the whole sky is awake with stars.

TEBO, a child of about ten with two whole legs, wakes and sits alone at the mouth of the cave, looking up at the sky, while the others sleep on.

The child crosses to the dead fire, blows the smouldering embers back into a small low flame, and warms a little meat left on a cracked pig legbone.

With a small crude stone flake drawn from a hide pouch, TEBO works the last of the meat off the bone, digging at the marrow. Stone against bone. Nobody sees.

Deeper in the cave, among the sleeping band, BULAN wakes. A lean young woman, a cowrie-shell band in her hair. She rises and comes quietly out of the dark toward the low fire and the child.

BULAN settles beside TEBO at the very lip of the cave, the karst range and the whole star-field opening out below them. TEBO holds out the first of the meat. She takes it, and the two of them sit and watch the last of the night.

What Tebo sees behind their eyes, rendered in the imagined-vision style: the hunted pig drawn the way the old walls are painted, ochre and charcoal, breathing in the dark, its one eye lit. The film's motif for a mind picturing a thing.

Quietly, so the sleeping band is not woken, BULAN takes up the hunt and acts it out for TEBO, hunching, baring her teeth, throwing up her hands like the charging pig's tusks.

The two of them laugh, low and helpless, at the edge of the fire.

The laughter settles. TEBO watches BULAN, and asks the thing that has been sitting there.

BULAN looks out at the star-field, quiet. She tells it plainly: tonight a dream came back that she had not had in years, and she can no longer tell it from a memory. She had another people once, a sea people lost in a single night, and the loss took the memory with it. This band took her in not out of pity but because she could hunt, and a band that hunts as one survives.

Her dream, in the imagined-vision style, worn soft and out of focus the way a thing remembered from earliest childhood comes back: a great water under the moon and stars, sea people wayfinders reading the sky to cross it.

The dream turns: a storm, a swell standing up, the canoe and the small figures lost in fragments and spray. The loss remembered only in pieces, never graphic.

The last fragment: a lone child adrift on the vast dark sea under the moon, dissolving into the dream-dark.

Back at the fire, TEBO, who has been listening, answers simply, the way a child would, and it lands, a first small seed of the one who will one day keep the dead.

A wide pull-back reveals the whole cavern: the band asleep scattered across the floor around the low fire, TEBO and BULAN small at the lip, the misted karst opening out beyond the mouth. No words. We settle into their world.

Closer, the two of them lean back at the cave lip and watch the star-field wheel over the karst. Still no words.

Then something out in the dark stops them both. Far off, on the last ridge before the sky, a single point of firelight, the first light either of them has ever seen out there that is not their own. They both point, and stare.

Miles across the valley, on the bare top of a far karst ridge, the very fire the children saw: a lone, huge, heavy figure at the flames, and a small wrapped bundle beside them. This is a world that still holds more than one kind of human. The heavy ones are out there yet, other archaic peoples, big-headed, broad-boned and powerfully built, stocky and strong, intelligent and mysterious, another species sharing the same forests and high ground.

Cut in tight, a narrow band across his face: a huge continuous browridge over deep-set, warm, grieving eyes. Not a modern human. Something older.

Closer. The big stranger, broad and archaic, not of the band's kind, feeds the fire with a stick and does not sleep, grieving over the wrapped form of someone he has lost. Awake too, alone, the last of his own.

Full light. A small break-out party has left the cave to find the fire, drawn to know what keeps it and afraid of the same thing. They crest a high blade of karst and look ahead, where a thread of smoke still stands on the far ridge. Everyone carries stone-tipped spears and bows, no metal, this is 31,000 years before it.

Tight on BULAN, contemplative, her eyes on the far smoke, the private thought moving behind them. She says the thing she rarely says.

Iconic close-up: BULAN settles her tall red-and-black feather headdress onto its cowrie band, a quiet donning of who she is before going toward the unknown.

Close on SERO, the band's dissenter, a hardened man reading an unknown as a danger to be met, not named.

Close on BATU, the maker, driven by wonder rather than fear, a stone hand-axe in his grip, eyes lifted to the far smoke, pulled by the oldest human wish, to find others and not be alone.

SERO and BATU walk on in disagreement. SERO lets slip the thing under his fear, a loss of his own, kept vague for now, to be built out later.

They go on anyway. An epic wide: the party strung tiny across an immense grey karst range, movement as survival in hard country.

Tight and low: bare feet and a gripping hand crossing the razor-edged, dew-wet limestone.

SUPER-WIDE. The band comes down off the high karst toward a wide brown river winding through the towers, single file across a colossal moss-covered fallen tree that bridges the drop, tiny against the vast valley and the rising mist.

At a muddy forest stream they stop over a bare human footprint pressed into the wet clay, wider than any of their own and driven deep. They gather over it, the child kept in among them. Whoever left it was heavy, and not long gone.

TEBO lays a small hand flat inside the print for scale. The bare footprint dwarfs it, a heavy, broad, powerful foot, far bigger than any of their own. Grounded, measured, real.

The footprint wakes an old story in SERO, told to him long ago. Close on him, grave, warning the others of the dangers out there.

We see the legend in the imagined-vision style: a people of giants, huge and browridged and club-bearing, exaggerated the way a telling grows, dwarfing tiny painted human figures.

SUPER-WIDE. Off the bare karst and down into the forest: the band tiny at the foot of towering dipterocarp giants and moss-draped stone, single file, the immense green world closing over them, shafts of dawn light falling between the trunks.

Through a screen of leaves and karst rock, they finally have him. Across the last gap the huge stranger sits alone at his fire on the ridge, tending the wrapped body of his dead, unaware. First sight of Deni, before any of them has moved.

Tight on SERO, crouched low behind the rock, the fear-and-hardness of a man who has kept a band alive a long time, mid-whisper.

No one responds. Across the gap Deni sits with his back to them, tending his fire beside the wrapped body of his mother, momentarily caught unaware.

All at once the whole jungle throws itself into the air. Macaques shrieking, a burst of hornbills erupting off the canopy at the top of the karst. A predator is on the move, close by.

CLOSE ON BULAN, her head snapping up, reading the alarm. She has read this forest to stay alive all her life, and she knows exactly what that cry means: whatever sent the birds up is worse than any stranger, and it is close. The wordless truth lands on all of them, forget each other, they are all prey now.

Deni feels their eyes and his head comes up. CLOSE ON his face, quiet, photoreal, understated: he meets the humans in the same breath as the alarm, faces almost his own and not his own at all, and a danger he already knows in his blood.

REVEAL, at the tree line where the forest meets the bare karst: the hunter itself, a huge tiger, low in the green, half-hidden in fern and vine, eyes fixed and burning, a silent snarl on its face. The thing the birds had fled, already at the edge of the rock.

Then it breaks from cover. A blur of striped muscle at full charge straight across the bare karst tops, low and driving and impossibly fast, dust torn up behind it, bearing down on them.

WIDE, everything scatters. The band breaks one way across the limestone, spears up, glancing back. And at the far edge of the rock the child TEBO loses footing on the wet stone mid-run, off-balance, one arm flung out at the lip of the drop, as one of the band twists back toward the child, too far to reach. END OF CHAPTER.