Parasites Like Us

Times are changing in South Dakota. Birds are disappearing. Dogs are turning on mankind. Hogs are no more. Anthropologist Hank Hannah has a hope: that by studying all of the lost civilizations of human history, he may finally come to understand the hearts of those nearest to him. But when one of his students discovers a prehistoric spear point, Hannah abandons his classroom in order to exhume a twelve-thousand-year-old grave, thereby unearthing an ancient and deadly legacy. Now his deep connection with an extinct people must guide him and his companions through an ever more uncertain future, across icy plains haunted by frozen corpses and burning pyres, back twelve thousand years to the dawn of another Ice Age. Adam Johnson's singular blend of extraordinary compassion, ingenious wit, and athletic prose have earned him comparisons to the likes of Salinger, Vonnegut, and Boyle. His visionary debut novel will not only cement that reputation, but is also certain to attract a variety of readers ranging from fans of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boysto Stephen King's The Stand.

Adam Johnson, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, teaches at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in publications such as Esquire and Harper's as well as Best New American Voices four years running (a record).

Chapter One This story begins some years after the turn of the millennium, back when gangs were persecuted, back before we all joined one. In those days, birds and pigs were still our friends, and we held some pretty crazy notions: People said the planet was warming. Wearing fur was a no-no. Dogs could do no wrong. Back then, we?d pretty much agreed that guns were good, that just about everybody needed one. Firearms, we were all to discover, were feeble, finicky things, prone to laughable inaccuracy.During this brief moment in human evolution, a professor of anthropology might, for the half-year he worked, fish in the morning, lecture midday, and stroll excavation sites until early evening, after which was personal/leisure time. I was a professor of anthropology, one of the very, very few. I owned a bass boat, a classic Corvette, and a custom van, all of which I lost during the period of this story, the brief sentence I served inside the cushiest prison in the Western Hemisphere, the minimum-security federal prison camp at Parkton, South Dakota.Camp Parkton, we called it. Club Fed.As an anthropologist, I had the job of telling stories about the past. My area of study was the Clovis people, the first humans to cross the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia about twelve thousand years ago. As you know, the Clovis colonized a hemisphere that had never seen humans before, and their first order of business was to invent a new kind of spear point, which they used to eradicate thirty-five species of large mammals. The stories I told about the Clovis were not new ones: A people developed a technology that allowed them to exploit all their resources. They then created a vast empire. And once they had consumed everything in sight, they disbanded?in the case of the Clovis, into small groups that would form the roughly six hundred Native American tribes that exist today.I had a ?72 Corvette and a custom van!Dear colleagues of tomorrow, fellow anthropologists of the future, how can I express my joy in knowing there is only one profession in the years to come, that each and every one of you has become a committed anthropologist? The trials of my life seem petty compared with their inevitable reward: that the turbulent story of our species should end with all its members? becoming experts on humanity.The fate of the culture we called ?America? is certainly no mystery to you. Of that tale, countless artifacts stand testament, and who could fail to hear such a song of conclusion, endlessly whistling through the frozen teeth of time? Yet you must have questions. Dig as you might, there must be gaps in the record. Who is buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Indian? you might ask. Was the hog truly smarter than the dreaded dog? Were owls really birds, or some other manner of animal? So, my dedicated peers, I will share with you how the betterment of humanity began, and let no one claim I slandered the past. I am the past.I?m not sure I can tell you the exact year this story begins, but I?ll never forget the day. It was the season in South Dakota in which the Missouri River nearly freezes over?day by day, shelves of white extend their reach from the riverbanks, calciumlike, until they enter the central channel, where the current rips great sheets free and sends them hurtling downstream.From my office on the campus of the University of Southeastern South Dakota, I could hear the frozen river wail and moan before a lurching crack tore loose a limb of ice. When the day was clear, I could even see from my window in the anthropology building scattered stains of red on the ice, where eagles had landed with freshly snatched fish and stripped them on the frozen ledges. An eagle was a kind of bird, quite large, and it was famous for the boldness it displayed when stealing another?s prey. Most birds were about the size of rats, though some came as big as jackrabbits. The eagle, however, weigh