West of Eden [antikvár]

PROLOGUE: KERRICKI have read the pages that follow here and I honestly believe them to be a true history of our world.Not that belief was easy to come by. It might be said that my view of the world was a very restricted one. I was bom in a small encampment made up of three families. During the warm seasons we stayed on the shore of a great lake rich with fish. My first memories are of that lake, looking across its still water at the high mountains beyond, seeing their peaks grow white with the first snows of winter. When the snow whitened our tents, and the grass around as well, that would be the time when the hunters went to the mountains. I was in a hurry to grow up, eager to hunt the deer, and the greatdeer, at their side.That simple world of simple pleasures is gone forever. Everything has changedand not for the better. At times I wake at night and wish that what happened had never happened. But these are foolish thoughts and the world is as it is, changed now in every way. What I thought was the entirety of existence has proved only to be a tiny comer of reality. My lake and my mountains are only the smallest part of a great continent that stretches between two immense oceans. I knew of the western ocean because our hunters had fished there.I also knew about the others and leamed to hate them long before I ever saw them. As our flesh is warm, so is theirs cold. We have hair upon our heads and a hunter wall grow a proud beard, while the animals that we hunt have warm flesh and fur or hair, but this is not true of Yilane. They are cold and smooth and scaled, have claws and teeth to rend and tear, are large and terrible, to be feared. And hated. I knew that they lived in the warm waters of the ocean to the south