"The law of the forest is birth, change, death. The law of the world is birth, change, death."
She boarded the ferry at Mackinaw City in the company of a woman who bore her a family resemblance, a sister with two children in tow and fitted out, like the man by her side, in fashionable running apparel that broadcast her objective, tomorrow's race. The first woman, dressed in street clothes, sat apart on a bench on the ferry's port side, its Mackinac Bridge side, with a five- or six-year-old girl at her elbow.

On Mackinac Island, coming out to the street from the dock, looking thin and frail, almost breakable, she boarded a horse-drawn carriage, settling in the back seat, her daughter tucked under her wing. Along the road to Mission Point the carriage passed the sister, who'd set off on foot beside her man for the same destination, one walking a daughter, the other carrying a son.

From my seat behind the carriage driver I turned to ask the first woman if she planned to run the next day. She said she did. I told her I'd come to treat myself to a race on my birthday in scenic surroundings. It would be my furthest race from home.

We struck a note of unguarded fellowship common among runners. She said she intended to join her sister in the half marathon. I told her I would run the 5.7-miler, then grab my camera and notebook to record the finish of the longer race.

Another passenger called my attention to the little girl, who was frowning. "She doesn't think you should be talking to her mother."

"Am I a stranger to you?" I asked the little girl.

But I couldn't charm her. The driver succeeded where I failed, mixing an eccentric patter with a commentary on a pair of Belgian horses drawing the carriage.

At the resort, the woman winked out of sight like a sorceress, the little girl going with her like a witch's familiar, while I took the Belgians' picture. I next saw the little girl late the following afternoon at the start of a Halloween festival, sticking to her mother's shadow as if wary of all the little monsters. I next saw the woman before that, about noon, late in the racing hour.

After finishing my run I'd put on a jacket against a breeze off the straits, shouldered a camera and walked back along the course to a bend in the highway at the island's easternmost point to wait for the leaders of the half mara-thon. Like a fairy voice out of the air, someone spoke to me as I tested photographic angles.

The woman had walked past me in the direction of the finish line before greeting me. She was evasive about her results, but her time had to have been good, or she wouldn't have been retracing the course so soon. I asked how her sister had done, but she didn't know, because of course her sister had miles to go in the half marathon.

I'd forgotten the two had planned to run together.

Maybe out of a need to explain herself, or a desire to warn off a too- attentive man, she gave a striking reason for running the shorter race.

"I'm four months pregnant."

Which came first, chicken or egg? Hunter or hunted? Egg or sperm? Birth or death?

It might come as a surprise that natural history trains an answering light on such questions, really a single question in a mixed bag. Observation focuses a laser's little red dot on a reply that blasts a creationist fallacy about nature as a system of clear distinctions.

All natural phenomenon came first, last and at once. It's counterintuitive but demonstrable. Separate things are never as distinct as divinity, as intelligent design, would have it seem. Richard Dawkins, in his essay, "Gaps in the Mind," gives a sample of natural progression in ring species, the herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull, two types blending into one:

"In Britain these are clearly distinct species, quite different in colour. Anybody can tell them apart. But if you follow the population of herring gulls westward round the North Pole to North America, then via Alaska across Siberia and back to Europe again, you notice a curious fact. The 'herring gulls' gradually become less and less like herring gulls and more and more like lesser black-backed gulls until it turns out that our European lesser black-backed gulls actually are the other end of a ring that started out as herring gulls."

Which ran first, mother or fetus?

Both ran as one, without distinction, on an island at Halloween.

Runners everywhere must have wondered whether they logged the brutal miles in a subconscious race to stave off aging, to cheat death, or to turn back the clock toward youth, toward birth. Maybe, deep down, they hoped to live out the magic of Merlin, King Arthur's sorceror, who lived backwards from old age to childhood. Maybe they understood better than philosophers that beginnings and endings blend together in a single ring.

Of course, as everyday wits know, somewhere around the ring another element joins the start and the finish to form a unity of three certain things in runners' lives.

Birth, death and taxes.

Birth of a Lover, or the French Kiss

Cherie Charieux, a prominent runner most of her life, was a teenager when she first went on daily jaunts through central Michigan farm country, eating up miles, an uncommon thing for a girl to do in the 1960s. Her high school had no running programs for girls. So she ran before school, before most teenagers woke, loping along, smiling, wearing cast-off boys' gym shorts because she couldn't find workout gear of an agreeable trim for a young woman.

One summer morning, at a sound of puffing and a heavy tread, she looked back to see Tony St. Quentin bearing down on her like a bear run amok.

"Hi, Frenchie," he called.

Tony was a classmate. Cherie knew he'd done well in cross-country and track his freshman year but couldn't figure out how. She thought he carried too much Chippewa pudge for a runner. She considered him homely, with his nose from the Gallic side of his family. She considered him too much of a smart-aleck, fooling around as a cover for being ticked off.

He said nothing, catching his breath, as he slowed beside her.

"You're going to give yourself a heart attack," Cherie said.

"You run pretty good for a girl. I had to hump it to catch up."

"How come you're out so early?"

"Going to driver's training." He was enough older to get into the course a year ahead of her, which didn't make her like him any better. "I'll run home afterwards."

"That's gotta be 15 miles altogether. Aren't you a little fat for that?"

"Hardy har har. If I don't put the work in, I don't get anything out of it."

"Sure, like you get much from running, other than a lot of sweat to stink out your driving partner."

"Score one for Frenchie. If you'd work your legs half as hard as your mouth you'd be a speed demon. You're not even breathing hard. Maybe you ought to ask the school to let you run on the boys' teams."

About then she fell in love. But just like a boy he didn't notice.

"No pain, no gain," he said and ran ahead, puffing like a dog having a nightmare. She chased him but didn't have the legs or wind, not until she got older.

But then she ran right past him to sleek womanhood and trophies, while he graduated to a desk job in a tribal office and to mounting pounds.

Birth of a Bushloper, or the French Fry

Etienne Brule ranked in the first order of coureurs de bois - runners of the woods, or bushlopers.

Born and raised near Paris, Brule, then a teenager, came to North America in 1608 as servant to Samuel de Champlain. He soon broke away from his master, stealing a march on everyone by living among the first Americans, particularly the Hurons. He learned their language and followed their lead in exploring the Great Lakes in vain for a water route to the Pacific Ocean.

In about 1622 he was the first European to see lands that would become part of Michigan.

He was a sportive young man, hunter, drinker, lover, taking his pleasures where he could, fathering several children with Indian women during his 24 years in North America. Gabriel Sagard, a friar and early missionary, denounced Brule's loose morals, opening a chism between Brule and Champlain. Brule never ceased his wild ways.

No records survived of his travels. So no historian could verify a forgotten tale of his greatest exploit in bushloping.

Brule and his companion, Grenoble, after crossing the St. Marys River near present-day Sault Ste. Marie with Huron guides, became the first Europeans to sight Lake Superior. They pitched a camp on the southern shore. A party of Ojibwa fishermen did not take kindly to an incursion by Hurons.

Brule, anxious to patch things up, ready as always to learn from strangers, eager to try his interpretive skills, went alone with the fishermen to their settlement in the bush some eight or 10 miles away.

There he cast his eye on an Indian maiden. Her name has been lost to history. She was slender as a fawn and bright-eyed as a crow. She was the equivalent of a princess.

Her brother, an early riser, discovered her at the side of Brule in the morning, asleep. He woke the happy Frenchman. "What is the meaning of this?"

Brule misread the brother's controlled face and tone. "I have been studying an aspect of cultural overlap. It has been a most satisfying exercise, if somewhat belabored."

The brother walked away, returned with a fishing net, and tried to haul out a man-sized catch, startling the Frenchman. Brule ran from the Ojibwa settlement, the brother, first invoking his princely right to whip up a posse, soon on his trail.

Brule had an idea he must bear north to the lakeshore and east to camp. He kept the sun on his right as he ran downhill through the bush. He thanked his lucky stars he'd walked so many miles in the lands between here and Quebec, keeping himself in fine fettle for daytime as well as nighttime exertions. Not that he went as straight as an arrow to the big sea waters, or found easy footing on the shore, but he approached camp with no signs of pursuers behind him.

Thus Brule followed up discovery of Michigan with the first half- marathon in state history.

He needn't have bothered. The princely brother and his fellows had gone straight to camp and clashed with the Hurons, who had driven them off.

Huron protection of Brule lasted another 10 years until, back east in New France, they killed him in a quarrel, whether over an Indian maiden is not told. By some accounts they had him for dinner. Birth of a Mystery, or the French Dip

Here's an arrowhead to draw blood from white supremacists up in arms about racial mixing. The Ojibwa princess cozying with Brule was his long-lost cousin. Descendants of the Solutreans of southern France and northern Spain began running 5Ks around the Great Lakes while an ice sheet shrank away to the north some 13,000 years before the lovers looked into each others' eyes.

That's right. The princess had an old strain of French in her DNA.

Solutreans saw almost as much of the globe as a dedicated Michigan marathoner. Paleo-archeologists, finding Solutrean markers in the gene pool of east-coast tribes, have theorized that the Europeans came to North America along an ice shelf in skin boats at the end of the last ice age. Some claim their genes made it all the way to mid-continent, where, it must be supposed, they mixed with genes from Asia.

Maybe the theory sounds like a fever dream of crackpots, who've been known to spell the word "Salutrian," but Solutreans, the stone-age version of frequent flyers, were a questing, innovatng kind of people. They did cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira and other famous places in France and Spain. They made the natural world their study. They or their ancestors left cave art dating back 26,000 years.

David Qaummen in "Monster of God" wrote an account of la Grotte Chauvet, a trove of prehistoric art discovered in 1994, probably of Solutrean vintage. Quammen called Chauvet the cave of dangerous beasts, of rhinos, bears and maneless lions. He saluted the Chauvet artists as advanced in technique.

"Whoever painted these images - the best of them, anyway - did so with a skilled hand, a calm heart and an attentive, reverential eye," he wrote.

"Their skills and their vision were already sophisticated, and would scarcely advance further over the next 20,000 years."

Quammen, casting his eye back to prehistory, looked in the wrong direction to note the doings of a band of early Potawatomis on a landscape just uncovered by receding ice.

One late Pleistocene evening the band gathered around a campfire in what would later be southwestern Michigan. Their purpose was to whip up feeling for a hunt the next day. Bear Guffaws, a hunter, an up-and- coming headman, directed a quip at She Baits Bear, a budding artist, a slender girl.

"Some would run while others stoop to stones like children, drawing pictures in red and yellow ocher," he said.

"Some would waste their breath on talk, waste their manly vitality, while others leave lasting marks," she said.

"Our fathers who journeyed with coyote and raven out of the wide land in the west never meant their daughters to smear themselves with paints."

"Our mothers who skipped with giants over the big water in the east never meant their sons to weaken their minds with boasts."

The shaman had little patience for an old debate over the band's origins beyond the wide waters in the west or the east. "Give it a rest. Drop it for a few thousand years." He lifted a hand to his eyes as if to block a vision of a far time that promised answers to mysteries. "I see a blood test in both your futures."

Overnight She Baits Bear tossed in dreams of an ancient grandmother in a cave with torches to light her drawing. Every animal a people might admire or worship, some in European shapes no Potawatomi had ever seen, circled the stone walls around the grandmother as if alive in the flickering firelight. Next morning the dreams haunted She Baits Bear as she readied for her race.

When she and Bear Guffaws met, she in scant clothing for running, he shouldering a spear, both went weak in the knees. Each recovered with the showy dignity of a bear chased off a kill by wolves.

"You could strip naked and not keep up with the runners," he said.

"I'd go naked if it'd help you - I mean the hunters -I n the chase," she said.

Later, when the mastodon fled, maddened by a first blood-letting, She Baits Bear loped on its right, ululating with the other flushers, the women and children in a crescent driving line. The hunters followed in the rear. She had no breathing room to think about the images of art welling up in her mind as she passed rocky outcroppings along the route.

When the mastodon tumbled down a slope into the shallows of Lake Chicago - Lake Michigan to later tribes - and when the hunters came forward to finish the kill, she stood back in a flush of pride, catching her breath. Her descendants would have said she'd run a 5K over rough ground in about 25 minutes. They'd have given her a championship trophy.

But she had thoughts only for a picture she wanted to draw of Bear Guffaws delivering a coup de grace, thoughts of what an ancient grandmother might have done with such an inspiration, thoughts that left her dissatisfied, muttering.

"When will I find a cave of my own?"

French Toast

Cherie Cherieu, competing year after year in an early-season race popular with hard-core distance runners, never noticed the rocky outcroppings in the hills above the river valley. Etienne Brule never got anywhere near the place. Nothing distinguished the rocky outcroppings because the art of She Baits Bear, cousin to rock drawings that survive in the desert Southwest, washed away in Michigan weather centuries ago.

But She Baits Bear got the last laugh, starting, with Bear Guffaws, a bloodline featuring a pinch of Solutrean DNA, a questing, innovating line known for its artists, hunters and runners.

Her progeny bore out a family injunction to never say die even in tax season.

Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3. MR