Einkorn

You are kneeling in dry grass on a sunlit slope, and you are picking seeds. Not for the first time. Not for the hundredth. This is what your family does now. This is what your family's family does. You don't remember when it started — no one does — but somewhere in the last few generations, the camp stopped moving. There is a word for what happened, though no one here has a word for it yet: settlement. The grass did it. This particular grass, small and unremarkable, with seeds that cling to their stalks instead of scattering on the wind. Wild grasses throw their seeds; they always have. That is how they travel. But one mutant stalk, somewhere on this hillside, was broken — it held its seeds until a human hand stripped them off. A mistake, from the grass's point of view. Or the best decision it ever made. You saved the seeds that stayed. You replanted them. Season after season, without knowing it, you were selecting for a grass that could not survive without you. The plant gave up its freedom. And in return, you gave up yours. The word for this grass is einkorn — the first wheat. It is one of the oldest ongoing relationships on Earth. It is older than writing, older than bronze, older than every nation that has ever existed. And it is, depending on how you look at it, the story of who owns whom.