Now the primates were bringing back the other half of the family. And so here she was.
H
er team of four was to check for animals not properly freed from their bubbles, to free them when found or help them if injured. This was not supposed to have happened very frequently, but the ground here was hummocky, with both pingos and depressions called kettles, which formed when the ice core of pingos melted away. Kettles were round and steep-sided, and often filled with water to the water table, only a meter or two underground in many areas. Wheat and a bioengineered cold rice had been attempted here, as on the tundra and taiga all around the north, as a climate change “adaptation,” but the attempt had proved to be more difficult than imagined. So in the resulting mess of a landscape, bad landfalls seemed quite possible.
As it turned out, the bubbles worked so well that Swan and her teammates did not see any animals in distress. They were all moving, however; some were even running in a panic. But soon the panicked ones would tire, stop, look around. Hopefully see a landscape not too unfamiliar. Most of the terraria had been kept at one g for precisely this moment, and had been designed to resemble the places the animals now returned to.
Caribou stood so tall that they found each other easily. The smaller animals slipped away in the wheat, headed for the hills to the west, or the little trees of the boreal forest visible on the horizons to the south. No creature was visibly in need of aid. All were on the land, confronting their new fate.
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very animal had been tagged, and now they were showing up on screens as patterns of colored dots, so Swan’s team proceeded to the next part of their plan, which was to follow the caribou, and if necessary chivvy them along, a bit like sheepdogs with sheep, on a course that would lead them east to the Thelon River. This new herd’s first migration would be instinctive but aimless—unless they picked up old traces of the lost Beverly, Bathurst, and
Ahiak herds—so whichever way they took now would begin to establish the smells and other signs of a new migration route. This would then become a de facto habitat corridor through the new wheat zone, a corridor that would perhaps need to be defended in the relevant courts, but they could cross that bridge when they came to it; first the caribou had to cross the river. This leading of animal migrations across agricultural land was the biggest organized act of civil disobedience ever committed by spacers on Earth, but the hope was that after being escorted the first time, the animals would manage on their own, and become popular with the indigenous humans, even the farmers, who were not having that much success anyway. So the escorts might get arrested before they were done, but hopefully the habitat corridors would be quickly recognized as values worth the land given over to them.
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s usual when walking with a group of people, Swan quickly fell behind. There was too much to look at; things were so interesting that she forgot what her task was, even now. The plans and research devoted to the possible rewilding of Earth had been going on for a century, and here she was part of it, and still she stumbled around looking at flowers poking out from rocky soil here and there, velvet pads of astonishing color. Above them stood a tall pale blue sky, with a line of cumulus scudding east. She still saw in her mind animals floating down like seeds in the sun; the sight had cast her into a dream and she had not emerged from it, and so naturally she had to go slow. She was in radio contact with her partners anyway. In fact their chatter in her ear was worse than Pauline, and she turned the volume to zero. She’d check in when she needed to. For now she wanted to get her focus back to the ground under her feet. In the previous year’s work in Africa she had come to take things for granted; she had forgotten where she was, simple as that. She had fallen inside her problem while all
the world flew on a big wind through the sky. Now this open land, this taiga. On the south face of the next rise, a straggle of dwarfed pines. A drunken forest, the permafrost under it melting. Low hills to the east under the line of clouds. Sky immensely tall, the blue a bit pastel above the low clouds still trundling east. The air seemed to smell slightly of fire. High afternoon sun, August 5, 2312. A new day. Warm, but not hot. A bit muggy and buggy. She was in a bodysuit that kept her dry, and very effectively repelled mosquitoes and flies, which was a good thing, because they hovered in dense black clouds that here and there looked like swirling smoke. She couldn’t see any of her team; the long up and down of the land here was chopped by low ridges, old eskers perhaps. In any case she had limited viewing east. She climbed up the side of a pingo and had a look around. Ah, there was Chris, just a couple hundred meters ahead, appearing to wave to someone even farther east. Good for them.
Spongy grass and moss of the taiga filled every low point. Only a meter higher were long mounds of flattened bedrock that crossed the bog north to south. It would have been best to stay on these natural roads, but her team had gone east, following the herding caribou.
She went north, heading for a point of high ground marked by krummholz trees waist-high to her. She reached this prominence and stopped at the sight of a wolf pack on the other side. They had just landed, and were running around sniffing and nipping at each other, stopping short on occasion to howl and then run on again. They were amped up by the descent, no doubt about it. She knew just how they felt. It took them a while to pull themselves together and lope off to the east. They were gray with black or beige points and shag, and were looking svelte in their short summer coats. More broad-shouldered and square-headed than most dogs, they were still very similar in lots of ways. Wild dogs, self-organized: it was always kind of a disturbing thought. That they had turned
out so well, so decent and playful, was a bit surprising to Swan, and reminded her that the wolves had come first and were wiser than dogs.
Now Swan was put to it to keep up with them, huffing and puffing fairly soon after she started her pursuit. No human could keep up with wolves running hard, but if you kept at it, they often stopped to have a look and sniff around, and then it was possible to keep them in sight, or catch up and relocate them again. A male howled and others replied, Swan among them. She would have to run a little bit harder if she wanted to stay part of it. That would be hard. She stayed in better shape off Earth than on, a small irony that was now making her grimace and resolve to do better.
These wolves were nine in number. They were big ones, with more streaks of black than white. Their fur bounced on them like hair as they ran. Their wolfish lope ate up ground, though it resembled a canter. Seeing them run, Swan howled to herself, oceans in her chest: they were free on Earth. That happiness could be so deep it hurt; another lesson in learning the world.
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head the pingos and kettles smoothed away, and a sheet of wheat covered the land. The wolves had hesitated at this sight, and Swan was able to slip around them to the south, behind the easternmost of the pingos. The wheat field beyond had been smoothed by laser to a plain tilting to the east about five meters in every kilometer. Flat land indeed—unreal—an artifact. A work of art, in its way. But soon to be reconfigured. Eight kilometers to the east another pingo outbreak was just visible, and another scrap of undeveloped taiga—undrained, too boggy to farm, more lake than land.
Swan pulled her wolf skin—a big old male’s skin, with head and paws still attached—out of her suit’s backpack. She draped it over her head so that it flowed down her back like a cape. She had clipped gold rings through the tips of its ears. Now she circled
ahead of the pack, howled back at them. Then she ran as hard as she could to the east. She was chest deep in wheat, and could run between rows of it. Ahead to the east her colleagues were leading a herd of caribou by way of scent and cast-off antlers. The wheat had taken a beating where the herd had passed. She saw that they were following the shallow streambed of a creek almost erased by the laser-flat plowing. The half-buried streambed was still muddy, and her teammates were leading the herd away from that, paralleling it to the south. The scent of wolves would reach them soon, and then it would be no problem to keep them headed east, over low rise after low rise. They would go wherever seemed most distant from wolves, at least for a while. Eventually the two species would come to a predator/prey accommodation, but for now the big prey animals were no doubt still spooked, and prone to stampede. She saw signs of what she thought had been a small panic, and the bodies of several calves lay trampled in the middle of this zone. Swan turned to face the wolves now following her. She stood on a high point with the wolf’s head draped over hers and howled a warning. The pack stopped and stared at her, ears pointed and fur erect—they too were spooked. Their look now was not their famous long stare, Swan judged, but a real attempt to see better.
Still, they were on the hunt, and so after a while, on they came. Swan gave way, turned, retreated at speed. She had given the caribou some extra time to get past the little swale, so now she got out of the way as quickly as she could. From the north she chivvied the wolves from time to time over the next few hours, but for the most part she could barely keep up with them, and in the end could only follow sign. For a long time it was a slog through wheat following the caribou tracks. Once, she saw a line of giant red harvesters on the southern skyline.
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hat night most of the caribou were ahead of her and had formed a herd and were headed east. They were primed for migration,
inclined to move. Then also the wolves and people and other predators were like beaters on a hunt, the people involved sometimes using sirens and scents and, as always, their own very disturbing presence. People were the top predator, even when wolves and lions and bears were around—as long as they stayed in packs, as wolves had taught them so long before—and had their tools in hand, in case push ever came to shove.
Swan, stumbling along at the end of a very long day, began to feel the spirit of the pursuit fill her and lift her up like a body bra. She was Diana on the hunt, it was what they did as animals. She had done this so often inside terraria that it was hard to believe she was out at last, but there was the sky over them, and the wind keening past.
If the line of caribou migration was to be established for good, and the entire zone made into a habitat corridor, then the land itself would have to be changed, as it had been before. Again humans would be altering it. All Earth was a park now, a work of art, shaped by artists. This new alteration was just one more stroke of the brush.
The transformation of taiga into cropland had been a matter of shaving down high points and filling up low points, with the growth of new topsoil hastened by engineered bacteria. Thus it was pretty flat now, as if a sea surface with a slight groundswell. But with the freeze-thaw cycle and the permafrost melt, things had been unflattening. The passage of the caribou was enough to tear up the topsoil; where they had passed, it looked like a phalanx of tractors hauling spikes had churned through the wheat. Swan avoided their track for that reason, except for brief excursions into the muck to bury transponder beacons, and also to mark the soil with scents, and herbicides aimed at wheat. They were also seeding boreal forest. In some places they were blowing up the land, tossing the blankets of introduced soil aside to bring the original taiga bacteria back to the surface. All this had to be
done while the caribou were far enough away that they were not scared from coming back; but there was a lot to do, so they were starting as soon as they could.
S
he slept those nights in her bodysuit, which had an aerogel mattress and blanket in its pockets to keep her warm, and enough food for a few days. Once or twice she checked in with her team, but she preferred to be by herself, unwolfish though that was, to track the wolves. She seldom had the pack in sight now, but she could track them by sign; the ground was soft, the paw prints of the nine frequent. Her own Group of Nine.
On the third morning, well before dawn, after a night of little sleep, she decided to rise and catch up to the pack if she could. In the dark and cold she hiked with a headlamp on, and saw the tracks on the ground best when she took the light off her head and held it near the ground and pointing forward.
About an hour before dawn she heard their howls ahead. It was their dawn chorus. Wolves howled at the sight of Venus rising, knowing the sun would come soon after. Swan saw what they were howling at, but by its relation to Orion knew it was not Venus, but Sirius. The wolves had been fooled yet again; the Pawnee had even named Sirius He-Who-Fools-the-Wolves for this very mistake. When Venus itself rose, about half an hour later, only one uneasy lupine astronomer spoke up again to howl that something was wrong. Swan laughed to hear it. Now other wolves farther to the west would be taking up the dawn howl. For a long time when dawn crossed North America, there had been a terminator zone of howling wolves running the length of the whole continent, moving west with the day. Now that might come back.
When it was light, she worked her way closer to them by tracking that uneasy astronomer. The wolves had apparently stayed on a pingo that night, and they yipped and barked gruffly as she approached; they didn’t want to leave, and they didn’t want her to
get any nearer. Something was going on up there, she thought; one of them giving birth or something like that. She waited for them at a distance, and only when they had slunk off to the east did she climb the soft side of the pingo to check it out.
A sound stopped her cold; she saw nothing at first, but there was a little pond at the very top of the pingo, a kettle like the caldera of a miniature volcano. Noise from there—a whining—she walked up to the edge of it to look down. A young wolf, fur wet and muddy, was slinking along a narrow edge of clay rimming the water three or four meters below. Walls of the hole were vertical, even hollowed out and eaten back by the water at the bottom, which had a tint of turquoise in its muddy blue, as if it might be floored by the ice at the pingo’s core. The wolf pawed at the lined clay. A young male wolf. He looked up at her and she half extended a hand toward him, and with that the ground under her gave way, and despite her twist and leap she fell into the pond with a load of mud.