“What happened to the, the leader of the hunt?” Nirgal asked, looking around. “Oh, the diana can’t sleep with us tonight.” “Besides she fucked up, she don’t want to.” “Yes she does. You know Zo, she always has a reason.” They laughed and moved nearer to the fire. A woman poked out a charred steak, waved it on its stick until it cooled. “I eat all of you, little sister.” And bit into the steak. Nirgal ate with them, lost in the wet hot taste of the meat, chewing hard but still bolting the food, his body all abuzz with trembling light-headed hunger. Food, food!

He ate his second steak more slowly, watching the others. His stomach was filling quickly. He recalled the scramble down the ravine: it was amazing what the body could do in such a situation, it had been an out-of-body experience — or rather an experience so far into the body that it was like unconsciousness — diving deep into the cerebellum, presumably, into that ancient undermind that knew how to do things. A state of grace.

A resiny branch spit flames out of the blaze. His sight had not yet settled down, things jumped and blurred with afterimages. The spear thrower and another man came up to him, “Here, drink this,” and tilted a skin’s spigot against his lips and laughed, some bitter milky drink in his mouth. “Have some of the white brother, brother.” A group of them picked up some stones and began to hit them together in rhythm, all their different patterns meshing bass to treble. The rest of them began to dance around the bonfire, hooting or singing or chanting. “Auqakuh, Qahira, Harmakhis, Kasei. Auqakuh, Mangala, Ma’adim, Bahram.” Nirgal danced with them, exhaustion banished. It was a cold night and one could move in or away from the heat of the fire, feel its radiance against cold bare skin, move back out into the chill. When everyone was hot and sweaty they took off into the night, stumbling back toward the canyon, south along the rim. A hand clutched at Nirgal’s arm and it looked like the diana was there beside him again, light in the dark, but it was too dark to see, and then they were crashing into the water of the reservoir, shockingly frigid, dive under, waist-deep silt and sand, heart-stopping cold, stand up, wade back out all the senses pulsating wildly, gasps, laughter, a hand at his ankle and down he went again, into the shallows face first, laughing. Through the dark wet, freezing, toes banging “ow! ow!” and back into the henge, into the heat. Soaking they danced again, pressed to the heat of the fire, arms extended, hugging its radiance. All the bodies ruddy in the firelight, the sequoia needles flashing against pinwheel stars, bouncing in rhythm to the rock percussion. When they warmed back up and the fire died down, they led him up one of the sequoia staircases. On the massive upper limbs of the tree were perched small flat sleeping platforms, low-walled and open to the sky. The floors swayed very slightly underfoot, on a cold breeze that had roused the trees’ deep airy choral voices. Nirgal was left alone on what appeared to be the highest platform. He unpacked his bedding and lay down. To the chorus of wind in sequoia needles he fell fast asleep.

In the early dawn he woke suddenly. He sat against the wail of his platform, surprised that the whole evening had not turned out to be a dream. He looked over the edge; the ground was far, far below. It was like being in the crow’s nest of an enormous ship; it reminded him of his high bamboo room in Zygote, but everything here was vastly bigger, the starry dome of the sky, the horizon’s distant jagged black line. All the land was a rumpled dark blanket, with the water of the reservoir a squiggle of silver inlaid into it.

He made his way down the stairs; four hundred of them. The tree was perhaps 150 meters tall, standing over the 150-meter drop of the canyon cliff. In the presunrise light he looked down on the wall over which they had tried to drive the antelope, saw the ravine they had crashed down, the clear dam, the mass of water behind it.

He went back to the henge. A few of the hunters were up, coaxing the fire back to life, shivering in the dawn chill. Nirgal asked them if they were moving on that day. They were; north through the Juventa Chaos, then on toward the southwest shore of the Chryse Gulf. After that they didn’t know.

Nirgal asked if he could join them for a while. They looked surprised; surveyed him; spoke among themselves in a language he didn’t recognize. While they talked, Nirgal wondered that he had asked. He wanted to see the diana again, yes. But it was more than that. Nothing in his lung-gom-pa had been like that last half hour of the hunt. Of course the running had set the stage for the experience — the hunger, the weariness — but then it had happened, something new. Snowy forest floor, the pursuit through the primeval trees — the dash down the ravine — the scene under the dam…

The early risers were nodding at him. He could come along.

All that day they hiked north, threading a complicated path through the Juventa Chaos. That evening they came to a small mesa, its whole cap covered by an apple orchard. A ramp road led the way up to this grove. The trees had been pruned to the shape of cocktail glasses, and now new shoots rose straight up from the gnarled older branches. Through the afternoon they pulled ladders around from tree to tree, pruning the thin shoots away and thereby harvesting some hard, tart, unripe little apples, which they saved.

In the center of the grove was a open-walled round-roofed structure. A disk house, they called it. Nirgal walked through it, admiring the design. The foundation was a round slab of concrete, polished to a finish like marble. The roof was also round, held up by a simple T of interior walls, a diameter and a radius. In the open semicircle were kitchen and living space; on the other side, bedrooms and bathroom. The circumference, now open to the air, could be closed off in inclement weather by clear walls of tenting material, drawn around the circle like drapes.

There were disk houses all over Lunae, the woman who had butchered the antelope told Nirgal. Other groups used the same set of houses, tending the orchards when they passed through. They were all part of a loose co-op, working out a nomad life, with some agriculture, some hunting, some gathering. Now one group was cooking down the little apples, making applesauce for preservation; others were grilling antelope steaks over a fire outside, or working in a smokehouse.

Two round baths right next to the disk house were now steaming, and some of the group were shedding their clothes and hopping into the smaller bath, to clean up before supper. They were very dirty; they had been in the back country a long time. Nirgal followed the woman (her hands still spotted with dried blood) and joined them in the bath, the hot water like another world, like the heat of the fire transmuted to liquid that one could touch, in which one could immerse one’s body.

They woke at dawn and lazed around a fire, brewing coffee and kava, talking, stitching clothes, working around the disk house. After a while they gathered their few traveling possessions and killed the fire and moved out. Everyone carried a backpack or waistpack, but most of them traveled as lightly as Nirgal or more so, with nothing but thin sleeping rolls and some food, and a few with spears or bows and arrows slung over a shoulder. They walked hard through the morning, then split into smaller groups to gather pine nuts, acorns, meadow onions, wild corn; or hunt for marmots or rabbits or frogs, or perhaps larger game. They were lean people; their ribs showed, their faces were thin. We like to stay a little hungry, the woman told him. It makes the food taste better. And indeed every night of this extended walk Nirgal bolted his food as during his runs, shaky and ravenous; and everything tasted like ambrosia. They walked a long distance every day, and during their big hunts they often ended up in terrain that would have been a disaster to run in, terrain so rough that it was often four or five days before they all managed to find each other again, at the next disk house in its orchard. Since Nirgal didn’t know where these were, he had to stick close to one or another of the group. Once they had him take the four children in the group on an easier route across Lunae Planum’s cratered terrain, and the children told him what direction to take every time they had to make a choice; and they were the first to reach the next disk house. The kids loved it. Often they were consulted by the larger group as to when they should leave a disk house. “Hey you kids, is it time to go?” They would answer yes or no very firmly within seconds, in concert. Once two adults got in a fight and afterward they had to present their cases to the four kids, who decided against one of them. The butcher woman explained to Nirgal: “We teach them, they judge us. They’re hard but fair.”