With a flexing strain his bowels moved, and watery shit pooled beneath him.

But now the surface of the water broke, the ice cracking with sharp reports. Something huge was coming out of the lake. Noth scurried back to the cover of the nearest trees, eyes wide.

Like Noth, the crocodile had woken early, disturbed from its slumber by the brightness of the day. As it rose from the lake, bits of ice tumbled from its back. With a single graceful motion it clamped its jaws on the frozen meso: frost crackled, bones crunched. Then the croc slid backward into the water, dragging the carcass effortlessly, making barely a sound.

The crocodile was hungry.

Before the comet the largest animals in each of the world’s ecologies had been reptilian: the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs in the oceans, the dinosaurs on land, and the crocodilians in fresh water. The disaster had wiped away these great families, and in their empty realms they would soon be replaced by functionally equivalent mammals — all save the crocodiles.

The freshwater environment had always been a difficult place to live. While the supply of plant material on land and in the sea was pretty reliable in space and time, freshwater environments were very variable. Erosion, abrasion, silting, flood, drought, and extremes of water quality were all hazards.

But the crocodiles — and other enduring freshwater species like turtles — were resilient. Some learned to walk overland in search of water. Others could take to the sea. Or they would just bury themselves eight or ten meters deep in the mud, and wait for the next cloudburst. And as for food, even during the worst of the killings on land and in the sea, they would subsist off the nutrients that continued to leach off the corpse-littered land, a “brown” food chain that persisted long after the green, growing things and the creatures that browsed them had died.

In this way the crocodiles had survived across a hundred and fifty million years, through extraterrestrial impacts, glaciation pulses, sea level changes, tectonic upheavals, and competition from successive dynasties of animals.

After all this time they were still capable of evolutionary novelty. Briefly, after the comet impact, the top predators around the water courses had been crocodile cousins with long legs and hooflike claws. They had been a nightmare, running predatory crocodiles capable of chasing down animals as large as small horses. Crocodiles had even adapted to survive here at the pole, where the sun didn’t shine for months on end; they would simply wait out the winter months in deep hibernation.

Unlike the dinosaurs, unlike the plesiosaurs, the crocodiles would not be forced out of their freshwater niches by upstart mammals: not now, not ever.

Noth had lost the meso carcass, but some scraps of flesh and crushed maggots were smeared over the ground where it had lain. Hungrily he licked at the frozen ground.

At last the days of breeding arrived.

The females of the troop gathered in the branches of one tall conifer. They were feeding on ripe young fruit, cramming their bodies with the resources they would need to survive the drain of motherhood to come. The females were loosely marshaled by the more senior among them, including Big and Biggest. Right was among them. She had survived her first winter. She was filling out quickly, and when her scrappy winter fur had blown away she had emerged as a small but elegantly built adult, ready to mate.

The Emperor himself was among his female subjects. He moved from one to the other, heroically humping. Already he had been accepted by Biggest twice, and had deflowered an unprotesting Right. Now he was taking Big. She was bent over, clinging to a low branch, her head tucked between her knees, her tail uplifted. The Emperor was behind her, arms wrapped around her waist, hips thrusting with a rapidity born of exhaustion and urgency.

This was the day toward which the Emperor had worked all year, and now was the time for him to spend all of his authority and energy by covering as many of the females as possible.

But the Emperor was already tiring. And this female troop was only one of several in the wider territory he commanded.

In this ferociously seasonal place, baby rearing had to be squeezed into a drastically short period, so that offspring were produced when food was abundant and their new mothers could eat enough to produce plenty of milk. Any female who mated outside the breeding season was unlikely to see her offspring survive to adulthood. And any male who missed the chance to mate with a fertile female would have to endure a whole year of hardship, danger, and privation before getting another chance.

For the notharctus, the breeding season was just forty-eight hours long. It was a frantic time.

Today, the start of the females’ simultaneous estrus, the air was full of an invisible pheromone cloud, and there were males everywhere, helplessly drawn, erections poking out of their fur. Every male had prepared since the return of the sun, feeding to build up his strength, practicing spectacular tree swings and engaging in mock battles: They had been like athletes preparing for a contest. It was impossible for the Emperor to keep them all away, and there was intense competition. Today the hierarchy of males was stressed to the point of collapse.

The stress on the females would come later, during pregnancy and nursing, when the fast-growing fetus or newborn pup demanded the mother find a stream of high-energy food — and she must eat well at a time when almost every other adult female was nursing too. It was the heavy cost of reproduction that had led to the general dominance of females over males, and it was the reason why the females always got the best of the food.

It was the same all over the forest. Every notharctus troop was hitting its brief mating season simultaneously, the timing dictated by the invisible chemical scents that permeated the air for kilometers around. For today and tomorrow, the forest was filled with primate lust: a tremendous clamor of battling males, pheromone-laden females, and frantically thrusting hips.

Noth, pursuing another young male he thought of as Rival, hurled himself through a loose stand of conifers. He swung one-armed on spindly branches. On each dip the earth tipped up like a vast bowl, dead leaves and new green ferns and the dull forms of snuffling ground feeders fleeing under him.

He approached a gap between two tall trees. On the far side he saw Rival, standing upright, genitals pinkly visible, rubbing his scent markers on the bark. Rival barked a contemptuous challenge.

Without hesitating, Noth took a final huge swing. The branch flexed and hurled him on a smooth parabola high into the air. For a few heartbeats he flew, tail held high, hands and feet held out before him ready to grasp.

His head was filled with the stink of estrus. He had had an erection since he had woken this morning. Even now, as he sailed from tree to tree, his penis stuck out before him, pink and solid. He had yet to succeed in battling his way through the crowding males to get to a receptive female, and he felt as if his belly would burst if he didn’t succeed soon. But even as he was consumed with inchoate lust, still he relished the power of his lithe body as he hurled it through the forest domain for which it was exquisitely adapted.

Noth had never felt so alive.

Noth landed in Rival’s tree, just where he had aimed. He grasped the branches with faultless positioning of his hands and feet. But immediately Rival was on him.

Facing each other they stood upright, their spindly erections poking out. Noth, tail held erect, stalked toward Rival, vigorously rubbing his groin against the tree bark, chattering and barking. Rival responded in kind. It was a ritualized encounter, each of them responding to the other’s movements in a kind of dance: tail waft followed by groin rub, wrist spread provoking a spitting glare.


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