And the sun climbed down into the western sky, in the direction they helplessly sailed.

Days and nights, nights and days. There was no noise save the creaking of the branches, the soft lapping of the wavelets.

The nights revealed a crushing sky from which Roamer wanted to cower.

But the light of day, under the glaring sun or gray lids of cloud, showed nothing but the elemental sea. There was no forest, no land, no hills. She could smell nothing but salt, and her ears brought her no calls of birds or primates, no herbivorous lowing. The river’s outflow had dispersed now into the greater ocean, and even the other fragments of debris washed down by that torrential storm had dispersed, sailing over the horizon to their own mindless destinies.

The raft itself was diminished.

The anthracothere corpses stuck in the branches of the mango tree had long since slithered away. The last crowder had gone too. Perhaps it had fallen into the sea. The great indricothere had swollen as the bacteria of its huge gut ate their way out toward the light. But the invisible mouths of the sea had been at work on the indricothere, eating into it from beneath. As its meat was steadily stripped away, the huge corpse had imploded, at last sliding beneath the sea.

The anthros had long since eaten all the fruit.

They tried to eat the tree’s leaves, and at first they would be rewarded at least by a mouthful of pleasing moisture that would, for a few heartbeats, ease their thirst. But the tree, uprooted, was dead, and its remaining leaves were shriveling. And, unlike the wretched potbelly, the anthros could not digest such coarse fare, and they lost still more fluid in the watery shit that erupted from their backsides.

Roamer was a small animal built for a life in the nourishing embrace of the forest, where food and water were always plentiful. Unlike a human, whose body was adapted to survive long periods in the open, her body carried very little fat, a human’s main fuel reserve. Things got bad quickly. Soon Roamer’s saliva became thick and tasted foul. Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. Her head and neck were very painful, for her skin was shrinking as it dried. Her voice was cracked, and she seemed to have a hard, painful lump in her throat that wouldn’t dislodge no matter how many times she tried to swallow. She and the other anthros would have suffered even more, in fact, if not for the overcast skies that mostly spared them from the glare of the sun.

Sometimes Roamer dreamed. The dead mango would suddenly sprout, its roots reaching out like primate fingers to bury themselves in the unforgiving ocean-soil, the leaves would grow green and wave like grooming hands, and fruit would bloom, huge clusters of it. She would reach for the fruit, even crack it and bury her face in the clear water that mysteriously filled each husk. And here would come her mother and her sisters, fat and full of vigor, ready to groom her.

But then the water would evaporate, as if drying in the harsh sun, and she would find she was gnawing nothing more than a bit of bark or a handful of dead leaves.

Patch came into estrus.

Whiteblood, as the top male of this little lost community, was quick to claim his rights. With nothing else to do and nowhere to go, Whiteblood and Patch coupled frequently — sometimes too often, and the bout would be a perfunctory matter of a few dry thrusts.

In normal times subordinates like the brothers would probably have been able to mate Patch in these early days of her estrus. Whiteblood, with plenty of potential mates to choose from, would have excluded them only when Patch’s peak of fertility approached and the best chance of impregnating her arrived.

This would have been in Patch’s interests too. Her swelling was there to advertise Patch’s fertility to as many males as possible. For one thing, the resulting competition kept the quality of her suitors high without requiring any effort from her. And if all the males in the group mated with her at some time, none of them could be sure who exactly was the father of an infant — so any male tempted to murder an infant to speed up a female’s fertility cycle ran the risk of killing his own offspring. The swellings, her very public estrus, were thus a way for Patch to control the males around her at minimal cost to herself, and to reduce the risk of infanticide.

But on this tiny raft there was only one adult female, and Whiteblood wasn’t about to share. Crest and Left looked on, sitting side by side, chewing on leaves, their comical erections sticking out of their fur. They could stare all they liked at Patch’s refulgent swelling. But every time either of them approached Patch, let alone touched her for the most tentative grooming, Whiteblood would fly into a fury, displaying and attacking the perpetrator.

As for Roamer, she would always be subordinate to Patch, always a stranger. But in these stripped-down conditions she had quickly grown as close to Patch as to one of her own sisters.

While Whiteblood and Patch were coupling, Roamer would often take Scrap. After the first few days Scrap had accepted Roamer as an honorary aunt. The infant’s tiny face was bald and her fur was olive-colored, quite different from her mother’s; it was a color that triggered protective feelings in Roamer, and even in the males. Sometimes Scrap would play alone, clambering clumsily over the matted branches, but more often she wanted to cling to Roamer’s chest or back, or to be held in Roamer’s arms.

Sharing the load of child rearing was common among anthros — although it was usually only kin who would be allowed to serve as child minders.

Anthro infants grew much more slowly than had the pups of Noth’s era because of the time it took their larger brains to develop. Though they were well developed at birth compared to human infants, with open eyes and the ability to cling to their mothers’ fur, anthro pups were uncoordinated, weak, and utterly dependent on their mothers for food. It was as if Scrap had been born prematurely and was completing her growth outside her mother’s womb.

This put a lot of pressure on Patch. For eighteen months an anthro mother had to juggle the daily demands of survival with the need to care for her infant — and she had to keep up grooming time with her sisters, peers, and potential mates. Even before her stranding on this raft, all these pressures had left Patch exhausted. But the society of females around her provided her with a ready supply of would-be aunts and nannies to take the infant away and give her a break. Roamer’s amateur aunting was helpful to Patch, and besides it gave Roamer a lot of pleasure. It was a kind of training for her own future as a mother. But also it let her indulge in a lot of grooming.

They all missed grooming. It was the most difficult thing about this oceanic imprisonment. Even now Whiteblood was showing signs of overgrooming by his two acolytes; parts of his head and neck had been rubbed raw. So Roamer was happy to indulge the infant with long hours of gentle fur pulling, finger combing, and tickling.

But as the days went by the infant, perpetually hungry and thirsty, became increasingly unhappy. Scrap would wander around the raft, and even pester the males. Sometimes she would throw tantrums, tearing at the leaves or her mother’s fur or racing precariously around the raft in her tiny fury.

All of which served to wear out Patch further, and irritate everybody else.

So it went, day after long day. The anthros, trapped together on this sliver of dryness in an immense ocean, were continually, intensely aware of one another. If there had been more space, they could have gotten away from the infant’s annoying scampering. If there had been more of them, the younger males’ jealousy of Whiteblood would not have mattered; they could have easily found more receptive females, and relieved their tension with furtive matings out of Whiteblood’s sight.