Mammals are a class of animals; there are 5,490 species in the class, 1,200 genera, 153 families, and 29 orders

Capybara, jaguars, giraffes, bison, Przewalski’s horse, kangaroo. Zebra, cheetah, wolverine

Biggest orders are Rodentia, Chiroptera (bats), Soricomorpha (shrews), then Carnivora, Cetartiodactyla (even-toed hoofed mammals, and whales), and Primates

All fall down.   Please

come back

SWAN AND THE WOLVES

They all came down together, first in big landers protected by heat shields, then in smaller landers popping parachutes, then in exfoliating balloon bags. At that point they were drifting down through the airspace the Inuit nations had given them permission to cross. When they got within a few hundred meters of the ground, every lander disintegrated into thousands of aerogel bubbles drifting down, each transparent bubble a smart balloon holding inside it an animal or animal family. What the animals thought of it was anyone’s guess: some were struggling in their aerogel, others looked around as placid as clouds. The west wind had its effect, and the bubbles drifted east like seed pods. Swan looked around, trying to see everywhere at once: sky all strewn with clear seeds, which from any distance were visible only as their contents, so that she drifted eastward and down with thousands of flying wolves, bears, reindeer, mountain lions. There she saw a fox pair; a clutch of rabbits; a bobcat or lynx; a bundle of lemmings; a heron, flying hard inside its bubble. It looked like a dream, but she knew it was real, and the same right now all over Earth: into the seas splashed dolphins and whales, tuna and sharks. Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians: all the lost creatures were in the sky at once, in every country, every watershed. Many of the creatures descending had been absent from Earth for two or three centuries. Now all back, all at once.

Swan came down in the midst of a cluster of animals. They were somewhere in the new wheat belt of southern Nunavut, “Our Land.” Her particular landing point was supposed to be a low rise in the midst of a district covered by wheat and cold rice farms. Every field was marred by a few pingos, small hills like boils, raised when big chunks of ice floated up through the mud of the melting permafrost. As she made her final approach, which hill was hers was hard to tell. The descent was handled entirely by her bubble, and as she had never landed in one before, she enjoyed the feeling of it—as if a transparent magic carpet were lowering her. All around her the animals in the air were becoming aware of the ground, some struggling, some hunched, many with their legs splayed out like falling cats or flying squirrels, in just the right way even though it was their first ever fall—some kind of conserved lizard behavior, perhaps, shared by all. She herself landed so neatly that it was as if stepping off an escalator. Touching the ground popped the balloon, and its aerogel blew away. And there she was, standing on the ground, on a pingo in Nunavut.

There were three other people in her observation team, coming down as close to each other as the wind would allow. She looked up to see if she could spot them, and the sight of the sky above almost caused her to fall on her butt; she cried out, she laughed: the sky was still full of animals. Descending out of the western sky, dropping from low cumulus clouds, were caribou and elk and grizzly bears, all big brown dots with splayed legs. All the other animals too, many in clusters, the higher ones too small to see what they were. Around her the dense wheat was shivering with the movement of creatures freed of their burst bubbles and running for cover. One could in fact land right on her; she had to keep an eye out. She laughed to think of it, she threw her arms out and howled to the wolves in the sky. In the distance other wolves were barking. There were also hoots and bellows, many sounding fearful, but it was hard to say; that was just an assumption; in fact she couldn’t be sure these sounds were not triumphant. Home at last! “All God’s children are home at last,” she proclaimed over her radio. The other humans were checking in; they had landed. The cool west wind blew through her and she howled some more. The last of their wave floated down; then the clouds above were all by themselves again. Only a few last black dots drifted in the distance, light as down. All together it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. “All right,” she said with her radio off. “I love you. You have done a great thing.” Whether she was talking to Alex, or Wahram, or the world, she couldn’t say.

So here she was, on the taiga between boreal forest and tundra. There would be caribou and grizzly bears here now, and mountain lions; every biome needed its top predators for the whole system to thrive. The grizzly bears would immediately take to the hills; mountain lions would likewise disappear on landing. But the wolves would find each other and band together, and thus stay visible in their packs; and Swan wanted to be there for that. All her life she had followed them in terraria, hunted with them, chased them off kills, slept curled at the edge of the pack, next to the nursing mamas. She had howled with them more times than she could have counted; every time she heard them howl she joined in, feeling it was the human thing to do. Other times she had felt the long stare on her, and had stared back. She had seen wolves in discourse with coyotes, seen ravens lead them to a target kill for a share of the leavings. She knew that humans had made wolves more human, and thus dogs, and in that same time period wolves had made humans more wolfish, by teaching them pack behaviors. None of the other primates had friends that were not kin, for instance; humans had learned that from watching wolves. The two species had at different times scavenged each other’s food; they had learned each other’s hunting methods; they had, in short, coevolved.

Now the primates were bringing back the other half of the family. And so here she was.

Her 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.

Every 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.