As 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.

Ahead 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.

That 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.