“You people should be happy the animals are back,” she would tell them. “You’ve been cut off from them for so long you’ve forgotten how great they are. They’re our horizontal brothers and sisters, enslaved as living meat, and when that can happen to them it can happen to you too, and it has. You people are meat! It stinks!”

Catcalls and ugly rumbling disagreement would greet this.

“At some point you have to get it!” Swan would shout, overriding the various objections filling the air. “No one can be happy until everyone is safe!”

“ Heppy,” one of them said, voice dripping with Slavic scorn. “What’s heppy? We need food. The farms in the north give us food.”

“You need soil,” Swan said, making it a long word with two syllables. “ Soy-yullis your food. Sheer total biomass is your food! The animals help make biomass. You can’t do without them. You’re hanging on by eating oil. You’re eating your seed corn. If it weren’t for the food coming down the elevators from space, half of you would starve and the other half kill each other. That’s the truth, you know it is! So what do you need? Animals.”

“They can pull my plow,” one said sourly. Most of these people spoke Russian to each other, and Wahram struggled to hear voices using English. When they spoke to Swan, they spoke in English. She was talking again about the horizontal brothers and sisters. Many who listened were sufficiently high on vodka and other substances that their eyes shone, their cheeks were red. They liked arguing with Swan; they liked being tongue-lashed by her. They had looked the same in 1905, no doubt, or 1789, or 1776. It could have been a room anywhere, anytime. It reminded him of the corner pub in his neighborhood of the bulge.

“We’re part of a family,” Swan was insisting now, going maudlin. “The mammal family.”

“Mammals are an order,” someone objected.

“Mammals are a class,” someone else corrected.

“We are the classof mammals,” Swan exclaimed, “and the orderis to suckle and to love!” Cheers to this. “It’s that or die. Our horizontal brothers and sisters. We need them, we need all of them, we’re part of them and they’re part of us! Without them we’re just—just—”

“Poor forked radishes!”

“Brains and fingertips!”

“Worms in a bottle!”

“Yes!” Swan said. “Exactly.”

“Like spacers in space,” someone added.

They laughed at that, and she did too. “It’s true,” she cried. “But here we are! I’m on Earth, right now.” Her cheeks burned and she looked around at them; she stood on a bench and caught them up: “ We’re on Earth!You have no ideawhat a privilege that is. You fucking moles! You’re home! You can take all the spacer habitats together and they’d still be nothing compared to this world! This is home.”

Cheers. Though it seemed to Wahram, as he caught Swan falling off her bench toward the bar, that what she had said wasn’t really true, not anymore—not with Mars up there, and Venus and Titan coming on board. Maybe it hadn’t been true since the diaspora. So they cheered her for being wrong, for flattering them, for buying the drinks and catching them all up in a moment of enthusiasm. They were cheering for this moment itself, detached from anything else. Night in a pub in Ottawa, with drunks singing in Russian. This moment of the storm.

They went back out with visas, in case they got stopped again by the Mounties, and rejoined the beater line for the caribou migration. No one stopped them in Yellowknife, and no one they spoke with knew what had happened before. In a couple of days they were back in their field routine, which made Wahram happy. He was used to the walking now, had adjusted his bodysuit to it, and got a lot of pleasure from watching Swan on the hunt. She was always ahead, but then again she looked good from behind. Diana on the hunt.

In the dining tent at night they were hearing more often from reports worldwide that people were finding the reappearance of animals in their world hard to handle. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! People were unused to being potential prey for big predators lurking right at the edge of town. It was enough to make them band together. Those who used to go out on their own now usually found company. Some who didn’t got eaten, and the rest shivered and complained and then sought out friends or strangers to walk with, not just at night but in the broad light of day. This was standard practice already in the terraria; going out alone was a luxury, a kind of decadence—or an adventure undertaken with a sense of the risk involved, as with Swan. It was obvious if you had grown up with it, oppressive if you hadn’t: out in the woods, humans needed to stick together.

Quickly too the animals were learning how dangerous people were. In fact many more animals were dying than people in the new encounters, which was no surprise to anyone. But it was a robust inoculant, and would prevail.

The two of them went out one morning with extra bags of gear, because Swan wanted to range farther than they could in a day and still get back to the dining tent. The caribou had massed on the banks of the Thelon River at a ford new to them, and she wanted to get around to the north side of them, to observe and to discourage the beasts from heading north in the shallows on the west side, looking for a better ford; they were already at the best spot, a place that the archeologists said had been used by caribou in the past.

So they walked north. At a certain point they crossed the caribou track. The ground was chewed into a sea of chaotic brown sastrugi; every step had to be made carefully. Swan was faster than Wahram by an even larger margin than usual, but he was determined not to hurry. A couple of times the corpse of a caribou drove the point home: falls could be dangerous. There were knee-high clumps of semi-frozen mud to contend with, and they made him nervous. He could scarcely stand to watch the way she waltzed over them. But she made no mistakes; and he had to keep his gaze on his feet. It didn’t matter how far she got ahead.

When they reached unshattered ground north of the migration path, Swan led him east. “Look,” Swan said, pointing. “Wolves. They’re waiting to see how the crossing goes.”

Wahram had become aware that Swan loved wolves, so he said nothing about the bloodthirsty nature of scavengers. Everyone had to eat, after all.

The caribou were massed on the near shore of the ford, about half a kilometer away. Swan wanted to be seen by the beasts, so she hiked up a short bluff overlooking the riverbed, which was a broad gravel wash, crisscrossed by river channels braiding in it; the entire wash was a maze of old lines of rounded rocks and the curved black dips of dried oxbows. Much of it would not be good footing for the caribou, and Wahram could see why Swan wanted them to cross at the ford, where solid permafrost soil made a flat brown-and-green road on both sides.

“Look, the first ones are trying it.”

Wahram joined her side and looked south. Hundreds of caribou were massed on their side of the river, tossing their antlers and bellowing. The large males at the front were testing the river with forelegs, pawing at it, and then one made a break and several others followed immediately, splashing knee-deep in water for the most part, then abruptly going in to the chest, spraying big waves before them.

“Uh-oh,” Swan said. “It’s deep there.”

But the leaders walked or swam on, working hard, and soon they surged back up to knee depth and smashed the water white on their way out. On the far shore they looked back and bellowed. By this time more of them were in the water, and the mass began to move slowly forward, funneling as those on the sides tried to get to the center. They wanted to bunch together, Wahram saw. “That drop-off will be the trouble spot,” Swan predicted, and it was so; as the beasts hit the water some bellowed and tried to turn back, but were shoved and even nipped until they carried on; but that made for a jammed crowd back in the shallows, and the uproar of their bellowing was loud over the already big noise of the river sluicing through its infinity of rocks. A few beasts on the left flank turned and began to head north, but Swan jumped up and down and waved her arms, and Wahram took a little compressed air horn she offered him and let off a couple of blasts. It was loud in a high and urgent way, but he thought it was Swan’s violent motion that turned the beasts back; and at that point the logjam of beasts at the deep point of the ford swam forward together, and soon the breakaway was forgotten and the whole herd was powering across in a storm of white water and steaming brown bodies. It took most of an hour. There were some accidents, some broken limbs, and even drownings, but there was never again any pause in the herd.