It seemed he had no English name. She took to thinking of him as Scarhead.

The meat was frankly delicious, though she longed for green vegetables, gravy and a mellow Bordeaux to go with it.

The Hams worked hard, of course. But it struck her how happy they all seemed or if not that, content. Evidently the game was bountiful here, the living easy; all these guys had to do was sit around and wait for the meat to come wandering past, season after season. They even had fresh running water, day and night, right outside the cave. She remembered fantasies as a child of finding Candy land, where all the trees were chocolate and the streams lemonade, where you didn’t have to work for anything, where you could take as much as you liked, just by reaching out. Was the way these people lived so different from that?

But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?

Well, they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candy-land. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.

Then would come the famines and the wars.

So much for Candy-land. Maybe these Hams weren’t just as smart as humans, she mused; maybe they were actually smarter.

On the third day she walked out of the caves, alone, and set off up the eroded hillside.

The rocks were broken and worn, and cut deeply by gullies, in some of which water still flowed. She found that the easiest way to make progress was to lower herself into one of the gullies and clamber up its smooth, sloping sides, taking care not to slip on moss or lichen, until the channel petered out and she had to transfer to another.

Though she was soon panting hard and sweating into her coverall, she could feel her heart and lungs pump, the muscles of her newly powerful legs tingling. You’re in the best shape you’ve been in for years, girl.

The noise of the tame whirlwind howled ever louder. She resolutely ignored it.

Just below the summit she sat on a patch of bare rock, gathering her breath, getting the hassles of the climb out of her head. The eroded hillside, deeply punctured by its limestone gullies and caves, swept away beneath her. The sun was still low; it was maybe ten in the morning local time.

She stood and turned away from the plain. She walked up the last few paces to the crater’s summit plateau, and faced the wind.

It was a wall of churning air: a cylinder, laden with dust, that must have been a couple of miles wide. It looked flat on her puny human scale, like the wall of a vast building. But it snaked into the sky, diminishing as her gaze followed it, and at its highest extremity it curled in the air, thread-like. The whole thing was streaked horizontally, like the clouds of Jupiter, by billows of crimson dust. The flow of the air seemed smooth, though here and there she saw bits of rock and vegetation, even a few snapped-off trees. But the rock at the wind’s shimmering foot was worn bare.

The violence, the energy, were startling; it was like a waterfall, a rocket launch. A deep part of her mind couldn’t accept that it was controlled by anything: the animal in her, conditioned by a million years of experience, knew that this lethal expression of nature’s power was unpredictable, beyond propitiation.

Nevertheless she walked forward. After a few paces, she felt the first breath of wind, and a speckle of dust on her cheek.

When she got to within maybe a hundred paces of that dense wall of dust the air grew turbulent. She staggered but kept on, leaning into the wind to keep to a rough straight line, and the dust bit harder, stinging her mouth and eyes.

She shielded her eyes. Only maybe fifty paces to the dust. Forty-nine, forty eight… The air was a powerful physical presence, battering at her torso and face, whipping her hair, snatching the breath from her lungs.

And now she was inside the dust, suddenly, as if walking into a sandstorm. The dust was’a thick glowing cloud around her, obscuring the sky, the rock, even the twister itself; and when she looked downwind she saw how she cast a kind of shadow in the streaming particles.

A fresh surge hit her, unexpectedly violent. She fell sideways, rolled a couple of times, and hit her head on a rock.

She lay there for a moment. Then she got to all fours on the worn-bare rock and tried crawling.

She fell again, rolled back, tried again. Her hands and the skin of her cheeks were streaked with tiny cuts, where sharp bits of rock had bitten into her. Still she kept trying.

Lacking a plan B, she tried again the next day. And the next.

She tried wrapping herself in her parachute silk, to keep out the dust and bits of rock. She just got blown away faster. So she tied the silk tightly around herself, an outer-body garment with slits for her hands, a mask over her face. She managed to get further into that central wall of dust, maybe ten paces deep, before the sheer strength of the wind stopped her progress.

She tried crawling in, all the way. That didn’t work.

The Hams watched all this, bemused.

She considered schemes with ropes and pitons and rock-hammers, where she would make a kind of ladder that she could “climb’, across the face of the barren windswept rock, all the way to the centre. But she had no rope or pitons or rock-hammers, and couldn’t come up with any way of making them.

She explored the cave system, but found no way through that way.

And if she couldn’t go under the twister wall, she surely couldn’t go over it; it looked to her as if that tunnel of tortured air stretched all the way out of the atmosphere. (She did toy with insane schemes of retrieving Malenfant’s lander and firing it up into some kind of Alan Shepard sub-orbital trajectory that would take her up and over the wall of air, and re-enter right into the eye of the storm. But — despite her various rash promises to Joshua to pilot him and the lander all the way to his mythical Grey Earth — she didn’t know how to fly the lander, still less how to rig it for such a flight, still less how to land it.)

On the tenth day of trying, as she lay clinging to the rock, sucking air from dust through a sheet of muslin, somebody walked past her.

Mouth gaping, bits of “chute silk flapping around her, she watched as a Ham man and child walked hand in hand into the teeth of the storm, blurring. Granted the Hams were stronger than she was — both of them probably, even the boy — but they weren’t that strong. They weren’t even leaning into the damn wind.

Then she noticed, just before they disappeared into grey-red dust, that their skin wraps were hanging loose around them. The churning air wasn’t touching them.

She spent more days watching.

The Hams had always used the other side of the crater as part of their domain for hunting and gathering. They had trails leading that way, so ancient they were actually worn into the rock. When a Ham walked such a trail, heading for the crater’s interior, she just carried on through the wall of wind and dust.

The Hams weren’t the only ones.

A flock of bats flapped clumsily into the crimson mist one day, their fragile wings unaffected by the tearing air. She spotted a young deer, apparently lost, that stumbled out of the dust, gazed around with wide eyes at the world beyond, then bolted back into the wind storm. Even other hominids could make it through: notably Runners, and one Nutcracker she spotted.

But not herself — and, for some reason, not the chimp-like Elves, an association she found insulting.