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It is not true that every mammal larger than a rabbit is endangered on Earth. Most are only

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

Kim Stanley Robinson

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.