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S o 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.

H er 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.

E very 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.