2312

A s 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.

A head 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.