2312

Swan pulled her wolf skin-a big old male’s skin, with head and paws still attached-out of her suit’s backpack. She draped it over her head so that it flowed down her back like a cape. She had clipped gold rings through the tips of its ears. Now she circled ahead of the pack, howled back at them. Then she ran as hard as she could to the east. She was chest deep in wheat, and could run between rows of it. Ahead to the east her colleagues were leading a herd of caribou by way of scent and cast-off antlers. The wheat had taken a beating where the herd had passed. She saw that they were following the shallow streambed of a creek almost erased by the laser-flat plowing. The half-buried streambed was still muddy, and her teammates were leading the herd away from that, paralleling it to the south. The scent of wolves would reach them soon, and then it would be no problem to keep them headed east, over low rise after low rise. They would go wherever seemed most distant from wolves, at least for a while. Eventually the two species would come to a predator/prey accommodation, but for now the big prey animals were no doubt still spooked, and prone to stampede. She saw signs of what she thought had been a small panic, and the bodies of several calves lay trampled in the middle of this zone. Swan turned to face the wolves now following her. She stood on a high point with the wolf’s head draped over hers and howled a warning. The pack stopped and stared at her, ears pointed and fur erect-they too were spooked. Their look now was not their famous long stare, Swan judged, but a real attempt to see better.

Still, they were on the hunt, and so after a while, on they came. Swan gave way, turned, retreated at speed. She had given the caribou some extra time to get past the little swale, so now she got out of the way as quickly as she could. From the north she chivvied the wolves from time to time over the next few hours, but for the most part she could barely keep up with them, and in the end could only follow sign. For a long time it was a slog through wheat following the caribou tracks. Once, she saw a line of giant red harvesters on the southern skyline.

T hat night most of the caribou were ahead of her and had formed a herd and were headed east. They were primed for migration, inclined to move. Then also the wolves and people and other predators were like beaters on a hunt, the people involved sometimes using sirens and scents and, as always, their own very disturbing presence. People were the top predator, even when wolves and lions and bears were around-as long as they stayed in packs, as wolves had taught them so long before-and had their tools in hand, in case push ever came to shove.

Swan, stumbling along at the end of a very long day, began to feel the spirit of the pursuit fill her and lift her up like a body bra. She was Diana on the hunt, it was what they did as animals. She had done this so often inside terraria that it was hard to believe she was out at last, but there was the sky over them, and the wind keening past.

If the line of caribou migration was to be established for good, and the entire zone made into a habitat corridor, then the land itself would have to be changed, as it had been before. Again humans would be altering it. All Earth was a park now, a work of art, shaped by artists. This new alteration was just one more stroke of the brush.

The transformation of taiga into cropland had been a matter of shaving down high points and filling up low points, with the growth of new topsoil hastened by engineered bacteria. Thus it was pretty flat now, as if a sea surface with a slight groundswell. But with the freeze-thaw cycle and the permafrost melt, things had been unflattening. The passage of the caribou was enough to tear up the topsoil; where they had passed, it looked like a phalanx of tractors hauling spikes had churned through the wheat. Swan avoided their track for that reason, except for brief excursions into the muck to bury transponder beacons, and also to mark the soil with scents, and herbicides aimed at wheat. They were also seeding boreal forest. In some places they were blowing up the land, tossing the blankets of introduced soil aside to bring the original taiga bacteria back to the surface. All this had to be done while the caribou were far enough away that they were not scared from coming back; but there was a lot to do, so they were starting as soon as they could.

S he slept those nights in her bodysuit, which had an aerogel mattress and blanket in its pockets to keep her warm, and enough food for a few days. Once or twice she checked in with her team, but she preferred to be by herself, unwolfish though that was, to track the wolves. She seldom had the pack in sight now, but she could track them by sign; the ground was soft, the paw prints of the nine frequent. Her own Group of Nine.