2312

On the third morning, well before dawn, after a night of little sleep, she decided to rise and catch up to the pack if she could. In the dark and cold she hiked with a headlamp on, and saw the tracks on the ground best when she took the light off her head and held it near the ground and pointing forward.

About an hour before dawn she heard their howls ahead. It was their dawn chorus. Wolves howled at the sight of Venus rising, knowing the sun would come soon after. Swan saw what they were howling at, but by its relation to Orion knew it was not Venus, but Sirius. The wolves had been fooled yet again; the Pawnee had even named Sirius He-Who-Fools-the-Wolves for this very mistake. When Venus itself rose, about half an hour later, only one uneasy lupine astronomer spoke up again to howl that something was wrong. Swan laughed to hear it. Now other wolves farther to the west would be taking up the dawn howl. For a long time when dawn crossed North America, there had been a terminator zone of howling wolves running the length of the whole continent, moving west with the day. Now that might come back.

When it was light, she worked her way closer to them by tracking that uneasy astronomer. The wolves had apparently stayed on a pingo that night, and they yipped and barked gruffly as she approached; they didn’t want to leave, and they didn’t want her to get any nearer. Something was going on up there, she thought; one of them giving birth or something like that. She waited for them at a distance, and only when they had slunk off to the east did she climb the soft side of the pingo to check it out.

A sound stopped her cold; she saw nothing at first, but there was a little pond at the very top of the pingo, a kettle like the caldera of a miniature volcano. Noise from there-a whining-she walked up to the edge of it to look down. A young wolf, fur wet and muddy, was slinking along a narrow edge of clay rimming the water three or four meters below. Walls of the hole were vertical, even hollowed out and eaten back by the water at the bottom, which had a tint of turquoise in its muddy blue, as if it might be floored by the ice at the pingo’s core. The wolf pawed at the lined clay. A young male wolf. He looked up at her and she half extended a hand toward him, and with that the ground under her gave way, and despite her twist and leap she fell into the pond with a load of mud.

The wolf barked once and cringed away from her. She swam; she had not hit the bottom of the pond, despite plunging deeply in when she fell. She swam to the other side of the wall and climbed out onto a narrow ring of exposed mud, which went all the way around. It was like being inside a vase. Her fall hole had created a spout for it.

Swan avoided looking at the wolf. She whistled and cooed like a dove, then a nightingale. She had never seen a wolf eating a bird of any kind, but just so he didn’t get any ideas, she added a short hawk’s cry. He was still trying to climb out; he was afraid of her. He fell back as the wet overhanging mud gave under his forepaws. He hit the water upside down and Swan reached out instinctively to help, but of course he was perfectly capable of twisting around and swimming back to the band of clay, and when he felt her touch he whipped around and bit her right hand, then swam desperately away. She shouted in pain and surprise. Her blood was in the water, in his mouth. The bite burned, and there was one puncture in the back of the hand that was going to well blood for a long time.

Her bodysuit, which was keeping everything but her head dry, had a first aid kit in its thigh pocket. She pulled it out and considered whether skin glue would work on a puncture wound. Well, it had to be tried. She punctured the tube and poured a lot of the glue into the dark red hole, then held a gauze pad to it hard. The gauze would be glued into the hole, but she could cut the excess away and leave the rest in there, and it would be all right.

The inner wall of the kettle was smooth except for some horizontal banding. How exactly was she going to get out? She reached into her pocket for her mobile, found that the pocket was empty. The pocket had been open, as she had been calling her colleagues pretty frequently. Well, they would notice her absence and GPS her. Possibly she could dive down to the bottom of the pond and recover the mobile, and possibly it would still be working after being submerged.

Actually neither of these seemed very likely. “Pauline, can you locate my mobile?”

“No.”

“Can you contact my team for me?”

“No. I am designed to be in contact with you alone, by way of a short-range airport function.”

“No radio?”

“No long-range radio transmitter, as you know.”

“As I should know. You useless piece of crap.”

The wolf was growling, and Swan shut up. Briefly she cawed. “Hawk!” she cawed, thinking the young wolf might give her some space as a creature that spoke the crow language. She didn’t know what to do, really.

“Pauline, how can I get out of here?”