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T hey went back out with visas, in case they got stopped again by the Mounties, and rejoined the beater line for the caribou migration. No one stopped them in Yellowknife, and no one they spoke with knew what had happened before. In a couple of days they were back in their field routine, which made Wahram happy. He was used to the walking now, had adjusted his bodysuit to it, and got a lot of pleasure from watching Swan on the hunt. She was always ahead, but then again she looked good from behind. Diana on the hunt.

I n the dining tent at night they were hearing more often from reports worldwide that people were finding the reappearance of animals in their world hard to handle. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! People were unused to being potential prey for big predators lurking right at the edge of town. It was enough to make them band together. Those who used to go out on their own now usually found company. Some who didn’t got eaten, and the rest shivered and complained and then sought out friends or strangers to walk with, not just at night but in the broad light of day. This was standard practice already in the terraria; going out alone was a luxury, a kind of decadence-or an adventure undertaken with a sense of the risk involved, as with Swan. It was obvious if you had grown up with it, oppressive if you hadn’t: out in the woods, humans needed to stick together.

Quickly too the animals were learning how dangerous people were. In fact many more animals were dying than people in the new encounters, which was no surprise to anyone. But it was a robust inoculant, and would prevail.

T he two of them went out one morning with extra bags of gear, because Swan wanted to range farther than they could in a day and still get back to the dining tent. The caribou had massed on the banks of the Thelon River at a ford new to them, and she wanted to get around to the north side of them, to observe and to discourage the beasts from heading north in the shallows on the west side, looking for a better ford; they were already at the best spot, a place that the archeologists said had been used by caribou in the past.

So they walked north. At a certain point they crossed the caribou track. The ground was chewed into a sea of chaotic brown sastrugi; every step had to be made carefully. Swan was faster than Wahram by an even larger margin than usual, but he was determined not to hurry. A couple of times the corpse of a caribou drove the point home: falls could be dangerous. There were knee-high clumps of semi-frozen mud to contend with, and they made him nervous. He could scarcely stand to watch the way she waltzed over them. But she made no mistakes; and he had to keep his gaze on his feet. It didn’t matter how far she got ahead.

When they reached unshattered ground north of the migration path, Swan led him east. “Look,” Swan said, pointing. “Wolves. They’re waiting to see how the crossing goes.”

Wahram had become aware that Swan loved wolves, so he said nothing about the bloodthirsty nature of scavengers. Everyone had to eat, after all.

The caribou were massed on the near shore of the ford, about half a kilometer away. Swan wanted to be seen by the beasts, so she hiked up a short bluff overlooking the riverbed, which was a broad gravel wash, crisscrossed by river channels braiding in it; the entire wash was a maze of old lines of rounded rocks and the curved black dips of dried oxbows. Much of it would not be good footing for the caribou, and Wahram could see why Swan wanted them to cross at the ford, where solid permafrost soil made a flat brown-and-green road on both sides.

“Look, the first ones are trying it.”

Wahram joined her side and looked south. Hundreds of caribou were massed on their side of the river, tossing their antlers and bellowing. The large males at the front were testing the river with forelegs, pawing at it, and then one made a break and several others followed immediately, splashing knee-deep in water for the most part, then abruptly going in to the chest, spraying big waves before them.

“Uh-oh,” Swan said. “It’s deep there.”