When they warmed back up and the fire died down, they led him up one of the sequoia staircases. On the massive upper limbs of the tree were perched small flat sleeping platforms, low-walled and open to the sky. The floors swayed very slightly underfoot, on a cold breeze that had roused the trees’ deep airy choral voices. Nirgal was left alone on what appeared to be the highest platform. He unpacked his bedding and lay down. To the chorus of wind in sequoia needles he fell fast asleep.

2

In the early dawn he woke suddenly. He sat against the wall of his platform, surprised that the whole evening had not turned out to be a dream. He looked over the edge; the ground was far, far below. It was like being in the crow’s nest of an enormous ship; it reminded him of his high bamboo room in Zygote, but everything here was vastly bigger, the starry dome of the sky, the horizon’s distant jagged black line. All the land was a rumpled dark blanket, with the water of the reservoir a squiggle of silver inlaid into it.

He made his way down the stairs; four hundred of them. The tree was perhaps 150 meters tall, standing over the 150-meter drop of the canyon cliff. In the presunrise light he looked down on the wall over which they had tried to drive the antelope, saw the ravine they had crashed down, the clear dam, the mass of water behind it.

He went back to the henge. A few of the hunters were up, coaxing the fire back to life, shivering in the dawn chill. Nirgal asked them if they were moving on that day. They were; north through the Juventa Chaos, then on toward the southwest shore of the Chryse Gulf. After that they didn’t know.

Nirgal asked if he could join them for a while. They looked surprised; surveyed him; spoke among themselves in a language he didn’t recognize. While they talked, Nirgal wondered that he had asked. He wanted to see the diana again, yes. But it was more than that. Nothing in his lung-gom-pa had been like that last half hour of the hunt. Of course the running had set the stage for the experience— the hunger, the weariness— but then it had happened, something new. Snowy forest floor, the pursuit through the primeval trees— the dash down the ravine— the scene under the dam. . . .

The early risers were nodding at him. He could come along.

• • •