They woke at dawn and lazed around a fire, brewing coffee and kava, talking, stitching clothes, working around the disk house. After a while they gathered their few traveling possessions and killed the fire and moved out. Everyone carried a backpack or waistpack, but most of them traveled as lightly as Nirgal or more so, with nothing but thin sleeping rolls and some food, and a few with spears or bows and arrows slung over a shoulder. They walked hard through the morning, then split into smaller groups to gather pine nuts, acorns, meadow onions, wild corn; or hunt for marmots or rabbits or frogs, or perhaps larger game. They were lean people; their ribs showed, their faces were thin. We like to stay a little hungry, the woman told him. It makes the food taste better. And indeed every night of this extended walk Nirgal bolted his food as during his runs, shaky and ravenous; and everything tasted like ambrosia. They walked a long distance every day, and during their big hunts they often ended up in terrain that would have been a disaster to run in, terrain so rough that it was often four or five days before they all managed to find each other again, at the next disk house in its orchard. Since Nirgal didn’t know where these were, he had to stick close to one or another of the group. Once they had him take the four children in the group on an easier route across Lunae Planum’s cratered terrain, and the children told him what direction to take every time they had to make a choice; and they were the first to reach the next disk house. The kids loved it. Often they were consulted by the larger group as to when they should leave a disk house. “Hey you kids, is it time to go?” They would answer yes or no very firmly within seconds, in concert. Once two adults got in a fight and afterward they had to present their cases to the four kids, who decided against one of them. The butcher woman explained to Nirgal: “We teach them, they judge us. They’re hard but fair.”

They harvested some of the yield of the orchards: peaches, pears, apricots, apples. If a crop was getting overripe they harvested everything and cooked it down and bottled it as sauces or chutneys, leaving it in big pantries under the disk houses for other groups, or for themselves on their next time through. Then they were off again, north over Lunae until it fell down the Great Escarpment, here very dramatically, dropping from Lunae’s high plateau five thousand meters down to the Chryse Gulf, in only just over a hundred horizontal kilometers.