“There’s more than one?”

“Oh, yeah. A male, two she-camels, and a calf just this spring.”

“But where from?” I asked again, holding out my hand.

“Put some grass in it, or she’ll just bite you. The land we’re on used to be the zoo. Whenever you’re up for a serious hike, you can see the old buildings — they’re over that ridge a ways. They’re ruined, though. It’s kind of a sad place. When the Engineers set up camp, the tropical animals had already died, and some other species, too. The last tiger died two years ago, and everybody was miserable, even though we all knew it was gonna happen eventually.”

“A tiger?”

“Yeah. He was beautiful. But we just couldn’t find out enough about taking care of tigers, and what we could find out, we couldn’t always use. But the moose and the wild horses did okay on their own, so we let ’em go feral. And you’ll see snow monkeys in the woods, if you watch. The musk oxen were our big success, though.”

The camel looked adoringly at me from under vast, sand-colored lashes, and tried to tear a piece from my sleeve. I pulled another hank of grass and offered that instead. “They’re still here?”

“No, it’s too hot for ’em here now. We were losing too many to disease. But we found out about some people north of Winnipeg who’re doing kind of what the Engineers are doing here, and they said they’d take ’em. So we had a musk oxen drive up to the border. It was great, except people started singing ‘Git Along Little Musk Ox’ when we’d stop for the night. Now we hear the herd’s increasing again. I figure that’s one for the good guys.”

“Who are—?”

The camel bit me.

“She’s really sweet,” Sher said as I rubbed my forearm. “You just don’t want to ignore her.”

“You’re darn right.”

The camel pulled her lips back blissfully once more.

Josh’s brand of tiptoeing wasn’t verbal. It wasn’t even tiptoeing, really; it was a different kind of caution, another sort of concern for my mental state, and it manifested itself in watching me. I’d known he was doing it, but I hadn’t known how thoroughly he was doing it until he stopped. I brought it up one evening, in his surgery, where he’d had an emergency call. Large Bob Beher had broken his left wrist; I assisted at the cast-making. (Josh’s principles of doctor-patient formality were, based on this example, a little slippery; Large Bob referred to the doctor as “Josh, you sonofabitch,” and Josh addressed the patient as “Mr. Beher, you horse’s ass.”)

We were alone, and I was gathering up the last ends of plaster gauze and the pan of chalky water when I said, “Did you think I was going to kill myself?”

Josh looked up from his dishpan full of scary stainless-steel implements. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know you before, you see. But I knew while I was sealing up the outside of you, that something inside was broken. Then, when you… ”