The day after that he got two more, for disappointingly little of the first one had turned out to be edible. It became necessary to get more and more of them and to range farther from the base of the hill in order to find ones that had not been killed or scared away. The uneaten bits of them began to clutter their hilltop camp and to make a stink not much preferable to that of shit. Mab, consulting the mysterious reservoirs of data to which she somehow had access, provided them with instructions on how those by-leavings might be put to use, and so they began to acquire such things as needles of bone and threads of sinew. They went about clad in skins and feathers of various creatures that Adam in his never-ending quest for satiety had brought back up out of the grassland.

The hill embodied a soul, which they could only assume had dwelled in it since the dawn of the First Age. It had chosen to save Adam and Eve from the wolves. It had then gone still and silent. It did not seem to have either the faculty of speech or the desire to communicate with them. Mab tried many times to reach into it with her aura but found nothing there. Or rather found a soul whose organization was so different from theirs as to render communication impossible.

A few months later, without warning or explanation, it stood up again and walked for a little while and then slumped to the ground in a new location, closer to the river valley and the range of hills. Between the lack of food and the change in location, it seemed that the hill might be letting them know that they had worn out their welcome. The tree was denuded of nuts, the hill of berries and greens. Wood to feed the fire had to be dragged from trees along the rim of the river valley. They encountered wolves, and creatures of other kinds that were unmistakably hazards.