Adam had worked for Feller in order to get what he needed to make a bigger dwelling for him and Eve and the children, but it almost immediately became obvious that his labors were at once too little and too much. Too little because the children grew so rapidly that Adam could never have cut down trees and expanded the cabin quickly enough to keep pace with them, and too much because they soon were given accommodations in other buildings around Camp. Adam’s log pile, when it finally made its way up the hill, dwindled and disappeared in a matter of days as the wood was used to shore up various structures that had fallen into disrepair as their builders wandered away or became forgettish.

Walksfar had spoken of other old souls who had accompanied him on the Trek, Cairn being one such, but for the most part they had not been in evidence. This changed as the twelve little ones grew and word of them somehow spread into the remote places into which those old souls had strayed during the many years that Walksfar had been drinking tea and carving marks on his wall. For the most part those were not as outlandish in their forms as Cairn; most were closer to Walksfar’s shape. But one had been dwelling among beasts for so long that he had begun to resemble a bear, and there was another soul that possessed no physical form at all but was embodied solely in movements of the air, made visible by entrained dust. Beast and Dusty seemed to favor each other’s company and were frequently seen together, the former sitting naked and hairy on the ground while the latter swirled about him in the form of a dust devil. Such was the community of souls in which the twelve children learned to crawl, then walk and talk. By the time they could go about on two feet they were already half as tall as Adam.