You’d first see those huge, lumbering shadows through the driving snow, for the beasts of burden are far larger than their masters, and even more so once they’re fully laden. Carrying loads is something the hunters are not built for, but they are endlessly inventive with rope and hides, playing Buckaroo to the nth degree to pack up their whole lives onto these monsters.

There are three types of beast in this caravan, besides the handlers themselves. The first are huge and slow, plodding on elephant legs, their heavy bodies bulked out further by a coat of something part feather, part hair, part scale. Reptile genetics driven to new extremes by evolution, to withstand a long series of glaciations. They have swaying, curved necks, small heads with almost prehensile lips, and long tails. At first they seem like a bizarre cross-breeding of camel and elephant, save that the hump is only mounded baggage, a tottering tower of rolled tents, bundles and slings. Beside them, and only marginally fleeter, come beasts that seem more familiar—a patchwork formed from the animals you know. Body of a reindeer, head of a warthog, high-stepping their way over the snowbound, stony ground with surprising delicacy. Some are laden, others carry passengers who perch along their spines in rows, squabbling and occasionally unseating one another. The third tame species is a kind of hook-beaked ostrich. Two of them run the edges of the caravan, their riders keeping a keen watch through the snow for trouble, either bestial or intelligent. It has been a hard winter; there are plenty of hungry mouths out there. The riders hold long, goad-like switches in their teeth and jab at their mounts to steer them; they have no reins. The third bird-beast draws a travois upon which an injured hunter reclines, one leg torn open by a misstep amongst the rocks but already poulticed and healing.

But then they are closer, the whole swaggering, shambling parade of them, and that conversational babble of croaks and quacks and clicks, chirps and cackles, would start to seem more alien to you as you took them in.