“I reinvented the wheel!” Mal declared loudly, which the assembled Birdmen seemed to find hilarious, passing the word back and forth between them. “I mean, you can’t go wrong with the wheel, right? And they don’t have it here. But it turns out that when you don’t have any roads or useful flat land, and the ground turns into a bog after every rain and thaw, the wheel is fucking useless. But it gave them a good laugh. That’s actually one way they’re like us: sense of humour. They love pratfalls and stories where characters build themselves up and get knocked down. Anyway, want to come hunting?”

“What…now?” Lee goggled at her.

“They’re low on meat—this dried stuff is their fallback, and they don’t like it much. We’re actually better at eating this than they are, because we’ve got molars. You may get asked to chew meat for someone—full disclosure, right?”

“Oh. Right. Okay.”

“But they’re about to hunt, and they want me—us—to come along.”

Lee looked at her doubtfully. “I bet they can run as fast as a horse and they’ve got…great big pointy teeth and all that. And spears. So my role in this would be…?”

Mal’s grin broadened. “You’ll see. And there’s some furs for you, too. Not going to get much warmer than this until mid-afternoon, by my reckoning.”

Lee’s mental images of crashing through a snowbound forest at breakneck speed, in pursuit of a sabre-toothed tiger, were considerably short of the mark. Firstly, although there was the occasional flurry of snow, the morning was crisp and clear and the ground was slightly soft. It was, after all, as Mal pointed out, midsummer, albeit in a timeline where the global climate had gone in quite a different direction.

They were hunting on the open ground that led down towards the river, and their prey was a herd of two-legged, long-tailed feathery creatures. They were the same size as Lee and Mal, a little larger than the Birdmen themselves. The animals were grazing, scything at the grass with their beaks, heads crooked like flamingos. They looked dismayingly fast, but Mal explained that the locals didn’t much care for chasing down prey when they didn’t have to. Elsewhere, other tribes drove herds off high places with fire and noise, or ran them into canyons or artificial choke points. Here on the flatlands, the technique was nets.