DAMANIS: When we were done with that, those of us who were still uninjured got together to discuss what to do next. Some of us wanted to find your colony. We knew it was down here because that’s why we were over your planet in the first place, and we knew you couldn’t be too far away. But none of our PDAs survived the fall and we couldn’t signal you, or use them to keep track of whoever wandered off. Most of us wanted to build a better camp and get ourselves squared away, find some water and some food before we did anything else. I said we should move the dead out of the container and the living back in, so they would at least have shelter. One guy, Nadeem Davi, started talking about how we should consider the possibility of using the dead for food. We argued about that so long that we didn’t notice what had happened to the forest.

EL-MASRI: What had happened?

DAMANIS: It had gone dead silent. Like it does when there’s a predator around, right? Everything that could get eaten just shuts up and hides. We finally noticed it when we all stopped talking. It was dead silent except for our injured. And then—

SPURLEA: And then a pack of animals was on you.

DAMANIS: You know about these things?

EL-MASRI: We just call it “the pack.” We don’t call them anything else because we’ve never caught one by itself. You don’t see them, or you see dozens of them. There’s nothing in between.

DAMANIS: I didn’t know that. I saw them coming out of the woods and they reminded me of the stories my grandmother told me of hyenas in Africa. There were just so many of them. One or two for every one of us.

EL-MASRI: We lost fourteen people to the pack early on before we learned not to wander too far into the woods alone. We go out in groups of four or five and always go armed. They seem to have gotten good at recognizing rifles. We don’t see them as much as we used to.