Trapping the Pleistocene

JAMES SARAFIN

Here’s a vigorous and fast-moving addition to the long body of stories in which time-travelers go back to prehistoric times to hunt big game, the best-known of which is probably L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur”—although here they’re trapping the animals rather than hunting them, and they’re after Pleistocene megafauna (in specific, a giant beaver the size of a car) rather than dinosaurs. And running into some unexpected problems along the way …

James Sarafin’s first fiction sale was to Asimov’s Science Fiction in the mid-1990s. Since then he has sold short fiction to Asimov’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other print magazines. His short story “The Word for Breaking August Sky” won the Mystery Writers of America’s Robert L. Fish Award (best first mystery story). Other stories of his include a semi-finalist for the Nebula Award and finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. James Sarafin practiced as an attorney in Anchorage for thirty-two years, doing civil litigation, contracts, and trial work, before retiring at the end of 2013. He still lives in Alaska, along with his wife, two adult children, and two granddaughters. Sarafin is an avid outdoorsman and gets out of the city to real Alaska whenever he can. During high school, he earned college money by trapping fur on rural lands in central Ohio.

The gray clouds had lifted over the bottomland, taking with them the threat of more rain. The creek ran high and muddy, near to overflowing its banks. Dead leaves of autumn swirled in back-eddies and jammed up against the protruding sticks of the beaver dam. Leaves clung to the man’s boots at waterline as he shuffled across the waterlogged top of the dam. Floating leaves rose and fell with the waves of his wading; some went spinning free and sliding down the band of water that poured over the top of the dam where the main current flowed, where the beaver crossed the dam.

Sometime in the night, after the rain stopped, the temperature had fallen and the air had become still. Jack’s breath plumed around him as he waded. The rocks along the banks and the edges of the dam were rimmed with the season’s first ice. Early in the year for ice, but here it was.

It’s winter again, Katie. The season when you left me.

He saw that the trap and guide sticks were gone from the crossover. He stooped to grope around the trap’s anchor stake. The water immediately numbed his fingers and made the back of his hand ache. His hands were getting a bit arthritic from years of immersions in winter water. He caught the tie-down cable with his index finger and began hauling it in, hand over hand, feeling more than the weight of the trap on the end. It never got old, the thrill of this moment, almost as strong as when his father had first taken him trapping as a boy: when you realized you had something but still weren’t sure what it was. We know that thrill, don’t we Katie?

The other end of the cable was looped to a body-grip trap his grandpa had made by bending and welding quarter-inch-diameter spring steel. The leading spring of the trap had twisted sideways after firing, and the dark, slender form of an otter, locked in the trap’s square jaws, corkscrewed just under the surface as he pulled it in. The otter’s long body and tail waved snakelike in the current, causing the cable to throb electrically in his hands. He could have been here hauling in the same kind of trap and animal in his great-great-grandfather’s time, if not for the rush of cars from the skyway that crossed overhead.

He compressed the trap’s springs, opened the jaws, and shook the dead otter free. A nice big male, in prime condition, its wet fur matted flat to its body and a little gritty with mud carried by the stream. He shook the otter again and blew against its fur.

Do you see how it’s primed up for winter? One of the Amish enclaves will trade us for this otter, Katie.

Jack reset the trap in the center of the overflow, bracing it upright with sticks taken from the dam. He still had one beaver, the old smart one, to remove from this colony for the landowner whose fields were being flooded by the dam. The landowner had tried removing the dam with an ax and even dynamite, but the beaver patched up any dam breaks almost overnight. Then, after doing everything possible to teach the beaver about traps and snares, the owner had called Jack.

He picked his way back across the dam and trudged along the trail to the road. A few dry leaves still rattled in the branches overhead and there was the musty smell of damp leaves underfoot. Remember when small steps followed behind him, how she liked to kick the leaves and send them flying in the wind? He resisted the urge to turn around and see the bitter truth again.

He paused to catch his breath atop the steep embankment leading up from the creek to the highway pull-off where his truck was parked. So much for carrying the extra weight of middle age. A life-shortening condition, they told him, and Carol was after him to get it cured with fat-cell-suppression treatments. Just a bit of tinkering with the right genes. But he’d have to go to one of the urban towers for the treatments and he’d almost rather die young.

Before he got to the truck, his phone rang. He fished around in his shirt pocket, found the phone, and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. An image sprang up above his hand: the face of his wife.

“Jack,” Carol said, “Emily called this morning. Henry is missing. He went off on some animal-capture job and was supposed to be back home the night before last. She’s frantic.”

“He didn’t say anything to me about it,” Jack told her. “Did she try the law?”

Her image nodded. “The sheriff hasn’t been able to find a trace of him here in the enclave. And you won’t believe who I just got a call from, five minutes ago. He said he’s a project director for the government.”

“The government,” Jack said. “What project?”

“He didn’t say. He said he’s with the Department of the Interior. They want to hire you for an animal-capture job.”

“Work for the government? That’ll be the day.”

“Jack, the guy on the phone said the job involves Henry’s disappearance. He wouldn’t say anything more. He wants to see you this afternoon at their headquarters. But, um, it’s in one of the towers in south Columbus.”

“So they just snap their fingers, and I’m supposed to come running?” Jack kicked a loose rock across the gravel pull-off. It click-clicked, bounced high, scattered smaller pieces of gravel. A few hours’ drive, if conditions on the old highway weren’t too bad. And then he’d have to go into that tower. He ought to just let the sheriff interview the guy. But the enclave’s sheriff had no jurisdiction there, and the government wasn’t asking to see him. If Jack left right now, he might make it before dark. No, not this time of year. He told Carol he’d go and dropped the phone into his pocket. He returned to his pickup truck and put the otter in the bed, beside the three beaver he had picked up at other jobs that morning.

Movement caught the corner of his eye. Darker shadows flickered past the dark edge of the woods on the other side of the road. Wolves had picked up his scent or the scent of the beaver. The lead wolf, the alpha female, came out along the edge of the road that marked the border between Jack’s enclave and the wilderness preserve. She saw Jack looking at her and howled a quick warning to her packmates.

Jack’s family had been on the land when it was a wilderness to the European settlers, when the wilderness was gone, and now that it was mostly wilderness again. Restored bear and cougar populations didn’t cause the rural folks enough grief, so the government had brought in western timber wolves on the grounds that wolves had once inhabited the Ohio wilderness. The wolves’ implants were supposed to keep them in the preserve, but things didn’t always work as intended.

Kill one and there would be hell to pay, if not from the government then from the wolf worshippers and their lawyers. He could see them now, the fans and sponsors of this particular pack, leaning forward in their tower homes, watching the video feed through the eyes of the wolves. Waiting to see if they would take down this reckless enclaver for their next meal. Eat everything a man ever was, right down to his bones and the soles of his boots.

Jack took the stunstick out of his pocket, telescoped it to its full length, and let the wolves see it. Their fear of man was mostly gone, but one thing had been engraved deeply enough in the canine culture by generations of stone and steel and lead and electron: beware of men carrying sticks. You couldn’t kill them with a stunstick, but could sure give them one hell of a shock. The wolves kept their distance, milling along the edge of the road, finally disappearing back into the forest after he got into his truck.

Jack drove down the empty road until he hit old Route 23 North, which paced the Scioto River for much of its length. This stretch of road ran next to a skyway, where the multitudes whizzed by high above ground on electromagnetic fields, lost in their business or conversations or whatever it was the tower-dwellers did with themselves. They couldn’t be taking in the country at that speed. Or notice Jack trundling along on his antiquated surface wheels.

Lo, once there were superhighways, now razed and reclaimed back to the earth. Just a few of the older roads were left for the enclavers to use and maintain by themselves.

Dense, overhanging trees gave the semblance of moving through a tunnel. Grass and weeds crowded the edges of the old highway and sprouted from the cracks they had formed in the asphalt. Dead branches and debris littered the empty road and potholes abounded. Twice he had to stop and move tree limbs that had fallen during the last storm. Outside the boundaries of the enclaves, where beaver were protected by law, he frequently had to slow for submerged pavement. In one place the water came up to his floorboards. After an hour, he chanced to glance at the fuel gauge, saw it was almost on empty. At the next enclave, another farming community, he stopped at a crossroads store, bought a gallon of distilled water, and dumped it into the tank. Then he drove on into the gathering dusk.

*   *   *

He could see the lighted tower, looming ever larger through occasional gaps in the trees, well before he arrived. An example of the newest, footprint-reducing architecture, the tower was built like a giant morel: a tall, narrow cap with an irregular, ridged surface overhanging a smaller, round base. No, not a morel; if that tower was a mushroom, it had to be one of the poisonous varieties. From a hub level in the tower cap, the thin lines of skyways spread out in various directions. Like a giant spiderweb.

When he saw the government’s sign at the compound’s surface entrance, his foot went to the brake pedal and his hands twitched, wanting to turn the wheel back toward home. But he followed the entrance ramp into the compound. He drove through parklands where elk and camels grazed, over a creek, and the length of a small lake where swans swam in pairs, to arrive at a small paved area before a tower entrance. It held no other vehicles but looked as good as anyplace to park the truck, so he did. The outside of the tower base presented a rough, ridged surface with no windows or seams. He pulled his wool cap down over his forehead and raised his hands to push open a door. He stumbled slightly when his hands met no resistance and he felt a puff of air as he passed through the non-existent door into the building. The lobby’s outer wall appeared to be made entirely of one-way glass that allowed a view of the compound outside. Or maybe he was only looking at video screens. It probably made no difference to the tower-dwellers.

The floor was covered with some mutated form of living grass that lay in a short, dense mat like a golf green. He gouged its surface with his boot-toe and watched it begin repairing itself. Imagine that crap growing over your foot, eh, Katie? From a wall of the tower’s core a waterfall trickled down and formed a stream that meandered across the floor to his left. A few of the dark-robed tower-dwellers strolled and loitered, communing with their view of the outdoors. Others scurried in or out of the elevators. They paid him no mind.

Jack had walked through the lobby, halfway around the tower’s core, when a voice growled his name from behind him. He turned and saw what looked like a cross between an orangutan and a human woman. She wore no clothing and was covered with straw-blonde hair, long but thin and with no underfur. Her face was bare ahead of her ears and heavily made-up. Her arms hung nearly to her knees and her breasts halfway to her waist; the breasts swung across her torso as she moved.

“Mr. Morgan, the director’s office is this way.” She smiled open-mouthed, displaying ivory canines. She seemed amused by his reaction.

“How do you know who I am?”

“We were expecting you. You’re not connected, so you’re the anomaly here.”

She turned and knuckle-walked to the nearest lift, wiggling her hips as she went. He moved to follow and almost fell on his face as a weight dragged on his right leg, the one with the bad knee. Some kind of cleaner robot had wheeled itself across the floor and was licking the half-dried mud off his boot. He kicked the robot free and caught up with the ape-woman at a lift. They ascended to the hub floor, the one with the transit stations, where the skyways spread out like the spokes of a wheel. Caught in the spiderweb.

One step out of the lift and he was mobbed by interactive holograms. Human and cartoon faces mouthing soundlessly, waving ad banners or petitions or virtual collection slots for various causes. The only one he had time to read solicited funds for saving species of geothermal bacteria endangered by leaks in the freshwater pipeline running down through the coastal waters from Alaska to California. He had no means to filter them out, but when he failed to show an identity response, the holos vanished.

Following his guide closely, Jack was dumbfounded by a place without boundaries or familiar reference points. Gleaming glass and metal, lights and colors, senseless flickering images. The lobby appeared to extend forever in all directions, including behind him where the lift doors had vanished. People moved around him, some ethereal as ghosts.

He was led to a door that appeared to stand by itself in the borderless expanse. The door had lettering that spelled out some guy’s name, project director of some division of bureaucrats, none of which Jack gave a crap about. His guide stepped aside and showed a last flash of canines and took two more steps to the side and vanished. The door opened, so he went in to a private office where a man wearing an early twenty-first-century-style business suit sat behind a desk.

“Good evening, Mr. Morgan.” The man in the suit spread his hands to indicate the room. “We created this old-style office just so you might feel comfortable.” He stood up, went around the desk, and held out his hand.

Yes, there were now walls Jack could see and touch, windows on one of them, and two visitor chairs in front of a desk that looked to be made out of walnut but was of course not real wood, if it had real substance at all. Jack ignored the man’s extended hand and touched one of the chairs. It felt solid enough, so he dropped slowly into the seat. He took a deep, slow breath and fixed his eyes on this condescending bureaucrat who would have liked nothing better than to take away Jack’s livestock and tools and traps, put a communication device in his head, and make him live far above ground in a meaningless anthill existence. No doubt to the dismay of some other bureaucrat whose job it was to manage the government’s relations with the cultural enclaves.

The project director returned to his seat. The windows behind him showed a fine view of a forest-covered hill lit by a midday sun. Phony video image. “Let’s get to business, okay?” the director said. “We’d like to issue a contract for your animal-capture services.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m just here to find out where Henry Andersen is.”

“You’ll have to hear about our job for that. Your friend’s location is confidential until then.”

“What kind of job?”

“We want you to catch a beaver.”

Jack nodded toward the fake window, an impulse he couldn’t control. “If you people ever set foot on the ground, you’d see there’s beaver all over the country.”

“Not this kind of beaver. Do you want to find out about your friend?”

Jack shrugged, then nodded. “So you want a beaver caught. Just one?”

“You won’t be able to bring it back alive.” The bureaucrat touched his finger to his tongue and used it to trace a circle on the top of his desk. “We just need tissue samples. We expect you’ll probably have to euthanize the animal first.”

Jack decided it was his turn to wear a smile. “Euthanize.”

“This is for a project that justifies the death of one beaver.”

Jack kept looking at the man, waiting him out. He succeeded.

“Have you ever heard of Castoroides ohioensis?” the director finally asked.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

The bureaucrat looked confused, then his eyes went empty, his mouth hung slightly open—the vacant, moronic look of someone consulting his web access. A common enough expression for those who let nanobots build artificial things in the middle of their cerebral cortex. Why would you open the last place of privacy to the whole world?

“Ah, okay,” the director said. “Meaning you haven’t heard of it. You people use such interesting expressions.”

“We get by.” Jack lifted one muddy boot and crossed his legs. “Without an implant telling us what to say. And think.”

“Okay. But to get to the point, Castoroides ohioensis was a giant species of beaver that lived during the Pleistocene epoch. It’s been extinct for at least ten thousand years. Our project requires sending an animal-capture expert to the late Pleistocene to catch an ohioensis and bring back tissue samples.”

“You want to send me back in time to catch a giant beaver?”

The bureaucrat nodded.

“What for?” Jack saw the bureaucrat’s face begin to go blank again, so he translated for the man. “Why do you want tissue from one of these big beavers?”

The project director’s finger traced circles on his desk again. He appeared to study the view through the video screens. Jack himself kept fighting the unconscious assumption that the view was real. “Our project involves cataloging the genomes of extinct Pleistocene mammals. For some species we have no bones, only fossils, and there’s a limit to the information that can be obtained from fossils.”

Jack thought of the only time in the past he cared about. “I’ll go if I can make a side stop at one year, eleven months, two days ago.”

The director started to shake his head, then his curiosity got the better of him. “Why then?”

“Because that’s when my daughter fell through the ice and drowned.”

“And you hope to change things and save her life.” The director finished the shake of his head. “No one is allowed to go to a past time and place where there were people. You might change the past, the timeline of human history. In fact, you admit that you’d try to change the timeline.”

“I just want to save my daughter. One little ten-year-old girl.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then forget it.” Jack stood up. “Screw you guys.”

A slight frown crossed the director’s face for a moment, then faded to an expression of serene disregard. Jack suppressed the urge to lean over the desk and backhand the man and shout at him. But there was no use trying to provoke someone with a mood regulator inside his head. The effort would only backfire.

“Before you leave, let’s talk about your friend, Henry Andersen,” the bureaucrat was saying. “He seems to have disappeared back there in the Pleistocene. His time capsule returned without him. And we hope you’ll say yes to us now in order to go look for him.”

“Are you saying you talked Hank into going back to the Pleistocene to catch one of these giant beaver?”

“Yes. I’m afraid you weren’t our first choice, sorry.”

“All by himself? You assholes sent him there all by himself?”

“The energy cost of time travel depends on the mass involved, and Mr. Andersen said he could do it by himself. We’ll send you in a two-seat capsule, in case you do find him.”

“Why would he agree to do that?”

The director shrugged. “Money. Even your people have some need for it, I understand. He also seemed perversely excited at the prospect of being able to catch an extinct giant beaver.”

Jack sat very still. That sounded like Hank all right. The damn fool. Jack played with the collar of his wool shirt, which was still damp from the morning’s rain.

“So, okay,” the director continued. “Andersen agreed that four days’ subjective time should be sufficient, so that’s what the schedule allows. We don’t want you staying any longer than necessary.”

“Four days? If I have to get around on foot, it might take longer than that just to locate these giant beaver. Let alone find Hank, which would be my first priority.”

“You’ll be sent to known ohioensis habitat, where fossils of relevant age have been found. The same site we sent him to.” He dipped his finger again and traced a circle on his desk. “Your contract pays a substantial bonus if you’re successful.”

“What if I run into prehistoric humans? Won’t that risk changing the timeline?”

“We’re sending you to a time before humans arrived on the continent.”

“Aren’t you worried I might do something to change the evolution of the beaver?”

“No. Modern beaver, Castor canadensis, were alive then, too. The giant beaver was a different genus that was driven to extinction by the arrival of humans in North America.” The director leaned forward, noticed his necktie spooling up on the table, and wiped his fingers on it. “Useful apparel item. Why aren’t you wearing one?”

Before Jack could decide whether to answer, the director’s face took on that blank, stupid look again. Obviously getting instructions from someone else. Just a flunky, then.

“Okay, I’m required to disclose certain project risks. You cannot control the time capsule. The wormhole is directed from our facility. Though rare, there’s the possibility of a wormhole misalignment. And North America was populated with dangerous megafauna—”

“Whoa. What does ‘wormhole misalignment’ mean?”

“Your capsule may not go precisely to when or where it’s supposed to. Just a slight chance. But we could still find your capsule and retrieve you.”

“Great. So what about the dangerous megafauna?”

“The division head insists that you be advised to take a firearm along for protection.”

“I don’t have a firearm that could stop a charging mammoth,” Jack said slowly. “Why wouldn’t you give me a plasma weapon?”

The director shook his head and smiled. “We don’t hand over a modern weapon to an unconnected individual. Who knows what you might use it for? Sorry, you’ll have to make do with your traditional cultural weapons.”

“At least we still have our culture.”

“Okay. So you’ll go?”

“What if I say no?”

“We’ll look for some other qualified individual willing to take the assignment.”

“Someone who doesn’t care about Hank, you mean.”

It didn’t have to be said that Hank was probably dead. Probably not a chance in ten of even finding his remains. Jack realized that, as he sat here right now, Hank certainly was dead—long, long dead and gone, even his bones turned to dust. Gone forever in the distant past. Could that be undone?

He opened his big mouth and said, “When do you want me to leave?”

*   *   *

They gave him no guide to lead him back to ground floor. They probably never thought of it. Once the director’s door closed and vanished behind him, he was lost. He couldn’t locate a lift entrance or even the walls of the tower core. It must have been a shift’s quitting time, for people now swarmed around him, hurrying on their way to wherever tower-dwellers went after selling their daily lives to their jobs. Among them were the occasional trans-specied individuals like his former guide.

He dodged mere images and ran into real people. The real people bumped him along with the flow of the crowd. Bodies jammed against him from all sides. He walked into a wall he couldn’t detect, then another. He could see only part of what was there. In a fleeting moment of insight, he recognized a band of wild horses browsing on prairie grass, a pair of moose stripping leaves from trees, salmon leaping to climb an ethereal cataract in midair. The moment was gone, and what remained were incomprehensible lights, links, and datastreams. None of what he heard was intelligible, just a cacophony of buzzes and clicks and whistles and beeps that he could no more interpret than he could the speech of porpoises. People were constantly running into him and glaring in annoyance, as if it was his fault they failed to detect him. He, the anomaly.

He tried to work his way out of the busy travel routes, but they shifted around him constantly. He felt the invisible ceiling and walls closing in on him, leaving no personal space or air to breathe. His legs wanted to run, anywhere, until he was out of there. His knees were coming unhinged. His bad knee buckled and he almost went down.

Jack caught hold of himself and took a slow, deep breath. They’re watching us, Katie. They must be. Somebody watched everything here, the stage for a million reality shows. See the poor enclaver-hick lost in the tower. The thought held him together. He willed himself to take slow, deep breaths. Okay. He’d been lost in the woods a time or three. When that happened, you stayed calm until you could orient yourself. He elbowed a path through the mob and parked himself out of the way in the middle of a diorama that appeared to display the lifecycle of a freshwater mussel. He stayed put, ignored the chaos around him.

At last he caught a glimpse of a door opening in the air ahead and two people came out of a lift. He headed quickly for the lift doorway, squeezing through before it could close and disappear from view. He had no means to operate the lift, and it moved through a number of higher and lower floors before finally opening to a level where he saw the surface view of outdoors. He exited quickly.

A line of people in white robes was filing through an entrance. He squeezed past them and at last stood breathing the fresh air of outdoors. He waited to make sure he really was outdoors. Thank God.

A few of the white-robed people stood talking outside the tower, their bare feet immersed in the damp grass beyond the walkway. It was full dark now and Jack’s truck was nowhere to be seen, so he looked up at the night sky to orient himself.

Something was wrong with his eyes. The stars had become fat smudges of light, none in any familiar position or constellation. Where were Jupiter and Mars? Venus should be following the sun to the west. And Polaris? Sirius? He stared at one of the stars too long and in a moment it came down to him, growing larger, moving quickly. Blooming in front of him in a burst of blue-white light. Holograms all around him then, moving soundless images just on the verge of being recognizable. A woman’s face? He couldn’t experience the whole effect, but part of it appeared to be an ad for a new skyway vehicle. Finally the display burst into a shower of sparks that died around him. The group of white-robed people cheered and applauded the display. Or were they applauding Jack’s reaction to it? He noticed that they didn’t look at the sky themselves.

He turned his eyes to the tower wall before he attracted the attention of another faux-star. Forget about compass directions. If he just kept walking one way around the tower, he’d eventually come to his truck. And he did.

It had never felt so good to slide behind the wheel. He started the engine and drove up the exit ramp as fast as he could. If those government people ever wanted to talk to him again, they’d have to come out to the country to see him.

*   *   *

Night had settled over the land as he headed down the highway to home. Beneath the overhanging trees, he drove through a tunnel of darkness that stayed always beyond the reach of his headlights. Why had he given up so easily on saving Katie? The one time in the past that mattered, and he lost it. Yet the director’s words jibed with everything he had read about time-travel restrictions.

It was late when he turned at the rusted old mailbox post that still stood at the end of the drive leading to the family farm. Nice long driveway to keep the tower tourists at a distance. Yeah, take a tour of an actual working agrarian enclave. Roll along the ancient roads in a wheeled surface vehicle. At regular stops you may experience the sights, sounds, and smells, or perhaps talk to some of the locals. See how they live. See them at work in the fields, the kind of clothes they wear. Yes, those are real cattle and sheep, pigs and chickens, which they still enslave. They have an exemption under the Cultural Preservation Act.

Eddie was waiting for him outside the barn door. “Dad! I caught a muskrat in the creek!” He held out the furry rodent by its dark, scaly tail.

“You pull your traps if it ices up any more, you hear?”

“Okay. Will you help me skin it?”

“Maybe tomorrow, if I have time.” The boy followed Jack into the barn. “I’m going away on a trip, so I have a lot to do before I leave.” Then he realized it wasn’t true. He would experience four days in the past while only a moment of present time elapsed before they brought him back. With Hank, if possible.

The barn held the familiar smells of dry hay, cow dung and piss, and green animal pelts. Jack set his gear to the side of the door and hung the beaver and otter from a rafter, high enough to be out of reach of the rats and cats. Hanging from the same rafter, still drying on the boards, were the skins of two coyotes, two other beaver, and three coons. Dry pelts hung on a wall, their skins stiff and crinkly like thick parchment. Tomorrow he’d skin and board out the new beaver and otter, then he’d go pull his trapline. It wouldn’t be right to leave his traps set when he couldn’t be sure he’d ever come back to check them.

Eddie set the muskrat on a workbench under an overhead light and began stroking the lustrous dark guard hairs on the animal’s back.

“Did you eat dinner yet?” Jack asked.

“Yeah. I finished milking the cows, too.”

“Good. Go get cleaned up, it’s near your bedtime.”

He went out after the boy and latched the barn doors, then thought to look up. The real stars, galaxies, and planets were back in their places over the open enclave sky. He searched and found the faint smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, Katie’s favorite. Jack himself had always liked M104, and Katie liked that one, too; but he knew he couldn’t find the Sombrero with his naked eye. Maybe he should get the old telescope out of the barn and have a look. No. It wouldn’t be any good without her.

Carol stood waiting in the kitchen doorway, watching him as he came in. He hung his hat and jacket on wall hooks by the front door. She watched him do that and watched him take off his muddy boots. The warmth of the room brought the scent of evaporating sweat from the neck of his damp wool shirt. He went to the kitchen and she backed up out of the hallway, still looking at him. The lights in the room flickered, dimmed, then came back. Trouble in the enclave’s old power plant again. Funny how events that seemed connected often weren’t.

He sat down at the table and she turned to the old cabinet microwave oven to remove a plate of food. She must have put it in to warm when she’d heard his truck come up the drive. Meatloaf made of ground beaver meat, corn, and potatoes. The thick, peppery smell of the gravy made his stomach growl. She set the plate in front of him and sat herself down on the chair across the table.

After a while of watching him eat, she said, “Josh also called today.”

Jack snorted. “You mean he’s still alive? So what’s up with them?”

She looked at her hands, gripping the table in front of her. “He actually won a drawing among the tower engineering staff for a two-week cruise of the moon. He and Shari are going next month.”

“Are they still in that plural-marriage group?”

“No.” She hesitated a moment, then: “At least they got out of it together.”

“Maybe if they didn’t get out of it together he would have come home,” he told her. Katie would have stayed, he felt sure.

She gave him the smile, the one that always lifted him, no matter what. “Maybe. But it is what it is. There’s still Eddie left to us.” She kept looking at him.

His contract had a confidentiality clause, but damned if he was going to make Hank’s mistake of honoring a contract by keeping secrets from his own wife. No way was he going to leave her frantically asking everyone she knew, “Have you seen Jack?” if he never came back. What a scatterbrain Hank was.

He waited until Eddie had gone to bed before he told her. Her first thought was the same as his. “Can you stop at two years ago?” He gave her the answer, the cold, bitter, final answer that had been given to him.

She wasn’t keen at all about his going off trapping in the Pleistocene, but when he explained about Hank she quit protesting. He could see in her eyes the thought of facing Emily if she talked him out of going.

“I’ll call Emily after you’ve left,” she said. “I’ll tell her you’ve gone to find Hank.” She looked up, directly into his eyes, and said in a louder voice, “Jack, you make sure you come back. With Henry if you can find him. You hear me?”

*   *   *

Strapped into his seat, he felt an initial sense of movement, then nothing. He saw nothing outside because there were no windows in the spherical capsule. As spacetime changed around him, he wondered if he’d feel the only time that mattered.

For one instant again, Katie, I’m going to be when you are. Maybe right around here is when I could have stopped you from going out on that ice. And maybe here is when you were a small child walking through leaves, and here is when you were born.

The passage seemed to take less than half a minute, but he couldn’t tell whether his own sense of time was normal or compressed. How much time does it take to travel through time? The wormhole was supposed to leave him at the same place, but the moment after Hank’s own capsule had returned to the future. He heard nothing until the crack of displaced air from outside the capsule when it popped back into normal space. But something wasn’t right; he still felt no sense of his own weight. There was an explosion of gas inside the capsule as it filled itself with foam. Then the capsule hit something. Hard.

The foam saved his life, but the impact knocked him unconscious for a moment. When he came to, the sphere was rolling and bouncing down a rough incline of some sort with Jack going along end-over-end inside. His ride stopped a few seconds later when the capsule hit something yielding, bounced back uphill a ways, then rocked itself to a standstill. He swung the hatch open and waited for the foam to evaporate before trying to see where he was. So much for wormhole misalignment. He must have popped into normal space well aboveground. The rest of this time-travel business had damn well better work as advertised.

He climbed out and for the first time in his life beheld a true wilderness. No skyways split the air, no towers jutted up along the horizon. No roads or fields or other mark of human beings. He stood on the slope of a gradual hill covered with grass, dense patches of brush, and a few scattered groves of trees. His capsule had come to rest against a small patch of alders; their springy branches had halted his tumble downhill. A cool breeze was in his face, sending a few last wisps of foam fluttering from his head and shoulders and vanishing as they swirled downwind.

The grass on the hillside was below his knees, and the vegetation showed the bright green of youth. Early summer, then, and the sun indicated near midday. The air was cool and the trees were different from those he knew. Gone were the dense hardwood forests, the oak, ash, hickory, walnut, cherry, and beech. The trees he knew had not yet migrated this far north. He saw instead the less familiar white trunks of birch, the green-gray of aspen, the dark-green-and-black of spruce.

In the valley below ran a good-sized river, light gray-brown in the sunlight. Its current looked to be moving along at a pretty good clip, but not enough to make waves. The other side of the river wound past a bare cutbank that rose into a bluff downstream. Half a mile or so upstream, the river disappeared around the shoulder of the hill on which he stood, and farther upstream he saw a lake spreading into a vast marsh that faded out of sight into the distance. On the slope across the river, a herd of large deer-like animals were stripping leaves from some scrub willows in a meadow. Their legs were long and a few mature males in the herd carried huge racks in velvet and looking like a cross between the antlers of a bull elk and those of a moose.

Enough gawking at the landscape. Jack took his trapping and camping gear from the compartment under the seat in the capsule. He had his trapping gear in an old maple-strip pack that had belonged to his great-grandfather. His camping equipment, extra clothes, and food were in a duffel bag. He had brought an old pump-action .35 Whelen rifle, the most powerful firearm he owned, used at home for collecting venison and the occasional bear or boar. He fixed it to a gun-holder bracket on the side of the pack; he could release the rifle quickly by reaching back with his left hand. He worked his shoulders through the straps of the pack, grabbed the duffel, and started downhill. If these giant beaver were any sort of real beaver, they’d be near water. That’s how Hank would have figured, too.

The ground was rough and uneven, a raw, wild land that had never felt the comb of plow and disk. Climb a grassy tussock one step, drop into a grass-hidden hole the next. While picking his way downhill, he scanned the ground for sign. He found a faint line of grass leaning in the direction of his travel, which might mark Hank’s passage. Hard to tell after several days.

He was passing upwind of a grove of aspen when he startled some huge animal. Maybe it was his unfamiliar smell or the clink of steel in his pack. All he could see at first was a moving patch of long-haired, light-brown coat. Brush was snapping and treetops shaking as it made its ponderous way down toward the river. It broke into a clearing on the riverbank and turned to look back toward him. Bear-like body suspended over long, thick legs ending in hindclaws he could see even at this distance. Heavy gorilla-like forearms with big, wicked-looking claws, and a head shaped like a hamster’s right down to the oversized, droopy cheeks. It used its heavy tail as a counterweight as it rose up on its hind legs to sniff the air. Twice a man’s height, easy.

The giant sloth was still downwind, and he could tell when it caught his scent again because it let out a low snort and shook its ludicrous hamster head. If the scientists were right, the animals here should not yet have any fear of the hominids that were migrating out of Africa. The sloth didn’t like the smell of this African hominid, anyway. It turned back toward the river and, with an unhurried, waddling gait, plunged into the water, wading and swimming to the far bank. It shook itself like a dog as it emerged, then climbed straight up the cutbank.

Jack opened the duffel, took out his .44 magnum revolver in its holster, and strapped it to his right hip. A lot of good it would do against an animal that size, but he felt better letting his hand brush against the gun handle as he walked.

He found the sloth’s tracks crossing a patch of mud on a game trail that ran along the river. Water was still trickling into the huge tracks from a puddle in the middle of the mudhole. The sloth appeared to have been walking pigeon-toed, with its ankles rotated inward, weight resting on the outside edges of its feet and huge claws lying almost sideways on the ground. Jack studied the patch of mud. Smaller, soft-footed animals and several large, cloven-hoofed animals had also left their tracks.

And there, on the far side of the puddle, was a smeared track that could only have been made by the boot of a man who’d hopped the puddle and skidded a bit on landing. Headed upstream, toward the lake. Jack went the same way, now and then finding part of a boot track that hadn’t been obscured by other traffic.

He found signs of old friends, familiar furbearers: muskrat pathways through the reeds, mink tracks on a sandbar, otter scat on a big rock. The river was cold and slightly discolored with fine, gray silt that coated rocks at the edge of the shallows. Twice he flushed flocks of ducks that went beating into the wind, turning to head upstream. Ducks weren’t the brightest of birds; they liked to fly off in the direction you were traveling, so you just wound up flushing them again and again.

As he waded across a little feeder creek to continue up the game trail, he saw a beaver-chewed stick caught on a rock. He picked it up. Toothmarks of a size that belonged to the beaver of his own time, probably from a colony somewhere up the little creek. But he found no sign of any giant beaver.

Then all at once, he did. As he rounded the bend, at a narrow part of the river where the banks rose up higher and steeper, he found the cause of the lake and marsh he had seen before: a dam five or six times his own height and stretching all the way across the valley. It was made of logs and limbs and whole trees, cemented together with a mixture of mud and rocks. Water rushed over the top in a dozen places and strained through a few gaps in the structure’s face.

The dam contained its own ecosystem, the holes of muskrat dens and swallows’ nests, the twig and grass nests of other birds, an egg-shaped hive of yellowjackets hanging from a dead tree. Weeds, brush, and willow bushes grew in every gap between the dead logs and limbs. Live spruce and birch trees sprouted there too, some with trunks as big around as his torso, indicating that the dam had probably been maintained by generations of beaver. The tree roots probably helped anchor the structure.

At the base of the dam was a great pool, held back by a tangle of limbs and trees that had washed over the top. Ducks, geese, and a pair of swans swam and dove and preened their feathers in the pool. He stopped at the dam’s base to look up at the structure. To support that mass of water hanging overhead, the dam would have to be about as wide at the base as it was high. The dam’s face wasn’t too steep but was far too tangled and overgrown to climb. He had to follow the game trail away from the river, climbing the bank through a stand of spruce trees, to skirt the dam. In the shade of the trees, a vicious swarm of biting gnats found him and harried him all the way to the top.

On the slick trail he found imprints where boot toes had dug in to climb. He came out of the trees above the dam, on top of a low ridge paralleling the river. The ridge and hillside below were grass- and brush-covered, logged-off long ago. A few gnawed white stumps stuck up from the brush, not yet rotted back to the earth. He stopped to catch his breath and look out over the lake, eyes following its flat surface near to far, until his sight grew fuzzy in the distance of the marshlands beyond. A dark line of deep water wound through the marsh grass and weeds, marking the path of the river current.

Built partly into the steep bank on the shore where he stood, not far above the dam, was a mound of sun-bleached trees, limbs, and packed mud constructed like the dam. It was a beaver lodge almost the size of Jack’s house. The bank dropped steeply down to the lake here, and the water looked deep. The grass showed no sign of Hank’s passage, but odds were he had gone to check out that lodge.

He found Hank’s trapping pack and his rifle, leaning against the pack, on the grassy bank near the lodge. The rifle muzzle had a light misting of rust. A line of bent grass led straight uphill and he followed it. Hank had set up his camp in a good place, on flat ground on top of the hill, with a view of most of the lake. Some fallen timber offered a supply of firewood, and a spring ran down the hill nearby. Hank had set up a tent and dug a pit and ringed it with stones, the makings of a fire ready to go.

The fire-ring was as Hank left it, but the tent was flattened and torn apart. Hank’s gear lay strewn about the camp, large toothmarks in most of it. Hank had hung his food, but not high enough. It had all been eaten, its packaging scattered in bits. Nothing but indistinct marks left in the grass.

Some big animal had come along … but was Hank here then? No sign of blood or human remains. Jack followed a few short trails to where Hank had gathered firewood and gone to relieve himself but found no trail that led very far—except for three parallel paths through the grass, where three large animals had crossed the slope of the hill and headed up the lake. The paths were too wide to have been made by the close-set legs of a man.

Jack carried Hank’s rifle and gear up to camp and spent the rest of the day following dead-end trails. Rifle in hands, he followed the three animal trails for more than a mile before losing them in a swamp. He found no sign of Hank.

He hung the duffel with his food from the branch of a lone cottonwood growing by the spring, set up his own tent in a jumble of dead tree branches, and slept fitfully, rifle lying next to his hand. Next morning he renewed the search, going back to the lodge where he’d found Hank’s pack and rifle. Had Hank fallen in the lake and drowned?

He stopped next to the lodge where the bank dropped steeply down into the depths of the lake. Something caught his eye below the top of the murky water. Something moving down there. He dropped to a knee, leaned forward, and put a hand up to shade his eyes against the glare. A pair of dark eyes looked back up at him from a head the size of a man’s. Grizzled face like an old man’s with a wispy handlebar mustache a forearm’s distance below the surface.

He sensed sudden movement and began to rise and turn away as the water exploded. All he saw then were snapping teeth that grazed his right ear. He kept twisting and fell forward, planting his nose in the mud of the bank. Something heavy hit his back and he heard teeth crunch into wood.

He was pinned to the ground by the weight of the thing as it tore at his pack, maple strips rending and splintering, a deep moaning sound coming from the animal. Claws raked the shorn strips away. The animal stuck its head inside the pack, and Jack was jerked violently side-to-side and nearly lifted from the ground as it shook its head. Amidst the splintering of wood and moaning growl of the animal, Jack could hear distinct plopping noises as his trapping gear flew into the lake.

Then he was being dragged back to the water. His hands clawed at the grassy bank. The rifle had fallen out of reach. His right hand was pulled free … and that hand, if not his conscious mind, remembered the revolver at his hip.

Over his left shoulder he saw a flattened head with a short, wide snout and tiny laid-back ears. Coal-black eyes gleaming like marbles in moonlight. A long, dark-furred torpedo of death. His hand pushed the barrel of the gun between the giant otter’s eyes and pulled the trigger. Bits of brain, blood, and skull fragments showered into the lake. The animal stiffened straight as a pole and slid beneath the water.

“God damn!” He cursed some more and could barely hear himself. His ears were ringing, but he had no memory of the gun’s blast. His pulse hammered in his heart and echoed in his head. He sat on the bank and leaned against the side of the beaver lodge, trying to catch his breath. As his hearing returned, his ears began playing tricks on him. Faintly and from a distance, he thought he heard voices mingling with the music of his pulse and the ringing in his ears. Fairy voices from underground, singing in the vanished speech of fairyfolk.

No, it was just one voice, coming from inside the lodge. He didn’t believe in talking beaver or fairyfolk, and there should only be one other human on this continent.

“Hank?” he hollered.

“Yeah,” came the faint reply. “Get me out of here!”

Jack started to laugh but cut himself off. He was sounding hysterical. Hell, he was hysterical. Suffering hallucinations. Henry Andersen in a beaver lodge? Right.

“What in God’s name are you doing in there?” Let the hallucination come up with an answer to that one.

“A giant beaver pulled me in.”

This time Jack didn’t try to stop himself from laughing. His own imagination wasn’t up to this much of a hallucination. He couldn’t wait to hear the rest. Most of his trapping gear was gone from his demolished pack, but he found his hand ax lying in the grass on the bank. He leaned the rifle beside him and started chopping at the lodge.

“Come toward my voice,” Hank called. “I’ve been working at it from the inside.”

“No, it sounds like you’re just digging into the hillside there,” Jack told him. “Over here is the fastest way to get you out.”

In fifteen minutes Jack was sweating and breathing heavily. The hard clay-mud that held the lodge together soon dulled the edge of the ax, and he had to pry the larger limbs out of the way using the flat of the blade. The lodge wall was a couple of feet thick, and he couldn’t cut straight through because he had to work around a large tree trunk in the way. Finally, he felt the ax punch through and smelled a puff of damp, cool air from inside. Hank’s face, eyes squinted and blinking, framed itself in the hole, a disembodied absurdity.

“I thought that sounded like you,” Hank said, after his eyes adjusted to the light. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for your sorry ass, what do you think?”

“I figured I was a goner for sure. All I have on me is a pocket knife.”

They both worked on enlarging the hole, breaking off dried mud, pulling away sticks, until the opening was large enough. Jack would only have got himself stuck, but Hank’s skinny frame squeezed through. He straightened his back and let out a groan.

“That big beaver has got two kits with her, and I had to wedge myself in a tiny nook to stay out of her way. She kept hissing and grinding her teeth at me. They all skedaddled out of there as soon as you let daylight in.”

“Have to take your word on that.”

“Did you fire a gun out here?”

Jack nodded. “A giant otter attacked me, big as a man.” He looked down into the water where the otter had sunk. It had occurred to him to wonder if he could recover it for its fur. Make a hell of a thing to hang on the wall to yak and yarn about when he was an old fogy sitting in his rocking chair. No one would believe him otherwise. But the otter nightmare had sunk out of sight in the deep water.

Hank said, “Wish I could have seen it.”

“You wouldn’t be wishing to see it if you had.”

“Maybe one of the extinct Lutra or Satherium species.”

“You’re the college boy.”

“Your ear is bleeding.”

Jack put his fingers to his ear and they came away with a smear of blood. Until then he hadn’t felt the sting.

“Doesn’t look bad,” Hank told him. “Just a scratch.”

A deep concussion sounded behind them. The water boiled a short distance from the lodge, like someone had just pulled the plug from the bottom of the lake. Jack saw the doglike head of a beaver, but huge, break the surface.

“There she is,” Hank said.

Jack had tried to envision what one of these giant beaver must look like, but still was not prepared. She was swimming toward them and you could just about surf on her bow wave. In front of the lodge, her head submerged, her massive barrel of a torso rolled under, kept rolling by and rolling by, and she gave another slap of her tail as she dove.

Hank ran away from the bank, tottering uphill on unsteady feet. “I ain’t letting her grab me again!”

Jack snagged his rifle by the sling and joined Hank upslope. The beaver’s snout appeared in the hole in the lodge and she sniffed around for a bit. A moment later, they saw a ripple of waves moving away from the lodge.

“You say that beaver took you in there?” Jack said.

Hank shook his head. “Damnedest thing. I was out on the far edge of the lodge, trying to spot the entrance. Thought I might get a snare down there. Then I slipped and fell in. You know, I never could swim too good. I was thrashing around when that mama beaver drug me under and hauled me in there.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“No kidding. Maybe she thought I was one of her kits in that murky water. They’re about my size, and still look to be learning to swim.”

“Maybe she’s love-struck. Maybe if you shaved that fur off your face, she’d have let you be.” Jack laughed a real laugh. It felt good, finding Hank alive.

A ripple of waves returned to the lodge and the beaver appeared again in the hole. She had brought in her forepaws a big gob of mud from the lake bottom and was going about the business of repairing her home.

“What day is it, anyway?” Hank asked. “I lost track of time in the dark in there.”

“It’s the day after the day you were supposed to leave.”

“I was in there almost three days, then. Good of them to make me wait so long.”

“Next time I’ll be sure to check all the beaver lodges first thing,” Jack told him. “I got here yesterday. They were worried about a paradox if they sent me any earlier.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hank said. “I see the problem.”

“I thought, what if they sent me back earlier, to warn you, maybe. But if I did, and you got home on schedule, then why would they have to send me back to warn you?”

“That’s why they don’t try it,” Hank said. “No one’s sure what would happen. Hell, no one really knows where these wormholes go. We might be in some alternate universe here, instead of Earth’s actual past.”

If so, then even if Jack could go through the wormhole to save her, when he went back to his own time she’d still be dead. It wouldn’t be his own Katie that he’d saved.

Hank rubbed his head. Bits of dried mud broke and flaked off as he did. “I’m starving. I got some water in there from the dive hole but only had a couple energy bars to eat.”

“It’s about lunchtime for me, too. Let’s go back to camp and grab a bite.”

“I did get one trap set before I fell in the lake,” Hank said as they climbed the hill, “on a dam crossover partway to the other side. Soon as we eat, let’s go check it.”

*   *   *

A well-used game trail ran through the tall grass and protruding logs and sticks along the top of the dam. The trail dipped down in channels where the lake water overflowed. The channels dropped into cascades running over the face of the dam to the big pool of the river below. On the lakeside the dam fell more steeply into the depths of the lake. Several of the overflow channels showed some evidence of being used as crossovers by smaller animals, but Jack saw no sign that giant beaver had done much travel downstream.

“I brought an old Newhouse bear trap and set it in this trail,” Hank said as they walked. “Not much fresh sign here, but I was tired of hauling that big old trap around. I was planning to move it when I found a better place.”

“How would you get a big enough weight out in deep water to drown one of these giant beaver?”

“I couldn’t figure that out, either. I was going to listen for a commotion over here and run down with my rifle before the beaver could twist out. They seem mostly nocturnal, like their smaller cousins.”

Hank stopped at the second channel and they both looked down at the empty mud bottom below the flowing water. The chain, still fastened to a log embedded in the dam, ended in a broken link; the trap was gone. In the mud that had been firmed and slickened by the current, they could see only slight indentations and a few large clawmarks. Jack’s foot hit something hard in the grass—one of the trap’s massive U-shaped springs. Hank found a twisted trap jaw on the dam face, and Jack found the crumpled trigger plate lying in the water just above the dam, but that was all that remained of the bear trap. Jack rose and did a 360-degree pan from the forested river downstream to the deep open lake upstream and back to the river again.

Hank unslung his rifle. “I think I’m going to start carrying this in my hands.”

“Notice I’m already holding mine,” Jack said. “Ever since I found your camp.”

They stood contemplating the remains of the trap, until Hank said, “Supposing we just shoot one.”

“It’ll sink. How would we find it in this murky water?”

“Looks like glacial silt. Must be a glacier somewhere upstream, grinding on the limestone bedrock. This could be the ancient Scioto River, coming down from the north.” Hank pondered a moment. “Okay, so we make a grapple out of tree branches, tie it to a line, and try to drag the carcass to shore.”

“How would we throw a grapple like that?”

“Maybe we could make a raft to float out and recover the beaver.”

“We’ve got three days left.” Jack kicked at a stick protruding from the dam. “If we can’t catch a beaver in that time, maybe we shouldn’t call ourselves trappers.”

Hank gave him a disapproving look. “You were an idiot to take this job, you know. We’ll probably be lucky just to survive the next few days.”

“Think maybe I should have turned down the work?”

“Only if you were smart, which you’re not.”

“Look who’s talking—the idiot who agreed to come here in the first place.”

Hank contemplated the lake upstream from the dam. “I only brought the one trap, so we’d better try using snares.”

“That’s what I figured to do all along. Brought some locking bear snares. But that damn otter tossed them all into the deep water.”

“I brought half a dozen snares, along with that trap.”

“You still want to try hanging one over that lodge entrance?”

“Nope. It’s way too deep. Anyway, who wants to take a mother from her kits? We couldn’t call ourselves trappers.”

“You sure you didn’t just fall for mama beaver?”

“Funny,” Hank said. “Let’s do some more scouting around.”

The day wore on past late afternoon as they worked their way up the far side of the lake from camp, looking for beaver sign. At the edge of the water they located several wide trails with smooth, rounded edges like larger-scale beaver runways, but there was little indication of recent use. They hung snares across these trails anyway.

A mile or so from the dam they came to a low ridge of land that stuck out as a peninsula partway across the lake. The peninsula and surrounding shore were being logged-off of the larger birch and aspen. Piles of fresh chips lay around fresh-cut stumps left from trees that had been hauled away for beaver feed or building material. Here a beaver runway led out of the water and a well-used trail crossed the base of the peninsula. They set a snare where the runway joined the trail. By then the sun was going down, and dark did not feel like a good time to be out in Pleistocene country.

*   *   *

They made supper and sat eating side-by-side on a fallen tree near the fire. Now and then one or both looked away from the fire and out toward the lake that lay hidden in the blackness of night. From where they sat, the beaver lodge lay beneath the slope of the hill, but they could see a line of white sticks marking the top of the dam. Much of the time they just listened for any sound from the other side of the lake. The wind was picking up as night settled in fully, leaving the fire’s smoke to stream up the valley, over the dark expanse of the marshlands.

After a while, Hank said, “You know, I did some digging around before I left home. What did they tell you about the government’s latest rewilding project?”

“Rewilding? The wolves weren’t enough?”

Most of Hank’s face lay covered under his dark beard, and his teeth really stood out in the firelight. “I bet you thought they were done, didn’t you? Wrong. They’re out to restore all North American species whose extinction was caused by the arrival of humans on the continent.”

“Are you telling me they want to bring back these giant beaver to our own time?”

“Yeah, along with the rest of the extinct megafauna. They aim to restore North America to its natural state, as it existed in the Late Pleistocene before people arrived. Pleistocene rewilding has been considered for at least a century, but all they could have done was use proxy animals from Asia or Africa. Now, with time travel, they can reproduce the actual Pleistocene megafauna. They’ve already begun releasing Camelops and tapirs in Ohio. We’re not the first to be sent through time to collect genetic material. We’re just the first trappers.”

“You mean they want to bring back wooly mammoths? Are they nuts?”

“Sure they are,” Hank said. “Though mastodons seem more likely around here.”

Jack was silent as he tried to wrap his head around the concept. He imagined mastodons playing with his fences, a giant sloth loose in his orchard. And giant beavers … He said, “God, I’m glad my place is in the hills.”

“Don’t worry. According to the government, these beaver don’t build dams.”

They both had a good laugh. Jack got up and grabbed a few more sticks for the fire. The wind sawed at the burning wood, sending sparks streaming toward the lake. The wind had acquired a chilly bite. He pulled his collar up on his neck and edged a bit closer to the flames.

They sat quietly, watching the wind work at the fire, until Jack finally said, “Something about camping out always makes my mind work more clearly.”

Hank nodded. “I wonder what it is about sitting by an open fire that makes us feel content? Must be something primitive left in us.”

Jack nodded. “I’m going to miss my bed, though.”

“I think you don’t just miss your bed, but also she who shares it.”

“I ain’t denying it.” Jack poked a stick at the fire, momentarily doubling the stream of sparks.

Hank sighed. “Yeah, I’m feeling kind of lonely for Em too. We need to stay together and be extra careful about everything we do here. If one of us gets hurt or lost or something, we might miss our pickup.”

*   *   *

At dawn they returned to the far side of the lake. The first two snares were undisturbed, but the last one, set on the trail crossing the peninsula, had been hit. The ground was torn up all around and most of the trees within the ten-foot radius of the snare’s length had been chewed down. Their trunks lay in a fallen tangle. Eventually the beaver had hit upon the large spruce that anchored the snare, leaving the trunk to fall into the lake and a chiseled stump leaking sap onto a pile of chips. They could smell the sweet, musky scent of beaver on the ground.

“Damn,” Hank said. “We must have missed a neck-catch. Who’d figure it could cut through all these trees in one night?”

At least one beaver was using the trail across the peninsula as a shortcut for moving along the shore. They hung a new snare at each end of the trail where the animal was entering and leaving the water. On the far end of the trail, they looked out over unending marsh covered with aquatic weeds. The shoreline and the trail both subsided into the marsh. From there the beaver’s pathway continued as a dark channel of open water through the aquatic plants. In the distance they saw another giant beaver lodge jutting up from the flat expanse.

Jack said, “These big beaver must do a lot of traveling.”

“Makes sense. They probably need a huge range to find enough food for their large bodies.”

“We’d need a boat to trap this marsh right. You just can’t cover enough ground on foot.”

They returned to camp for lunch, then scouted up the near side of the lake for a couple of miles, setting two more of Hank’s snares. The last was set across the mouth of a creek where it ran into the lake. The bottom and banks of the creek were smooth and rounded from the passage of beaver. The creek was too wide to jump and too deep to wade, and the sun was going down, so they called it quits for the day.

*   *   *

Camp had been hit again. Jack’s tent was ripped apart, his gear strewn all around. Their sleeping bags had been dragged around in the dirt and torn, though remained barely useable. Only the food bag hanging high in the tree had been left alone. They spread the tattered tent over some dead branches as a rain-fly and gathered the remnants of their gear and equipment. Again, they found no clear sign of what sort of animals had paid them a visit. Three trails of bent grass led off up the lake, only a few hundred yards from the way Jack and Hank had come.

Hank said, “I’ve about had enough of this.”

“At least they didn’t get our food.”

After eating supper at the fire, Jack said, “You lived with the tower-dwellers when you went off to college. Were you connected?”

“Couldn’t keep up with the coursework otherwise,” Hank told him. His dark face showed gleaming teeth in the firelight. “Did I ever tell you what my major was? Paleontology. This poor fool just couldn’t resist a chance to see these animals alive.”

They had built up the fire and Jack’s legs were getting hot, so he scooted back a bit. “You didn’t keep it—the implant?”

“It’s still in here.” Hank tapped his head. “I had it shut off when I moved home.”

“It hasn’t caused any damage?”

“None that I know of. Unless we’re talking about the brain damage that led me to take this job.”

Jack used a stick to poke the fire. There was little wind, the sky was clear, and the spark-stream rose toward the stars. Looking away from the firelight, he found Jupiter immediately. A few recognizable stars had moved and some of the constellations were tweaked out of familiar shape. Different time or different universe? The question had never felt more important. Could the stars give him an answer?

Precession of the earth’s axis should not be much of a factor, assuming he had traveled in time almost one full twenty-six-thousand-year cycle. The nearer stars, with their greater proper motion, should show the greatest change. The Pleiades were recognizable, but not in their familiar location in the constellation Taurus. The star he assumed to be Sirius was way out of position, had lost some of its brightness, and was now near a faint blotch he guessed might be the M50 star cluster. Distant galaxies and star clusters should show little or no change; and yes, Andromeda was in its usual position. These observations were consistent with movement through time in their own universe. Jack wondered whether, if he had the right star charts and a telescope, he could find anomalies that might suggest he was in a different universe.

He said, “If we hadn’t sent him to college, he’d probably still be living in the enclave.”

“Who, Josh?”

“Yeah. But what could we do, with a bright young man who wanted to learn?”

“When he gets enough of tower life, he may come home yet.”

Jack rested a boot on a spruce log protruding from the fire. Pitch on the other end of the log burned with a blue flame. “What brought you back?”

“Family. Friends.”

“Didn’t you make a bunch of new friends out there in the world?”

“Yeah, some, I guess.” Hank poked his own stick at the fire, turning over another log. Flames flared up as they caught the unburned wood on the other side. “But not anyone who would travel twenty-five thousand years to look for me.”

“Forget about it.”

“Sure I will.”

They watched the fire. Jack said, “Kind of weird to think of family while we’re sitting here.”

“Why?”

“They’re not even alive yet. Does that make them real?”

“They’re real in our memories.”

“Which memory?”

Hank gave him a puzzled look.

“I mean,” Jack went on, “with Carol it’s easy. She came from that Smoky Mountain enclave. She’s been an adult since I met her. Got older, maybe, but she’s pretty much the same person in all my memories.” Jack poked the fire more vigorously.

“And Josh, I think of him as an adult, too.”

“You’re talking about Katie now, aren’t you?”

“She’s not alive anymore in our own time.” Jack gave the fire a vicious poke, sending a shower of sparks skyward. “And they won’t let me go to a time when I could have saved her. The last memory I have of her is her lying in her casket, still and cold.”

“That’s not the memory you have to keep.”

“All I know is her loss. The hole it left in me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Her.”

“You must have memories of the whole time she was growing up. She lives in all of those memories, so long as you keep them.”

“I don’t have any trouble keeping them. The problem is letting them go.”

Eventually they crawled into their sleeping bags. Jack tried to sleep, but couldn’t stop thinking. When is the here, the now? Is it when a person is, or when he thinks himself to be? Can you live in the memories, or must the mind follow the body? Does the world around you say when the is is, or does your own mind decide?

If is is where memories are, then why not when Katie was ten years old? Together, trapping the creeks, fishing the river, waiting in the deer blind. The smile that lit her face when she caught her first muskrat, the disbelief and joy when her shot folded the grouse’s wings. Was there a way to keep only the good memories? To revisit them without grief or bitterness?

And then there was Eddie. The boy had just caught his own first muskrat, and Jack never did help him skin it. He was old enough to start following Jack on the trapline. They both deserved to make their own memories together.

Jack was in a vanished world, long gone. But now it was the is, to his body and mind. His world back home existed only in his mind. His family was vanished from the what-is, until he returned home. If he and Hank missed their pickup and were stuck here, his family wouldn’t exist outside of memory.

Maybe somewhere Katie hadn’t died, but that was in some other world than his own. She would never live again in his own world, whether he went home or was marooned here. If memories were as good as the real thing, the real now, he could stay here and remember his family. He could lose himself to thoughts of the past. But memories weren’t as good. They were just all you had left when the ones you loved were gone.

*   *   *

The snares on the peninsula trail on the far side of the lake were untouched. Scuffed-up leaves and forest litter in the gathering light of dawn showed that a beaver had walked around the snares.

“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “Looks like we educated a beaver.” The snare wire was big enough to be seen and avoided once the beaver had learned about it. They must be no less smart than their smaller cousins that Jack had trapped most of his life.

They went back across the dam to check the snares on the camp side of the lake. The first was undisturbed, but they had caught something in the last snare, the one set across the mouth of the creek. The ground was scuffed-up, grass trampled, and brush broken all around. Jack found the stump-end of the snare still anchored to the base of a big spruce tree. The wire ends had separated, unwound, and spread apart. It looked like a steel-stranded flower in his hand.

“Damn,” Hank said. “That was eighth-inch wire rope.”

“I think we caught a beaver here, then something else came along and took it. Something a lot bigger.”

They stared at a line of broken brush leading up the little creek through scattered trees. “I guess we’d better track it down,” Jack said. “See if there’s enough left for tissue samples.”

A dozen yards uphill was a huge pile of carnivore dung, still steaming in the cool morning air. A fragment of food packaging protruded from the pile.

“Aha,” Jack said. “It’s our camp raiders.”

“Good,” Hank said, tightening his grip on his rifle. “We’re due some payback.”

They followed the trail of snapped brush and flattened grass a short distance to the edge of a swampy meadow. There was little blood, but a blind man could have followed the trail, which led straight to a stand of stunted spruce out in the meadow. The trees were too thick to see into. As they started forward a distinct clicking sound came from the spruce, repeated twice, then followed by a series of deep whoofs. A head like a giant bulldog’s thrust itself out of the trees and appeared to levitate high above the ground. It snapped its teeth and whoofed once more.

Then the creature dropped to all fours and was coming at them, a huge thing tall as a man’s head at its shoulders, with legs long as a horse’s and galloping like a horse, black claws gleaming above the flat-black footpads. Ears on that bulldog head laid back and body straight as an arrow, coming faster. A nightmare chimera, accelerating to full speed in two strides, forequarters rising and falling as it came.

It was halfway across the meadow by the time Jack had the rifle to his shoulder, firing, working the slide-action, firing again. A trail of spinning brass arced over his rifle, showing that Hank was firing too. The beast filled his view, until his tunneled vision saw only the black eyes and ivory teeth, and he fired.

Hank fired again and the bullet appeared to strike the heavy scapular bone of the left shoulder, causing the animal to stumble slightly. The massive bulldog head dipped down, and Jack, ignoring the riflesights, just looking down the barrel, drove a round directly through the top of its skull. The dark hole left by the bullet immediately filled with a column of blood that fountained out with the beat of the creature’s heart. The bulldog head swung once to the left, once back and to the right, flinging a crisscross of blood-spatters on the grass. The animal’s forequarters collapsed and it dropped onto its belly, and Jack fired his last round into its neck. Lungs like the bellows of an ancient blast furnace took one improbably long, ragged breath, then stopped.

Jack lowered his empty rifle. He tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. “That’s cutting it a bit fine.” His voice came out as a dry squeaking noise. He cleared his throat again.

“Yep.” Hank appeared to want to say more, but his voice squeaked out, too.

Jack managed to bring his breathing down to a low-pitched rasp. “What is this thing? Some kind of bear?”

Hank cleared his own throat and nodded. “Can’t think of the scientific name. Hell, I can’t think of the common name. Jesus, I can’t even think of my own name right now. Wait. It’s a giant short-faced bear.”

“Why couldn’t we have run into a pygmy long-faced bear?”

“If there was such a critter, we’d probably run into that one, too.”

Jack could see one of the animal’s eyes. It looked the size of a grapefruit inside its socket. It was already acquiring that thin, milky glaze of when the tear ducts of a mammal ceased working in death. Without having to move his feet, Jack extended the rifle barrel to poke that eye, just to make sure.

“Arctodus,” Hank said. “That’s it. Biggest mammalian carnivore that ever walked North America.” Hank shook his head. “Just think—pretty soon we may have them running around in our own time.”

“Well, I’m not taking back a tissue sample of this thing.” Jack had noticed a mosquito drinking off his left hand. As he watched, the insect’s abdomen bloated and turned red. He let it drink its fill and fly off. “They really believe these things were wiped out by cavemen with stone-tipped spears?”

“Maybe they all died when their prey was gone.” Hank squatted down to look at the bear’s head. He put his hand over one forepaw. The naked claws were twice as long as his fingers. “Look here.” He pointed to a line of cut hair and bruised skin on the forepaw. “We’ve found our trap-destroyer.”

Jack remembered something important and looked back toward the spruce stand. He felt a sudden urge to reload the rifle. He fumbled two rounds to the ground before he got one into the magazine. “If that’s a sow,” he tried to say calmly, to steady his own hands, “imagine how big a boar would be.”

“We can’t be sure of its sex unless we can roll it over. These bears had proportionately slimmer bodies than the bears we know.”

“Nope, I’m pretty sure it’s a sow. You better get up and reload.”

“Why?”

“’Cause she’s got a couple of subadult cubs with her. And they’re coming this way.”

Hank stood up and dug into a pocket for more cartridges. The two young bears were out of the spruce stand now, peering at the men in that near-sighted bear way. As one they turned, trotting smoothly with none of the usual waddling bear gait, to swing downwind.

“I guess they’re going to keep our beaver. Unless you want to make a fight of it.”

“Hell,” Hank said, “they aren’t much bigger than adult grizzlies. Why don’t we just walk over there and take it away from them?”

“You first. I don’t have enough ammo on me.”

They waited to see if the bears would leave, but the two cubs were slowly approaching from downwind, showing no fear. Hank sighed. “I guess it’s not worth the risk. We’ll have to catch another beaver.”

They backed down the trail, leaving the cubs to sniff at their mother’s body, and returned to camp. They built the fire back up about as high as they could and sat silently contemplating it while they ate lunch.

“Just one night left,” Hank finally said.

Jack looked at the ground. “At least we won’t be helping them bring back these giant beaver.”

“They’ll just send someone else.”

“We won’t be able to hold our heads up if we get skunked and someone else catches a beaver.” They both gave halfhearted laughs.

Jack felt drained, tired, and weak, and Hank looked the same. But they picked themselves up and trudged across the dam and up the lake to the trail that crossed the peninsula, the place where they’d found the most beaver sign.

Their snares remained undisturbed, so they walked the trail to look for new ideas. Jack went past it twice before he stopped to ponder a large, dead cottonwood tree that leaned over the trail above his head. A beaver had chewed through its base some years back, and the tree had fallen halfway before it tangled with a smaller spruce on the other side of the trail. After that the cottonwood’s top had broken away in some wind- or snowstorm, leaving a main trunk that was at least a yard in diameter. The wood was still solid and the trunk probably weighed well over a ton. If the spruce hadn’t been there, it would have fallen squarely across the beaver trail. Jack remembered how beavers were sometimes killed by the very tree they were cutting down.

Hank said, “I wonder how primitive man ever wiped these beaver out. If that’s really what happened to them.”

The light came on the rest of the way for Jack. “You remember that time when we were kids and made that deadfall? You read about deadfalls in some old book, so we made one, and we caught a squirrel in it.”

“Yeah. A deadfall is one of the most primitive kinds of trap there is.”

“That’s why I suggested it. We don’t need anything but what we find right here.”

“How in hell would we make a deadfall big enough to kill a giant beaver?”

“With this treetrunk here. If we can get rid of that spruce…”

Hank studied the tree and trail. “I don’t have a better idea. If you can free that tree trunk so it will fall, I’ll make a trigger.”

Jack found two straight, young-but-stout birch trees. With his ax he cut and trimmed them into poles, which he lashed together near the top. He raised this bipod up to brace the cottonwood trunk, then cut down the spruce that had supported it. He held his breath as the spruce fell away. The massive cottonwood groaned as its full weight came to rest on the bipod, but it stayed in place.

By then Hank had carved out the three trigger pieces and base, also out of birch. The pieces fit together as a figure-4, with the long horizontal piece extending across the trail. When that part of the trigger was disturbed, it would pop out of a notch in the vertical piece, which in turn would kick the angled and vertical trigger pieces out of place, allowing the tree trunk to fall. In theory.

They took the birch bipod away, allowing the full weight of the cottonwood to rest on the trigger. It held. They tested their deadfall by holding the bipod a short distance below the trunk and tripping the trigger. Sure enough, the cottonwood dropped immediately, a fraction of an inch, before catching on the bipod. They reset the trigger and took the bipod away, carrying it uphill, out of sight of the trail, in order to minimize disturbance at the site.

“One thing bothers me,” Hank said. “We educated the beaver that’s using this trail, and now we’ve left our scent all over the place. What if he’s come to associate our scent with danger and shies away from this part of the trail?”

Jack thought about it. “Let’s move a snare a bit up the trail from here. Make him think that’s the new danger. He should go around the snare, then be back on the trail before he hits the deadfall.”

By the time they finished, it was getting dark and they hurried back to camp. Every sound in the forest caused them to raise their rifles.

“Can you imagine a couple tower-dwellers trying to face that bear?” Jack said as they made their way across the dam.

“They’d never get that far,” Hank told him. “They’re all too dependent on the web connection they’ve had since they were kids. There’s nothing to connect to here in the past. The ones that tried to go back in time were so lonely and panic-stricken that they could barely get out of their capsules.”

Jack smiled. “So us poor backward enclavers are good for something after all.”

*   *   *

The night was very still, and in the wee hours they both awoke to the sound of the cottonwood falling on the other side of the lake. On a windy night it might have been any tree. Even now, the deadfall could have been tripped by accident or by some other animal. That was it, then. They either had a beaver or they didn’t.

They broke camp in the dark, got what little was left of their gear ready to go. At first light they crossed the dam and went up the lake. The beaver lay in the middle of the trail with its legs folded up as if it were taking a snooze. The tree had fallen squarely and broken the animal’s back just behind the forelegs. It was an old male, even larger than the female they had seen. Its teeth were cracked and the right foreleg had been lost to some accident, predator, or beaver fight. The remnant of the missing snare stretched between the animal’s right shoulder and left foreleg.

They used the birch poles to lever the cottonwood off the beaver. The big animal’s legs were stiff with rigor mortis and they had to work them loose before they could roll it onto its back. Its tail was proportionately longer and narrower than a regular beaver’s and its incisors were like spades, with ridges running from the roots to the tips.

Jack breathed in the beaver’s sweet, damp scent and took out his knife. Starting at the animal’s lower lip, he began to split the tough, thick hide down the chest and abdomen all the way to where the fur ended at the base of the long scaly tail.

“What are you doing?” Hank asked. “All they need is a tissue sample.”

“It may not be prime this time of year, but I ain’t going to waste a fur like this. They can get all the tissue samples they want from the flesh and fat we scrape off the hide at home.”

“I guess our contracts don’t say we can’t bring back a fur.” Hank took out his own knife. “But we don’t have much time left.”

While Hank skinned out the forequarters and head, Jack did the hindquarters, cutting around the ankles and working the hide free of the legs with his hands and the knife. When they were done, they dragged the carcass off, folded the hide once, skin to skin, and rolled it up.

Jack took one last look at the carcass and noticed the dark castor sacs showing through the thin wall of the animal’s lower abdomen. He was staring at them and suddenly felt his mouth form a smile. Castoreum was attractive to most mammals and had been used for centuries in perfume. It also made a great trapping lure. He took out his knife and removed the sacs, each larger than his hand and consisting of wrinkled convolutions like brain matter inside a translucent membrane.

“Why are you taking the castors?” Hank asked.

“We may just find a use for them.”

They tied the beaver skin together with a couple of snares and slung it over their shoulders like a roll of carpet. Jack looked at his watch. “We’d better shake a leg.” They collected their remaining snares as they went.

As they waded across a spillway on the top of the dam, Jack paused to catch his breath. Fat-cell suppression would sure improve his mileage. Looking down at the water, he smiled again. Hell, he’d already survived an afternoon in one of the towers. And none of those people could survive one hour here in the Pleistocene. After the trip to the doctor’s, maybe he and Carol could visit Josh and Shari, and even take Eddie along. Better to show him the outside world than let him stay curious about it. Katie was gone no matter what he did. Better to live with the living than the dead.

They reached the sphere with twenty minutes to spare. “What do you keep grinning about?” Hank demanded.

“Let’s get loaded up and I’ll tell you.”

*   *   *

The beaver hide and castors barely stuffed into the compartment under the seat. They had to set the remains of their gear on their laps.

While they were waiting, Hank said, “Okay, what’s so amusing?”

Jack felt his grin get bigger. “I’ve been thinking. Suppose a bunch of these giant beaver are turned loose in our time. What do you think they’ll do?”

Hank blinked. “They’ll do what beaver do—cut trees, build dams, make more beaver.”

“Lots of trees. Giant dams. And a bunch of beaver.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the tower-dwellers want. They couldn’t law us out of existence, so they want to drown us out.”

“We’ll survive, we always have. But what happens when these giant beaver dams start flooding the tower and skyway foundations? The lakeshore retreats? In ten years, Ohio could be one big swamp.”

Hank stared at him a moment, then got it. “They’ll probably need some giant-beaver-removal services.”

“And which two guys are going to be the only ones who know anything about trapping giant beaver? The only ones with giant-beaver castor lure ready to go?”

“If I can put up with your ornery ass, it could be a beautiful partnership.”

Jack felt the initial sense of movement when the wormhole found the capsule.

Back across your time again, Katie. But maybe I’d better say goodbye to you here.