The Traveler

In the early dawn light an outcast licks her wounds, and must at once begin a new journey she had not anticipated. She is barely an adult, her childhood still a close memory, yet adulthood has come fast and hard, leaving her struggling to keep up. Just a few months independent of her parents and her siblings, a young foxtrotter had just dug a den for herself and claimed a tentative hold of her first ever territory, only to lose it in a single fight to a much older and more experienced female. She quickly submitted and so she lived, but if she sticks around too much longer her rival will return to kill her as a competitor to her future offspring.

So without looking back, the young female moves on. She tripod-trots along the rocky coast, quickly moving forward one foreleg and then the other, pushing her hind leg up forward, and repeating the sequence countless times. It’s a less fluid motion than the rabbit-like bounding gallop she uses to move fastest, but at her small size it’s the most energetically efficient gait for longer distances. Time and hardship have changed her world, and from the canithere lineage her kind alone have endured, now bearing thicker fur and longer legs. Wide-splayed toes with bristle-like hair once carried her ancestors over scorching desert sand; they now do the same over bitter-cold snow as well as the loose gravel of coastal shorelines. She remains a clever, opportunistic creature, perhaps the most of both adjectives of any yet, for without brains and tenacity in this ever less forgiving world no-one will survive.

As the desert froze and the world around became smaller, her kind was pressed south close to the coast. The shoreline is where most of the food is now to be found, and so she follows it, slipping through the territories of many others along the way in hopes of finding a vacant spot to settle. She cannot afford to stop and rest for long anywhere or she will be promptly driven away by the rightful landowners along this prosperous strip, so for days she keeps her pace with little rest. She snags scraps of dead fish and the odd ailing or unaware bird from the shore when she comes across them, just enough to sustain her yet, never to feel full. And when she comes to nothing but open water on the fifth day, she sees land in the distance. It will be a difficult swim, but the arrival of two larger rivals from the hills nearby is all she needs to take the plunge and come out on the other side. Yet even here she faces confrontations from others once like her, young ones struck out alone to the fringes of the world in search of home. Everywhere she goes they watch her, bristling the long red hair on their backs and baring their sharp teeth. It’s a clear signal - keep moving, this is not your home. So the days become weeks, and she repeats the water crossing several more times in her drive to find a place where she belongs. Each time she makes landfall she is met with still others who made the journey already and refuse to grant her sanctuary. Tired and near her limits, she grows increasingly numb to their bites. But instinct tells her to keep going.

At the start of the third week, left ragged and woebegone and having traveled for hundreds of miles as a refugee on the fringes of her world, she comes to a strange sight. The beach ends, and gives way to a narrow bridge of ice stretching featureless as far as her eyes can see beyond the horizon. It’s weird, and she doesn’t know what to think. She lowers her snout to the ground and sniffs the ice. It lurches and gains a little more distance over the land, creaking and cracking into frozen boulders at its edge. It appears to her almost alive, and yet inside her the drive to keep searching for a home pushes her onwards. She leaps up the piled ice and climbs up upon the bridge. A cold wind from the south tells her there are no other foxtrotters ahead.

above: searching for a place to settle, a young adult glacial foxtrotter, Sabulasalta glacievagus (ice-wandering sand-jumper) crosses a newly-formed bridge of sea ice from the southernmost peninsular islands toward lands unknown.

The tired but tenacious trotter runs the ice for about a day and a half before she finds her first windfall. A clamcracker pup as heavy as herself, just days old, warm and round and well-fed, rests exposed on the sea ice. Its mother has just returned to the water to find food for itself after spending the first week of its offspring’s life and so left it vulnerable. Glacier ravens would not hesitate to take her child if they found it, yet its stark white coat against many other small chunks of ice would hide it relatively well from above in her absence. She had no way of knowing that this ice had collided with a far-off landmass and now carried a foreign traveler, one who could pick it out easily by its scent alone. Out on the sea ice a baby cries out, and a mother surfaces. She rushes to where she left her young - her everything - and hopes it was anything else she had heard. But slow and ungainly on the ice, she arrives to find only a small red stain in the snow. In the distance a skulking monster from a world beyond her own drags away her future, too fast to hope to catch up. To try would be hopeless anyway, for its cries have already stopped. It was her first, and she will mourn it.

But the foxtrotter, having found it, will now survive. She at last fills her stomach to capacity, and with no-one nearby to take it from her, she can rest. She scratches a depression into the ice with her claws, enough to shelter from the prevailing wind, and spends a few days there until the carcass is reduced to just a few of its hardest bones. She soon feels better than she has in a long while, and with her strength regained she continues down the ice bridge. For this was just a rest-stop. With no further prey nearby, she must continue her journey.

Two more days pass, and some sixty miles, when she finds her next meal. A seabird with a broken wing is an easy kill, and enough to keep her going another three days. The ice bridge becomes unstable here, fracturing into a series of slowly-moving ice flows as far as the eye can see, which she must jump daringly across for several miles, and then a chasm. Open water. But on the wayward shore she picks up the scent of food stronger than she has ever known, and she jumps in toward it. When she approaches the other side she sees it. A colony of molodonts thousands-strong, hauled out on the sea ice. To either side flocks of huge towering birds, standing stark black against the white backdrop, their shapes upright like bowling pins. Between them all, she hears the chorus of cries of their helpless young.

As she pulls herself from the sea and shakes the cold water from her coat, she looks on with wonder. She has never seen so much food in one place. And she knew that at last, she had found her home. A strange land yes, but a place of immeasurable abundance with no other foxtrotters yet laid claim. And not a moment too soon, for she is pregnant. Several weeks ago along her journey, she had a tryst with a pair-bonded male she met on her travels, and so gained a temporary ally and a bit of food. Yet when all was done he remained with his primary partner, and when she realized the second female was loitering in the territory promptly drove the young interloper away, and so left her without a helping hand. Normally for her kind to raise young requires both partners’ support. But if food was so widely available here, she might be able to manage it alone.

Sneaking to the edge of the clustered animals, she quickly finds a large bird chick which has already died and been left by its parents. A large winged bird has claimed it, tearing into the soft down with a hooked beak. It looks at her, however, and pauses. It has never seen anything like that before. The foxtrotter bares her teeth and lets out a shrill shriek, closing in and gnashing her jaws. They extend out from her face to reveal gleaning white fangs, and she growls with a guttural rumble of rage deep from inside her. The bird is stronger than she is, and it is intelligent… and yet with intelligence comes improved capacity for calculating risk versus reward. This thing is unfamiliar. Its capabilities are yet unknown, and though it is small, its confidence is unnerving. After a moment of contemplation, the glacier raven backs off and lets the bold intruder take its prize. It is the preys’ breeding season, lost and sick and helpless babies are all around for the taking, and it will find another one. Until it better knows this contender, it’s likely best to play it safe.

With prey and rivals alike naive to her, an invasive species had landed. But she would soon find out that the raven was not her only rival in an unfamiliar new land, but that there were others forged by the hostility of the land during the other time of year she had not yet seen. Creatures that had eked out their lives in Serina’s least welcoming environment, holding on long after the rest of their ecosystems collapsed, and would not receive a new rival warmly.

Unfortunately, it would not be an easy life here either for the wandering foxtrotter. But as smart and tenacious as any of her kind, she would establish a place for herself against the odds. In doing so she would become the first terrestrial tribbethere, and the second species of land animal of any kind, to make its home on the frozen continent of Serinaustra in almost ten million years.

She would not be the last.