Suddenly he saw three antelope ahead, moving over a hillock to the west, silhouetted by the low sun. Ah; hunters. The antelope were being herded west by the humans, who were scattered in an arc behind them, waving scarves at them from behind rocks. All in silence, as if sound had disappeared from the world: no wind, no cries. For a moment, as the antelope stopped on the hillock, everyone stopped moving, everyone alert but still; hunters and hunted all frozen together, in a tableau that transfixed Nirgal. He was afraid to blink for fear the whole scene would wink away to nothing.
The antelope buck moved, breaking the tableau. He rocked forward cautiously, step-by-step. The woman with the green sash walked after him, upright and in the open. The other hunters popped in and out of view, moving like finches from one frozen position to the next. They were barefoot, and wore loincloths or singlets. Some of their faces and backs were painted red or black or ochre.
Nirgal followed them. They swerved, and he found himself on their left wing as they moved west. This turned out to be lucky, as the antelope buck tried to make a break around his side, and Nirgal was in position to jump in its path, waving his hands wildly. The three antelope then turned as one, dashed west again. The troop of hunters followed, running faster than Nirgal at his fastest, maintaining their arc. Nirgal had to work hard just to keep them in sight; they were very fast, barefoot or not. It was hard to see them in the long shadows, and they stayed silent; on the other wing of the arc someone yipped once, and that was their only sound, except for the squeak and clatter of sand and gravel, the harsh breath in their throats. In and out of sight they ran, the antelope keeping their distance in short bursts of flowing speed. No human would ever catch them. Still Nirgal ran, panting hard, following the hunt. Ahead he spotted their prey again. Ah— the antelope had stopped. They had come to the edge of a cliff. A canyon rim— he saw the gap and the opposite rim. A shallow fossa, pine tops sticking out of it. Had the antelope known it was there? Were they familiar with this region? The canyon had not been visible even a few hundred meters back. . . .
But perhaps they did know the place, for in the pure flow of animal grace they half trotted, half pronged south along the cliff edge to a little embayment. This turned out to be the top of a steep ravine, down which rubble siphoned onto the canyon floor. As the antelope disappeared down this slot all the hunters rushed to the rim, where they looked on as the three animals descended the ravine, in an astonishing display of power and balance, clacking from rock to rock in tremendous leaps down. One of the hunters howled, “Owwwwwwwww,” and with that cry all the hunters hurried over to the head of the ravine, yelping and grunting. Nirgal joined the others and dropped over the rim and then they were all in a mad descent, clacking and jumping, and though Nirgal’s legs were rubbery his endless days of lung-gom now served him well, for he dropped past most of the others as he hopped down boulders and glissaded down little rockslides, jumping, holding balance, using his hands, making great desperate leaps, like everyone else utterly locked into the moment, into the striving for a quick descent without a bad fall.
Only when he was successfully on the canyon floor did Nirgal look up again, to see that the canyon was filled by the forest he had barely seen from above. Trees stood high over a needle-strewn floor of old snow, big fir and pine, and then, upcanyon to the south, the unmistakably massive trunks of giant sequoias, big trees, trees so huge that the canyon suddenly seemed shallow, though the descent of the ravine had taken quite a while. These were the treetops that had stuck up over the canyon rim; engineered giant sequoias two hundred meters tall, towering like great silent saints, each one extending its arms in a broad circle over daughter trees, the fir and pine, the thin patchy snow and the brown needle beds.
The antelope had trotted upcanyon into this primeval forest, headed south, and with a few happy hoots the hunters followed them, darting past one huge trunk after another. The massive cylinders of riven red bark dwarfed everything else— they all looked like little animals, like mice, dashing over a snowy forest floor in the failing light. Nirgal’s skin tingled down his back and flanks, he was still adrenalated from the descent of the ravine, panting and light-headed. It was obvious that they could not catch the antelope, he didn’t understand what they were doing. Nevertheless he raced between the stupendous trees, following the lead hunters. The chase itself was all he wanted.
Then the sequoia towers became more scattered, as at the edge of a skyscraper district, until there were only a few left. And looking between the trunks of the last of the behemoths, Nirgal again hauled up short: on the other side of a narrow clearing, the canyon was blocked off by a wall of water. A sheer wall of water, filling the canyon right to the rim, hanging suspended over them in a smooth transparent mass.