Then later that same day they came on a young caribou bull, off on his own, looking disoriented. Their food problems were solved, if they could catch him. But he was wary despite his confused air, and he kept beyond the reach of even the longest bow shot, heading away from the group, down the Great Escarpment with all the hunters in view on the slope above.
Eventually everyone got on their hands and knees, and began to crawl laboriously over the hot rock of midday, trying to traverse quick enough to circle the caribou. But the wind blew from behind them, and the caribou moved skittishly downslope or traversed north, grazing as he went, and looking back at his pursuers more and more curiously, as if wondering why they continued with such a charade. Nirgal too began to wonder. And apparently he was not alone; the caribou’s skepticism had infected them. A variety of subtle and not-so-subtle whistles filled the air, in what was evidently an argument over strategy. Nirgal understood then that hunting was hard, that the group failed often. That they were perhaps not very good at it. Everyone was baking on the rock, and they had not eaten properly for a couple of days. Part of life for these people; but today too miserable to be fun.
Then as they continued, the horizon below them to the east seemed to double: Chryse Gulf, gleaming blue and flat, still far below. As they continued to follow the caribou downslope, the sea covered more and more of their view of the globe; the Great Escarpment pitched so steeply here that even Mars’s tight curvature did not bend fast enough to hide the long view, and they could see out over Chryse Gulf for many kilometers. The sea, the blue sea!
Perhaps they could trap the caribou against the water. But now he was trending north, traversing the slope of the escarpment. They crawled after him, over a little ridge, and suddenly had a good view down to the coastline: fringe of green forest flanking the water, small whitewashed buildings under the trees. A white lighthouse on a bluff.
As they continued north a turn in the coast hove over the horizon. Just beyond the point of the turn lay a seaside town, banked around a half-moon bay on the southern side of what they now saw was a strait, or more accurately a fjord, for across a narrow passage of water rose a wall even steeper than the slope they were on: three thousand meters of red rock rearing out of the sea, the giant cliff like the edge of a continent, its horizontal bands cut deep by a billion years of wind. Nirgal realized suddenly where they were; that massive cliff was the sea-facing escarpment of the Sharanov Peninsula, and the fjord therefore Kasei Fjord, and the harbor town therefore Nilokeras. They had come a long way.
The whistles between the hunters got very noisy and expressive. About half the group sat up— a crop of heads, sticking out over a field of stones, looking at each other as if an idea had struck them all at once— and then they stood and walked down the slope toward the town, abandoning the hunt and leaving the caribou heedlessly munching. After a while they skipped and hopped downslope, hooting and laughing, leaving the stretcher bearers and the injured boy behind.
They waited lower down, however, under tall Hokkaido pines on the outskirts of the town. When the stretcher group caught up, they descended through the pines and orchards together, into the upper streets of the town. A loud gang, passing fine window-fronted houses overlooking the crowded harbor, straight to a medical clinic, as if they knew where they were going. They dropped off the injured youth and then went to some public baths; and after a quick bath they went to the curve of businesses backing the docks, and invaded three or four adjacent restaurants with tables out under umbrellas, and strings of bare incandescent lightbulbs. Nirgal sat at a table with the youngsters, in a seafood restaurant; after a while the injured boy joined them, knee and calf wrapped, and they all ate and drank in huge quantities— shrimp, clams, mussels, trout, fresh bread, cheeses, peasant salad, liters of water, wine, ouzo— all in such excess that they staggered away when they were done, drunk, their stomachs taut as drums.
Some went immediately to what the butcher woman called their usual hostel, to lie down or throw up. The rest limped on past the building to a nearby park, where a performance of Tyndall’s opera Phyllis Boyle was to be followed by a dance.
Nirgal lay sprawled on the grass with the park contingent, out at the back of the audience. Like the rest he was awed by the facility of the singers, the sheer lushness of orchestral sound as Tyndall used it. When the opera was done some of the group had digested their feast enough to dance, and Nirgal joined them, and after an hour of dancing joined the band as well, with many other audience sit-ins; and he drummed away until his whole body was humming like the magnesium of the pans.