Chapter 1

Annie knelt on the hard ground of a tomato patch. She pulled an immense dock weed from between two tomato plants. A creature the likes of which she had never seen wriggled through the plant’s roots. She gaped at the one-inch-long pink cylinder writhing downward through the weed she held in her gloved right hand and at the thin cuticle that enveloped it. Its miniature body shone in Earth’s bright sun.

Her heart leapt. An animal! An animal made of not one but two parts joined together and shaped like a piece of string.

She knew about animals. The family had used to house a pair of cowdles. The tawny, curly-haired, long eared creatures had stood forty-four inches tall and weighed eight hundred pounds. The female had given the family four gallons of milk a day. On the day Annie turned three, the male had died. As the two cowdles grazed in a grassy field, a rogue tornado had spirited him away. The female had died three months later.

Annie summoned her gentlest instincts, lowered the weed to the ground, and gave it a tender shake. The helpless invertebrate—a creature who could go anywhere yet remained underground and who preferred the dark moistness of the earth’s depths to the clean air warmed by the sun’s rays—dropped to the ground and disappeared into the soil.

She closed her eyes and pictured the determined creature pushing, pushing through the ground, searching for sustenance, for the prolongation of life. Her light brown hair flying in the wind, she sped from the tomato field on long legs. At the prepubertal age of eleven, she was already five foot two. She darted through a corn field and sped up a dirt path. She burst into the kitchen of a mammoth stone house surrounded by shrubbery and tulips.

“Mom!” she cried. “Grandma! I found a little animal!”

Two women raised their eyes to Annie. The first, Helen, was tall and middle-aged. She had clamped her tawny hair behind her neck with a metal clip. Her dress, one functional piece of clothing, was loose-fitting and the same color as her hair. The second woman’s, Grandma’s, hair was gray and cut to shoulder length. Annie’s and both women’s cheeks were rosy; their feet were bare.

“Where?” Helen cried.

“In the tomato patch.”

The three of them rushed down the path and into the cornfield.

“Stop!” Grandma said. Annie and Helen halted in their tracks.

“We must respect the animal’s needs.”

“And we don’t know what they are yet,” Helen said. “Annie, exactly where is the new animal?”

“In the ground, among the tomato plants,” Annie said.

“Then tread softly,” Grandma said. “We don’t know how sensitive the animal is to the vibrations of our heavy feet.” They tiptoed past the fallow wheat field and into the tomato field. Annie led Helen and Grandma to the abandoned clump of weed that rested on the ground. They knelt on the hard dirt to search for the animal.

“It’s bright pink,” Annie said.

“It shouldn’t be hard to find,” Helen said. But the strange creature was nowhere to be seen.

“It’s time to make dinner,” Grandma said. The family returned home. Grandma opened the stove’s air controls. She fit three trivets onto each of three burners and opened each burner’s damper. She watched to make sure flames remained red and low.

With slow, graceful movements, Helen filled a two-gallon pot with spring water from a ten-gallon vat that stood in a corner of the kitchen. She opened a one-pound bag of potatoes and withdrew three of the huge tubers. She dumped them into the pot and stirred them with a stick to allow them to clean each other. Annie placed three carved-edge wooden plates and three sets of silverware, clouded by decades of use, on the sturdy kitchen table.

Grandma stirred the burners’ embers until they were white and even. “It’s wonderful that the burrowing creature has re-evolved,” she said. “Helen, do you know why we only plant our crops on level ground?”

“No, I don’t,” Helen said.

“It’s because steep earth can’t hold rain water. When we plant on the flatlands, the rainwater sits atop the ground until the plants catch it and use it. If we plant on a hillside, the water runs off and the plants are not moistened. The soil erodes and leaves the roots dry and bare. If the burrowing animals increase, they will enable the hillside soil to retain the water, so plants will grow anywhere.”

Helen placed the three cleaned potatoes into a half-gallon pot. Grandma stirred one of the burners’ embers and stood aside. Helen set the pot of potatoes onto the trivet above the burner, where they would simmer for an hour or more.

“Are there any more animals on Earth besides the burrowing creature?” Annie asked.

Helen chose to answer. “Not that we know of,” she said.

“What about people? Didn’t there used to be a lot of people?”

Helen nodded her head.

“What happened to them?”

“The same thing that happened to the lower animals. They were killed in the Great Expulsion or the meteorological catastrophes that followed it.”

“Our ancestors obviously weren’t killed back then.”

“Mother Earth spared our family. We survived for centuries by foraging through civilization’s ruins, until the ecosphere had recovered enough that vegetation regenerated.”

“But now it’s just us three women?”

Helen evaded the question. “Women have superior endurance,” she said. “For two centuries, no man has lived more than forty years.”