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.
Annie 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.”
Annie smiled at Grandma, at her creased face, her speckled skin. Yet her arms were thick and strong, not spindly. “How old was Dad when he died?”
“George was thirty-nine. It was the worst blizzard I’ve ever seen. Throughout the month of February, the screaming, howling polar winds blew over us, carrying snow dumped by the blackest of clouds. We shortened and reinforced the silo to protect and preserve the stored grain. We enclosed the two cowdles in the one-foot-thick walls of a stable built of granite. We stocked the house—and we had stocked the stable—with supplies and clean water. We battened down our windows and bolted the door. For three weeks, we huddled in warm blankets and listened to Earth’s powerful yet so powerless winds.”
“We hurt Earth so bad,” Annie said.
“Then one day we heard a new sound, a loud crash. We knew immediately what caused it. We bolted to the stable. During the storm, a male calf had been born to Pudgy, the female. She had been playing with him, giving him gentle nudges. One of the nudges had knocked over a manger and caused it to scrape against the stone. This created a microscopic spark. The spark flew to a piece of dry straw and ignited a fire. Most of the stable’s contents were dampened by the moist air, so there was more smoke than fire, but the fire frightened Bandy, the male cowdle. He panicked and charged the door. We had not noticed the crack growing around the door’s lower hinge. Bandy broke the door down and disappeared into the storm.
“Within a minute, Dad and Grandma put out the fire while I tried to calm Pudgy and the baby. George wiped soot off his face and started toward the stable’s doorway.
“You will not go out there looking for Bandy, I said.
“We need him,” George said.
“No, we don’t, I said. We need you.
“I got this, George said. He gave me a kiss and disappeared into the wind and snow. Neither he nor Bandy came back to us. The following spring, Grandma found George’s body in a half-thawed bank of snow. His heart had given out not a quarter of a mile from the house.” Helen picked one oat from the hand mill she had been using and scrutinized it. For the first time ever, Annie saw her slump in her seat.
In a tiny voice, she asked, “There are no other men at all?”
Granny said, “There are no males remaining under or over the face of Mother Earth. Will you say grace, Annie?”
Annie raised her arms high. “Thank you, Mother Earth,” she cried, “for giving us everything. Everything we need. And,” she continued, “I-I apologize for what we did to you.”
Grandma set a pot filled with juicy corn kernels of considerable size on a second stove burner. Helen poured two cups of water into a kettle into which she had sprinkled half a dozen birch leaves. She placed the kettle onto the third burner. Annie brought a forty-ounce cut of cave-aged cowdle cheese from the cellar. She carved three pieces off the block and set one piece on each of the three plates. She handed the remainder of the block to Helen, who cut it into bits and placed it in a two-quart pot. Grandma drew a loaf of bread made of hard, high-protein, spring wheat and a pot of thick, zingy tomato sauce from the stove’s warming oven. While Grandma strained the corn into a mammoth bowl and set it onto the table, Helen replaced the bread and sauce with her pot of cheese. Annie made a salad of woodland lettuce, spring onions, and morels in another large bowl. Helen cut the thick-crusted bread into three thick slices and set one slice on each plate. Grandma mashed the potatoes and mixed into them the cheese that had melted in the warming oven. She set onto the table an enormous bowl of strawberries she had picked and washed the day before.
They seated themselves on rickety wooden chairs, piled their cheese atop their bread, and spread tomato sauce over the cheese. They ate everything on the table; they postponed the cleansing salad until last. They used the last pieces of bread to clean every crumb off their plates. They drank spring water with the meal but, afterward, Helen rose to obtain the kettle of birch tea. Grandma closed the three burners’ dampers and opened the smoke bypass, Helen poured tea for herself and Grandma into their emptied water glasses, and Annie cleared the table.
Annie reseated herself. “So,” she said, “did all humans except our family die during the Great Expulsion?”
“During or after it,” Grandma said.
Helen said, “After the Great Expulsion, another family also lived in the forest. A great bolt of lightning shot from the clouds and caused what is said to have been the fastest-spreading fire in all history. Only our family, the members of which lived farther away from the fire’s origin, managed to escape it.”
“Helen, you’re partly correct. Let me tell you the legend that’s been passed down through our family for centuries.” She turned to Annie.
“Earth’s population had reached ten billion. Unfettered businesses had ravaged Earth of most of her resources and polluted her with their wastes. This was commonly known. The rich, at least, saw the Great Expulsion coming. They used the last of Earth’s resources to develop terraforming technology and the ability to propel huge ships through space, and they made plans to escape Earth’s ravages and catastrophes and transport themselves to Mars.”
“But Mother Earth has plenty of resources now,” Helen said. “She produces so much food it could feed billions of people.”
“She does. After the Great Expulsion, Earth slowly recovered. It took twenty-five hundred years [correct?] for her to again form polar, temperate, and tropical zones and for her temperatures to begin to stabilize. [How many?] thousands of years passed before her sea levels returned to pre-expulsion levels. Once that occurred, Earth’s recovery picked up speed. It took four hundred [?] years before soil richness was restored to the temperate and tropical forests. After another two hundred fifty [?] years, the forests began to look the same as they do now. The animals extinguished by the Great Expulsion are another matter. I hope more animals evolve.”
“Or re-evolve,” Helen said.