Difference between revisions of "Naturalization"

Revision as of 21:57, 6 February 2008

This story is a work in progress.

Part 1: Emmigration

From an external vantage point in the rolling hills of the French-Swiss border the mightiest engine of physics experimentation on the planet was hardly visible. The 27-km circle traced out on the surface was merely a marker, a remnant of the construction of the tunnel a hundred meters below. The Large Hadron Collider threaded through that, a pipe jacketed in superconducting magnets that channeled particles pumped up to the highest energy man could yet manage.

About the same energy as a baseball pitch, Reynard Cramer reflected as he swiped his passcard through the reader to summon one of the service elevators. Cramer had been an electrical engineer for many long years and had plenty of experience with high-energy systems. Million-volt main lines at power plants, laser capacitors at the National Ignition Facility with enough stored power to rival dynamite should something go wrong. Yet it never ceased to amuse him how much effort it took to funnel just that seemingly trivial amount down into the small handful of particles circulating through that ring.

The whole process was on hold right now and it was up to him to get it back online. The accelerator was fine, but just getting particles up to speed wasn't the end goal of research here; in order to do an experiment the particles had to smash into a target, the spray of fragments being recorded by detectors arrayed around the impact point. There were seven targets distributed around the circle with seven different detector arrays, each designed to probe a different aspect of the microscopic realm's physics. Most were gigantic behemoths, thousands and thousands of tons of magnets and circuitry. Leave it to the inherent perversity of the universe that the one he was heading down to service was BOLIDE, the smallest of the lot at barely the size of a train locomotive.

His job at CERN was plum, the top of his field. Reynard wished he'd landed it years ago. At the age of forty-nine, his career was now clearly past its peak and on the final run toward retirement. The stereotype of distinguished elderly scientists with long white beards and accumulated wisdom creasing their features was largely a myth; with the rapid pace of change these days physics was a young person's game. Reynard was overweight, beardless and balding, and most of the time when he tried to follow the papers being generated by the researchers here he felt more confused than wise.

But engineering, that he understood. BOLIDE was the newest of the detector arrays, hurriedly added to the LHC's design when new principles and areas of knowledge had popped up during construction. The target suspended in its center was a Bose-Einstein condensate, a tiny knot of ultra-cold matter. Isolation from external perturbations was essential to keep it preserved in that delicate state. Not easy considering the sorts of magnetic fields the rest of the system was tossing wantonly about...

Reynard climbed into one of the small electric service vehicles and set off down the gently curving track toward BOLIDE, his laptop and toolkit stowed on the seat beside him. Something was introducing a 71 Hz oscillation into the target's containment fields. He wasn't sure, but it was probably a misaligned filter in the power system. Should be easy enough to fix if that were the case.

Small though it was compared to the other detectors, BOLIDE hulked in its subterranian chamber, almost completely filling it and leaving only a narrow space beyond the path of the service vehicle's tracks. This was the main reason Reynard didn't like the beast; its hurried design phase and construction had left a lot of cut corners and ragged edges. The other chambers had a lot more room, and were frankly just more impressive to be inside. Reynard grunted as he squeezed through to the nearest access panel where he could get at the power system's readouts.

He got in place and pulled out his radio. "I'm at the detector, what's the stats?"

"1746 électroaimants supraconducteurs, dont 1232 aimant dipolaires de courbure sont répartis autour des deux anneaux accélérateurs lovés l'un dans l'autre." Reynard sighed. The interference from the electrical systems and the thick layers of earth made communication hard enough as it was, but even though he'd been living on site for over a year now he'd made little headway in learning the local language. Yet since his name was of French origin, most people assumed he had native fluency.

"Well, keep the beam out of the chamber. I'm on this."

Reynard got to work. He was able to detect the 71 Hz signal just fine, it was indeed in the power system, but the trick was figuring out which feeder was the problem one. He had to deactivate them one at a time to check. The system could remain running okay with one feeder down, but more than that and he'd lose the condensate that had been established. With the system currently primed for a shot he'd rather not do that; they'd have to power everything down and start from scratch again the next day. The hotshot physicists who'd designed today's run and probably spent the past few months of their lives working on getting grant approval for it would not be happy.

Fortunately he found the problem quite quickly. A filter on feeder line seventeen was wonky, just as he'd expected. He turmed off the feeder and pulled out the radio. "I've got it, I'll see if I can get this to work without having to dig for spares."

"Doté d'un canon court et d'un barillet de 5 coups seulement."

Reynard sighed again, the signal even more distorted. That makes two signals now... He pulsed the power through the feeder, trying to reset the filter. It didn't fix it, though the frequency increased it to 76 Hz. Whatever that meant. The spurious signal was causing the condensate to oscillate inside its chamber in the bore of the accelerator, though, and it was supposed to be held rock-solid in the middle of the beam.

He dreaded having to physically pull modules out while any part of the system was still hot so he spent a few more minutes tinkering with settings in an attempt to clear the area. Something started buzzing in the tunnel outside. Clear the area... It took a few more minutes for the thought to work its way through Reynard's concentration. Oh shit!

The boys in the control room must have been having as much trouble with the radio as he was. When he'd turned off the feeder and the oscillation had temporarily stopped, they'd thought he'd fixed the problem. They were gearing up for a beam shot.

Reynard grabbed for his radio while scrambling to squeeze back out of the narrow passage. Idiots! Check your screens, I turned the faulty feeder back on! "Arret! Arret!"

But evidently nobody was listening at the other end at that moment, or perhaps they were just too slow. Indicator lights on the accelerator tube flickered just as he got out from behind BOLIDE's bulk, signalling the arrival of the packet of high-speed particles. They slammed into the oscillating condensate deep inside its core and Reynard winced. Even though the screwup was harmless, it meant a wasted day for sure now.

It should have been harmless, at any rate. Reynard caught his breath in surprise and cringed when, a moment later, a blue nimbus crackled over the surface of BOLIDE. Thank god I got out from there...

He had just enough time for that thought before the world exploded in a brilliant flare of light around him and then both the world and his thoughts plunged into darkness.

Reynard groaned, then coughed. The air was laden with dust and he was lying on his back on hard concrete.

It was still dark, there wasn't even emergency lighting. What had happened? BOLIDE exploded. But that didn't make any sense... I'm lying here, aren't I?

Don't panic. Don't move. I could be hurt. Reynard closed his eyes and breathed through his nose, hoping the dust would settle quickly, and tried to think things through calmly. He didn't smell smoke, just powdered concrete or rock, so that was good. He didn't hear any creaking of the roof about to cave in. There was a distant sound of wind... No immediate concern.

He felt no pain. But he did feel very strange. He lifted his hand, clenching it in the darkness and feeling the grit on his palm. The other hand performed likewise. Okay, that works. Now legs... woah. They flexed, but they didn't flex quite right. His knees didn't straighten easily, his feet felt strangely heavy and his ankles stiff. But again, there didn't seem to be anything injured. There was no debris lying on him.

"Hello?" Reynard called out, his voice pitched high and tight with more fear than he'd realized. Okay, shit, calm down. So BOLIDE exploded. They'll send help for sure.

The dust was indeed settling, enough for Reynard to take some deep breaths. That didn't feel right either. There was a sense of weight on his chest but not nearly enough on his stomach. He moved his hands to his midsection and stifled an alarmed gasp.

I'm thin. What the hell? His fingers found other strangenesses - his shirt seemed to disintegrate at his touch, the fabric turned into a loose mat of fibers somehow, and beneath it was a layer of short, dense hair. But that all seemed like trivial details. His abdomen was slim and firm, the spare tire he'd been carrying gone without a trace.

I have a concussion. That made sense, explaining away all of the other things that didn't in one fell swoop. I must have hit the back of my head when I fell and now my brain's swelling and screwing up my body image. Reynard sighed and tried to relax again, holding still while he tried to remember what to do about that. Stay awake. Get medical help. "Hey, help! Where is everybody! I'm hurt, damn it!"

Reynard coughed again, unable to get his voice back down into its regular register. Minutes passed. The elevator was nearby, why wasn't anyone coming? Maybe help isn't coming after all? Maybe...

It was quite frustrating. He didn't feel like his thoughts were addled, but at the same time he knew that the situation he was in didn't make any sense. He couldn't trust himself to figure it out. "Damn it," he murmured more softly. "I need to get out of this hole."

He was pretty sure at this point that he didn't have a spinal injury, and he didn't think that moving his head was likely to worsen any brain injury that might be going on in there, so Reynard carefully rolled over and tried to get to his feet. It was an excercise in disorientation. His legs seemed proportionally shorter than they should have been, his feet bigger and clumsier as if he was wearing clown shoes. His body was inexplicably light but a heavy mass of tissue rested on his chest. He managed to get onto his hands and knees and then paused for a moment to pat himself down.

His shirt was sloughing off like shredded kleenex now so he brushed it away. The pelt of short hairs clung more tightly and wouldn't budge. But even that was secondary in Reynard's mind right now as he gingerly hefted and squeezed the breasts hanging on his frame. He didn't believe it, couldn't believe it. What kind of physics experiment gone awry could give a guy breasts?

The next logical question came to mind, and he slid his hand down his fuzzy belly to check between his legs. A tentative touch at first, then a more frantic grope with a bewildered whimper. There was just a pair of fleshy lips down there among the surprisingly thick and curly hairs, fitting in perfectly with the breasts and leaving nowhere for anything else to hide. It seemed hard to ignore the evidence that he'd somehow been turned into a woman.

A very hairy woman with deformed legs. He had been lying next to the wall and he propped himself up against it now as he rose unsteadily to his feet. He felt hopelessly awkward at first, his proportions below his waist all thrown out of whack and his tendons pulling in unfamiliar ways. But then he let his posture adjust naturally and he rose up onto his toes, a strangely comfortable pose.

His pants and shoes had fallen apart along with his shirt and he could feel a much thicker, woolier coat of hair down there than what covered his arms and torso. His bare toes felt numb, not at all uncomfortable from bearing his full weight on the hard concrete, and he gave one foot a ginger tap on the floor. There was a solid clacking sound. Hooves, of course, he thought giddily. A physics experiment that gave him breasts and hooves.

"Will someone please get me out of here!" The shriek echoed through the tunnel, making him cringe and flick his ears at his own desperate high-pitched voice. Flicked my ears... He reluctantly explored further. He had long, pointed, furry ears sticking out from the sides of his head, a scalp full of hair longer and thicker than he'd had even in his youth, and strangest of all a pair of huge curved horns were anchored in his skull high on his forehead. To his immense relief his face still felt human. Though fuzzy and with a broad, flattened nose...

"Get out of here," he reminded himself weakly. Yes, let's do that. Unlike everything else that had happened to him, this was a problem he could deal with.

Reynard groped his way along the wall, the silence broken only by the soft clack of hooves and the distant moan of wind. There should be sirens, it occured to him. Considering how catastrophic this accident had been, to cut off all power and even kill the emergency lighting, he should have been able to hear them even here. Unless some sort of EMP had fried everything, even on the surface? That didn't make sense.

The concrete wall was rough, the floor uneven. And it was sloping upward. That didn't make sense either, the tunnel curved in a giant circle but should have been level. What could twist it without collapsing it outright? Nothing he could do anything about right now, so he continued onward. Soon he was heartened by the glimmer of light ahead.

The tunnel emerged into sunlight, so blindingly bright after the darkness he'd been stumbling through that Reynard had to screw his eyes shut again for a minute to let them readjust. There was only the wind whistling in his enormous ears, the sound of sand whispering across the ground, the distant cry of what could have been an eagle... it was so vivid that, the irrationality of it all aside, Reynard was hardly surprised when he was finally able to open his eyes and look at the landscape outside.

He wasn't in the alps any more. There were mountains on the horizon but they were low, rounded knobs rather than the snow-capped crags he was used to. Smaller outcrops of orange rock dotted the savannah between here and there, carved by centuries of wind, and the rolling grasslands was interspersed with patches of barren soil and small groves of gnarled gray-barked trees.

Reynard's new legs felt weak. He sank down to sit on the edge of a low boulder at the mouth of the cave, so numb and bewildered that he barely noticed when he pinched his stubby tail under his weight.

There were so many impossible things going on that the fact that he'd developed a tail hardly seemed worthy of note right now.

"Okay," Reynard announced to himself - as far as he could tell he was completely alone right now - "so here's the score. One," he crouched down and scratched a line in the sandy soil with a fingertip, "I'm a girl." His voice caught slightly but he kept it level; he'd never live it down if he lost it on just the first bullet point of his presentation.

"Two, I'm a goat-girl. Or maybe a sheep-girl." He shook his head. The fur covering his body was a muted sepia shade of dark brown, not any color he'd ever associated with sheep before. "A satyr, maybe, assuming there's such a thing as a female satyr." He tugged on one of his horns and sighed. They were big and curved like a ram's horns, but there was no questioning his gender.

"Three, I'm not in Kansas any more." A strained chuckle. "Well, Kansas is actually closer to this than France or Switzerland. Maybe I'm in Arizona."

"Four..." Reynard paused, examining the fourth line he'd drawn in the sand. He actually hadn't thought this far ahead when he'd finally dragged himself out of his daze and decided to get things straight. "I'm not injured," he concluded. "No bumps to the head. Hell, I feel great. For a goat-girl."

He sighed and stood back up, flexing his strange legs. His chest bounced, his gut didn't. He stomped his hoof. "I must be young again, somehow. What a trade-off. Ask me again later if it's worth it."

A long pause, and then he continued without answering. "Five. I've got no clothes, no tools, and no one to help me. Well, maybe I have tools, back in the tunnel. But I'm not sure what good they'll be, and I don't want to go bumbling around back in the dark if I can help it." He looked around at the wasteland he was stranded in. "Six, I have no idea where the nearest help is, or how long it'll take to get here. Seven, I'm already talking to myself."

Would it help if I reminded myself that that's the least worrisome symptom of insanity I've got to deal with right now? Reynard shook his head, ears twitching and suppressing an inappropriate grin. No, I guess not.

So what do I do? He could last days without food, even without the fat reserves he'd spent his life accumulating. Water would be more of a problem; this arid landscape made him thirsty just thinking about it. But he'd grown up part of his childhood in Phoenix, and who didn't spend a lazy weekend or two pondering desert survivalism in a place like that?

Reynard hadn't ventured out from the security of the tunnel mouth yet, but he could nevertheless see a number of clusters of prickly pear cacti within easy reach. He could cut them open and subsist on the juices they'd stored... if I had a knife, he sighed. Basics. I need basics.

This was not the sort of problem he'd been expecting to have to solve when he went down that elevator shaft scant hours ago.

"Wait, hours?" Reynard squinted up at the Sun, then switched to the more practical method of judging its elevation by looking down at the angle of the shadows it cast. "It's almost overhead. It was just three o'clock at CERN, and I wasn't out cold for long or the dust in the tunnel would have settled before I woke up. This can't be anywhere in North America. A desert just a little bit east of CERN... Africa? Swell." On the one hand, that made getting help far less easy; Reynard knew little about Africa. On the other hand, making a useful logical deduction like that made Reynard feel somewhat more confident in his own abilities. He found himself smiling.

Wipe that grin off your face. You've got a lot left to figure out yet, and it's not even your face. Reynard sighed at his own spoilsport attitude, but grudgingly accepted it. It didn't matter where he was right now. If rescue came, it came. He just had to survive until then.

And as for figuring out what exactly had happened to bring him to this situation in the first place... I may not be up on the very latest in particle physics. Quantum teleportation, sure, maybe I can buy that. But why am I a goat-girl?

Better to focus on the more immediate questions, the ones he both stood some chance of solving and the ones that he had to solve.

Learning to walk without a wall for support was one such problem. Reynard killed two birds with one stone by taking a short journey around the rock outcropping the cave was under, getting a full view of the surrounding terrain in the process. There weren't many distinguishing features aside from the distant mountains, he didn't even know yet which direction was north. By the time he got back to the cave mouth he wasn't quite so wobbly on his hooves any more. It was a small accomplishment but he'd take what he could get. And I suppose if I have to walk around here barefoot, having hooves is not so bad...

Tools. He needed to see what was left down in the tunnel, but without a light source he dreaded going back down there. Perhaps if he could make a torch... Need tools for that too. And wood, and rags, and pitch. Or equivalent. Good luck with that. So, lacking any other option, he headed back down into the pitch blackness to feel his way around.

The concrete walls had lost their smoothness and uniformity, but not via conventional damage - the floor was covered in dirt, not debris. If Reynard hadn't known what the place was supposed to be he'd have taken it for a natural cavern. Reynard found the service vehicle parked about where he remembered leaving it. He wouldn't have recognized it otherwise; instead of the smooth metal surface of the machine his fingers found an enormous heap of crumbly powder. From the scent he guessed it was rust. Reynard winced as his hand brushed one of the tires, now just a pool of tar.

There were probably toxic chemicals from the battery in that pile so he quickly moved on. The chamber that had contained BOLIDE was next, and progress beyond was blocked by the sagging heap of what had once been that great engine of physics; now collapsed on its crumbled supports, probably completely oxidized as well. He pawed through it for a few minutes in a vain search for his toolkit, but decided that even if he found it it was probably ruined too. He picked up a piece of debris and returned to the surface to examine it in the sunlight.

It was like everything had been returned to some sort of unfinished state. His clothing had become a pile of unwoven fiber, the tunnel had become a rough cave, the machinery inside had been reduced to ores. The piece of BOLIDE he'd brought with him was now fine green malachite, apparently a fragment of the thousands of tons of magnet but unblemished by any visible flecks of copper metal. "So why the hell am I a goat-girl?" Every time something started to make a little sense, that one question came back and threw it all back into confusion.

Could have been worse. Could have turned me into compost. Would've made sense... Instead he'd been made young and fit, he'd even got back a molar he'd lost years ago. So yes, he decided, it could have been worse. And now at least he knew what he had to work with.

He would have to make everything he needed from scratch. He wished he'd spent more than just one year in the Boy Scouts.

The rest of Reynard's first day was not very productive. He was reluctant to venture far from the cave, and didn't see any particularly favorable directions to try in any event, so his resources were very limited. The rock of the outcropping was something sedimentary; flaky, crumbly, and not very useful for forming tools. There were a few scrawny woody shrubs that resembled sage but weren't quite the same, a few thickets of low-lying cacti, and as much dry grass as he could pick. He'd tried twining together the raw fiber from his clothing into usable string but hadn't had much success.

At least he'd guessed right about the moisture content of the cacti. Peeling one open had been quite tricky without anything sharp and he'd punctured his fingertips quite a bit trying to deal with the spines, but he got enough bitter but palatable juice out of the deal to make up for it. He wouldn't die of thirst in the immediate future.

The Sun set in the direction of the mountains, so that way was west. Reynard marked the direction with a line of rocks for future reference. He'd be able to figure out his lattitude soon enough once Polaris became visible, and from there he could start making guesses about exactly where in Africa he was.

The sky reddened and darkened as night fell.

The air had been almost oven-like at the height of the day but now a chill rapidly descended. Reynard found himself actually thankful for his strange coat of fur; it had probably saved him from sunburn during the day and now it served to take the worst of the bite out of the cold. His shaggy legs were just fine, though the thinner fur on his upper body let enough through to trigger a shivver.

His shiver wasn't just from the cold. The chorus of insect noises changed character, the day shift quieting down as the nocturnal creatures roused themselves; off in the distance Reynard heard what he guessed to be coyotes howling. He'd settled into a nook at the mouth of the cave to rest, cloven-hoofed feet pulled in protectively and the most weapon-like rock he'd found close at hand, but he felt far from secure. Wish I had a fire. He kicked himself for putting off thinking about lighting one, even though he knew that he didn't have enough fuel available to keep it burning through the night anyway.

He'd survive. Coyotes didn't bother bigger creatures like him, and he wouldn't freeze to death with this fur. Tomorrow morning he'd be rescued, he assured himself, and all this would be explained.

The stars were coming out. Reynard allowed himself to admire their beauty; even the relatively remote CERN was normally too flooded with light pollution for the full display to be visible like this. Need to find Polaris before I sleep... Reynard frowned. The constellations were unfamiliar. Was he all the way into the southern hemisphere? He wasn't familiar with the constellations down there.

A crescent moon was rising. That would settle it for sure; he remembered an old mnemonic about which side was "up" in which hemisphere. It was just a matter of figuring out if the Man in the Moon was on his head...

There was no Man in that moon. Reynard shook his head, yet another impossibility being added to the pile. The mottled pattern on that moon's disc was not the same as Earth's moon. He was sure of it; there was a bright reddish streak that was as obvious as it was unfamiliar.

Far off in the distance a whistling cry rose up and the coyotes fell silent. It was strangely melodic, almost pleasant, but it wasn't any animal call that Reynard had been familiar with from Earth life. "I suppose I should have guessed sooner," he whispered to himself. "There isn't any life like me on Earth either..."

The accident had sent him farther away than Arizona or Africa. Rescue would probably not be coming the next morning, or any time after that Reynard could hazard to guess. For the first time the true depth of his solitude struck him and Reynard stifled a quiet sob. No matter how impossible his situation seemed he was going to have to deal with it entirely on his own.

Reynard actually did manage to catch a little sleep during the night despite the chill of the air and the fearful strangeness of his situation. Waking up and finding himself still in it was a bit of a shock, but after he took a few minutes to regain his bearings - yeah, still a female satyr - he climbed groggily to his hooves and clopped over to the cave entrance to meet the dawn.

The red light of sunrise tinted the rock and soil of the savannah a deeper shade of orange. Reynard snorted and sat down on a small boulder to think about what to do next, trying not to be distracted by the restless flicking of his ears and tail.

The cave seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. It fit relatively smoothly with the landscape, the walls having been changed from concrete into the native sandstone and reshaped to look naturally carved, but there weren't any traces of other caves visible nearby and there certainly wasn't any sign of flowing water. And there were only so many usable cacti in the vicinity to sustain him... "I'm going to need to get moving," Reynard concluded reluctantly. Southward looked most promising; the sparse dotting of trees seemed denser in that direction. Logically, he should set off that way before his reserves became depleted. But he didn't want to leave the remains of BOLIDE behind, wrecked and useless though it may be.

If there was any home of rescue whatsoever it seemed likely that this would be the place it would happen; it was the only spot where he knew for certain that travel from Earth to wherever he was had occurred. But there was certainly nothing that he could do to effect it by himself, and since the Large Hadron Collider had just had a big bite taken out of it it would be a while before anyone on Earth could try any similar experiments.

Assuming anyone over there had any idea what had happened or what to do. "I have no idea what's happened to me." No idea other than what I can see with my own eyes, that is. Assuming I believe them. Reynard's hand slipping down to his hairy crotch but he quickly pulled it away and hooked his fingers over the tip of one of his horns instead. "Let's limit the numver of impossible things I believe before breakfast, okay?" He nodded to himself and gave a strained chuckle.

Breakfast. Reynard was getting hungry, though not as hungry as he would have expected - the small amount of cactus flesh he'd eaten yesterday for the moisture must have been reasonable fare. Good to know, he'd grab some more before he left. But before then...

Reynard didn't have any good writing implements but the cave wall was soft enough that he could scrape lines in it reasonably well with a pointy rock. He carved crude letters; 'REYNARD CRAMER 30/05/06 FROM EARTH'. After some thought, he added under that; 'BECAME F/SATYR ON ARRIVAL'. It was unlikely that anyone would figure out what that meant without further clues, but his space was limited and he assumed that if anyone were to follow him they'd learn more than just this.

'NO WATER HERE, GOING SOUTH'. That was in case anyone who came through would actively go out in search of him. There was room for one more line and Reynard spent a few minutes pondering what to write. Nothing profound came to mind and so ultimately he just left the pointed rock on the ground in front of the wall. Maybe the next guy will need to add more.

There wasn't much packing to do. Reynard rolled up the frazzled fibers from his old clothing into a ball, figuring he could perhaps make string out of it or if all else failed use it as tinder, and stuffed the piece of BOLIDE's magnet he'd retrieved into it. It didn't seem right to not bring at least some token of it along with him. Tucking the bundle under his arm, Reynard set out to the south.

Morning seemed to be a good time of day to travel. The cold of night dissipated quickly but hadn't yet been replaced with the furnace heat of midday, there didn't seem to be any large predators about, and there was ample light to see where he could place his feet. The sandy soil was tight-packed and his hooves handled the surface well; he made good time.

The cave from CERN soon vanished into the distance behind him. He stopped at the next outcrop, just a small pile of boulders on a low hillock, and hammered a crude arrow into the surface of the rock to make sure he wouldn't lose the trail. He had no idea if he'd be coming back this way but there was no point in burning bridges unecessarily. Every few miles would probably suffice.

Morning started to edge toward noon, the furnace creeping slowly back across the landscape. Reynard was amazed by his own fitness, he'd been walking for hours without a hint of fatigue in his strange goat legs, but now he was starting to sweat through the thinner patches of fur. He knew he couldn't afford the moisture loss, not without some guarantee of being able to replenish it; the trees were still extremely sparse and the cacti were a literal pain to harvest.

A splintered crag of rock off to the southwest offered the shelter of shade and he made his way there. The outcropping was as old and worn as the others but appeared to have split in relatively recent geologic history, leaving an overhang with just enough headroom for a person to relax in for a while. Or a satyr. Reynard approached cautiously, ears flicking nervously as he checked for any other large animals that might be lurking in the welcoming shadows, then crept out of the scraggly sagebrush when it became apparent he was alone. He sat down on a well-worn rock, set aside his modest bundle of raw materials, and patted dust from his shaggy leg-fur with a sigh.

If there are aboriginals around, this would make a good camp... The thought had crossed Reynard's mind a few times already but this was the first place he'd come to that might have been expected to hold any traces of evidence. There were no obvious markings on the rocks, but the soil did seem unusually gray here and there were a few bits of wood mixed in that looked like they might have been charred. Firepit? If so, the place wasn't very frequently used. There wasn't any soot on the overhang's surface or other such traces. The soil seemed pretty well churned up, though, so perhaps something had obliterated them. Hard to say.