At might have been banished from our society, but was far from forgotten. If I had gotten a fragmented picture of what Greater Than and his young acolyte were up to in those long, warm days, my impressions of the existence of At and Question in their exile was closer to a few random specks now and then. The more so because nobody wanted to talk about them, or the fact that they weren’t around the fire dining with us.

Several of the kits took up the truly unwise habit of prowling the woods to spot the exiles’ doings. Or at least that was their story if questioned. I suspected that they were actually smuggling food and tools to them, meeting at selected rendezvous rather than just happening to run across the pair as they claimed. Suspicions confirmed by Paren, who I discovered preparing some pies and acorns of mint tea for them. There were also adult males who slipped into the woods taking tools and material to the outcasts, but they didn’t speak about it, at least not around Greater Than, Point, or myself.

The kits, however were more voluble, especially since their forays into the woods were good topics for boasting and exaggeration. The pack had been stripped of its natural leaders, both because of Greater Than’s precipitous actions, and they were resentful, but unfocused. There was no other real alpha of their generation, although Xclaim could step up as a de facto commander at times and it looked as though Percent, a former quiet follower with yellow and white stripes, was starting to emerge as their idea man and the one everybody listened to. This happens when a group has no alpha and needs one, it’s as though some societal call to office transforms a seemingly unlikely character into a leader. Looked into by many investigators, it remains a minor mystery. Perhaps your “psychology” could offer some answers to us, but it doesn’t seem to help you very much.

Speaking of Dash, he was also slipping out in the woods to see Question. Such disappearances must have been very obvious to Greater Than but he affected not to notice. Perhaps deferring to his obvious need to have a clansman, or perhaps constrained because the new pledge-based commons we were deriving would have made it difficult for him to enforce his hold over the Younger. The visits grew fewer as time passed, however, and kit life gelled up around their new constellation—and Dash’s around his new personal chief.

The outcasts were ranging further away, the kits reported, their tongues freed by the privacy of my front yard and the way Paren fawned on them and plied them with treats. They were independent of the colony; had sufficient tools and supplies, were accustomed to eating off the wild. They moved deeper and higher, away from the lake into coniferous stands where the open forest floor offered little natural cover. They slept in trees at night and roved the woods by day in constant search for food and discoveries. They had even topped the ridge into the next valley which they claimed contained a lake far larger than our own.

There were many delicious details of their life away from the group, and the kits gloried in them. I never asked them why they didn’t all just run off to join them, make their own ways in this new world which was the only one they’d known. I doubt it occurred to them, actually. As I have mentioned, we are social beings to the point of virtual slavery.

But what excited them most was their reinvention of the bow. They loving described polished shafts of willow strung with copper wire, arrows nocked with feathers and tipped with needles. This was heady stuff for them, not only because the two had armed themselves in the wilderness—and with weapons probably superior to anything we had at the colony—but that it was archery, a legendary image for us. We had never practiced archery as a sport: when energy weapons became available we put aside primitive ones. But the legends remained, the way you still resonate to the era of swords, I suppose. Archers Of The Green Dawn was more than a boy’s adventure story in books and acted out on screens, it was the only myth cycle that survived from our primordial days, endless variations of the pre-history machinations that had either solidified our race or eliminated the competition, depend on which brand of scholarship you subscribe to.

Arrows flying in the trees while we lived in burrows and hollows and Spirit walked the world and dreams. Stirring tales, but we were not inclined to try to go back to that life any more than your people would want to revert to living in castles and huts, fighting in steel armor. Stories from the birth pangs of time. Until the Ascension started talking about progressing towards the past and heights. But even they hadn’t mentioned bows and arrows.

XClaim rattled happily about Question letting him shoot his bow during their daily practice sessions. He couldn’t hit small targets like At, but just the sensation of pulling back the wire and letting fly, watching an arrow leap forth to hang quivering in a tree, had him delirious. There was a flurry of clandestine bow construction out at the Midden, but few workable results. That was the thing: the kits were smart and energetic, but none of them had the practical hands that Question had brought to their projects. And none of our adults had the facility with objects that At had used to elevate our lives. Equal was very adept, I must admit, though hampered somewhat by his cultish disapproval of anything leading towards living at ground level or demonstrating decadence.

So life went on in our little “village”, while out beyond us in the wider wilds, two of us explored and melded into this huge new form of forest, hiking along with glove leather packs and acorns of water slung over their shoulders, bows at the ready even though at that point this world had offered almost nothing to threaten our lives and persons. So far our only injuries had come about because of our own stupidity or arrogance. My experience on this world, among a different race, indicates to me that this is possibly a universal situation: guarding against unseen monsters from the dark while falling victim to ourselves.