At New Haven, Connecticut, in the year of 1816, the president of Yale College recorded a June average temperature normally expected of a Labrador location 700 miles to the North. Killing frosts continued into August in New England, crop failures caused hardship in temperate latitudes worldwide, and folks remembered the year, coldest on record then, as 'Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death'. The calamity was caused by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia, an apocalyptic event in which twenty-five cubic miles of debris were thrown into the atmosphere. Much of the pyroclastics were in the form of a very fine dust that circled the world for several years, reflecting back to space a portion of the sun's radiation.

Thirty years before, Benjamin Franklin had theorized that dust in the upper air could provoke lower temperature on the ground, but no one at the time of the eruption thought of the connection between the Indonesian eruption and the resulting episode of worldwide cooling.ĺ

The disc was a precious find, thought Betula. Here was a mild preview of the events that brought the Shaman's Call. The variations in the Mother's display of anger were exquisite. Read the tale of a volcano's burp, imagine the Mother's shaking of Her great hide and picture the million-years-long mayhem of the breakup of Gondwanaland. See a nudge in the polar axis, watch continents scrapped bare by miles-deep ice mantles.

The Mother constructs an ice sheet one snowflake after another. She takes her time. Now and then She sighs a storm. For Her sheer enjoyment perhaps, avalanches fill valleys and blizzards scour lichens from high ledges. As calm returns under an eternal snowfall, gravity crushes flakes into ice. At the mantle's edge a necklace of glaciers slope to frozen plains. Further, tundra spreads where hurricanes once toppled cypresses in mangrove swamps.

After a few hundred thousand years, the Mother changes Her mind. A melt carries to ocean abysses much of what was caught in the grip of the ice. Under cyclonic downpours or the implacable glare of a revealed sun, the gouged land reappears, ground to gentle curves. On endless moraines, immense gullies sever windrows sprinting from the lee of decapitated peaks.

Borne on the blow of a southerly gale, a moss spore finds a crack on a granite slab, the winged achene of a dandelion flutters to the dew on a clay field. At the edge of a mud puddle a seed sprouts. In a passing bird's droppings chokecherry pits scatter over a drift of sedges. Pleased with the freshness of Her scrubbed skin, the Mother is putting on a new face.

Such episodes are not kind to the Mother's fauna. Past extinctions associated with periods of glaciations sometimes wiped off the land all animals over eighty pounds in weight. Betula thought of those currently in the Mother's favor. Most plants and trees, no doubt, their seeds born by wind, water, bird or insect to follow the whims of the climate; the decomposers, like sow bugs under rotting wood toiling to keep the Mother prim; her tribes for sure, all adults well over eighty pounds; a few great whales perhaps, crisscrossing the silent oceans for rafts of plankton, calling to their kin across the depths to report a find.

Even with Marcel Desfresnes' puny contribution, the Tectonic Plates Realignment would not merit from the Mother a significant geological signature. With only a millennium to mature, the ice sheet had spared many relics and in the nunataks' lee the litter of the Ancients' civilization remained, for better or worse. Picking over plastic garbage strewn on a slope for a worthy find, Betula often wished that the ice had stayed for an eon, long enough to grow into the splendor of the azure color that darkens to violet and vanishes into the blackness of bottomless crevasses. Down there the profusion of the Ancients' artifacts would have been ground to bits, or frozen mud.

Aloft on her last evening of the season, Betula felt blue at the thought of leaving the ice to return to the Institute gossip, the neo-shamans' nonsense, the day-to-day routine of writing, filing, lecturing, the stifling heat of tropical storms, the stench of her tribe. Leaving behind so much death and so many decaying relics, she almost longed for her own decomposition in the embrace of the Mother's earth. As sunlight faded over the forest below, she put her flyglider on automatic circling early and let the slow revolutions of the landscape lull her into a fitful sleep. On her way home, with her usual loot, a map, a few tales, and surely the Ancients' sole worthy legacy which she had carried in and was carrying out, a few chromosomes bits in her loins.

The flyers' return wasn't meant to be celebrated until everyone was accounted for, but after two seasons Liriodendron was still missing.
Betula had wished he would be there to welcome her on landing and her hopes were shattered again. They had been close friends a long time though she was born with a rosy skin that did not take much sun to burn, and a small upturned nose that attracted glances and provoked frowns. The bullying of her first school year had her parents turn to home schooling but, as a teenager at the Institute, she had to face the finks. She found that a triangular filing of her nails could be useful and chose to respond to mockery with swift aggression. Punishments and lectures did little to change her habits since her usually splendid grades often had teachers look another way when some boy showed bloody scratches on his cheeks. What else could you expect in a society born of violence? In the case at hand the perpetrator was once the victim, a not unexpected occurrence in the history of the species. Weren't the half-starved, abandoned dogs running loose in lowlife neighborhoods much feared by the matron's poodles? A shaky analogy certainly, but Betula's mischief was quite positively redeemed by her superior exam results, wasn't it?

Liriodendron, a handsome specimen of the Mother's best breeding line, kept scores and eventually befriended the harridan. Born poor, driven to succeed, he was an outsider also, too smart to be liked. Before graduation they found themselves partners in the last field trip of their class, an event meant to be the culmination of their training and a memorial to the travails of the first Scientists in their escapes from the mobs. Students were to be dropped in pairs in a Northland wilderness and expected to survive a week with a hunting knife. No food supplies. Naked.

NEXT: Devil's Rainbows, Tree Huggers and Golden Showers