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How many times did I enter a dark building, where a small glow of light lit up what seemed like a herd of beasts asleep on the floor. But they were our people, deep inside the animal pelts; and faces lifted unwillingly from under covering arms, or out of hoods of fur, and eyes watched me as I strode about, trying to impress on them that vigorous movement was indeed still possible. The eyes moved slowly, their gleam being extinguished at every moment as sleep closed them, then I saw them glitter again... it was like coming at dusk on a hillside where a herd of our great beasts had lain down to rest and, seeing us come near, they lifted their heads and stared, wondering if this time we were a danger, and then, deciding not, the shine of many pairs of eyes vanished as they turned away the great heavily horned heads. Oh, it was so stuffy and unpleasant in our dwellings now! How I disliked having to make my way into them, and stand there, trying to look alert and awake, when the foetid atmosphere, the general torpor, the cold, dulled my mind and made me want only to lie down with them all and sleep away my life - until Canopus came.
'Is Canopus here yet?' - I heard, everywhere, from these dark smelly interiors, and this anxious needy cry seemed to ring in my ears all the time as I went about my work.
We had managed to arouse enough young and strong people to extend the sheds and runs where Alsi was breeding the snow animals. These covered a large area near our town; and the system Alsi had worked out was in operation in all our towns. Being creatures of the cold, they did not need much shelter. We provided for them something like the caves which we believed were their original breeding places, made out of rock and piled with lichens and moss. The animals were kept in bounds by walls of the half-frozen earth of the tundra. They were now as important a source of food as the herds of great beasts. Feeding them was a problem we did not expect to solve. Vegetable matter of some sort was what they had to have, and their need for it competed with ours. They had learned to accept a diet of lichens, mosses, and the new kinds of low-growing tough plants that now were the planet's chief vegetation. But these were what we too were eating, made into broths and stews of all kinds, when we could not stand for one more minute the monotony of meat. But what these animals gave us was meat - again meat; but at least, because they seemed to thrive on so little, the return from them was greater than if we ate the lichens and the bitter woody plants.
To breed them was economic, was sensible. But we did not like them. Had no affection for them.
In captivity they had become clumsy, slow-moving animals, their whiteness dimmed by the necessary and inevitable dirt of their pens and caves. I often stood there beside Alsi, to watch them. She, this most capable and inventive tender of animals, did not like her work. She wore, often enough, a rueful sort of grimace on that pleasant broad face of hers; and her eyes that shone out of the deep hood of fur had an apology in them. For what? I knew, well enough! So did we all. When Alsi, Klin, or Marl, or myself, had about us a certain look of deprecation, defensiveness, it was because we did not like what we had to do!
Imprisonment had changed, too, the nature of these creatures: they were unlikeable and unresponsive, and their bright expressionless blue eyes stared back at us from the soiled white faces. But in her own quarters, which she shared with brothers and a sister, Alsi had two of these little creatures as pets. And there they played and bounded about, and were delightfully affectionate. They greeted the approach of any one of us with little trills of pleasure, and they loved to nestle close or to creep into the folds of a coat or a scarf, where they lay blinking soft blue eyes that were all mischief and friendliness. Such was the real nature of the beasts we had made unpleasant prisoners.
Sometimes I went out by myself when there was soft snow falling, and stood quite still, and soon I saw a gentle darting movement which was not the blowing or settling of the snowflakes. If I stared long enough, my eyes attuned to what I hoped to see, this subtle shadowy movement took shape, and I was looking at the little snow animals, wild ones, that seemed to lift, and settle, and then run through the white fall, and then float up among the snow. Yes, I have seen that: how they ran and were airborne, sometimes for long distances, as if they were birds using air currents. And they alighted more softly than birds; and then a white plumy shape came into vision again quite high above the ground, at the level of my own gaze. For the flash of a moment blue alert friendly eyes shone into mine, and then there was a fast turning movement, like that of a water creature, and the white soft thing was floating away among the white blowing feathery particles. And I had met Alsi out there, doing the same: refreshing ourselves with this delightful-ness, this soft delicious play in the snow - reminding ourselves of the real nature of the poor animals whom we had deprived. But what did they live on? There were few droppings from the great birds who lived on them, and these were usually covered over almost at once by fresh snowfalls. The lichens on the rocks and the plants had to be dug out by us from under snow. We came to believe, Alsi and I, that these creatures were nourished by snow; or, if we did not believe it, we enjoyed playing with the idea, making for ourselves a small place in our minds where fantasy and improbability could be enjoyed; and this was a resting place and a restorative for us, living as we did amidst a grinding necessity that narrowed us and pressed us down.
And then Canopus did come to us. Canopus came at last. It was Johor who came, but what I saw first was a tall figure in thick clothes standing not far from the pens and caves of our snow animals, looking into our town, with an alertness and interest that made me say at once, That is a stranger. For animation of any kind at all had to strike me as unusual. Then he turned his head towards me, and I saw his brown healthy face, already greying because of the crumbs of snow on his skin and his eyebrows, and I said: 'Johor!' And he said: 'Doeg!'
By then I was sleeping in a snow dome, or snow hut, thus relieving the pressure on space for others, but it was not a place I spent time in unless for sleep. Johor said: 'Oh, it is cold! Where can we go?'
There was a long low shed near the animals' pens that Alsi used to store food and bedding for them, and I said: 'In there...' And already I was feeling that my strong expectations for release were about to be killed dead, for there was nothing in his ma
So what I saw in Johor's eyes was what I saw every day; and what I knew others saw in mine. I knew already that there were no fleets of rescue ships waiting somewhere just out of my line of sight on the tundra. I knew he had come to us alone.