Did the little snow rodents mass in what caves still were free of the ice packs? Did the great birds nest in caves? Was there some other kind of bird or animal we had not imagined?
It was with feelings of loss, even of anguish, that we left those creatures behind: this was because, of course, we identified with them. How could we not, pressed in upon as we were, so that our lives became ever smaller and narrower? We could feel for these poor animals, whatever they were, surviving in an icebound cave.
We travelled on polewards, but more slowly because of Nonni's bad arm. He could not help with pulling the sliding carts, and Alsi did his work. And then we lost our sense of time, and of distance, as we laboured on, and on; our eyes burning, the exposed skin of our faces painful, and even the bones of our bodies protesting - those light elegant bones of ours that had been made by nature for easy and graceful movement. Over us storms came down, and we were enclosed in shrieking winds that never stopped, until we came to believe that a screaming of air in violent movement was what was normal, and silence or the soft stirrings of breezes and zephyrs only what we made ourselves imagine to save our reason from present horror. And then, when the storms stopped, and we found newly deposited snows preventing our struggling progress forwards, and the snow masses fled past overhead, our space in the world seemed shrunk to no more than our group of shivering bodies, so that we were in a white room whose walls pressed in on us as we moved and that moved with us. And when the skies lifted and cleared, and we were in a high valley surrounded by tall icy peaks, there was no life but in ourselves, our few small selves huddled together there. Again we could not put up our tent on the hard ice. Night came down on us and we did not sleep, for the wonder and the splendour and the terror of the place. Overhead a black sky, with a few brilliant stars. No wind, no clouds, only silence. We crouched there, trembling, and gazed up, at this bright star and then at another, asking if this was the sun of Rohanda, the fruitful planet, or if that was; and we talked of the race that Canopus was bringing up to a level of high evolution, and we wondered how these people, who in our imaginations had everything brave and strong and good in them, would welcome us and make us at home... and we talked of how we two races, these nurslings of Canopus and ourselves, who were also the children of Canopus, their creation, would work together, and live together and become even stronger and better. And we, the three older ones, were aware of the vibrant expectation and longing of the two young ones, and we felt for them all the warm protective love that a passing generation must feel for its charges.
How still it was through that long night, and how beautiful! The silence was so deep we could hear the small crystalline whispering of the stars. And, before dawn, when the cold was so intense our thick fleecy coats seemed to have crumbled away, leaving us naked, one of the high glittering peaks that surrounded us let out a violent cracking noise, as the icy blast bit into it, and this sound was echoed by another peak, and in a moment all the mountains seemed to be shouting and groaning and protesting with the cold. And then it was silent again, and the stars sparkled and invited. We did not believe we would survive the night, and in the first light that made everything glitter and hurt our eyes we found Nonni slow and heavy, and we pushed back the shags of fur from around his face so we could see the truth of his state: and his flesh was thin and yellow and clung to his bones, and his dark eyes had no answer in them. We were still a good way from the pole. I remembered that there had been a cave not far from here, and we carried him to it. He was so light he lay in my arms like a child. The cave had a small entrance, a hole in the snow; and there was no guano there. The floor was a hard greyish mixture of soil and frost, and we had no sense of animals watching from the cave's recesses. We found piles of straw from - we supposed - the habitation of a solitary or a hermit, and with this we made a bit of a fire. But there was not enough warmth to save Nonni, and he died. And we could not bury him, for the floor was too hard. We left him there, in his thick pelts, and we four, wondering which of us would be next, went on with this journey of ours that we believed useless and perhaps even criminal, until we saw ahead of us a tall black spiring thing. It was the column that Canopus had asked us to erect at the place of the pole. But it was not as high as we remembered it, for the ice had reached more than halfway up it. The columns were at the poles because the spacecraft of Canopus found them useful as markers when they came in to land.
It seemed to us that the sun here at the top of our world was hotter than anywhere on our journey. It will be remembered that I said there was the very slightest inclination of our planet on its axis, which had never been enough to make much difference in our good times; but now we wondered if perhaps, because we were in such extremities of climate, this small slant might make enough of a change to call it a summer, when the other pole in its turn reached forward closer to the sun. Well, it turned out that it was so: there was the briefest season of weather when a slight increase in warmth made it possible to bring on crops and cosset a few vegetables. But it could not be summer enough to change our situation.
Here at the top of the planet, with nothing around us but glazed ice on which we could hardly keep our footing, we had to acknowledge that we had not found anything that could be of use as foodstock, except perhaps the white snow creatures. Which did not live up here, in these latitudes - here nothing lived. And our small livingness, our slow and cold-confused thoughts seemed to us out of place, almost an affront to nature which had ordained only the silences of the ice, the shrieking of the storms.
On the way back, the girl fell ill and we had to pull her along on one of the carts - there was room for her, now we had eaten nearly all our dried meat. When we reached the valleys, where the small movement of the snow animals showed on the snows among the shadows of the great birds that swung their white wings overhead, we caught several. This was easy, for they did not know enough to fear us. They were confiding little beasts, and snuggled up to the girl who lay half-conscious on her bed, and their sweetness and warmth revived her, and she wept for the first time, because of the death of her friend Nonni.
Of the journey back there is no need to say any more than it was frightful, and every dragging and painful step told us how foolish we had been to match ourselves against dangers we had not been equipped to measure. When at last we reached where we expected to see our black wall, we did not see it. It was a blindingly brilliant glittering morning, after a night of snow that fell so heavily we thought we might be suffocated by it. Stumbling on, our eyes half-closed against the glare, we nearly stepped straight over a cliff - our wall; we had walked up to it at the level of its top, for ice and snow had filled in everything. Standing there and looking down, we could see that snow had been blown down from the cold side into drifts along the foot of the wall. Not deep drifts but enough to cover the earth to a good distance.
We climbed carefully down the slippery dangerous steps into safety. Alsi soon recovered, and she took the little beasts that had shared her cart with her to the Animal Makers, and at last, after much experimentation, it was found they would eat lichens and the low bushes of the tundras. But what had they lived on when they were in that wilderness of frozen water? It was at last decided that in the caves there must have been supplies of straw or leaves, or perhaps even some sort of vegetation growing. We bred these creatures for food; but our problem was, after all, that we were not able to grow enough to feed animals. The great herds, which had seemed able to thrive on such sparse and dry vegetation, were now roaming restlessly from valley to hillside and even up the mountains in search of food. If the cold was going to creep down past our barrier wall, then we must expect our grasses and shrubs to dwindle - and the herds to dwindle too.