Dawning Nodder

270 Million Years Post-Establishment

The world was a different place when she last laid down to sleep. No longer than a man's thumb, a slender, cold-blooded creature slowly climbed down the cactaiga bush one chilly autumn evening and nestled herself down under the needles and the moss. With shuffling movements of her long, spindly legs, she slipped under the litter and covered herself with soil. As temperatures dropped with the nightfall, her heartbeat began to slow and her breaths grew shallow. Day by day, the processes of life slowed to a crawl, the deepest of dreamless sleep, until all fell silent. When the snow fell and covered the ground, it hid her away from all who might look for her. Nestled down beneath, ice crystals began to grow on her skin and even between her internal organs. Yet, this was not death. Before all shut down, her liver flooded every cell in her tiny body with glucose, a natural antifreeze, preserving her tissues even as ice filled every available space between her cells. Like the wood frog, she was simply biding her time for conditions to warm and for spring's warmth to bring her back to the world of the living.

She was an incredible survivor, a kind that had adapted to the limits of possibility to the challenges of the ice age world she lived in, a world where the forest her kind arose in were almost entirely gone, save for these stunted spiny thickets, and where the summer was warm enough to wake her just three months per year. Her entire waking life was condensed to a fleeting moment in time, and so she made the most of it, leaping through the thickets, devouring so many insects that were racing against the clock just the same as she to fulfill all the activities of their lives. She was a dawning nodder, the very last of the handfishes, the final gibbet, that had been one of the mid-ultimocene world's most bewildering creations. But with life now so constrained by the cold, these last gibbets led very different lives. With tropical jungles now a memory forgotten, it had taken her seven years just to grow to adulthood, even at such a small size. This was to be her final winter as a juvenile. In the spring, she would seek a mate for the first time, and she would give birth another year later, hibernating with her unborn offspring within her. And with its birth, she would complete the final, most important purpose of her life.

But that year the spring never came. Brutal arctic winds continued to bring snow squalls and ice storms through the summer, and the ground never thawed. So what should have been fall came again, and winter carried on. And the nodder never roused, never knew the passing of time. Somewhere between the living and the dead, she carried on beneath the earth, still as the fresh-fallen snow. She used little energy at such a low temperature, so little that she did not need to breathe. Her skin absorbed what oxygen she needed from the soil that encased her, and her body burned trace amounts of stored fat to power what few remnants of life still occurred in her tiny body. An occasional missed summer was not unheard of. And though some other nodders like herself, which had less energy reserves or less sheltered resting places, would die as a result of the weather, most would carry on. When the second spring came, and the blizzards never ceased, it became far more serious. By the next autumn, by which time 8 feet of snow covered the spiny thicket past the height of its canopy, most of the nodders had quietly vanished. They had been pushed past their limits by the unrelenting cold. But even as the third season of winter came and went - within the years-long winter - a handful of the nodders survived. And so did she. Even though spring didn't come this year, either, she carried on, burning the very last of her reserves. Snow continued every day of the summer, though, and the ground still did not thaw. Autumn was approaching, and soon, she too would die. It would be unnoticed, for she was already in a limbo at the very edge of life, unable to feel or to notice anything around her. She would slip away so slowly as to be imperceptible. A death without boundary, a fall into quietness.

But something was very strange, this autumn. The sky above was orange, and the air thick with smoke. A tremendous wildfire burned on the horizon for five weeks. Its heat radiated far and wide beyond its flickering borders, turning the snow far and wide into a flooding torrent that eventually washed back downhill, and extinguished the blaze. All around her spiny thicket, devastation lay, black and charred. Not a single surviving cactus-tree remained in sight, and no animals wandered anywhere to be found on the distant side of the river. But her small thicket had become an island, surrounded by the flow of the melt water that formed a temporary river, and so it was spared. Unbeknownst to her, her thicket had become one of just a handful of such refuges where life remained left in the world. And as the air cleared, the most woebegone and yet luckiest of creatures began to peer out from its edges. An arc of scarce, battered survivors anchored at the edge of a world at the brink, unsure what the future now held. They had made it to the other side. But none knew, yet, what awaited them.

The autumn air was inexplicably warm thereafter, like the days of high summer used to be in the memories of the few animals who had lived long enough to recall them. The cactaiga had already begun to bud, wasting no time in returning to life's overdue cycles. Scavengers walked and flew up from the coasts where they had spent the longest winter, and they set across the blackened land to find other islands spared from its destruction in search of food and the remains of other creatures that did not make it through. Rain and sleet and hail had fallen for several days, the result of snow clouds from the north releasing their payload into an atmosphere too warm to keep it frozen, and it washed the thick smoke from the air. Three years after she lay down to rest, in an endless winter that had become an endless spring, the dawning nodder awoke.

 She was thin and sore and ravenously hungry. So long had she spent curled up and near-death that she seemed, for a time, to forget all that it mean to be alive. Her first waking experiences were pain, disorientation, unease, and so intense and so harsh did she find this new and forgotten life to be, that she could have laid back down and given it up. But instinct compelled her to go on, to do what she must to complete her life's purpose. And so with difficulty, the nodder stood, and slowly crawled. A beetle, a survivor as miraculous as herself, appeared out of the shadows to her left, and with no hesitation she lunged to engulf it in her arms, stuffing it into her mouth and ending its own story before it really even began. And on and on she did, hunting the other smaller survivors, the protagonist of her own story, for to her no other was of any importance. With each such morsel, she remembered a little of what it meant to live, one small piece at a time. Only with a full belly, could she even consider what must come next.

A few weeks later, a fatter and refreshed nodder peered upwards just as the clouds broke overhead for the first time since the thaw began. An arc of sunlight streamed down through the branches, warming her, reminding her of days long gone by. A new dawn lay before her, and she began to feel a renewed urgency complete her life cycle. She still behaved, then, like she had limited time. She could not know, yet, that no longer would the threat of winter hang over her every movement. And to do so, she would have to find a mate. Though there was just enough food to last her until now in her thicket, there were no other nodders here, none who had lived to see the morning, yet somewhere out there, there must be another like herself. The world was wide, and there must be other islands, other endlings, others who had endured the endless winter that should have never ended and yet had now turned to a primordial spring. If it was the last thing she did - the only thing she did - with her second chance, she would find them.

And so as she set off across the emptied land beyond her small thicket, to places she had never been before, she would either ensure that her kind would survive...

Or she would die trying.