A cave, but the sun lives in it. Small suns, colored, hanging low, pulsing to a drum that never tires and no one beats.
The tribe sits. They sit on beasts that do not move. Wheels, but the wheels go nowhere. I watch a long time. Nobody arrives. Nobody leaves the beast anywhere new.
They pedal hard. Faster, harder, sweat falling like the first rain of the wet season, breath torn, faces twisted the way a man's face twists when he outruns the wolf. But there is no wolf. There is no meadow ahead, no herd, no ledge to leap. Only the mirror, and their own face charging toward them.
The pack-leader stands on a raised beast and shouts. She does not shout of danger. She shouts numbers. She tells them to climb a hill that is not there, and they climb it, chests heaving, and reach the top that is not there, and are proud.
I understand the running. Running is old. Running is how the meat gets caught and how you keep your own meat off another's fire. But these ones run from nothing, toward nothing, and pay the leader for the honor.
Then the drum stops. They wipe their faces. They walk out into the true world, slow, satisfied, and eat almost nothing.
A hunt with no kill. They call it good.
I have seen this before, in a different animal. A dog, chained, running in its sleep.