They have set a hollow woven thing upon my back, and into it they pile the shed skins of their day. This much I have watched them do for many warm afternoons in a row now, which by my reckoning is perhaps a blink and a half.
The soft quick creature comes at speed, always at speed, heat rolling off it in waves, and drops the skins in a heap that smells of salt and effort and their brief frantic living. Then it goes away. Then, a little later, it comes back, gathers the whole hollow thing against its chest, and hurries off with it as though something depended on the hurry.
I have watched water do this same patient work, carrying grain from a height to a valley, except the water took an age and asked nothing, and the creature does it before the sun has crossed a single sky.
The skins are never truly gone. This is the part I find restful. The creature carries them off, and in a day or two they are back, folded, waiting to be worn and shed and gathered again, the same small tide going out and coming in, out and in, a season of it, a whole life of it, all so the creature may keep covering and uncovering the warm little body it is so briefly given.
It set the hollow thing down beside me last afternoon and sat a moment, breathing hard, staring at the pile as though it might do something.
It did nothing. It got up. It carried the pile away.
By the next ice age I will not remember which of the ten thousand afternoons that was.