They have been pooling in the low warm hollow again, the soft quick ones, the way rain gathers in a dip before it decides where to run. I have felt them come and go for what would be, to them, a great many afternoons, though it was all one flicker to me.
Their heat is remarkable up close, each little furnace of them throwing off warmth as it burns down its brief allotment, and today they have crowded so densely that the ground carries a hum, a fast trembling I have not felt since a herd of the large hoofed things crossed here, in what was, for me, only a little while ago.
I take these creatures to be at war. They fling their small warm weights against one another, tumble, are lifted, are dropped, rise up and fling themselves again, all of it faster than a heartbeat I do not have. And yet none of them stays down. The fallen are hauled upright by the very ones who felled them, which is not how war goes for the slow things, the glaciers and the seas, that only ever take and take across ten thousand of these afternoons.
So it is not war. It is some manner of weather they make for themselves, a warm wet storm of their own bodies, spent as quickly as any storm. Their heat is already thinning. Soon they will scatter to their cooler places and go dark, one by one, as all the quick warm things do.
I felt them here so vividly. It seemed, briefly, that they had always been. But I have been wrong about that before, about the hoofed herds, about the great cold that came and went, and I will not, I think, recall this particular wetness by the time the next ice arrives to smooth me down.