Four billion years, and the little one has gone out among strangers dressed as an animal on purpose.
We buried the seed corn through the hungry winter so this could happen. We, the shrew, spent the whole age of the great reptiles as a mouthful with legs, twitching in the dark, learning by the hundred-thousand generation exactly what a predator's outline meant and how fast to freeze. And now the eyes we sharpened on that terror are scanning a carpeted hall full of enormous grinning wolves and dragons and foxes, and the body does not freeze.
The body walks toward them. The body is delighted.
The lungfish gulped raw air at the edge of a drying pool so this heir could stand in a climate-controlled room where the temperature never once tries to kill anyone, and hug a stranger shaped like a bear.
We do not fully understand it. Where we come from, a creature that large with teeth that white was a question of whether you would see morning. To dress as the thing that hunted us, to pad the danger with foam and soft fur and give it a friendly nose, to make the shape of fear into something you wave at across a room.
We kept the fire lit specifically to hold that shape back. And the little one has invited it in for a photograph.
Look at the paws. Fire-tending hands, seed-burying hands, the hands that knapped the flint and stitched the hide, zipped into paw-shaped mittens, waving. Waving at nobody. Waving because it feels good.
We hid in burrows. We crossed the ice. We ate the bitter root when there was nothing else, so that this one, our whole unbroken relay, could be somewhere warm, unhunted, and this happy in a costume of the very thing we ran from.
Go on, then. We are watching. We are astonished.
Wave.