Megafauna

How it fights

Everything about a colossus is slow and none of it is safe. It will not chase you and it has no need to: the ground it is standing on is the ground the fight happens on, and it has more of itself to spend than you have of yourself. Blows land on it the way weather lands on stone. The danger is never a single strike but the arithmetic of a long fight, and the moment you decide you are winning is usually the moment you have run out of what it would take to prove it.

Field notes

The great grazers move with the season and not with the day, and the same herd crosses the same fords in the same order year on year. They are placid until the calves are on the ground, and then the herd closes and the bulls stand outward, and the watcher who did not know the calving month has learned it. Their dung is warm for an hour and the wolves know it too. Nothing else on the plain is that big and that uninterested in you.