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All this Spencer conveyed by mime, alternating the hands-in-prayer position with the throwing motion, making faces as contorted and clear as any demon mask. Holy activity; tribute to Homo erectus; form of nature worship.

“All at once,” Frank whispered. The others nodded.

Frank aimed and threw with the rest of them, and four disks flashed through the forest. One hit a tree and startled the aurochs a step forward, then another struck him on the flank, causing him to bolt up the ridge and away, out of sight before they were even done screaming. They high-fived each other and ran to collect their frisbees and play on.

So each blustery afternoon changed his life. That was autumn, that was how it should feel, Frank saw, the landscape suffused with the ache of everything fleeting by. A new world every heartbeat. He had to incorporate this feeling of perpetual change, make it an aspect of optimodality. Of course everything always changed! How beautiful that the landscape sang that truth so clearly! Ooooooooop!

More than ever he loved being in his treehouse. He would have to find a way to continue doing it as the winter came on, even in the midst of storms, yes of course. John Muir had climbed trees during storms to get a better view of them, and Frank knew from his mountaineering days that storms were a beautiful time to be out, if one were properly geared. He could pitch his tent on the plywood floor; and his heaviest sleeping bag would keep him warm in anything. Would he bounce around like a sailor at the top of a mast? He wanted to find out. John Muir had found out.

He would not move indoors. He did not want to, and he would not have to. The paleolithics had lived through ice ages, faced cold and storms for thousands of years. A new theory postulated that populations islanded by abrupt climate change had been forced to invent cooperative behaviors in bad weather time and time again, ultimately changing the gene and bringing about the last stages of human evolution. Good snowshoes, clothing as warm as Frank’s mountain gear, fire carriers, bow and arrow. The appearance in the archeological record of bone sewing needles and trap nets correlated with a huge extension northward, some forty thousand years ago. They had not only coped, but expanded their range.

Maybe they were going to have to do that again.

Clothing and shelter. At work Frank could see that civilized people did not really think about these things, they took them for granted. Most wore clothing suited to “room temperature” all the year round, thus sweltering in the summer and shivering in winter anytime they stepped out of their rooms—which however they rarely did. So they thought they were temperature tough-guys, but really they were just indoors all the time. They used their buildings as clothing, in effect, and heated or cooled these spaces to imitate what clothing did, no matter how crazy this was in energy terms. But they did it without thinking of it like that, without making that calculation. In the summer they wore blue jeans because of what people three generations before had seen in Marlboro ads. Blue jeans were the SUVs of pants, part of a fantasy outdoor life; Frank himself had long since changed to the Khembali ultralite cotton pants in summer, noting with admiration how the slight crinkle in the material kept most of the cloth off the skin.

Now as it got colder people still wore blue jeans, which were just as useless in the cold as they were in the heat. Frank meanwhile shifted piece by piece into his mountaineering gear. Some items needed cleaning, but were too delicate to run through a washing machine, so he had to find a dry cleaners on Connecticut, but then was pleasantly surprised to discover that they would take all his other clothes too; he had disliked going to the laundromat up the street from Van Ness.

So, autumn weather, cool and windy: therefore, Patagonia’s capilene shirts, their wicking material fuzzy and light against the skin; a down vest with a down hood ready to