NATA

…Eight billion people on this planet right now, all family, all carrying the same impossible inheritance, all watching the same stars that Neka watched over his mother's body, that Nata watched from the Alpine Pass, that the River Clan watched from their raft in the middle of the ocean, with nothing visible in any direction but water and the southern sky.…

…On the northern slopes of the Alps, in the weeks after Nata's group descended from the pass, they were not alone.…

…The group that followed Nata into the mountains numbered perhaps twenty five people at the start.…