Kickaha's Joy

“Why not?” he said, waving his hand to indicate the Great Plains. “The air is drunk with sun and green and life. There are vast rolling prairies before us, much like the plains of North America before the white man came. But far more exotic or romantic or colorful, or whatever adjective you choose. There are buffalo by the millions, wild horses, deer, antelope, and the great beasts of prey, the striped Plains lion or Felis Atrox, the running lion, which is a cheetah-like evolution of the puma, the dire wolf and the Plains wolf, the coyote, the prairie dog! The Plains teem with life! Not only pre-Columbian animals but many which Wolff gated through from Earth and which have become extinct there. Such as the mastodon, the mammoth, the uintathere, the Plains camel, and many others.

“And there are the nomadic tribes of Amerinds; a fusion of American Indian and Scythian and Sarmatian white nomads of ancient Russia and Siberia. And the Half-Horses, the centaurs created by Jadawin, whose speech and customs are those of the Plains tribes.

“Oh, there is much to talk about here! And much which I do not know yet but will some day! Do you realize that this level has a land area larger than that of the North and South Americas of my native Earth combined?

“This fabulous world! My world! I believe that I was born for it and that it was more than a coincidence that I happened to find the means to get to it! It’s a dangerous world, but then what world, including Earth, isn’t? I have been the luckiest of men to be able to come here, and I would not go back to Earth for any price. This is my world!”

Anana smiled slightly and said, “You can be enthusiastic because you are young. Wait until you are ten thousand years old. Then you will find little to enjoy.”

- from A Private Cosmos, pages 86-87 of my 1968 Ace Paperback