So he sat, watching the spectacle beneath the moon’s silver light. The thousands made into one, the one broken free of its seasonal habit. It wasn’t enough to simply wonder why. There could be a dozen reasons for that and perhaps they were important, something worth taking notice of, but what took hold of his soul, what occupied his thoughts as the night slowly worked past and the beasts surged up onto the shore and then spread out, heading south across pastureland and the vast swaths where forests had once been, was something far more profound. People looked at the beasts and saw every habit
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