Jack Morgan and his wife, whose ten-year-old daughter recently fell through the winter ice and drowned, are two of the rare beings who live in an agrarian enclave in the new Ohio wilderness, tending their livestock and working with tools rather than living in the anthill-like sterile towers full of webbed-together people. But now the towers need Jack’s help in rescuing a friend in the Pleistocene and track down a specimen of Castoroides ohioensis along the way.
Okay. But to get to the point, Castoroides ohioensis was a giant species of beaver that lived during the Pleistocene epoch. It’s been extinct for at least ten thousand years. Our project requires sending an animal-capture expert to the late Pleistocene to catch an ohioensis and bring back tissue samples.

Variants

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  1. “Trapping the Pleistocene” by James Sarafin, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May/June 2015.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by James Sarafin