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