The dog was excited and happy to be part of a successful hunting team with a master he adored, as he had been so many times before in his long life. Art was pleased and relieved that he would have meat for his family for another year without having to resort to canned chicken or ham. He removed his pack and retrieved a short piece of rope, placing his rifle atop the pack before cinching the ram’s front legs together and suspending it from a branch of a tree a few feet away, with its abdomen at his waist and hind legs just off the ground. The animal was a good two hundred and fifty pounds and he had to tie the loose end of the rope to Beast’s harness to help drag the ram the last couple of feet up.
The day was now warming up nicely under the early June mid-morning sun. Beast was content to lie down in the snow, with his chin resting on his paws, and watch as Art began to clean their kill. In a few minutes the big dog closed his eyes. The two-legged member of the team used his razor-sharp Bowie knife to make a circular cut around the animal’s anus, pulling all the intestines out through that hole and throwing them onto the snow. Even this elicited no response from the slumbering dog. Art’s knife was bigger than most would want for the purpose, but it had belonged to his dad, and both liked the firm grip of the large wooden handle in their own big right hands.
Art continued on cutting up through the belly and chest cavity, removing the internal organs and tossing them on top of the intestines except for the liver and kidneys, which he packed with snow in a separate pile. They would be coming home, with the liver destined for tonight’s dinner. The twenty-three-year-old was in his physical prime with the strength and stamina that comes not from exercise but from days filled with physical activity, shoveling snow, chopping ice, splitting wood and snowshoeing up and down mountainous terrain.
As he prepared to lower the carcass down to the ground, the first that Art was aware anything was wrong was a deep chuff from his partner, Beast, followed by a series of growls and barks as the big dog threw himself to his feet. Art followed the direction of Beast’s intense gaze to see a massive grizzly bear break into a full charge from not more than forty feet away, straight at him. The bear had undoubtedly just come out of hibernation a week or two before as temperatures had begun to warm up. It was a longer-than-normal hibernation, and the bear was very hungry and in need of large quantities of food to rebuild his reserves. The bear would normally have difficulty catching one of the fleet-footed goats. He nevertheless viewed the carcass that Art was standing beside as his own personal property, and Art as a trespasser and poacher at best, a threat to survival and maybe, under current difficult conditions, as a supplementary source of protein and fat.
All of this flowed through Art’s mind in an instant as time seemed to slow to a crawl. He could see the bear charging down a shallow incline toward him, snow flying everywhere as it launched off its powerful hind legs and then skidded down the slope on its chest and forelegs before gathering for another leap. He could see Beast begin his own intercepting charge as he turned to take the four steps to his pack and rifle, knowing he would not have enough time to reach the gun, never mind to get it up, before the bear was on him. He assessed his chances of surviving an attack with nothing for defense except the big Bowie as low, but he would give it everything he had, knowing Nancy and little Tom depended on him.
As Art reached the pack and swept up the rifle, he saw Beast collide with the bear less than ten feet away, temporarily halting the carnivore’s charge, but only for an instant as the bear stood and raked its powerful and sharp-clawed foreleg across the dog’s chest, sending Beast reeling backward. The instant was just enough to give Art a fighting chance. He brought the rifle up, cranked the empty shell case out and a fresh cartridge into the breech and fired point-blank as the bear resumed its charge, then twice more before the bear reached him and lunged down to take his head in its powerful jaws. The bear leapt on top of him, but as Art fell back, it continued to roll over him and into the grove behind.
Art struggled to his feet, slightly dazed by the bear’s impact, and cranked the last round from the magazine into the breech, noting the Bowie knife he had dropped on the pack as he brought the rifle up to take a final shot. The bear did not get up to resume the attack. It didn’t move then, or ever again. After watching closely for another minute, Art ejected the magazine from the rifle and replaced it with a fresh one, then turned to check his dog.
Beast lay unmoving on a layer of bright red snow. As Art gently rolled the faithful animal over to examine the wound, he immediately knew that Beast had paid the ultimate price for saving his master, with his chest slashed wide open and blood welling out in a steady stream. He held his companion and gazed into his eyes as they gradually dimmed and then closed. Art wept freely over the great shaggy head.
Art sat still for a time, immersed in thoughts of all the times before when he or his father had teamed with Beast on a successful hunt, the dog always insisting on a full share of the credit for every kill. “You sure earned it this time, old boy,” he said as he rose to carry on with the life he had been given back.
The sorrowful hunter took the time to skin the bear. The large bear skin would serve his little family well and would be a lasting tribute to their long-time friend and protector. Then he retraced his steps back up the mountain to retrieve the toboggan. By the time he returned and lashed both the ram and Beast onto the toboggan it was midafternoon, and almost warm. He shed his parka, adding it to the load on the toboggan, and headed back downhill, breaking a fresh trail but angling to the west to intercept his broken trail from yesterday’s trip in.
Art reached the last leg of the trail home in the late afternoon, having had several hours to reflect on the day’s events, and was at peace. He knew in his heart that Beast had at most another year or so before he would grow too old to go out on the hunt anymore. The dog had died doing what he lived for, hunting and protecting. It was a good ending even if he would be greatly missed.
Art ploughed down the steep slope beside the cabin, being careful not to upset the toboggan or let it get away. The cabin and its surrounding outbuildings now sat at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep crater in the snow which extended about one hundred feet out in every direction. One of his most time-consuming tasks was to shovel the snow back away from their dwelling after every snowfall. Little Tom, now four years old, thought that the resulting toboggan slide, down one side of the crater and up the other, then back, was well worth his father’s efforts. Art placed both the ram carcass and Beast in his work shed. He would rest and have dinner before digging a grave and butchering the carcass.
Inside the cabin, Nancy threw herself into his arms while little Tom tackled his knees. It was Tom who first noticed the absence of the big dog who would normally follow his master in for some patting before retiring to the landing to the basement where it was cooler. Art fetched himself a dark rum and Coke Zero before relating the whole story, doing his best to put it in a way that was not too frightening to his little guy. He could fill in the details for Nancy later that evening. They were all sad but took their lead from Art, who explained that Beast would live on, always happy, for as long as they all were happy when they thought of him. After dinner Art went back out and dug into the snow slope behind the work shed, bringing an eight-foot-wide section right down through the fairly solid lower layers of snow to the frozen ground below. There he placed his long-time companion and covered him back up, entombing him in the snowy grave.
Later that evening, after the boy was put to bed and they had both had time to wind down themselves, Nancy suddenly piped up, “Oh, I have some news, two pieces of news actually. I had almost forgotten with everything else. Maybe I should save it for a better time though.”
“Is it good news or not so good news?” Tom inquired.
“I think it is all good news,” she replied.
Art beckoned a come-here gesture as he said, “Well, there can’t be anything better than getting back to my beloved wife and child, but I’ll happily listen to an
ything more in the good news category.”
Nancy cuddled up beside the big woodsman and looked up into his eyes as she continued, “First, I am pretty sure that we are going to have another baby.”
Considerable embracing and murmuring followed, but eventually Art released his wife and said, “Was there more good news? That first one will be hard to top.”
“Yes,” replied Nancy, “there is more, and I am pretty sure it is nearly as good as the first. Art, yesterday it warmed up enough by midafternoon that we got some meltwater running off the roof and I could see the snow starting to melt along the southwest walls of the cabin and all the other buildings. Today it happened again, with even more melting, and it was warm enough that Tom and I could make the dash from the front deck to the biffy just in our shirts. Art, we haven’t had melting this early in June since three years ago. Last year it was nearly the middle of the month before we had our first melt and it had just been getting later and later each year until I was starting to think maybe there would eventually be no melting at all, a year-round deep freeze.
“I know I shouldn’t leap to any conclusions too quickly, but I really have the feeling that the worst is behind us now and little Tom and baby two will one day get to see the world that we once knew before Peregrinus, and get to enjoy what a true summer in the Canadian Rockies should be like. Oh Arthur, I know that won’t be anytime soon, but I think that we now have reason to be hopeful for a better world for our children. Before today I never dared to even hope for such a thing.”
Technical Information and References
In the writing of Peregrinus Orior, I have spent a great deal of time on the internet researching various subjects to ensure all the details in the book are as accurate as possible. Google has been my primary research tool, Wikipedia my most common source. It would have been a much longer and more laborious process to dig out all the details without this modern capability. We now have instant access to virtually any information, from the size of the most powerful telescopes to the long-term history of climate change –with cycles of extremes from snowball earth to tropical poles – to the impact of asteroid strikes of various sizes.
I am not going to list every article that I read, but some of those I found especially useful or interesting are as follows:
Orientation of the Earth, Sun and Solar System in the Milky Way (author’s name not indicated)
www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-earth-sun-and-solar-system-in-the-milky-way.888643/
This forum is a great source to help visualize how our home planet and its motions fit into the bigger picture.
Astronoo Simulator
www.astronoo.com/en/articles/positions-of-the-planets.html
This is a program with animated 3D graphics, showing the correct relative position of the planets as they orbit the Sun and running out decades into the future.
Moonrise, Moonset, and Moon Phases
https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/
This provides data on the Moon’s position in the sky, as seen from any place on any date.
Earth Impacts Effects Program – Robert Marcus, H.J. Melash, Gareth Colins
teachspatial.org/earth-impacts-effects-program/
A program that predicts the severity of the effects of an impact from an asteroid of specified size, speed and angle of impact.
Temperature and Radiation – Mike Luciuk
www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut40RadiationTutorial.pdf
An article that sets out the formulas for calculating the approximate temperature of an object orbiting the Sun at a specified distance, albedo and greenhouse atmospheric factor.
Methods of Detecting Exoplanets
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets
An interesting Wikipedia article on how astronomers can detect planets as small as Earth, and even measure a number of their characteristics, when orbiting stars many hundreds of light years away. An amazing number of planets of varying sizes have been detected.
Climate Action Tracker
climateactiontracker.org
A website that sets out the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of the various Paris Accord signatories and compares them on a gigatonne per capita basis.
Various formulae have been used to ensure the scenario described in the story is scientifically sound. The main ones are as follows:
Python program was developed by Dr. Colin Bantin to calculate the gravitational interactions of Peregrinus with the Earth, Moon and Sun, incorporating Newton’s law of gravitational attraction and Kepler’s laws of orbital characteristics.
The inputs to the program include the basic mass of the Sun, Earth and Moon; the orbital parameters of the latter two; and Peregrinus’ mass, position and velocity on November 6, 2027, when first identified as follows:
Mass = 3 Jupiters or 5.7 x 1027 kg
Initial position P(x,y,z) = (-.509, .966, 53.7) AU (helio-ecliptic coordinate system with X axis pointing to the first point in Aries. This position is about 53.7 AU below the plane of the ecliptic.)
Initial velocity V(x,x,z) = (0,0, 259,870) mph (about 260,000 mph straight up, orthogonal to the plane of the ecliptic)
The program calculates a closest approach of 10.07 million miles on January 13, 2030, with Peregrinus passing through the plane of the ecliptic just outside of Earth’s orbit. The resulting impact on Earth’s orbit is an increase in the semi major axis of 2.3% and a new period of 377.65 days.
Newton’s law of gravity is expressed by the formula:
F = G x (M1 x M2) / D2
Where F is the strength of the force of gravitational attraction measured in newtons between two bodies of masses, M1 and M2, measured in kilograms positioned at a distance (D) from each other, measured in metres (m). G is the gravitational constant and equals 6.67 x 10-11.
The masses of the four bodies are:
Msun = 2.0 x 1030 kg
Mperegrinus = 5.7 x 1027 kg
Mearth = 6.0 x 1024 kg
Mmoon = 7.3 x 1022 kg
Average distance between Sun and Earth = 149.6 x 109 m
Distance of closest approach between Earth and Peregrinus = 10.07 x 106 miles = 16.2 x 109 m
Average distance between Earth and Moon = 0.393 x 109 m
Substitution of the appropriate masses and distances into the formula indicates that the force of attraction between Peregrinus and Earth at closest approach is about 25% of that between the Sun and the Earth.
The formula for the strength of the tidal effect of one mass on another is the difference in the force of gravity between the point on the surface of the mass being considered, which is nearest to the other mass, and the point which is farthest away.
F = (2 x G x M1 x M2 x r) / D3
Where r is the radius of the mass being considered.
Substitution of the appropriate masses and distances into this formula indicates that the tidal force exerted on Earth by Peregrinus at closest approach is approximately equal to the tidal force exerted on Earth by the Moon.
It turns out that for a mass travelling at the speed of Peregrinus there was a fairly fine balance between how close it would need to come to Earth to induce the requisite change in Earth’s orbit without coming so close as to cause substantial tidal effects. Much closer than 10 million miles of separation would result in quite destructive tides and probably trigger earthquakes and volcanoes, all of which I wanted to avoid in order to limit Peregrinus’ damage to seemingly modest orbital effects with concomitant climate impacts. Much farther than 10 million miles of separation would result in orbital effects too subtle to have a rapid enough impact on the climate to fit the story’s timeline.
The formula for the amount of solar energy received by the Earth from the Sun is:
E = (r2 x B) / D2
Where r is the radius of the Sun in metres, B is the Stefan – Boltzman constant, 6.32 x 107 watts/m2, and D is the distance from the Sun in metres.
Substitution of the appropriate amounts into
the formula indicates that an increase in the Earth’s distance from the Sun by 2.3% from 149.6 million kilometres to 153.0 million kilometres would result in a 4.4% reduction in the amount of solar energy received by the Earth.
A formula that can be used to directly calculate the impact on the temperature of a solar system body due to changes in distance from the Sun, in albedo and in greenhouse gas energy recapture is (See Mike Luciuk’s article, referenced above.):
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