Gwen Hopkins looked sadly at the flattened prairie grasses, spread in a wide band of demolition for as far as she could see. They were so fragile! It took years to get them re-established. And just look at them!
Rusty patted her hand. He knew what this meant to her. He paged through the Prairie Reclamation Primer and pointed to a picture of a bison. "No, Rusty - thanks, though, that was a good thought." Gwen gestured at the destruction. "Their hooves just don't flatten everything like this. Heck, they ran all over the prairie for centuries and everything got along just fine. This looks like a thousand trip hammers pounded the prairie flat. Overnight."
Gwen was especially proud of her prairie. It was a complicated system, but once it had got going it would take care of itself for... well, forever, pretty much. It looked like all her work in this region was going back to square one, though. The grass would spread back over the scar, but the same thing could easily happen again. Whatever it was. Rusty kicked a dirt clod. "You said it," Gwen agreed.
At least the damage was only local. They'd flown over mile after mile of young prairie before they'd seen the long scar across the land. It looked almost like a trail, as though something had started at one end or the other, and kept going till it reached.... something else. At the other end.
She followed the trail for a ways, turned, and wandered back. Rusty was holding out his Primer again. He'd turned to the page that described the Chemical Communication Analyzer.
"That's swell, Rusty! We can practically ask the plants what happened!
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