Machine by Peter Adolphsen Page B

over the slope and its voluminous network of roots, partly revealed by the rain, had broken her fall towards certain death in the lake. It was an ancient maple, more than thirty metres tall, whose roots stuck out ten metres into the air. The horse gingerly shifted her weight to a more secure footing, stood up andchecked herself: there was a gash on her thigh, she was generally bruised and a sharp pain throbbed in her temple, but no broken bones it would seem. She made it up the tangled roots towards the edge of the slope on hesitant legs, but the last bit necessitated a small jump which she prepared for but ultimately did not dare attempt.
    â€˜Wait until tomorrow,’ she thought and stretched her neck out for some leaves. She was not short of drinking water either as the brook, now reduced to a small stream, cascaded from the slope and flowed through the roots down into the lake while making a constant trickling sound. Having quenched her thirst and eaten most of what she could reach, she found a broad root to settle down on.
    â€˜This is safe,’ she thought. ‘Crocodile cannot reach up.
Diatryma
cannot reach down.’
    The sun set and the moon rose. For a long time the mare lay there looking alternately at the moon and its reflection in the surface of the water. Finally she decided that the moon must have a sister who lived in the lake. She whinnied contentedly at this explanation, fell asleep and dreamed that she was watching dust particles dance in a beam of sunlight. A column of ants marched past her on the forest floor. Suddenly,with incredible speed, the whiskers on her muzzle grew into long, heavy, quivering rods that bashed into tree trunks and branches whenever she tried to move. Every time a whisker hit something a shrill note rang out in her skull. This quickly escalated into a cacophony that was approaching her pain threshold . . . which was when the dream ended, before the mare had time to surface from her sleep.
    This period of sleep gave the animal’s organism the chance to concentrate on the healing process which had commenced within seconds of her sustaining her injuries. First the body tried to cleanse its wounds of impurities and dead tissue by allowing white blood corpuscles to emigrate from the bloodstream out into the tissue, where the neutrophil granulocytes carried out a number of functions, such as fagocytosis and the excretion of enzymes to break down tissue and bacteria. The product of this process, inflammatory exudate, was now gradually turning into granulation tissue though angiogenesis and fibroblast proliferation: the wound was forming a scab.
    Throughout the night another process persevered: the seepage from the brook and the considerable weight of the maple, together with the mare’s small,but nevertheless crucial weight, eroded the slope, which eventually gave way round about midnight. A huge chunk of soil crashed into the lake with a rumble and a splash, and these noises roused the horse out of her sleep, but, before she had time to look around, the tree, with a deep groan, tilted 30º whereupon the horse lost her footing and tumbled towards the water, landing first on a small floating island formed from a chunk of the collapsed slope. During the few seconds that passed before the temporary vessel sank, the mare had time to smell the newly upturned soil and watch the tree keel over so it hung diagonally downwards. What were formerly the top branches now dangled just beyond her reach. Simultaneously the unstable ground beneath her gave way. Another splash. Wide-eyed she struggled for just under a minute, but then gave up. The mud on the bottom enveloped the little horse almost lovingly. Her final thought concerned the taste of fern shoots.
    Death exists, but only in a practical, macroscopic sense. Biologically one cannot distinguish between life and death; the transition is a continuum. Furthermore, at this point nature consists of irreducible processes