..But then as he peered out through the branches, the sky tore open--abruptly, distorting, and bubbling out, a darkness looking at first like a black globbed mass, like dark spittle on a French trapper's beard, but then widening, widening, widening...until Wore Wolf Teeth inched back with dread. This deadly vision came from the spirits, not from a bodied foe...The dark, translucent bubble continued enlarging...Then the sky tunnel of smoked blackness swallowed the whole sky and out of the cavernous maw charged, stormed, a moving drab-gray monster. He gripped his medicine bag hanging from his neck, crawled out of the brush, stood and said, "I am of the Chaticks-si-chaticks (Men of men) Above, the dark gray spirit hovered pulsating, and behind it the sky endless tar. Three miles away, horses of an Oregon-bound wagon train skittered and bucked, one large roan knocking its rider to the ground. The men looked up in shock, bewildered by the sudden darkness. Thus begins The Feeling of the Earth, a new speculative novel concerning an alien research mission to the minor planet Earth which will last at least until 2073, from the conflicts of the Oregon Trail to the mysteries of astrobiology.