Strange Dogs characters

Appears from the start

A girl in her early teens, one of the first children raised on a newly settled colony world. She is curious, observant and largely unsupervised outdoors, and she has spent her whole life treating the planet's alien wildlife as neighbors rather than specimens. She looks after her younger brother, keeps her own private map of the countryside around the settlement, and understands the local ecology better than most of the adults do.

Appears from the start

Cara's much younger brother, a small boy who follows her everywhere and copies whatever she does. He is the person she is responsible for, and the one she is least willing to be careful about losing.

Appears from the start

Alien machines the colony's children call dogs, roughly the size and shape of large animals, left behind by whatever built the ruins on this world. They move through the countryside without paying attention to people, and they repair things. What they will and will not treat as a thing to be repaired is not something anybody has worked out.