State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (19 page)

Jimmy slips his bow over his shoulder and strings an arrow. Just as he’s pulling back, horses gallop up behind him on the hill, and one of the riders kicks Jimmy and sends him and his bow flying to the ground. I jump over to help him up. We stand together and watch as the riders encircle us.

The horses are small but stout, and so are the men. There are six of them, all bearded except one boy much younger than we are. They’re hard-looking and wild, with the exception of the child whose dark eyes seem to take us in with a humorous curiosity, his baby-like face blanketed in his hood of furs. One of the men motions with his gloved arm, and the eagle flies to him and perches there. Then he pulls up a wooden brace where it’s tied to his waist and props it under his elbow to help hold the eagle’s weight. Another man dismounts and pulls the stake and carries the dead fawn back to his horse, drapes it limply over the withers, and then mounts up again. Then the men all turn to look at the eldest among them, a thick man with a gray beard and a missing eye—no patch, no eyelid, just a pink and empty socket. He and the strange boy next to him look at us, as if considering together our fate. The old man reaches into his fur and pulls out a little jade bottle. He removes the stopper and a small spoon attached to it, holds the spoon to his nose, and sniffs. Then he dips the spoon again and repeats with the other nostril before returning the bottle to the folds of his furs. Then he lifts up his hand, not in greeting but as some kind of command to his men, and says something in a tongue I don’t understand. They turn their horses and gallop off the hill. The boy lingers for one moment, smiling at us from his hood. Then he too turns and is gone.

Alone again on the hill, I look at the trampled snow, stained with the fawn’s blood. I feel fortunate that we’re not draped over their horses ourselves.

“Well,” Jimmy says, “I guess your mom was right.”

“That we should have stayed away from them?”

“No, that they’s wild.”

We start back together, retracing our path. The sun drops behind the western peaks, and the temperature drops with it. I’m not looking forward to crossing the river again.

After we walk quietly for a time, me contemplating our brush with death, Jimmy contemplating who knows what, he turns to me and says, “How do you think they get ’em?”

“Get what? I ask.

“The eagles.”

Two days the blizzard comes.

We stand in the doorway and watch it come down.

“Close that door,” my mother calls.

Jimmy’s more disappointed than I am. He sulks around the shelter for the next three days, constantly going to open the door to see if the snow has stopped.

“Stop letting all the heat out,” my mom barks, looking up from her workstation. “The batteries are already low enough with no sun in the sky to recharge them.”

Jimmy jerks the door shut, stomps to the table, and flops down on the chair next to me. He runs his fingers through his hair, then pulls his bangs down toward his eyes and looks up to try and see them, with a surprised look on his face, as if he’d forgotten his hair had been shaved before coming here.

“This blows,” he says.

“Come on,” I say. “It’s growing back.”

“Not my hair,” he replies. “Bein’ stuck in here. I’ve done worked every pelt in the place. I made us some boots too, so we can go out when it clears.”

“You want to go down and check out the drone again?”

“No, I’m sick of looking at it. I’ll tell you what I’d like to do, is fly it. See if we can find them horsemen’s camp maybe.”

“Mom says we can’t risk it. I already asked.”

Jimmy leans in and lowers his voice. “I’ll bet if you asked her again nice, she’d let us. Call her Mom like you do.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but there’s no sense in asking if the snow hasn’t stopped.”

Jimmy looks at the door and sighs. “And now I can’t even check anymore or she’ll yell at me.”

“I heard that,” my mother says.

Two days later, Jimmy and I are loaded up in the drone while my mother programs the flight path into its computers. She seals the panel and turns to give us yet another warning.

“If you see anything out of the ordinary, anything at all—another drone, or threatening weather, anything—you press the return button, and the drone will bring you home.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I’ve programmed it to fly for about an hour, which will actually be good for charging its batteries since the sun is finally out. You boys be safe.”

Jimmy smiles. “Thank you, Miss Bradford.”

“You’re welcome, Jimmy.”

She pushes his glass canopy down and latches it.

Then she turns to close mine. “You have your water?”

“Mom, stop worrying. We flew here, remember?”

She smiles and closes the canopy, stepping away to watch us go. The door at the end of the runway opens, and the tunnel fills with light. I look at my mom, and then she’s gone in a flash of gray as we jet forward and launch out of the mountainside.

Of all the days and places one could go flying, I can’t imagine any other as beautiful as this is. After five nonstop days of snow, a blanket of white covers everything except the high and jagged peaks that rise into the blue sky like the backs of enormous prehistoric creatures surfacing in a sea of white. Giant icicles hang frozen where waterfalls once ran, glinting in the sun like diamond stalactites. Shaded valleys lay so deep with snow that only the tips of trees stick out—conifers thick with frozen cones, leafless aspens with their upper branches frozen into intricate frosted sculptures, like ice-carved skeletons. And the quiet of it all is haunting. The drone is propelled by silent electric engines, and the only sound I hear is the beating of my own heart. Jimmy turns in his glass enclosure to grin at me, and his smile is as wide and white as the snow out our windows.

Later, I see a small red fox laboring across a narrow combe surrounded by high cliffs, a trail of trampled snow marking its insignificant progress out of all that untouched beauty. Jimmy sees it too, and the way he leans to follow it with his eyes as we pass tells me that it reminds him of Junior. I know he misses him. I do too. Never has there been a better fox.

The drone glides slow and easy, dropping then rising. The pristine winter views roll by like pages from some incredible brochure Radcliffe might have devised to convince me to join his mad plot to save the planet from people. But then again, no. There must be room in this global wilderness for humankind. Otherwise, who are we saving it for? What other species can have an appreciation so wide? An eagle might be able to soar like this, but can it also dive to the depths of an ocean reef, or tunnel into caves of crystal, or write about these experiences and share them with others? No, no, no. And what creature can look to the stars from where we all came and contemplate the creation of everything from nothing? A woman can. A man. This planet is beautiful only because there are human minds here to discern that beauty from ugliness. Otherwise what is the difference between fragile Earth and the timeless deserts of Mars? What preference would a mindless universe have for one above the other? None, or so it seems to me.

As the drone sweeps low through a wide glade, I notice a small herd of horses prancing through the deep snow. Then I notice that several of the horses have riders dressed similarly to those Jimmy and I already met. As we glide by, stunned faces look up within their upturned hoods. Several mouths open as if to shout something, but I hear no sound. An instant later an arrow clanks pathetically against the underside of the drone. I turn and see another arrow arc in the empty sky behind us before gravity turns it back toward the ground.

My mother waits for us in the hangar as if she’d never left. She smiles once the hatches open and she knows we’re okay.

“How was it?” she asks.

“It was beautiful,” I say.

“Did you see anything interesting?”

Jimmy glances at me, a silent plea on his face not to tell her about the people or else we’ll never be allowed to go out again.

Not wanting to lie, I say, “Nothing we hadn’t seen before.”

Later that evening, after we’ve all eaten a supper of cured meat and boiled yams that were left as a gift at our door, we all sit around in our furs to stave off the cold, since we can’t risk draining the batteries by running the heater. Jimmy and I spend several hours catching my mother up on our adventures. We tell her about my meeting Jimmy and about the cove. We tell her about our journey over the mountain and about finding Junior and then the lake house. We tell her about blowing up Eden and about the wave that killed Radcliffe. We fill her in on our journey to the Isle of Man too, and we tell her all about the people there. Mostly we talk about Finn.

“So that’s how you got that scar then,” she says.

Then it hits me—Finn was my half-brother.

“You sure you didn’t know about him or about the island, Mom?”

She shakes her head. “I had no idea. But knowing Robert, I’m not surprised.”

When we tell her about our return journey, Jimmy gets excited, recounting how we sank that warship with a torpedo.

“I’ll bet it was the same ship that killed your family that day in the cove, Jimmy,” my mother says. “There was only one that patrolled the west coast of North America that I know of.”

The next day we spot the drone.

Jimmy is coming back from hunting alone when he rushes into the shelter and tells us. We race to the tower together, my mother carrying her rocket launcher, and watch as it passes by twice, staying just out of range.

“You think Hannah knows we’re here?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” my mom says. “The professor knew about this place, for sure. And he’s smart enough to put me and you two disappearing together, even if he is no good at math.”

“Well, I guess we’ll know if it comes back.”

“I hope I get a chance to shoot one,” Jimmy says.

My mother nods. “I hope so too. But remember we only have this one handheld rocket left, so if I’m not around and either of you needs to use it, be sure to do just like I showed you. We can’t afford to waste it and we can’t afford having you blown back against the wall like I was, either.”

“If we shoot one down, can’t we jus’ use the weapons off of it?” Jimmy asks.

“There sure wasn’t much left of the one I shot,” she says. “I collected all the useful parts. They’re in the hangar, but the munitions were destroyed.”

“Maybe we could catch one some other way,” Jimmy says.

“Catch one? They’re not birds that you can trap.”

There’s a pause in their conversation while Jimmy works out some wild idea in his head. I take the opportunity to ask my mother something that’s been on my mind.

“Mom, what do you do on your computer all the time?”

“Just work mostly,” she says. “Nothing fun.”

“Yeah, but working on what?”

“I’ll tell you about it when the time’s right, Son. Right now it’s still a long shot. I’d hate to get your hopes up.”

“You can communicate with Holocene II, though, right?”

She nods. “I have a back door into their system, and I send and receive short text messages. But it only works when the satellites are lined up with my dish, which is on a nearby peak but hard to get to. That’s where I was when you both showed up, adjusting it for a connection so I could get some word from Beth on how long you had been out there.”

“Well, have you talked with them since we got here?”

“Yes, I have. What are you driving at, Son?”

“Do you know if Bill ever made it back?”

The second I ask it, her eyes drop to the tower room floor. She slowly shakes her head and says, “I’m afraid not, Son. And worse, the tunnelrats discovered the opening and filled it in, so even if he had found it again, he would’ve been trapped above in the jungle alone. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t you have them reopen it?”

“No, the Foundation is monitoring all subterrenes now.”

“So Hannah knows we got away, then?”

“Probably,” she says. “I’m guessing that’s why this drone was just here. They must be looking for you.”

That night, as Jimmy and I lie in the hammocks that we’ve rigged up for ourselves, I can’t seem to fall asleep.

“Jimmy,” I whisper. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” he whispers back. “I’s thinkin’ on trappin’ birds.”

“What do you want a bird for?”

“I dunno. Huntin’ maybe. What’s on your mind?”

“I was thinking about Bill.”

“It’s sad, ain’t it?”

“I keep imagining him out there in the jungle all alone.”

My mom groans in her sleep, the bedding rustling as she turns over. We lie quiet for several minutes. Then Jimmy says:

“He was a good man, I know that. He stayed behind so we could go. He sure was a good man.”

“You think he’s dead, then?”

“I ain’t said that.”

“No, but you said he
was
a good man.”

“Well, however you say it, he was.”

I stare up into the blind darkness and try to picture Bill’s face. It’s already fading away to just a blur, same as my father’s image has. My real father. The man who raised me. I only wish I could forget Radcliffe’s evil face instead. Why is it that anger sometimes outlasts love? I push my thoughts of Radcliffe away and focus instead on my real father and on Bill. As I drift off, they merge together into the same person in my mind.

“Yeah,” I say, almost to myself, “he was a good man.”

“Absolutely not,” my mother says.

“You have to let me go and try to find him.”

“I said no, and that’s that.”

“But this is important to me, Mom.”

“Calling me ‘Mom’ won’t work this time, Son. There’s no way I’m sending you off by yourself all the way back to the Yucatan. No way. Not now, not ever.”

I get up from the table and pace the shelter.

“So you’re just going to let him die there, then?”

“He’s probably already dead,” she says.

“We don’t know that. You don’t know that. If there’s even a chance, then I have to go. It isn’t right to abandon him there. It wasn’t right when you abandoned me, and it isn’t right now.”