The Birdwatcher, Page 3

She looked across the river, where a handsome stand of large haystacks stood, pristine, held in reserve for just such conditions. No, on second thought, pristine was the wrong word. The stacks were untouched, but had been so for three years already, by orders from bureaucrats who had in their rulebooks that hay should be used within five years, but who didn't seem to understand that the quality suffered long before that. What mattered to them was that they could show that they had a steady reserve of hay.

  Via text message, Julia requested permission to move the cattle across the river into Oregon Jurisdiction. Her Informer blinked low battery signals at her, then died altogether. She went to her hut and took her other Informer off the charging stand. It was dead, too.

  She stood in shock, unable to decide what to do. A person had two Informers – one with you, one charging – precisely to make this sort of situation impossible.

  It slowly dawned on her that perhaps the power had failed. The power, after all, often flickered and dipped and sometimes went out altogether, although up until now it had never been out for more than perhaps half an hour at a time. Certainly, it had never been out long enough to cause serious problems. The government had made sure of that.

  She had dutifully turned off the heating system when she'd left the hut. She flipped the switch to turn it back on. The coils stayed dull and cold.

  She tried the lights. They stayed dark.

  The power was out. Really out. Not low, not flickering. Out. It had been out long enough for both Informers to die. Impossible, that. Impossible.

  Her mind spun.

  Pilots wouldn't be bringing supplies for another nine days. Until then, unless the power came back on by itself, she had no way to report the outage, or to revive an Informer, and her usual way of getting warm was gone. She could burn wood and brush to stay alive, if she could get permission from the Particulate Police to make a fire. But she couldn't get permission until she could use an Informer. She felt trapped. To calm herself, she went outside to brush more cows. Caring for them gave her at least a sense of purpose, a sense of normalcy. They were warm, too. Perhaps she could sleep next to one, she thought – if she could coax it to lie down and stay down, instead of standing with its face into the wind as much as possible, which was standard bovine procedure out here in the wilds. Trying that would be an innovation, though, so she'd have to be careful not to get caught.

  The wind picked up. The cattle stirred. Coyotes yipped a horrid, taunting chorus, cut off unnaturally by a howl of agony. Julia fancied that it had been a coyote's dying yell. An eerie silence settled on the landscape, heavy and sharp at the same time. Julia's heart sank. It felt like wolves were in the area. She had no recourse against wolves; no effective recourse, at any rate. She eased her way to the hut, singing gently and soothingly to the cows as she went. Just as she reached the hut, wolves unleashed on the herd.

  The cattle spun in place, bounced off one another, stampeded.

  Julia dove into her hut to get her bow and arrows, meaning to shoot at the wolves if she could get permission from the Department of Predators. Automatically, she keyed in a request.

  The Informer did nothing. Panicked, she stared at it for a moment, trying to will it to work. Her overburdened mind reluctantly remembered, and finally fully acknowledged, that both Informers were dead.

  Cut off completely from Authority for the first time in her life, she locked herself in her hut, covered her ears against the fading sounds of the stampeding cows, and burst into tears.

  Anger soon swamped everything else. These were her cattle, under her protection. They were valuable Government Property. Duty called. It called incoherently, true enough, with competing ideas warring with each other in her mind, but it called loudly.

  She put on her quiver, grabbed her bow, and went outside. There was a dead cow in the quarantine corral. That would be Number 7762 – dear, sweet, gentle, friendly 7762, who liked to have her belly scratched. Wolf puppies were gnawing on her. Julia sank fatal arrows into three of them, before the others realized that the world had gone terribly wrong, and scrambled off in search of a universe less hostile.

  The grown wolves in the vicinity eyed one another, weighing a response. Julia drew a bead on the craftiest-looking one, then reconsidered. She put an arrow into the heart of a wolf standing with its left side conveniently exposed. When it dropped, its mate faced Julia, and began a slow, menacing approach. Julia aimed an arrow at her opponent's chest. The wolf's eyes met hers. The wolf stopped. It turned its head to consult another, higher ranked wolf. The top wolf called retreat. The wolves turned and ran, gathering tighter as they went.

  Julia uncharitably hoped that wolves could get the illness for which 7762 had been quarantined. She hoped they would die from it. But that would take days, even under the most hopeful variation of that dream.

  She went to retrieve arrows from dead canines. She felt an odd pang about the puppies as she dealt with their lifeless bodies, but that passed. They had been disorderly. Death was appropriate for them.

  The arrow in the grown wolf was embedded deep. She couldn't get it out. She gave up on it. Government would give her a new one.

  She went to the river and washed the bloody arrows, then sat on a log, uncertain what to do next besides rest for a minute or two. She wanted to help the cows that had run off, but now that the initial fury had worn off, she didn't feel she was a match for a whole pack of wolves. Sitting by the river, like she was doing, offered no protection. Going into the hut meant volunteering to be trapped there. Going after the wolves meant more or less volunteering to be dessert to their beef dinner. None of the options struck her as appealing, to say the least. At the moment, she couldn't imagine any other options.

  There was movement overhead. An eagle sailed down to feed on the abandoned dead cow. Julia thought about shooting the big bird, but decided against it. The local eagles had already taken a hard hit today. Besides, it pleased her to think that the wolves would be deprived of some food.

  She noticed another eagle, perched in a tree, watching something partway to the horizon. Perhaps the wolves? She found a tree that allowed a bit of climbing. She gained enough height to see where several wolves, perhaps the whole pack, had settled in to eat a cow they'd separated from the herd.

  Looking along the river, she saw surviving cattle nervously crossing the bridge to join cattle already on the other side. Some were already at the reserve haystacks, eating as if nothing had happened. Julia smiled, enjoying for a moment a delicious envy of cattle, which hadn't imagination enough to dwell on dangers they couldn't see.

  She took stock of the wolves. They were distant and absorbed in what they were doing. She climbed down. Staying in the cover of riverside vegetation, assessing trees for climbability as she went, she worked her way to the bridge. She led the last remaining cows across. Most of these were limping. Some were torn and bleeding.

  She cut twine from hay bales, tore off hay in sections (called leaves), and tossed the leaves in a row on the ground, so cows could eat without battling one another.

  She tried to rearrange bales to make a rest nook for herself out of the weather, but the bales were too heavy for her. She tried to fashion something workable with partial bales, but once the twine was cut, the bales lost both strength and structure. As no-longer-compressed hay came apart in her hands, her resolve and sense of ingenuity crumbled with it.

  Involuntarily, she looked up the hill, toward where the birdwatcher stood for his bird counts. It struck her that he might have a working Informer. It also struck her that he had a gun, which would be good protection against wolves.

  She didn't know where his quarters were, but she trusted that there would be a well-worn trail to it from the observation point.

  The wind acquired snow. There wasn't nearly enough snow to hide a trail, but Julia's imagination conjured up the possibility of it. Trusting that the cattle would stay anchored to their new food supply, Julia headed up the hill.

  Renzo's dreams refused to
stay in line with correct thought. Eagles fell from the sky, and it seemed a bad thing instead of good. Also, the upcoming spring played with him, filling his mind with the marvels of green grass, budding trees, returning migratory birds, nests, baby birds; things he was supposed to take for granted, but sometimes, despite himself, secretly thought of as unbound to anything man could do, even through government and science.

  The themes got tangled up with one another, eagles with spring. Renzo was transported back to the time a pair of eagles had stayed to nest, instead of going north with the others. He had sat for hours, watching as the youngsters hazardously, comically, learned to fly. The flying itself wasn't too bad, usually, but, oh, what misjudgments they made about landing. Again and again they had landed on branches that couldn't bear their weight. There had been flapping, and dancing, and sometimes a tumble. The youngsters had recovered before hitting the ground, but there had been close calls.

  Memories of laughter popped into the dream. The woman across the river had laughed at a young eagle as it floundered on a pliant branch. Renzo had nearly laughed then, too; but his concern for the bird, combined with his fear of being seen, held him in check until he'd come to his senses. His senses, after all, knew that blundering