State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (23 page)

“So you did see him?”

She shakes her head. “I thought so,” she says, “but no. I saw the smoke and landed the drone and hiked in on foot. But when I got there, it was just a tree that had been struck by lightning and burned down to a stump.” She grits her teeth and plants her hands on the bed to adjust her position before going on. “I was hiking back when the snake bit me. It hardly hurt, but before long I couldn’t walk. I thought I was dead, Aubrey. I crawled the last kilometer to the drone and just managed to get inside and hit ‘return home’ before I passed out.”

“Well, you’re safe now,” I say.

“But I didn’t find Bill, Aubrey. I failed you.”

“No you didn’t fail, Mom. You tried and that’s all anybody could do. I’m really, really, proud of you.”

She closes her eyes and sighs.

When she opens them again she says, “Do you think we could get me out of this hangar and upstairs? I feel like an old drone mothballed for maintenance.”

It takes a long time and lots of careful maneuvering, but I manage to help her up the ladder, using only her good leg and her hands. Then I sit her on a chair and go back down and carry up her bedding. She’s lying down and in better spirits by the time Jimmy comes bounding in with his eagle on his arm.

Mother looks at him as if not quite believing her own eyes. I see her move a hand over to pinch the skin on her forearm.

“Hi, Miss Bradford.”

“Jimmy, what in the name of science are you doing with that feathered dinosaur on your arm?”

“This is Valor, Miss Bradford. My eagle.”

“Your eagle.” She says it quietly as if repeating it to herself might help make some sense of what’s she’s seeing.

“You should have seen him trap it, Mom. It was wild.”

“I’m sure it was. Don’t you dare think that that thing is sleeping in here, Jimmy. If you want to keep it, you had better keep it in the watchtower.”

“That’s fine by me,” he says.

After Jimmy makes his eagle comfortable in the tower, he joins us back in the shelter for dinner. In addition to spoils from Jimmy’s hunting, the gifts have continued to appear at the door. We eat boiled potatoes and fried meat and chase it all down will long drinks of milk from the jug. Afterwards, we sit around and fill one another in on our adventures. Jimmy tells us about how Valor now flies and returns on command. My mother tells us about a flock of geese that decided her drone was their leader and how they formed up behind her in a V and followed her all over the jungle. She says she felt so bad leading them in circles that she finally sped up and maneuvered to shake them. Her story reminds me about my own adventure with a drone, and I tell her about the one we shot out of the sky while she was gone.

“You’re right about them knowing we’re here,” she says. “Someone was manually controlling that drone. They’ll likely be sending more. We’re going to have to be on the lookout.”

None of us mentions that I used the last rocket to take down that drone, but we’re all thinking it.

A knock on the door startles us from our quiet reflection. Jimmy and I look at one another and rise from the table at the same time. Jimmy pulls out his knife and cups it in his hand and I grab the key and unlock the door, having locked it before we sat down to dinner. When I pull the door open, a bearded man is standing there in the late afternoon light. He looks like one of the men Jimmy and I saw that day on horseback. His face has no expression, but he hands me a piece of bark with strange characters written on it. I show it to Jimmy, but Jimmy just shakes his head. I hand it back to the man.

“We can’t understand this,” I say.

The man nods, as if he’d been expecting as much He tucks the bark away amongst his furs and mimes the act of eating by touching his hand to his mouth.

“Oh, you’re hungry,” I say, nodding. “Come in and eat.”

I step aside and wave him in, but the man shakes his head. He points at each of us, including my mother where she sits in her chair, then points back down the path up which he came.

“I think he’s askin’ us to join ‘em for dinner,” Jimmy says.

Jimmy mimes eating and then points down the path. The man nods. Jimmy points up to the sky, shrugging and holding out his hands to indicate that he’s asking when. The man nods that he understands, points himself to the sky, and mimes the sun crossing it from east to west. Then he holds up two fingers.

“I think he wants us to join ’em for dinner at this time two days from now,” Jimmy says. “I can take us there.”

I turn to look in at my mother where she sits.

“Mom, what do you think about that? Are you up for it?”

“It would be awfully rude to say no, considering they’ve saved my life twice now. I’d tell you to ask him what we can bring, but I’m afraid you’d be there with the door open all night trying to scratch it out. And it’s getting cold in here already.”

I turn back to the man and hold up two fingers and nod. He bows slightly, turns, and walks away down the path.

When the door is closed again, my mother looks at Jimmy and says, “Jimmy, do you think you could stitch me up one of those kilts you boys wear? It seems like you all saved my leg but destroyed my zipsuit in the process. Besides, I doubt those folks want to see the Park Service emblem anyway.”

“Of course, Miss Bradshaw. I’ll start it tonight.”

“And maybe tomorrow you could kill something fresh to bring. I’ll bet those folks eat a lot of meat. And Aubrey, you’ll have to help me down to the pools so I can wash my hair. I look much too horrid right now to dine at anyone’s table, even if these wild people take their meals on the dirt, as I suspect.”

My mom walks pretty well on her new crutch.

Jimmy wanted to bring his eagle along, but we convinced him it was rude to show up to dinner with a pet. Instead he’s carrying three dead rabbits that he shot this morning to give to our hosts as gifts.

“How’s your new kilt, Miss Bradford?” Jimmy asks.

“I’m loving it, Jimmy. Thank you. We should fit right in.”

Jimmy beams when she says she loves the kilt. It’s obvious that he respects her a great deal, and that makes me proud.

We each take a side and help my mother down the rocks to the river and discover that the strangers have placed flat-topped stumps in a shoal, creating a dry path for us to cross.

“Thoughtful for such a wild bunch,” my mother says.

Safe and dry on the other side, we continue on to crest the hill where Jimmy and I saw the eagle kill the deer. Then Jimmy leads us directly toward a granite cliff that rises hundreds of meters into the sky; a cliff so steep and impassible that if he had not brought back that healer to our shelter for my mother, I’d seriously doubt that he even knows where he’s taking us.

Then we hear the music: a beautiful song echoing off the cliff face, as if the rock itself were singing. We stop for a moment and listen. The sun has dropped behind the western peaks, and the soft afternoon light adds to the mystery of the music—strings beneath a melody of throaty notes that create an ethereal experience. I could stand here all day and listen.

“Come on,” Jimmy says. “The entrance is right over here.”

We walk straight toward the stone wall of music, and I try to puzzle out what illusion is making it possible. Then we crest an almost imperceptible rise in the landscape, and I see that Jimmy has brought us to a portion of the mountain that is actually made up of two cliffs meeting. From a distance the granite all blurs together, tricking the eye into believing it’s a solid wall, but there’s a hidden gap where the cliffs overlap. Standing in front of this secret entrance is the source of the song—a small man cradling a tall, stringed instrument in one arm and drawing a bow across it with the other. His face is uplifted, as if perhaps he’s serenading the sky, and the sound that rises from his throat seems far too powerful to be coming from such a humbly-statured man.

“This is quite a welcome,” my mother says to me.

The man keeps right on singing as Jimmy walks past him and around the corner and into the gap, as if he were walking into his own home. My mother and I follow. The narrow gap has a blind turn at the end. I notice that the dirt path is trampled as smooth as stone with nicks of horse hooves visible on its edges. When we round the corner, I can hardly believe my eyes. I’m looking at a hidden valley containing a kind of permanent camp. Steep cliffs rise up on three sides. A waterfall tumbles down into a pool and fills a dredged channel that runs through the center of the valley until it reaches the far end and drains out through a narrow gorge, showing just a crack of sky between the two cliffs that hem it in. Multiple wooden bridges crisscross the channel, beautifully constructed with gentle arches and decorated rails. A maze of pathways leads to an assortment of tent-like structures. The narrow slice of sky above washes everything in a sort of magical glow. Torches line the bridges and the walks and reflect back out of the water. Many of the tents glow with the promise of more fires within. I see a fenced corral of horses with their heads buried in feed bins. Another pen contains goats fattened for milking.

I take all of this in with hungry eyes in just a matter of seconds, because when I see the boy standing on the nearest bridge to greet us, I can’t look at anything else. He’s dressed in red robes embroidered with intricate gold patterns. Two men stand behind him, holding the train of his royal garments off the ground. He wears a quilted crown embedded with precious stones, and by the expressionless look of curiosity on his young face, I’d guess that he’s just as comfortable in this gaudy get up as he was in the furs we saw him wearing while on horseback the other day. The old man with one eye stands beside him, overshadowed by the boy and his costume.

My mother nudges Jimmy, and he unstraps the dead rabbits from his waist. We each take one rabbit cradled in our open palms, just like Jimmy taught us to, and walk as a group toward our hosts with our gifts outstretched before us. The boy looks at each rabbit in turn. When he nods, the old man steps up and collects them from us. Then the boy unfolds his heavy robe and reaches up both arms as if to take my face in his hands and kiss me. But when I bend down to accommodate this gesture, he pulls my head to his nose and smells my hair. He repeats this strange custom with Jimmy and with my mom. Then he speaks a few words none of us understand, and he turns along with his procession and leads us over the bridge and into the camp.

He takes us into a large community tent with an enormous clay stove in its center. Several shirtless men work at the stove, their sweat-covered backs glistening in the firelight. They stir pots and turn meat and make small balls of dough into cakes that they fry on a flat, clay cooktop. The smells set my mouth to watering. The old man carries our rabbits to the stove and hands them over to the cook, who takes them one at a time and turns them each toward the firelight and inspects their faces as if perhaps he might recognize them. Satisfied, he carries them off somewhere.

“Looks like you shot good ones, Jimmy.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Those was the fattest I could find.”

The two attendants gather up the boy’s train and hold open his robe while he steps out of it. He’s wearing a thinner, less extravagant robe underneath, and he emerges from the cocoon of the formal robe much smaller than he was while wearing it. I can’t help but imagine how small he’d be if he kept on disrobing, robe after robe after robe. The boy crosses to where a royal red curtain hangs from one end of the tent and sits down cross-legged on a pillow in front of it. The old man strikes a gong, and suddenly several men appear from behind the curtain and line pillows on the floor in a semicircle around the boy. Then the men disappear behind the curtain again, as if by some magic. There must be a door back there. The two attendants, having now discarded the boy’s formal robe somewhere, return and stand on either side of him. Then the old man sits on a pillow and motions for us to do the same. When we’re all seated, the woman who came to treat my mother’s snakebite appears and sits next to the old man. There are a dozen other unoccupied pillows, and one by one people of apparent importance appear from behind the curtain, bow to the boy, and sit. Only when all the pillows around the boy are occupied does some silent signal bring the rest of the village into the tent. They all come carrying their own pillows, and they form into family circles of various sizes until nearly the entire floor surrounding the stove is covered.

My mother watches this all unfold with a look of shocked appreciation.

I lean over and whisper to her, “They sure don’t seem so wild now, do they?”

She smiles and shakes her head.

Someone brings the boy a large decorative cup. He dips his finger into it and then flicks his finger into the air. The old man takes the cup next and sips it with great ceremony, holding it by its base with both hands. When the cup reaches me, my mother stops my hand, leans over before I can drink it, and smells the contents. She shakes her head no. I try to hand the cup back to the attendant, but he indicates that I should do as the boy did, so I dip my finger and flick a drop into the air. Jimmy does the same. My mother drinks. I elbow her playfully.

As soon as the passing of the cup is finished, the food begins to arrive. We’re each given beautiful bowls carved out of tree burls, and then the cooks come into the circle carrying clay platters of food that they present to each guest. We follow the lead of those next to us and hold our bowls in the palms of our left hands and take up food and eat only with our right. The cooks return to their oven and refill their platters. There are meats spiced like no meats I’ve ever tasted, barley cakes stuffed with delicious fat that melts in my mouth when I bite into them, cheese-filled dumplings, venison kabobs, and hunks of fried potato as big as my fist. An attendant seems to always be at my elbow with something to drink. My mother is vigilant at first, allowing us only tea and milk, but as the meal wears on she either tires of checking the cups or stops caring. Jimmy and I begin to get intermittent sips of some fermented beverage that burns my throat, warms my stomach, and makes my hands begin to float.