“Are you telling me they want to bring back these giant beaver to our own time?”
“Yeah, along with the rest of the extinct megafauna. They aim to restore North America to its natural state, as it existed in the Late Pleistocene before people arrived. Pleistocene rewilding has been considered for at least a century, but all they could have done was use proxy animals from Asia or Africa. Now, with time travel, they can reproduce the actual Pleistocene megafauna. They’ve already begun releasing Camelops and tapirs in Ohio. We’re not the first to be sent through time to collect genetic material. We’re just the first trappers.”
“You mean they want to bring back wooly mammoths? Are they nuts?”
“Sure they are,” Hank said. “Though mastodons seem more likely around here.”
Jack was silent as he tried to wrap his head around the concept. He imagined mastodons playing with his fences, a giant sloth loose in his orchard. And giant beavers … He said, “God, I’m glad my place is in the hills.”
“Don’t worry. According to the government, these beaver don’t build dams.”
They both had a good laugh. Jack got up and grabbed a few more sticks for the fire. The wind sawed at the burning wood, sending sparks streaming toward the lake. The wind had acquired a chilly bite. He pulled his collar up on his neck and edged a bit closer to the flames.
They sat quietly, watching the wind work at the fire, until Jack finally said, “Something about camping out always makes my mind work more clearly.”
Hank nodded. “I wonder what it is about sitting by an open fire that makes us feel content? Must be something primitive left in us.”
Jack nodded. “I’m going to miss my bed, though.”
“I think you don’t just miss your bed, but also she who shares it.”
“I ain’t denying it.” Jack poked a stick at the fire, momentarily doubling the stream of sparks.
Hank sighed. “Yeah, I’m feeling kind of lonely for Em too. We need to stay together and be extra careful about everything we do here. If one of us gets hurt or lost or something, we might miss our pickup.”
* * *
At dawn they returned to the far side of the lake. The first two snares were undisturbed, but the last one, set on the trail crossing the peninsula, had been hit. The ground was torn up all around and most of the trees within the ten-foot radius of the snare’s length had been chewed down. Their trunks lay in a fallen tangle. Eventually the beaver had hit upon the large spruce that anchored the snare, leaving the trunk to fall into the lake and a chiseled stump leaking sap onto a pile of chips. They could smell the sweet, musky scent of beaver on the ground.
“Damn,” Hank said. “We must have missed a neck-catch. Who’d figure it could cut through all these trees in one night?”
At least one beaver was using the trail across the peninsula as a shortcut for moving along the shore. They hung a new snare at each end of the trail where the animal was entering and leaving the water. On the far end of the trail, they looked out over unending marsh covered with aquatic weeds. The shoreline and the trail both subsided into the marsh. From there the beaver’s pathway continued as a dark channel of open water through the aquatic plants. In the distance they saw another giant beaver lodge jutting up from the flat expanse.
Jack said, “These big beaver must do a lot of traveling.”
“Makes sense. They probably need a huge range to find enough food for their large bodies.”
“We’d need a boat to trap this marsh right. You just can’t cover enough ground on foot.”
They returned to camp for lunch, then scouted up the near side of the lake for a couple of miles, setting two more of Hank’s snares. The last was set across the mouth of a creek where it ran into the lake. The bottom and banks of the creek were smooth and rounded from the passage of beaver. The creek was too wide to jump and too deep to wade, and the sun was going down, so they called it quits for the day.
* * *
Camp had been hit again. Jack’s tent was ripped apart, his gear strewn all around. Their sleeping bags had been dragged around in the dirt and torn, though remained barely useable. Only the food bag hanging high in the tree had been left alone. They spread the tattered tent over some dead branches as a rain-fly and gathered the remnants of their gear and equipment. Again, they found no clear sign of what sort of animals had paid them a visit. Three trails of bent grass led off up the lake, only a few hundred yards from the way Jack and Hank had come.
Hank said, “I’ve about had enough of this.”
“At least they didn’t get our food.”
After eating supper at the fire, Jack said, “You lived with the tower-dwellers when you went off to college. Were you connected?”
“Couldn’t keep up with the coursework otherwise,” Hank told him. His dark face showed gleaming teeth in the firelight. “Did I ever tell you what my major was? Paleontology. This poor fool just couldn’t resist a chance to see these animals alive.”
They had built up the fire and Jack’s legs were getting hot, so he scooted back a bit. “You didn’t keep it—the implant?”
“It’s still in here.” Hank tapped his head. “I had it shut off when I moved home.”
“It hasn’t caused any damage?”
“None that I know of. Unless we’re talking about the brain damage that led me to take this job.”
Jack used a stick to poke the fire. There was little wind, the sky was clear, and the spark-stream rose toward the stars. Looking away from the firelight, he found Jupiter immediately. A few recognizable stars had moved and some of the constellations were tweaked out of familiar shape. Different time or different universe? The question had never felt more important. Could the stars give him an answer?
Precession of the earth’s axis should not be much of a factor, assuming he had traveled in time almost one full twenty-six-thousand-year cycle. The nearer stars, with their greater proper motion, should show the greatest change. The Pleiades were recognizable, but not in their familiar location in the constellation Taurus. The star he assumed to be Sirius was way out of position, had lost some of its brightness, and was now near a faint blotch he guessed might be the M50 star cluster. Distant galaxies and star clusters should show little or no change; and yes, Andromeda was in its usual position. These observations were consistent with movement through time in their own universe. Jack wondered whether, if he had the right star charts and a telescope, he could find anomalies that might suggest he was in a different universe.
He said, “If we hadn’t sent him to college, he’d probably still be living in the enclave.”
“Who, Josh?”
“Yeah. But what could we do, with a bright young man who wanted to learn?”
“When he gets enough of tower life, he may come home yet.”
Jack rested a boot on a spruce log protruding from the fire. Pitch on the other end of the log burned with a blue flame. “What brought you back?”
“Family. Friends.”
“Didn’t you make a bunch of new friends out there in the world?”
“Yeah, some, I guess.” Hank poked his own stick at the fire, turning over another log. Flames flared up as they caught the unburned wood on the other side. “But not anyone who would travel twenty-five thousand years to look for me.”
“Forget about it.”
“Sure I will.”
They watched the fire. Jack said, “Kind of weird to think of family while we’re sitting here.”
“Why?”
“They’re not even alive yet. Does that make them real?”
“They’re real in our memories.”
“Which memory?”
Hank gave him a puzzled look.
“I mean,” Jack went on, “with Carol it’s easy. She came from that Smoky Mountain enclave. She’s been an adult since I met her. Got older, maybe, but she’s pretty much the same person in all my memories.” Jack poked the fire more vigorously.
“And Josh, I think of him as an adult, t
oo.”
“You’re talking about Katie now, aren’t you?”
“She’s not alive anymore in our own time.” Jack gave the fire a vicious poke, sending a shower of sparks skyward. “And they won’t let me go to a time when I could have saved her. The last memory I have of her is her lying in her casket, still and cold.”
“That’s not the memory you have to keep.”
“All I know is her loss. The hole it left in me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Her.”
“You must have memories of the whole time she was growing up. She lives in all of those memories, so long as you keep them.”
“I don’t have any trouble keeping them. The problem is letting them go.”
Eventually they crawled into their sleeping bags. Jack tried to sleep, but couldn’t stop thinking. When is the here, the now? Is it when a person is, or when he thinks himself to be? Can you live in the memories, or must the mind follow the body? Does the world around you say when the is is, or does your own mind decide?
If is is where memories are, then why not when Katie was ten years old? Together, trapping the creeks, fishing the river, waiting in the deer blind. The smile that lit her face when she caught her first muskrat, the disbelief and joy when her shot folded the grouse’s wings. Was there a way to keep only the good memories? To revisit them without grief or bitterness?
And then there was Eddie. The boy had just caught his own first muskrat, and Jack never did help him skin it. He was old enough to start following Jack on the trapline. They both deserved to make their own memories together.
Jack was in a vanished world, long gone. But now it was the is, to his body and mind. His world back home existed only in his mind. His family was vanished from the what-is, until he returned home. If he and Hank missed their pickup and were stuck here, his family wouldn’t exist outside of memory.
Maybe somewhere Katie hadn’t died, but that was in some other world than his own. She would never live again in his own world, whether he went home or was marooned here. If memories were as good as the real thing, the real now, he could stay here and remember his family. He could lose himself to thoughts of the past. But memories weren’t as good. They were just all you had left when the ones you loved were gone.
* * *
The snares on the peninsula trail on the far side of the lake were untouched. Scuffed-up leaves and forest litter in the gathering light of dawn showed that a beaver had walked around the snares.
“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “Looks like we educated a beaver.” The snare wire was big enough to be seen and avoided once the beaver had learned about it. They must be no less smart than their smaller cousins that Jack had trapped most of his life.
They went back across the dam to check the snares on the camp side of the lake. The first was undisturbed, but they had caught something in the last snare, the one set across the mouth of the creek. The ground was scuffed-up, grass trampled, and brush broken all around. Jack found the stump-end of the snare still anchored to the base of a big spruce tree. The wire ends had separated, unwound, and spread apart. It looked like a steel-stranded flower in his hand.
“Damn,” Hank said. “That was eighth-inch wire rope.”
“I think we caught a beaver here, then something else came along and took it. Something a lot bigger.”
They stared at a line of broken brush leading up the little creek through scattered trees. “I guess we’d better track it down,” Jack said. “See if there’s enough left for tissue samples.”
A dozen yards uphill was a huge pile of carnivore dung, still steaming in the cool morning air. A fragment of food packaging protruded from the pile.
“Aha,” Jack said. “It’s our camp raiders.”
“Good,” Hank said, tightening his grip on his rifle. “We’re due some payback.”
They followed the trail of snapped brush and flattened grass a short distance to the edge of a swampy meadow. There was little blood, but a blind man could have followed the trail, which led straight to a stand of stunted spruce out in the meadow. The trees were too thick to see into. As they started forward a distinct clicking sound came from the spruce, repeated twice, then followed by a series of deep whoofs. A head like a giant bulldog’s thrust itself out of the trees and appeared to levitate high above the ground. It snapped its teeth and whoofed once more.
Then the creature dropped to all fours and was coming at them, a huge thing tall as a man’s head at its shoulders, with legs long as a horse’s and galloping like a horse, black claws gleaming above the flat-black footpads. Ears on that bulldog head laid back and body straight as an arrow, coming faster. A nightmare chimera, accelerating to full speed in two strides, forequarters rising and falling as it came.
It was halfway across the meadow by the time Jack had the rifle to his shoulder, firing, working the slide-action, firing again. A trail of spinning brass arced over his rifle, showing that Hank was firing too. The beast filled his view, until his tunneled vision saw only the black eyes and ivory teeth, and he fired.
Hank fired again and the bullet appeared to strike the heavy scapular bone of the left shoulder, causing the animal to stumble slightly. The massive bulldog head dipped down, and Jack, ignoring the riflesights, just looking down the barrel, drove a round directly through the top of its skull. The dark hole left by the bullet immediately filled with a column of blood that fountained out with the beat of the creature’s heart. The bulldog head swung once to the left, once back and to the right, flinging a crisscross of blood-spatters on the grass. The animal’s forequarters collapsed and it dropped onto its belly, and Jack fired his last round into its neck. Lungs like the bellows of an ancient blast furnace took one improbably long, ragged breath, then stopped.
Jack lowered his empty rifle. He tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. “That’s cutting it a bit fine.” His voice came out as a dry squeaking noise. He cleared his throat again.
“Yep.” Hank appeared to want to say more, but his voice squeaked out, too.
Jack managed to bring his breathing down to a low-pitched rasp. “What is this thing? Some kind of bear?”
Hank cleared his own throat and nodded. “Can’t think of the scientific name. Hell, I can’t think of the common name. Jesus, I can’t even think of my own name right now. Wait. It’s a giant short-faced bear.”
“Why couldn’t we have run into a pygmy long-faced bear?”
“If there was such a critter, we’d probably run into that one, too.”
Jack could see one of the animal’s eyes. It looked the size of a grapefruit inside its socket. It was already acquiring that thin, milky glaze of when the tear ducts of a mammal ceased working in death. Without having to move his feet, Jack extended the rifle barrel to poke that eye, just to make sure.
“Arctodus,” Hank said. “That’s it. Biggest mammalian carnivore that ever walked North America.” Hank shook his head. “Just think—pretty soon we may have them running around in our own time.”
“Well, I’m not taking back a tissue sample of this thing.” Jack had noticed a mosquito drinking off his left hand. As he watched, the insect’s abdomen bloated and turned red. He let it drink its fill and fly off. “They really believe these things were wiped out by cavemen with stone-tipped spears?”
“Maybe they all died when their prey was gone.” Hank squatted down to look at the bear’s head. He put his hand over one forepaw. The naked claws were twice as long as his fingers. “Look here.” He pointed to a line of cut hair and bruised skin on the forepaw. “We’ve found our trap-destroyer.”
Jack remembered something important and looked back toward the spruce stand. He felt a sudden urge to reload the rifle. He fumbled two rounds to the ground before he got one into the magazine. “If that’s a sow,” he tried to say calmly, to steady his own hands, “imagine how big a boar would be.”
“We can’t be sure of its sex unless we can roll it over. These bears had proportionately slimmer bodies than the bears we know.”
> “Nope, I’m pretty sure it’s a sow. You better get up and reload.”
“Why?”
“’Cause she’s got a couple of subadult cubs with her. And they’re coming this way.”
Hank stood up and dug into a pocket for more cartridges. The two young bears were out of the spruce stand now, peering at the men in that near-sighted bear way. As one they turned, trotting smoothly with none of the usual waddling bear gait, to swing downwind.
“I guess they’re going to keep our beaver. Unless you want to make a fight of it.”
“Hell,” Hank said, “they aren’t much bigger than adult grizzlies. Why don’t we just walk over there and take it away from them?”
“You first. I don’t have enough ammo on me.”
They waited to see if the bears would leave, but the two cubs were slowly approaching from downwind, showing no fear. Hank sighed. “I guess it’s not worth the risk. We’ll have to catch another beaver.”
They backed down the trail, leaving the cubs to sniff at their mother’s body, and returned to camp. They built the fire back up about as high as they could and sat silently contemplating it while they ate lunch.
“Just one night left,” Hank finally said.
Jack looked at the ground. “At least we won’t be helping them bring back these giant beaver.”
“They’ll just send someone else.”
“We won’t be able to hold our heads up if we get skunked and someone else catches a beaver.” They both gave halfhearted laughs.
Jack felt drained, tired, and weak, and Hank looked the same. But they picked themselves up and trudged across the dam and up the lake to the trail that crossed the peninsula, the place where they’d found the most beaver sign.
Their snares remained undisturbed, so they walked the trail to look for new ideas. Jack went past it twice before he stopped to ponder a large, dead cottonwood tree that leaned over the trail above his head. A beaver had chewed through its base some years back, and the tree had fallen halfway before it tangled with a smaller spruce on the other side of the trail. After that the cottonwood’s top had broken away in some wind- or snowstorm, leaving a main trunk that was at least a yard in diameter. The wood was still solid and the trunk probably weighed well over a ton. If the spruce hadn’t been there, it would have fallen squarely across the beaver trail. Jack remembered how beavers were sometimes killed by the very tree they were cutting down.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 62