State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy

by Ryan Winfield

  She stops talking and looks at us with a smile on her face, as if that were the end of her story. The room is silent. We sit on the edges of our seats, our half-completed kilts forgotten on our laps. Afraid to be chastised again for interrupting her, Jimmy nudges me to say something.

  “Come on, Mom,” I say. “Tell us what happened next.”

  “Well, I really don’t know,” she says.

  “You didn’t hit it?”

  “Oh, yes, I hit it all right. But I didn’t know it until a week later when I found the wreckage. I think the blowback from the rocket slammed me against the stone wall and knocked me out. It really was a bad concussion. I’m lucky I survived. I woke days later in my own bed. My wound had been cleaned and dressed. The blood had even been washed from my hair.”

  “So the wild people helped you,” I say.

  “I assumed it was them,” she replies. “Although I never did see or talk to them. But from that day on, I began finding gifts left at my door. The bow and arrow I gave to you, Jimmy, that was from them. The milk in the fridge is from them. Most of the furs you’re wearing. In fact, I’m certain that I’d never have made it once winter set in if it weren’t for their gifts.”

  “They seen you shoot that drone is why,” Jimmy says.

  “You think that was it?” she asks, as if considering it for the first time.

  “Sure,” he says. “I know we never took well to strangers, but if they was against the Park Service and we seen it for our own selves, then they was friends of ours.”

  “You have a very wise friend there, Son,” she says to me.

  “Yeah,” I say, grinning, “most of the time he’s all right.”

  Jimmy slugs me in the shoulder. “Whaddya mean, most of the time?” he asks.

  By the next afternoon, Jimmy and I are roaming the snow-covered hills in our new kilts, looking for the wild people and their camp. He has his bow and arrow over his shoulder, just in case we run across something actually worth hunting, since that’s what we told my mother we were heading out to do.

  “They gotta have a place around here somewhere,” Jimmy says. “If it was me, I wouldn’t be too far from that hot spring.”

  “Let’s try over there,” I suggest, pointing. “On the other side of those cliffs, where I saw them.”

  We walk awhile without talking, listening to the sound of our breathing and our shoes crunching in the new snow. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago, we were trudging through a rainforest halfway around the world.

  “Your mom sure is somethin’,” Jimmy says.

  “How so?” I ask.

  “The way she shot down that drone. She sure is cool.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What? You dun’ like her?”

  “I like her. I’m just not sure about everything. I mean I had her built up in my mind one way, and she’s nothing like it.”

  Jimmy nods that he understands.

  A few paces later, I add, “Maybe I’m just not sure yet if I can trust her.”

  “What makes you think you can’t?” Jimmy asks.

  “Well, she lied to my father, for one thing.”

  “That’s true,” Jimmy says. “But your father isn’t you.”

  “And you know what else is strange?” I ask. “I remember when Dr. Radcliffe was showing me his control room for the first time, explaining the drones and how they hunt humans and all that. Gosh, what a nut case he was, now that I think about it. But while we were down there, he mentioned to me that they had lost a drone in China. He said they sent another after it and that they lost it too. And here he was talking about my mother and I didn’t even know it. And maybe worse, he was my biological father, and I had no idea about that either. I mean, it makes me wonder what else I don’t know right now.”

  “That makes sense,” Jimmy says. “But jus’ remember how lucky you are.”

  “Lucky? How am I lucky?”

  “I’d give jus’ about anythin’ to find out my mom was still alive, even if she had lied to me.”

  I stop in my tracks and look up at the clear blue sky. He’s right. I would have traded my left arm and maybe my right too just days ago if I had thought it would bring my mother back. And here she is, and I’m refusing to forgive her for being alive. Maybe I should give her a chance. Movement catches my eye. I spot an eagle soaring on a high breeze.

  “Look, Jimmy. An eagle. Think it’s one of theirs?”

  “I dunno,” he says, “let’s follow it.”

  We take off at a jog, losing sight of the eagle when we dip down into a gulch and then picking it up again when we come out the other side. We climb a small peak to get a better view and see that the eagle is circling above a wide valley with a river running along its edge. The snow is trampled on both sides of a shallow ford, the river having recently been crossed by horses.

  “That’s where I’d build a camp,” Jimmy says, pointing to the other side of the valley. “Under those cliffs.”

  There’s a hill between us and the base of the steep granite cliffs, obscuring the view of where any camp might be.

  “Should we go check it out?” I ask.

  “The universe hates a coward,” he says.

  We scramble down to the banks of the river and cross it in the tracks of the horses, with our shoes slung around our necks and our new kilts hiked up. The water is only knee deep, but it’s cold enough that I can’t feel my legs or my feet when we wade out the other side. With our shoes back on, we jog the rest of the way, trying to warm up.

  When we crest the hill, we both come skidding to a halt. Several feet away, a fawn stands staring at us with enormous, dewy eyes. The young deer is spotted, not unlike the kilts we’re wearing, and it’s tethered by a rope to a wooden stake driven into the ground. The snow is trampled in a circle that marks the end of the leash. When neither of us moves to harm it, the fawn drops its head and begins grazing on the frozen ground.

  “It must be someone’s pet,” I say.

  “I dunno,” Jimmy replies. “Why would you keep one? I ain’t never seen anyone milk a deer.”

  The fawn raises its head to look at us again, as if perhaps it had heard us talking and might speak to clear things up. Then a shadow races across the snow, swelling as it approaches, until it casts a pool of darkness over the fawn. Then a golden eagle slams into the fawn’s back, digs its talons into its neck, and bears down on it. The fawn’s front legs buckle, and its head drops to the snow beneath the weight of the great raptor. Its helpless hind legs continue to rear and kick, and the eagle’s wings continue to beat wildly, so close that they blow wind in our faces. Surprisingly, neither the eagle nor the deer makes a sound. The struggle lasts for several seconds. Then the eagle severs the fawn’s spine with its powerful beak. The fawn twitches once and is still. The eagle tucks its wings and perches atop its kill, looking at us as if we were nothing more than a sideline curiosity.

  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 co
nsidering 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.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Flying over China

  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 knowin
g 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.”