State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy

by Ryan Winfield

  “It’s not a good sign, Jimmy,” I finally admit, since neither of us has talked about what’s happened.

  “Whaddya mean?” he asks.

  “I mean for my mother coming back.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because Hannah and the professor obviously know we’re here. And they must have been manually controlling that drone from the Foundation. They’re programmed to target people, and that thing was trying to destroy our runway.”

  Jimmy sighs and pushes his bowl of stew away.

  “Or,” he says, “It could tell us your mom at least ain’t been hurt by them yet.”

  “How so?”

  “They was tryin’ to destroy the runway, right?”

  I nod and Jimmy continues.

  “Well, if they knew that your mom was hurt or somethin’ worse, then they wouldn’t have bothered. So it’s a good sign.”

  Jimmy’s insight is small comfort, but I carry it to bed with me like my last hope on Earth. I lie in my hammock and imagine a thousand scenarios that might have held my mother up. Maybe trouble with the drone. Or maybe she found Bill, but he wasn’t fit for travel, and she’s nursing to him. Or what if she had some other errand to run that she hadn’t told me about? This last thought jolts me awake with the realization about just how little I know about my mother and her plans. I know she wanted to rescue me, but she must have had some longer term plan to take over the Foundation from Hannah. There’s no way we could live forever on the run from the Park Service.

  I quietly get up, but the lights snap on anyway and give me away. Jimmy rolls over in his hammock and covers his eyes with his forearm. The eagle cracks one yellow eye and follows me with it to my mother’s workstation. I sit down and turn on the monitor. Her last sent message is open on the screen:

  Leaving tonight to search for Bill. Should be back within one week. If you don’t hear from me by day zero, go ahead with the mission on your own. May history be on our side. Signed, your affectionate Chief.

  There’s an unopened reply message beneath it, but when I try to scroll down to open it, the computer locks and calls up a password screen. Great. I’m locked out. Wanting to commit it to memory, I repeat the message I just read: “If you don’t hear from me by day zero, go ahead with the mission on your own.”

  What mission? I wonder. And who was she writing to? She also said she should be back in one week, and tomorrow will be the tenth day since she’s been gone. Now I’m even more confused and even more depressed than before. I’m tempted to wake Jimmy, just to have someone to talk to, but he’s sound asleep in his hammock. I tiptoe up to his eagle and look at its solemn face. It stares back at me as if it understands everything in the world but has for some secret reason decided to care nothing about any of it. Perhaps it’s wiser than we are, after all.

  Fatigue hits me like an aftershock from the day’s wild events. I return to my hammock and fall asleep before the lights can even turn themselves off.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Return

  I dream she’s home and then the dream is real.

  Jumping from my hammock, I nearly trip and break my neck on my way down to the hangar. Sure enough, the door is just closing out the gray light of dawn, and the drone is parked on the runway beneath the LED tunnel lights, with ice crystals still sparkling on its wings. The cockpit glass is fogged so that I can’t see inside. I impatiently lift it open.

  “Oh, God, Mother.”

  She’s slumped in the seat with her eyes closed. Her skin is pale, and her hair is soaked with sweat. Her breathing is labored and shallow.

  I turn and scream, “Jimmy! Help me, Jimmy!”

  Jimmy is by my side in a flash, and we lift her from the cockpit and lay her on the floor. As soon as she’s out, I realize how bad it is. Her right leg is swollen to twice its normal size, hemmed in and horribly misshapen by the stitching of her zipsuit. Jimmy runs for a knife while I try to wake her up. But she won’t speak to me or even open her eyes. Jimmy returns and carefully cuts the material away from her leg. He peels it back, revealing the blackened and swollen flesh. Her skin has cracked near the calf, and a gaping wound leaks yellow puss.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Snakebite,” Jimmy says. “I seen it before.”

  “Then you know what to do, right? You have to know, if you’ve seen this before. What do we do, Jimmy?”

  He looks gravely at her leg and shakes his head. “I dunno. My mom always had snakeroot, but I wouldn’t know how to find it or if there’s even any around here.”

  “We have to try, Jimmy. We have to do something.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll go. Make her comfortable. And get some liquids in her.”

  Her head is in my lap when I hear the door slam above.

  “You’re going to be okay, Mom,” I tell her, even though she doesn’t appear to hear me. “We plan to fix you up.”

  I climb the ladder and drag her bed over and toss it down into the hangar along with her blankets. When I have her on the bed, I hold her head up and squeeze drips of water into her mouth from a wet towel. Her eyelashes flicker as if she wants to open them, but soon she’s gone again. I go back upstairs and search everywhere for a first aid kit but can’t find one. Instead, I boil water and a cloth and then I carry the hot pot carefully down the ladder and spend a solid hour cleaning her wound. Dark tendrils spread out and run up her thigh from the bite, and the way her calf has split open and blackened reminds me of Jimmy’s brush with death in the cove. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the result of venom, and that I can’t be sure yet that it’s even infected.

  I hear the door above open, then close. Jimmy comes down the ladder followed by a woman bundled in furs. She kneels and takes my mother’s wounded leg in her weathered hands and looks at it closely. Then she opens a bag and pulls out a plump, live bird, resembling pictures I’ve seen of doves. She produces a tiny knife from among her clothing and slits the dove’s belly open and presses it to my mother’s leg, wound to wound. The dove doesn’t make a sound; it just rests in the woman’s hand with a trickle of its own blood now running down my mother’s swollen calf. It twists its small head on its rubbery neck to look at each of us in turn. A minute later it begins to convulse. Two minutes later, it’s dead.

  The woman turns and says something to Jimmy in a language I can’t understand. When Jimmy hold up his hands, confused, she picks the towel up and motions as if tearing it into strips. Jimmy nods, climbs the ladder, and disappears. I want to ask her if my mother will be okay, but I know we don’t speak one another’s language, and the woman has hardly even acknowledged that I’m here.

  Casting the dead dove aside, she opens a deerskin pouch, pulls out a gnarled root, bites off a chunk and chews it. She holds the root out to me, signaling that I should do the same. We sit together, chewing over my sick mother, our jaws frantically working the tough root. The texture is pulpy, and it swells in my mouth like dough. The woman spits the chewed root into her hand and then holds her hand beneath my mouth for me to spit mine. Then she mashes the chewed root into my mother’s open wound. I wince, imagining her pain. Fortunately, she’s so out of it she doesn’t make a sound.

  Jimmy comes down, carrying strips of cloth that he’s torn from the clothes we discarded when we made our kilts. He hands them to the woman, and she wraps the leg and ties it off. Then she takes another small bite of root, chews it, and wraps it in one of the cloths, making a small ball. She dips this chewed root ball into the pot of water. Then she holds my mother’s head upright with one strong hand and puts the dripping cloth into her mouth. She massages my mother’s neck, coaxing her to swallow. Then she dips the root again and repeats the process.

  When the woman is finished, she lays my mother’s head back. Then she hands me the cloth and the leftover root and signals that we should continue to feed her the juice.

  “How often?” I ask.

  When she looks at me blankly, I point to the root in my
hand and then to my mother’s mouth. The woman points and arcs her finger, signaling the sun moving across the sky. Then she holds up four fingers. I take this to mean four times a day.

  “Thank you,” I say, bowing.

  She lays a hand on my mother’s forehead as if blessing her, then she gathers up her pouch and rises to leave. She picks up the dead dove, slips it back into her sack, and climbs the ladder. Jimmy follows her up, I presume to say goodbye. I stay by my mother’s side.

  It’s three days before she’s well enough to speak.

  I’m sleeping beside her on the floor, or at least trying to sleep, when she mumbles my name. I sit up and trigger the lights. Her fever has broken, and for the first time since she returned there’s no sweat on her brow.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  She opens her eyes. They seem to look at nothing. Then her pupils slowly dilate, she focuses on me, and smiles.

  “Oh, Aubrey.”

  I reach down and caress her cheek. “Mom, I love you.”

  “I love you too, Son,” she says.

  Then she closes her eyes again and sleeps.

  In the morning she tells me she’s hungry. Jimmy says it’s a great sign, and he makes her a pot of broth. She drinks it all and asks for more. Later, after the calories have restored her energy, she wants to see her leg. I pull her bed against the wall and prop her up. Then I remove the bandage for her. She sees the blackened flesh and turns away.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I say. “It’s not infected, and Jimmy says other than nasty scarring you should be okay.”

  “I never was much for shaving and showing off my legs anyway,” she jokes. Then she caresses my cheek and adds, “Thanks for looking after me so well.”

  “We had help from the wild people.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy went and found them. He said he’d seen their camp when he was out hunting. It probably saved your life, but certainly your leg.”

  “That’s twice now,” she says. “We’ll have to find a way to thank them. And Jimmy too.”

  “What happened out there, Mom?”

  “I tried, Son. I really tried to find him.”

  “Did you see any sign of him at all?”

  “It was stormy a lot, and it rained almost every night. I’d sleep under the drone’s wing to stay dry and then fly again at first light. I was out of rations but I decided to give it one last day. That’s when I saw the smoke.”

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Dinner with Friends

  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.