State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (24 page)

As the little bit of light coming in from the open tent door fades, and as the flames of the cook stove diminish to coals, lanterns are lit and covered with colored-paper shades that cast the entire scene in a royal rainbow of soft light. Laughter and talk comes from the other circles, but ours is entirely quiet. I get the feeling they are not speaking out of respect for us not being able to understand them. Two little sisters come by with a basket of sweet candy made from honey. When they get to Jimmy, they stand back and blush until the older sister pushes the younger one forward. Jimmy takes a candy, pops it in his mouth, and smiles. The little girl runs off giggling with her basket. I guest flirting is flirting in any language.

When the meal is finished, our bowls are taken away and removed from the tent. Then the cup is passed again. The man who was singing when we arrived appears again with his odd fiddle and stands beside the boy. He plays and sings with such power and beauty that when he finishes, you could hear a pebble drop. Then two men step from behind the curtain with eagles on their arms.

“See,” Jimmy says, nudging my ribs, “I told ya I shoulda brought mine.”

The men release their birds into the tent. Each swoops off in the opposite direction, hugging the interior walls to cross within inches of each other at the other end, then circling back to cross again. They keep circling, faster and faster, until they whip by and cross right above us in a flurry of golden-feathered gymnastics that manages to stir enough wind to move my hair, as short as it still is. The boy sits on his pillow, watching with an enormous smile. Each time the eagles crisscross in front of him, he claps his hands and giggles. It’s the first time I’ve seen him act like a child. The birds make their fastest pass yet, and it’s a miracle of aviation that they don’t collide and fall to the floor. Then they slow and cross once more as they return to their masters’ arms. The men bow their heads and carry their eagles out behind the curtain.

The boy rises abruptly, as if signaling that the dinner is over, but the woman healer—whom I have come to believe must be his mother—rises with him, takes his hand, and leads him around the circle to say goodnight. He stands in front of each of us where we sit and leans to smell our hair again. Then he turns once to the entire group and bows before taking his mother’s hand and following her from the tent.

As soon as the he’s gone, the mood lightens. The musician, who had been eating a quick meal while the eagles flew, picks up his fiddle again and plays a more upbeat tune. The others drag their pillows over and circle up around us until we’re all one large group. Most of them recline, with their fingers laced behind their heads to watch the lanterns play colors on the ceiling, or cross their legs and bob their feet and heads to the music. A larger cup comes around.

Then the old man calls out something to the group, and everyone backs several feet away from him with their pillows. An attendant sets a chest down in the open space now in front of the old man. I wonder if he plans to charm a snake like I’ve read about in books. But he opens the chest and removes a pointed stick and a brush, and then he tips the chest over and dumps a pile of sand onto the floor. He sets the empty chest aside and smooths the sand with a pass of his open hands. Then he picks up his stick again and begins to draw in the sand. We all kneel on our pillows and lean forward to watch.

He works the stick like a paint brush—drawing clear lines one moment, flicking his wrist for a shadow effect the next—and he composes an image of such realistic beauty that I forget entirely that I’m looking at a pile of sand. He draws a picture of a city, complete with skyscrapers and streets. He draws a pair of happy faces greeting one another in the foreground. Then, with a slight embellishment from his stick, he makes the people look up. And now in the line of their sight, he draws a missile descending toward the city from the sky. Then he grabs his brush and sweeps it across the sand, erasing the city and its people. There is an audible gasp from the villagers watching this slide show of sand.

Next he draws an image of ruin—smoke billowing above the city, buildings collapsed to rubble, people burning in the streets. This picture he also erases to begin yet another on the clean slate of sand. His art is so masterful that I find myself forgetting where I am, my mind filling in the details he so gracefully suggests. I sit and watch the story unfold like a film before my very eyes.

He tells of a devastated people rummaging through the wreckage and migrating to the clean and unblemished hills to start a new life. He tells of hardship and toil, celebrations and joy. And then he tells of drones appearing in the sky like great mechanical birds of prey, slaughtering entire villages. He tells harrowing tales of survivors and of fresh starts cut short by new slaughters. And as the people thin, he tells of their constant search for shelter from the drones and of their eventual migration to these cold mountains for the safety of their clouds and cliffs. Then he draws a woman standing on a wall, facing down a drone. Here he stops and points with his stick to my mother and smiles.

The room is silent, the music having long ago stopped as the fiddler came to stand and watch the story himself. But now the old man lays the chest on its side and pulls the sand into it, sweeping the remainder inside with his brush. Then he closes the chest up and signals for it to be taken away. He pinches a bit of sand between his thumb and finger from the remainder on the hard-packed dirt floor and throws it over his right shoulder. Then he claps his hands and calls to the musician. The musician picks up his instrument and begins to play again.

The old man scoots over to Jimmy and me and looks at us with his one eye. I do my best not to let my gaze drift to his empty socket. He reaches into his fur and produces his jade bottle and palms it to me with what I think is a wink, but it’s hard to tell since he blinks with only one eye too. I look at the little bottle in my hand and remove the stopper carefully. A fine brown powder rests in the spoon that comes out attached to it. The old man signals that I should sniff it, as I’d seen him do that day on his horse. I hardly get the spoon to my nose when I feel my mother’s strong grip on my wrist. She pulls the spoon toward her and inspects it, even leaning down to smell it. Then she nods and releases my wrist. The snuff stings my nose and sets me coughing. The old man pats me on the back and takes his bottle back. He hands it to Jimmy. Of course, he doesn’t cough. Then the old man points to my neck. I look down and see my father’s pipe on the lanyard that Jimmy made me. I take the pipe off and hand it to him. He inspects it in the low light as best he can, holding it close to his one good eye and running his rough fingers over the butterflies carved into the bowl. Then he heaves himself up from his pillow with much effort and walks off with my pipe. I rise to go after him, but Jimmy grabs my hand and pulls me back down.

“But he took my father’s pipe,” I say.

“He’ll be back with it,” Jimmy says. “I think they only consider it a gift if you hold it out to them with both hands.”

Sure enough, the old man returns a few minutes later with his own pipe and a small wooden box of tobacco that must be a treasure in these high and hidden lands. He loads both pipes, hands me back mine, then reaches over and lights a small stick of wood from the flame of a lantern, and hands that to me as well. As I puff my pipe lit, my mother just smiles and shakes her head.

We sit in the dim-colored light and drink and smoke and listen to the music while just the tiniest patch of starlit sky is visible in the ceiling smoke hole. The old man puffs his pipe and strokes his beard, his one eye closing and opening, as if he’s having a hard time staying awake but doesn’t want to sleep either. Jimmy has found one of the eagle masters and is deep in conversation with him, their communication comprised entirely of gestures. I puff my pipe and look at my mother. She must have had her share from the cup, because she’s lying back on her pillow with such a peaceful look of contentment on her face that I only wish I could find a way to paint it there forever. If only my father could be here to see this. The moment is so perfect that it almost feels like this entire life has been one big dream and that I’m finally in the real Eden. I blow a smoke ring and watch it come slowly apart as it rises toward the ceiling until it disappears out the smoke hole and into the night.

“I’ll always love you, Dad.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, hi, Jimmy. I was just thinking out loud.”

Jimmy flops down beside me on his pillow. I try to hand him my pipe, but he shakes his head. The music plays on, quieter now than before, and soon others around the room begin to chant softly along. The acoustics of the tent mix the voices together into a lofty harmony that tickles my scalp.

“I think your mom’s sleepin’,” Jimmy says.

I look over and see that her eyes are peacefully closed.

“Did you get some good pointers for Valor?” I ask.

“These guys are no joke, man. I’ll bet I have him huntin’ in less than a month.”

Jimmy’s comment sets my mind to wandering. Will we even be here in another month? Where would we go? What would we do? We couldn’t possibly live on the run from drones in these mountains. Or could we? These people seem to have things figured out pretty well. And this valley sure seems like a safe place. Then I remember the serum. My mother and Jimmy and I will all live to be nearly a thousand years old, but none of these people will. The entire length of that history he wrote in the sand, nine hundred years plus since the War, forty-five generations of these people, that would only cover our lives. How could we ever grow close to anyone? Are we fated to live a nearly eternal life of sadness like Finn, burying our loved ones and our friends? I wish now I had thought things through a little more before taking that serum. Sometimes a gift too good to be true can turn out to be a gift too true to be good.

Jimmy and I are lying side by side with our heads propped on our pillows. A red lamp behind casts outsized shadows of our matching silhouettes against the canvas in front us.

“Hey, Jimmy.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever think about how long we’re going to live?”

“No,” he says. “Not really.”

“Well, why not?”

“I dunno. Guess I’m too busy livin’ it to think about it.”

I clamp my pipe in my teeth and nod. Sometimes he says the damnedest things that make me wish I was more like him. A little later, I have another thought.

“You ever think about Red?”

“Sometimes,” he says.

“Do you feel bad about it?”

“There was no way to know we wasn’t comin’ back.”

“So we just do nothing, then?”

I see Jimmy’s shadow shrug.

“You gotta cook the bird you shoot,” he says. “At least that’s what my pa used to say.”

I listen to the chanting and the music and watch our heads swell and shrink on the canvas with the flickering of the flame.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I finally say. “Maybe there is nothing we can do.”

I puff my pipe but it’s gone out.

The short days of winter give way to longer days of spring, and the snow recedes into the shadowed folds of the mountain.

My mother spends most her days in the shelter in front of that mindless screen, working on some boring project I don’t even pretend to understand. I try to watch over her shoulder, but she always stops and tells me to go out and play.

“Play with what?” I ask.

“Whatever it is you and Jimmy do out there.”

“He’s busy with his eagle.”

“I know what you can do,” she says. “Hike up and adjust the antenna for the repeater dish.”

“Again?”

“My connection is spotty after last night’s wind.”

I agree and go do it, grateful to at least feel needed.

Jimmy’s eagle seems to always be on his arm. I joke with him that he’s developing a lopsided physique because of it. He shrugs off my comment, but I notice that he’s carrying Valor on his other arm the following week, having made a matching left-handed glove. They make quite the pair—Jimmy always talking to the bird as if it could somehow understand him and the bird just perched there ignoring him all the while.

It’s a solid month beyond what he’d predicted, but Jimmy announces over dinner one night that he’s ready to test Valor the next day. “You have to come,” he says. “Both of you.”

“I wouldn’t miss it, buddy.”

My mother shakes her head and says, “I have no interest in watching that tic-infested accipitridae kill a helpless deer.”

“Please,” Jimmy pleads. “This is my day. If Valor makes the kill, he’s a worthy bird and I’m a worthy master.”

“What happens if he doesn’t?” she asks.

“Then I gotta set him free and find another.”

“Who told you all this nonsense?”

“Our friends, the Motars.”

“Motars. Worthy master. You speak their language now?”

“No. But there’s other ways to talk, you know.”

My mom smiles and rubs Jimmy’s shaggy head. “I’ll come and watch, but only if you let me give you a haircut.”

“Aw, come on,” he says. “It’s just growing back in.”

The entire trip there the next afternoon, Jimmy whispers encouragement into Valor’s ear. My mom and I walk behind him and make silent jokes with each other about it. Every so often the eagle spins its head nearly all the way around to look at us, and I swear that bird understands more than it lets on.

The Motars meet us on the bluff above their hidden camp. They’re all sitting horseback. They have three other horses with them, I’m guessing one for each of us. The boy looks more childlike and less kingly now that he’s wearing his furs again. He trots his horse up to Jimmy, reaches down, touches the crown of Jimmy’s head and then the eagle’s head. Then the boy says something, and one of the men presents Jimmy with a horse. Jimmy mounts up one-handed, with Valor still on his arm. But when my mother is presented with her horse, she steps away and holds up her hands.

“It’s not that bad, Mom. We rode them on the island.”