Beasts

6 VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO

On Mondays Loren came in to meet the packet plane that flew in once a week with supplies and mail to a small town ten miles or so from his cabin. To get into town, he had to canoe from his river-island observation station, where he spent most of the week, downriver to his cabin. From there he went on muleback to town. He rarely got back to the cabin before midnight; the next morning he would start out before dawn, and canoe back upriver to the island. Then, as though the whole of this journey had set him vibrating on a wrong note, he would have to spend most of that day untuning himself so that he could once again turn all his attention to the flock of Canada geese he had under observation. If he brought whiskey back from town to the cabin, he would struggle with himself to leave it in the cabin, having sometimes to go so far as to pour it out, or what was left of it. He kept himself from ever bringing any to the island; but this struggle made his first day’s work at the island that much harder.

There weren’t, every week, enough reasons for him to make the journey into town, as far as supplies or necessities went. Yet he made it. He tried hard to stock up on things, to deprive himself of logical reasons for the trip; yet when he couldn’t stock up, when some supply was short that week in town and he saw that he would have no choice but to return, he felt a guilty relief. And even when he had utterly subjugated all these tricks, and had no reason to come in that even self-deception would buy, he came in anyway. Always. Because there was one thing he couldn’t stock up on, and that was mail. Each week, that was new; each week it bore the same promise, and like the stupid chickens he had experimented with in school, each time there was no mail, he responded more fiercely the next time.

“No mail” meant no letter from Sten. He got enough other things. Dross. Newspapers he soon became unable to read with any understanding. Letters from other scientists he corresponded with about technical matters, about the geese. They weren’t what brought him to town. Nor was it the whiskey either, really. The whiskey more or less resulted from the mail or the lack of it; or, what brought him into town for the mail brought him later to the whiskey. It all came to the same impulse. A syndrome, he knew he had to call it; yet it felt more like a small, circumscribed suburb of hell.

Even Loren Casaubon, who had dissected many animals, from a nematode worm to a macaque monkey — which began to decay loathsomely in the midst of his investigations, insufficiently pickled — even he located the seat of his fiercest and most imperative emotions in his heart. He knew better, but that’s where he felt them. And it seemed, over the last months, that his heart had suffered physical strain from the vast charge of emotion it continuously carried: it felt great, heavy, painful.

That Monday the packet was late. Loren had a not-quite-necessary reshoeing done on the mule, watching the smith work gracelessly and hastily and wondering if these old skills that had once meant so much to the world, and seemed to be becoming just as necessary again, would ever be done as well as they once had been. He picked up a box of raisins and a dozen pencils. He went down to the muddy end of the street, to the rusting steel pier, and waited. He had been born patient, and his patience had undergone training and a careful fine-tuning in his work. He could remember, as a kid, waiting hours for a dormant snail to put out its head or a hunting fox to grow accustomed to his stationary, downwind presence and reveal himself. And he used those skills now to await, and not attempt to hasten, the guttural far-off sound, the clumsy bird.

It appeared from the wrong direction, made maneuvers around the skyey surface of the lake. Its ugly voice grew louder, and it settled itself down with a racing of engines and a speeding and slowing of props that reminded him of the careful wing-strategies of his landing geese. It must be, he thought, as its pontoons unsteadily gripped the water’s stirred surface, the oldest plane in the world.

When the plane had been tied up, a single passenger got out. He hardly needed to stoop, so short he was. Leaning on a stick, he made his way down the gangway to the pier; sun and waterlight glinted from his spectacles. When he saw Loren he came toward him in his odd, mincing gait. Loren noticed that he limped now as well; he made the process of walking look effortful and improbable.

“Mr. Casaubon.” He removed the spectacles and pocketed them. “We’ve met. Briefly.”

Loren nodded guardedly. His small, week-divided world was shaken by this creature’s appearance. The beaten paths he had walked for months were about to be diverted. He felt unaccountably afraid. “What are you doing here?” He hadn’t intended to sound hostile, but did; Reynard took no notice.

“In the first place, to deliver this.” He took a travel-creased envelope from within his cape and held it toward Loren. Loren recognized, at once, the angular script; he had after all helped to shape it. Strange, he thought, how terrific is the effect of a fragment of him, outside myself, a genuine thing of his in the real world; how different than I imagine. This sense was the calm, self-observant eye of a storm of feeling. He took the letter from the strange, rufous fingers and put it away.

“And,” Reynard said, “I’d like to talk to you. Is there a place?”

“You’ve seen Sten.” The name caught in his throat and for a horrible moment he thought it might not come out. He had no idea how much the fox knew. He felt naked, as though even then telling all; as though his racing pulse were being taken.

“Oh yes, I’ve seen Sten,” Reynard said. “I don’t know what he’s written you, but I know he wants to see you. He sent me to bring you.”

Loren hadn’t risen, not certain his legs would hold him; still, within, that calm eye observed, astonished at the power of a letter, a name, that name in another’s mouth, to cause havoc in the very tissues and muscles of him.

“There’s a bar up the street,” he said. “The Yukon. Not the New Yukon. A back room. Go on up there. I’ll be along.”

He watched Reynard stick his way up the street. Then he turned away and sat looking out across the water as though he still waited for something.

After Gregorius had been murdered, the three of them — Sten, Mika, and Loren — began gradually to move into the big house. They took it over by degrees as Gregorius’s spirit seemed to leave it; the kitchen first, where they ate, where the cook stuffed Sten and Mika out of pity for their orphanhood (though what Mika felt was not grief but only the removal of something, something that had been a permanent blockage at the periphery of vision, a hobble on the spirit; she had hardly known Gregorius, and liked him less). Next they moved into the living quarters, spreading out from their own nursery wing like advancing Mongols into the lusher apartments. The movement was noticed and disapproved of by the maids and housekeepers, for as long as they remained; but Nashe, utterly preoccupied with her own preservation and the prevention of anarchy, hardly noticed them at all. Now and then they would see her, hurrying from conference to conference, drawn with overwork; sometimes she stopped to speak.

The government was finally withdrawn altogether from the house and moved back to the capital. Nashe hadn’t the personal magnetism to rule from seclusion, as Gregorius had done; and she didn’t have Reynard for a go-between. She knew also that she had to dissociate herself from Gregorius; the memory of a martyr — even if most people weren’t sure just what he had been martyred for, there were reasons enough to choose from — could only burden her. And Sten Gregorius must not figure in her story at all. At all. A small number of men in Blue continued to patrol the grounds; the children saw them now and again, looking bored and left over. The house belonged to the three of them.

Loren continued to be paid, and continued to teach, though he became less tutor than father, or brother — something else, anyway, inexorably. There had been a brief meeting with Nashe in which the children’s future was discussed, but Nashe had not had her mind on it, and it ended inconclusively. Loren felt unaccountably relieved. Things would go on as they had.

There was a sense in which, of course, Sten at least was not an inheritor but a prisoner. He knew that, though he told no one what he knew. Except when this knowledge bore down on him, paralyzingly heavy, he was happy: the two people in the world he loved most, and who loved him unreservedly, were with him constantly. There were no rules to obey except his own, and Loren’s, which came to the same thing. Sten knew that, with his father dead and Nashe departed, Loren drew all his power from the children’s consent. But Loren’s rules were the rules of a wise love, the only Sten had ever known, to be haggled over, protested sometimes, but never resented. He wondered sometimes, times when he felt at once most strong and most horribly alone, when it would happen that he would overthrow Loren. Never! his heart said, as loud as it could manage to.

Still there were lessons, and riding; less riding when winter began to close down fully and snow piled up in the stony pastures and ravines. Loren spent a long time trying to repair an ancient motor-sled left in a garage by the mansion’s previous inhabitants.

“No go,” he said at last, “I’ll call somebody in the capital. They can’t refuse you a couple of motorsleds.

“No,” Sten said. “Let’s just snowshoe. And ski. We don’t need them”

“They really more or less owe it to you.”

“No. It’s all right.”

Later that month four new sleds arrived as a gift from a manufacturer; arrived with a hopeful photographer. Sten warily, ungraciously, accepted the sleds. The photographer was sent away, without Sten’s picture, or his endorsement. The sleds were locked in the old garage.

Evenings they usually spent in the dim of the communications room, where deep armchairs deployed themselves around big screens and small monitors. They watched old films and tapes, listened to political harangues, watched the government and the religious channels. It didn’t seem to matter. The droning flat persons were so far from them, so unreal, that it only increased their sense of each other. They could laugh together at the fat and the chinless and the odd who propounded to them the nature of things — Mika especially had no patience with rhetoric and a finely honed sense of the ridiculous — and the fat and the chinless and the odd, hugely enlarged or reduced to tininess by the screens, never knew they laughed. They could be extinguished by a touch on a lighted button. The whole world could be. It was a shadow. Only they three were real; especially when the heat failed in fuel shortages and they huddled together in a single thronelike chair, under a blanket.

Nashe was a fairly frequent shadow visitor in the communications room.

“Here’s the straight pin,” Mika said. Somehow this description of Mika’s was hilariously apt, though none of them knew exactly why.

“She’s got a hard job,” Loren said. “The hardest.”

“But look at that nose.”

“Let’s listen a minute,” Sten said, serious. They all knew their fate was, however remotely, connected to this woman’s. Sten felt it most. They must, sometimes, listen.

She was being asked a question about the Genesis Preserve. “Whatever crimes may have been committed within its borders are no concern of the Federal government,” she said in her dry, tight voice. “Our longstanding agreements with the Mountain give us sole authority — at the Mountain’s request — to enter it and deal with criminal activities… No, we have had no such request…. No, it doesn’t matter that it’s a so-called Federal crime, if that phrase has any legal meaning anymore. I can only interpret all of this as an attempt by the Federal and the Union for Social Engineering to gain some quasi-legal foothold within this Autonomy. As Director, I cannot countenance that.” She seemed to have to do that — announce her status — fairly frequently. “We know, I think, too much about USE to countenance any such activities.” At least, Sten thought, she’ll keep USE out. She’s got to fight them, take positions against them, because she benefited from their act, or what everybody thinks is their act. She can’t make them illegal in the Autonomy, they’re too strong for that. But she’ll fight. Sten had inherited Loren’s loathing of the intense men and women with their plastic briefcases and mechanical voices.

“What happens,” Sten asked, “if Nashe can’t hold it together?”

“I don’t know. Elections?”

Sten laughed, shortly.

“Well,” Loren said. “Supposedly the Federal can intervene if there’s severe civil disturbance. Whatever that means.” His leg ached where Sten lay on it, but he wanted not to move. He wanted never to move. He put a careful left hand, as though only to accommodate his bigness between the two of them, in the hollow between Sten’s neck and his hard shoulder. He waited for it to be thrown off, willing it to be thrown off, but it wasn’t. He felt, within, another self-made rampart breached; he felt himself sink further into a realm, a darkness, he had only begun to see when the children and he inherited their kingdom; when it was too late to withdraw from its brink.

“What happens to us, then?” Mika said.

“They don’t care about us.” Sten was quick, dismissive.

Yet later that night the old tape of him as a boy ran by again, on every screen; and the next night too. They watched it unroll. Not even Mika made fun of it. It seemed like a warning, or a summons.

There was an old-fashioned wooden sauna attached to what had been Gregorius’s suite in the house. Here too, in the close, wood-odorous heat and dimness, they could hide together from whatever it was that seemed to press on them from the outside. When during the summer they had gone swimming together in the lakelets of the estate, Loren had been careful for their young shame; he’d worn a bathing suit, and so had they, until once on a humid night they’d gone without them and Mika had said that after all they’d only worn them for Loren’s sake. After that they always went swimming naked, and later in the sauna too. They enjoyed the freedom of it, and they told each other that it was only sensible really, and forged without admitting it another bond between them.

“You start to feel,” Sten said, “that you can’t breathe, that the air’s too hot to go in.” He inhaled deeply.

“You’re hyperventilating,” Loren said. “You’ll get dizzy.”

Sten stood up, nearly fell, laughed. “I am dizzy. It feels weird.”

Mika, feeling utterly molten within, as hot for once as she felt she deserved to be, rested her head against the wooden slatting. Drops of sweat started everywhere on her body and ran tickling along her skin. She watched Loren and Sten, Loren took Sten in a wrestler’s hold around the middle and pressed; they were seeing how hyperventilated they could get, how giddy. Their wet feet slapped the floor. In the dim light their skin shone; they grappled and laughed like devils on a day off. At last they collapsed, gasping, weak. “No more, no more,” Loren said.

Mika watched them. A man and a boy. She made comparisons. She seemed to be asleep.

“My father said,” Sten gasped throatily, “that his father used to take a sauna, and afterward he ran out and rolled around in the snow. Naked.”

“Loco,” Mika said.

“No,” Loren said. “That’s traditional.”

“Wouldn’t you catch cold?”

“You don’t catch cold,” Loren said, “from cold. You know that.”

“You want to do it?” Sten said.

“Sure.” Loren said it casually, as though he did it often.

“Not me,” Mika said. “I’m just starting to get warm at last.”

In fact they had to egg each other on for a while, but then they went bursting out into the suite, halloing, through the French doors, and into the sparkling snow. Mika watched, hearing faintly through the glass their shouts — Loren’s a deep roar, Sten’s high and mad. She rubbed herself slowly with a thick towel. Loren wrestled Sten into a snowbank; she wondered if they were showing off for her. Loren was dark, thick, and woolly. Sten was lean, flaming pink now, and almost hairless; and shivering violently. Mika left the windows and went into the bedroom. She had already turned on her father’s electric blanket; she always crawled beneath it after a sauna and slept. She glimpsed herself in one of the many tall mirrors, lean and brown and seeming not quite complete. She looked away, and slipped beneath the sheets.

She dreamed that she was married, in this bed, with her husband, whose features she couldn’t make out; she felt an intense excitement, and realized that the mirrors in the room were her father’s eyes, left there by him when he died just so he could witness this.

That winter was one of the hardest in living memory. Shortages made it harder: of fuel, of food, of everything. It didn’t matter that Nashe and the few loyal ministers she had managed to keep around her blamed the Federal and USE for systematically blocking deliveries, causing delays at borders, issuing ambiguous safe-conducts or withholding them altogether: Nashe and the Directorate were whom the people blamed. There were mass demonstrations, riots. Blood froze on the dirty snow of city streets. USE journals and speakers, systematically and with charts and printouts, endlessly explained each crisis as a failure of human will and nerve, a failure to use human expertise, human reason — to make the world work. People listened. People marched for reason, rioted for reason. Along the borders of the Autonomy, troops — bands of armed men anyway, Federal men — kept watch, waiting. Candy’s Mountain, self-sufficient and no hungrier this winter than another, felt, far-off, the pressure of envy.

Gregorius’s house, too, felt far-off pressures. However they filled up the shortening days with activity, with hikes and study and snow castles, the days were haunted by the flickering hates and hungers they watched at night, as a day can be haunted by a bad dream you can’t quite remember.

Every fine day that wasn’t too bitterly cold, Hawk was set out on his high perch on the lawn. There was no way to fly him in this weather, so he had to be exercised on the lure, which Sten found tiresome and difficult. He went about it doggedly, but if Hawk was fractious or unaccommodating, it was a trial for both of them. Loren began to take over the duty, not letting Sten out of it, but “helping” just to keep him company and keep him at it; then gradually taking over himself.

“See,” Loren said, “now he’s roused, twice.”

“Yes.” Sten tucked his hands into his armpits. The day was gray, dense with near clouds; wind was rising. It would snow again soon. Hawk looked around himself at the world, at the humans, in quick, stern glances. His feathers filled out, his wings and beak opened, he shook himself down: exactly the motion of a man stretching.

“Three times.” It was an old rule of falconry that a hawk that has roused three times is ready to be flown: Loren’s falconry was a pragmatic blend of old rules, new techniques, life science, observation, and patience.

“Do you want to work him?”

“No.”

The skills involved in flying a falcon at lure were in some ways harder to acquire than hunting skills. A sand-filled leather bag on a line, with the wings and tail of a bird Hawk had slain last summer tied on realistically, and a piece of raw steak, had to be switched from side to side, swung in arcs in front of Hawk till he flew at it, and then twitched away before he could bind to it. If Hawk bound to the lure, he would sit to eat, or try to fly off with the lure, and the game would be over, with Hawk the winner. If Loren swung the lure away too fast, giving him no chance, Hawk would soon grow bored and angry. If Loren should hit him with the heavy, flying lure, he’d he confused and perhaps refuse to play — he might even he hurt.

Loren swung the lure before Hawk, tempting him, until Hawk, his eyes flicking back and forth with the lure, threw directly into the air and stooped to it, talons wide. Loren snatched it away and swung it around his body like a man throwing the hammer; Hawk swooped in a close arc around him, seeking the lure. Loren watched Hawk’s every quick movement, playing with him, keeping him aloft, intent and careful and yet reveling in his delicate control over this wild, imperious, self-willed being. He swung, Hawk stooped; the lure flew in arcs around Loren, and Hawk followed, inches from it, braking and maneuvering, only a foot or two off the ground. Loren laughed and cheered him, all his energies focused and at work. Hawk didn’t laugh, only turned and curved with his long wings and reached out with his cruel feet to strike dead the elusive lure.

Sten watched for a time. Then he turned away and went back into the house.

When Loren, breathless and satisfied, came into the kitchen to get coffee, something hot, some reward, he found Sten with a cold cup in front of him, his chin in his hands.

“You don’t, you know,” Loren said, “have to be best at everything. That’s not required.” As soon as he had said it, he regretted it bitterly. It was true, of course, but Loren had said it out of pride, out of success with Hawk, Sten’s bird. He wanted to go to Sten and put an arm around him, show him he understood, that he hadn’t meant what he said as crowing or triumph, just advice. And yet he had, too. And he knew that if he went to him, Sten would withdraw from him. That blond face, so whole and open and fine, could turn so black, so closed, so hateful. Loren made coffee, his exhilaration leaking away.

That night they turned away from the increasingly desperate government channels to watch “anything else,” Mika said; “something not real—” something they could contain within the compass of their dream of three. But the channels were all full of hectoring faces, or were inexplicably blank. Then they turned on a sudden, silent image and were held.

The leo, with his ancient gun under his arm, stood at the flapping tent door. His great head was calm, neither inquisitive nor self-conscious; if he was aware his portrait was being taken he didn’t show it. There was in his thick, roughly clothed body and blunt hands a huge repose, in his eyes a steady regard. Was it saintly or kingly he looked, or neither? The deep curl of his brow gave his eyes the easeful ferocity that the same curl gave to Hawk’s eyes: pitiless, without cruelty or guile. He only stood unmoving. There was no sound but that peculiar electronic note of solitude and loneliness, the intermittent boom of wind in an unshielded microphone.

“Well,” Mika said softly, “he’s not real.”

“Hush,” Sten said. A mild boyish voice was speaking without haste:

“He was captured at the end of the summer by rangers of the Mountain and agents of the Federal government. Since that time he has not been heard of.

The pride awaits word of him. They don’t speculate about whether he was murdered, as he might well have been, in secret; whether he’s imprisoned; whether he will ever return. For leos, there is no speculation, no fretting, no worry: it’s not in their nature. They only wait.”

Other images succeeded that lost king: the females around small fires, in billowing coats, their lamplike eyes infinitely expressive above their veiled mouths.

“God, look at their wrists,” Mika said. “Like my legs.”

The young played together, young blond ogres, unchildish, but with children’s mad energy: cuffing and wrestling and biting with intent purpose, as though training for some desperate guerrilla combat. The females watched them without seeming to. Whenever a child came to a female, leaping onto her back or into her broad lap, he was suffered patiently; once they saw a female throw her great leg onto her child, pinning it down; the child wriggled happily, unable to free himself, while the female went on boiling something in a battered pot over the fire, moving with careful, wasteless gestures. No one spoke.

“Why don’t they say anything?’ Mika said.

“It’s only humans who talk all the time,” Loren said. “just to hear talk. Maybe the leos don’t need to. Maybe they didn’t inherit that.”

“They look cold.”

“Do you mean cold, emotionless?”

“No. They look like they’re cold.”

And as though he knew that his watchers would have just then come to see that, the mild voice began again. “Like gypsies,” he said, “like all nomads, the leos, instead of adapting their environment, adapt to it. In winter they go where it’s warm. Far south now, other prides have already made winter quarters. For these, though, there will be no move this winter. The borders of this Autonomy are closed to them. They are, technically, all of them, fugitives and criminals. Somewhere in these mountains are Federal agents, searching for them; if they find them, they will be shot on sight. They aren’t human. Due process need not be extended to them. They probably won’t be found, but it hardly matters. If they can’t move out of these snow-choked mountains, most of them will starve before game is again plentiful or huntable. This isn’t strange; far from our eyes, millions of nonhumans starve every winter.”

In half-darkness, the pride clustered around the embers of a fire and the weird orange glow of a cell heater. Some ate, with deliberate slowness, small pieces of something: dried flesh. In their great coats and plated muscle it was hard to see that any were starving. But there: held close in the arms of one huge female was a pale, desiccated child — no, it wasn’t a child; she appeared a child within the leo’s arms, but it was a human woman, still, dark-eyed: unfrightened, but seeming immensely vulnerable among these big beasts.

The image changed. A blond, beardless man, looking out at them, his chapped hands slowly rubbing each other. “We will starve with them,” he said, his mild, uninflected voice unchanged in this enormous statement. “They are what is called ‘hardy,’ which only means they take a long time to die. They have strength; they may survive. We are humans, and not hardy. There’s nothing we can do for them. Soon, I suppose, we’ll only be a burden to them. I don’t think they’ll kill us, though I think it’s within their right, When we’re dead, we will certainly be eaten.”

Again they saw the childlike girl within the leo’s great protecting arms.

“We made these beasts,” the voice said. “Out of our endless ingenuity and pride we created them. It’s only a genetic accident that they are better than we are: stronger, simpler, wiser. Maybe that was so with the blue whale too, which we destroyed, and the gorilla. It doesn’t matter; for when these beasts are gone, eliminated, like the whale, they won’t be a reproach to our littleness and meanness anymore.”

The lost king appeared again, with his gun, the same image, the same awesome repose.

“Erase this tape,” the voice said gently. “Destroy it. Destroy the evidence. I warn you.”

The king remained.

When the tape had run out, the screen flickered emptily. The three humans huddled in their chair together before the meaningless static glow, and said nothing.

(Far off, in the cluttered offices of Genesis Section, Bree Landseer too sat silent, shocked, motionless before a screen; Emma Roth’s large arm was around her, but Emma could say nothing, too full of the bitterest shame and most sinful horror she had ever felt. She, she alone, had brought this about; she had opened the doors to the hunters, the killers, the voracious — not the leos, no, but the gunmen in black coats, the spoilers, the Devil. She had delivered Meric and those beasts into the hands of the Devil. She couldn’t weep; she only held Bree, unable to offer comfort, knowing that for this sin she could not now ever see the face of God.)

“It’s not right,” Sten said. “It’s not fair. It’s not even legal.”

“Well,” Loren said. “We don’t really know the whole story. We didn’t even see the whole tape.”

Sten walked back and forth across the communications room. The screen’s voiceless note had changed to an inscrutable hum, and dim letters said TRANSMISSION DISCONTINUED.

“We could help,” Sten said.

“Help how?” Loren said.

“We could call Nashe. Tell her…”

“What? Those are Federal agents, he said.”

“We could tell her we protest. We could tell everybody. The Fed. I’ll call.”

“No, you won’t.”

Sten turned to him, puzzled and angry. “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you see them? They’ll starve. They’ll die.”

“In the first place,” Loren said, trying to sound reasonable but succeeding only in sounding cold, “we have no idea what the situation is. I’ve seen that man before. Haven’t you? He’s been on. He’s from Candy’s Mountain. He puts out propaganda, I’ve seen it, about how we should love the earth and how all animals are holy. Maybe this is just propaganda. How, anyway, did they get that tape out from wherever they are? Did you think of that?” In fact it had just occurred to Loren. “If they had the means to do that, don’t they have the means to get food in, or get out themselves?”

Sten was silent, not looking at Loren. Beside him in the chair, Mika had drawn up into a ball, the blanket drawn up around her nose. He felt that she shrank from him.

“In the second place, there’s nothing we can do. If there are Federal agents on the Preserve, presumably the Mountain let them in. It’s their business. And anyway, what do the Feds want with the leos? What do you know about leos, besides what this guy said? Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe the Feds are right.”

Sten snorted with contempt. Loren knew how remote a chance there was that the Fed was acting disinterestedly. He knew, too, that Sten did have power — not, perhaps, with Nashe, but a vaguer power, a place in people’s hearts: stronger maybe because vague. “In the third place…” In the third place, Loren felt a dread he couldn’t, or chose not to, analyze at the thought of Sten’s making himself known to the government, or to anyone; that seemed to make Sten horribly vulnerable. To what? Loren pushed aside the question. The three of them must hide quietly. It was safest. But he couldn’t say that. “In the third place, I forbid it. Just take my word. It would lead to trouble if we got involved.”

Mika squirmed out from under the blanket and stood hugging herself. Never, never would she learn to bear cold; it would remain always a deep insult, a grievous wrong. Watching the leos around their little fires, she had felt intensely the cold that bit them. “It’s horrible.”

“He’s wrong, too, you know,” Loren said softly, “about their being better than we are.” The children said nothing, and Loren went on as though arguing against their silence. “It’s like dog-lovers who say dogs are better than people, because they’re more loyal, or because they can’t lie. They do what they have to do. So do humans.”

Sten got out of the chair and went to the control panel. He began to punch up channels, idly. Each channel yielded only blank static or a whining sign-off logo.

“I don’t mean it’s right that they should be starved or hunted,” Loren said. Between the three of them a connection had been strained; the children had been deeply scandalized by what they had seen, and he must help them to think rightly about it. There was a proper perspective. “They have a right to life, I mean insofar as anything does. There are no bad guys, you know, not in life as a whole; it’s understandable, isn’t it, that people might hate and fear the leos, or be confused about them, and… Well. It’s just difficult.” He shut up. What he said wasn’t reaching them, and he felt himself trying to draw it back even as he said it; it all sounded lame and wrong after their eyes had looked into the eyes of those beasts, and those crazy martyrs. Smug, wrong-headed martyrs: as wrong as the domineering men who hunted the leos, or the USE criminals who had exiled his hawks. Taking sides was the crime; and guilt and self-effacement, taking on this kind of crazy “responsibility” — that was only the opposite of heedless waste and man-centered greed.

“What’s wrong?” Sten said. None of the channels was operating. He stopped nervously switching from one blankness to another, and without looking at Loren, left the room.

Mika still stood hugging herself. She had begun to shiver. “I thought they were monsters,” she said. “Like the fox-man.”

“They are,” Loren said. “Just the same.”

She turned on him, eyes fierce, lips tight. He knew he should mollify her, explain himself; but suddenly he too felt rigid and righteous: it was a hard lesson, about men and animals and monsters, life and death; let her figure it out.

Mika, turning on her heel and making her disgust with him obvious, left the room.

So it was only Loren, left sitting rageful and somehow ashamed in the electronic dimness, who saw the drawn face of Nashe appear very late on every channel. She was surrounded by men, some in uniForm, all wearing the stolid, self-satisfied faces of bureaucratic victors. Her voice was an exhausted whisper. Her hands shook as she turned the pages of her announcement, and she stumbled over the sentences that had been written for her. She told the Autonomy that its government was hereby dissolved; that because of serious and spreading violence, instability and disorder, the Federal government had been obliged to enter the Autonomy in force to keep the peace. The Autonomy was now a Federal protectorate. Eyes lowered, she said that she had been relieved of all powers and duties; she urged all citizens to obey the caretaker government. She folded her paper then, and thanked them. For what? Loren wondered.

When she was done, fully humiliated, she was led away from the podium and off-screen, with two men at her side, as nearly a prisoner as any thief in custody. A thick-faced man Loren remembered as having been prominent on the screens recently — one of those they had laughed at and extinguished — spoke then, and gave the venerable litany of the coup d’etat: a new order of peace and safety, public order was being maintained, citizens were to stay in their homes; all those violating a sundown curfew would be arrested, looters shot, the rest of it.

They played the old national anthem then, a scratchy, dim recording as though it were playing to them out of the far past, and the new government stood erect and listened like upright sinners to a sermon. An old film of the Federal flag was shown, the brave banner waving in some long-ago wind. It continued to wave, the only further message there would be that night from the masters, as though they were saying, like a wolf pack, Here is our mark; it is all we need to say; this place is ours, you have been warned, defy it if you dare.

The waves that the packet plane had made in its landing continued to rebound from around the lake shore and slosh gently against the pilings in arcs of coming and going.

Loren saw that the letter began with his own name, but then he rushed along the close-packed lines so fearfully and voraciously that he understood nothing of the rest of it, and had to return, calm himself, and attend to its voice. “I hope you are doing all right where you are. I couldn’t get any news for a long time and I wondered what had happened with you.” Wondered how, how often, when, with what feelings? “I’ve heard about what you’re doing, and it sounds very interesting, I wish we could talk about it. This is really very hard to write.” Loren felt like a stab the pause that must have fallen before Sten wrote that sentence; and then felt well up from the stab a flood of love and pity so that for a moment the words he looked at glittered and swam illegibly. “For a lot of reasons I can’t tell you exactly where we are now, but I wanted you to know that I’m all right and Mika is too. I know that’s not much to say after so long, but when you’re an outlaw and a murderer (that’s what I’m called now) you don’t write much down.

“I think a lot about what happened and about the fun we had alone in the house and how we were happy together. I wish it hadn’t ended. But I did what I thought I had to, and I guess so did you. It’s funny, but even though it was me who left, when I think about it it seems like it was you who ran out on me! Anyway I hope we can be friends again. As you will find out, I need all the friends I can get. I need your help. You always helped me, and whatever good I am, I owe to you. I’ve changed a lot.” It was signed “Your good friend Sten.”

Beneath his signature he had added another sentence, less like an afterthought than an admission that he had known all along he must make but which had been wrung from him only at the last moment: “I’m very very sorry about Hawk.”

For a tense and ominous week after Nashe’s fall the three of them waited for the new government to notice them. It would be like the Federal in its mindless thoroughness to attempt something against the heir of Gregorius, but nothing happened. They remained as free within the estate as they had been. People came, not sent by any government, but impelled by some need to gather at a center. They camped outside the walls or loitered in groups beyond the barred gates, looking in. They went away, others came. Still no official change in their status came.

But Sten felt a change. Where before he had felt isolated, hidden, protected even in his redoubt with Loren and Mika, safe from the consequences of his complicity in his father’s murder, now he began to feel imprisoned. The night when he had watched the leos, cut off and surrounded in their mountains, and listened to the pale powerless man admit that he and the girl would die with them, unable to struggle against it, Sten had felt torn between contempt and longing: he wanted somehow to help them; he knew he would never, never surrender like that, accede to powerlessness as that man had; and at the same time he saw that he too was as chained, as powerless as they were.

Now Nashe had given in, and the same Federal government that hunted the leos surrounded Sten, strangling him, waiting for him to starve to death. He felt a suffocating sense of urgency, a feeling that wouldn’t diminish; the more the invisible chains bound him, the harder he pressed against them.

Even Loren, now, seemed interested only in restraining him. Where before they had stood in a kind of balance, each. as it were, holding a hand of Mika’s to keep themselves stable, now they had begun to rock dangerously. Loren issued commands; Sten flouted them. Loren lectured; Sten was mum. Sten saw, shocked, that Loren was afraid; and not wanting to, he began to press Loren’s fear, as though to see if it was really real.

“Are they still out there?” Mika asked.

“Don’t acknowledge them,” Loren said. “Don’t encourage them. Don’t…”

Sten turned away from the bulletproof window of his father’s office, where he had been spying with binoculars at two or three silent, overcoated people who could be seen beyond the gate. “Why is it,” he said to Loren coldly — it was his father’s penetrating tone — “that you’re always hovering over me?”

Loren, knowing he couldn’t say “Because I love you,” said, “Don’t do anything dumb. It’s all I meant,” and left.

When he was gone, Sten took out the letter again. It had been given to him by the man who brought provisions to the house, handed to him without a word as the man left the kitchen. It wasn’t addressed. It was carelessly typed: if after the manner of men, I have struggled with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Beneath this, which Mika thought was a quote from the Bible, was a series of numbers and letters. Sten figured out, after much study, that these were geographical co-ordinates, elevations, compass directions. Perhaps he wouldn’t have given it that much study, except that carefully, childishly, scrawled at the bottom was a single letter for a signature: R.

“We should ask Loren,” Mika said.

Sten only shook his head. Why should Reynard reveal to him the place where the leos were hiding? Because Sten was sure now that this was what it was. The maps kept in his father’s office showed him the place Reynard had directed him to: a place in the mountains that bordered the Autonomy on the north, the crest of Genesis Preserve.

“Could it be,” Mika said, “that he meant we should help them? Get to them somehow, and help?”

When, in the old schoolhouse, Reynard had given him this house and this safety, even, probably, his life, in exchange for silence, he had told him: be neither predator nor prey. If that was so, he was in growing trouble here, because he was fleeing, like prey, hiding: from the government, from the people out there — from Loren. If now Reynard had directed him to rise, as from the dead, was it for the leos he was to do so? And did he dare anyway? He did, desperately, want Loren’s advice and help. But Loren had made himself clear about the leos.

“Would you dare?” he said to Mika. “Would you dare go up into the mountains, bring them food?”

Her black eyes grew round at the thought. “What will we tell Loren?”

“Nothing.” Sten felt flooded with a sudden resolve. This would be the unbinding he had been waiting for: he had been called on, and he chose to answer. With Mika, if she dared; alone, if that was how it had to be.

Mika watched him fold the letter carefully, once, again, again, as though he were laying away a secret resolve. Without looking at her, he told her the story of how their father had been killed, and what he had done, and why they had been safe in the house.

“You could stay,” he said. “You’d be safe, here, with Loren.”

She sat silent a long time. It had begun to snow again, a sleety, quick-falling snow that could be heard striking, like a breath endlessly drawn. She thought of them naked, laughing in snow,

“We could use sleds,” she said at last.

That week the telephone lines into the house were cut — perhaps by the snow, perhaps deliberately, they were given no explanation — and Loren began making weekly trips to the nearest town, nearly five miles off, to call their suppliers and to buy newspapers, to see if he could perceive some change in their status, guess what was to become of them. There was no one he trusted whom he could call, no old government official or family lawyer. He knew it was madness to try to hide this way; it couldn’t last. But when he contemplated bringing Sten to official attention, to try to get some judgment made, he shrank from it. Whatever came of it, he was certain they would somehow take him away, somehow part them. He couldn’t imagine any other conclusion.

Returning from town, he pushed his way through the small knot of people at the front gate and let himself in at the wicket. When questions were asked he only smiled and shrugged as though he were idiotic, and concentrated on passing quickly through the wicket and getting it locked again, so as not to tempt anyone to follow, and went quickly up the snow-choked road, away from their voices.

He stopped at the farmhouse and went in. A small cell heater had been brought down from the house and was kept going here always, though it barely took the chill from the stone rooms. That was all Hawk needed.

Hawk was deep in molt. He stood on his screen perch, looking scruffy and unhappy. Two primaries had fallen since Loren had last looked in on him — they fell always in pairs, one from each side, so that Hawk wouldn’t be unbalanced in flight — and Loren picked them up and put them with the others. They could be used to make repairs, if ever Hawk broke a feather; but chiefly they were saved as a baby’s outgrown shoes are saved.

The day was calm and bright, the sun almost hot. He’d take Hawk up to the perch on the lawn.

Speaking softly to him, with a single practiced motion he slipped the hood over Hawk’s face and pulled it tight — it was too stiff, it needed oiling, there was no end to this falconer’s job — and then pulled on his glove. He placed the gloved hand beneath Hawk’s train and brushed the back of his legs gently. Hawk, sensing the higher perch behind him, instinctively stepped backward, up onto the glove. He bated slightly as Loren moved his hand to take the leash, and only when Hawk was firmly settled on his wrist did Loren untie the leash that held him to the perch. As between thieves, there was honor between falconer and bird only when everything was checked and no possibility for betrayal — escape — was allowed.

He walked him in the house for a time, stroking up the feathers on his throat with his right forefinger till Hawk seemed content, and then went out into the day, blinking against the glare from the snow, and up to the perch on the wide lawn. From behind the house, he thought he heard the faint whistle of the new motorsleds being started. He tied Hawk’s leash firmly to the perch with a falconer’s one-handed knot, and brushed the perch against the back of his legs so that Hawk would step from his hand up to the perch. He unhooded him. Hawk roused and opened his beak; the inner membranes slid across his dazzled eyes. He looked with a quick motion across the lawn to where three motorsleds in quiet procession were moving beyond a naked hedge.

“What’s up?” Loren shouted, pulling off his glove and hurrying toward them. Mika, and Sten, to whose sled the third, piled up with gear wrapped in plastic, was attached, didn’t turn or stop. Loren felt a sudden, heart-sickening fear, “Wait!” Damn them, they must hear… He broke through the hedge just as the sleds turned into the snowy fields that stretched north for miles beyond the house. Loren, plowing through the beaten snow, caught Sten’s sled before Sten could maneuver his trailer into position to gather speed. He took Sten’s arm.

“Where are you going?”

“Leave me alone. We’re just going.”

Mika had stopped her sled, and looked back now, reserved, proud.

“I said where? And what’s all this stuff?”

“Food.”

“There’s enough here for weeks! What the hell…”

“It’s not for us.”

“Who, then?”

“The leos.” Sten looked away. He wore snow glasses with only a slit to look through; it made him look alien and cruel. “We’re bringing it to the leos. We didn’t tell you because you’d only have said no.”

“Damn right I would! Are you crazy? You don’t even know where they are!”

“I do.”

“How?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“And when will you come back?”

“We won’t.”

“Get out of that sled, Sten.” They had meant to sneak away, without speaking to him, without asking for help. “I said get out.”

Sten pulled away from him and began to pull at the sled’s stalled engine. Loren, maddened by this betrayal, pulled him bodily out of the sled and threw him away from it so that he stumbled in the snow, “Now listen to me. You’re not going anywhere. You’ll get this food back where it belongs — he came up behind Sten and pushed him again — “and get those sleds out of sight before… before…”

Sten staggered upright in the snow. His glasses had fallen off, but his face was still masked, with something cold and hateful Loren had never seen in it before. It silenced him.

Mika had left her sled and came toward them where they stood facing each other. She looked at Loren, at Sten. Then she came and took Sten’s arm,

“All right,” Loren said, “All right. Listen. Even if you know where you’re going. It’s against the law.” They made no response. “They’re hunted criminals. You will be too.”

“I am already,” Sten said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You wouldn’t have helped, would you?” Mika said. Even if we’d told you.”

“I would have told you what I thought.”

“You wouldn’t have helped,” she said with quiet, bitter contempt.

“No.” Even as he said it, Loren knew he had indicted himself before them, hopelessly, completely. “You just don’t throw everything up like this.

What about the animals? What about Hawk?” Fle pointed to the bird on his perch, who glanced at them when they moved, then away again.

“You take care of him,” Sten said.

“He’s not my hawk. You don’t leave your hawk to someone else. I’ve told you that.”

“All right.” Sten turned and strode through the snow to the perch.

Before Loren could see what he was doing, he had drawn a pocketknife and opened it; it glinted in the snowlight.

“No!”

Sten cut Hawk’s jesses at the leash. Loren ran toward them, stumbling in the snow,

“You little shit!”

Hawk for a moment didn’t notice any change, but he disliked all this sudden motion and shouting. He was in a mood to bate — to fly off his perch — though he had learned in a thousand bates that he would only fall, flapping helplessly head downward. Sten had taken off his jacket, and with a sudden shout waved it in Hawk’s face, Hawk, with an angry scream, flew upward, stalled, and found himself free; for a moment he thought to return to the perch, but Sten shouted and waved the jacket again, and Hawk rose up in anger and disgust. It felt odd to be free, but it was a good day to fly. He flew.

“Now,” Sten said when Loren reached him, “now he’s nobody’s hawk.”

With an immense effort, Loren stemmed a tide of awful despair that was rising in him. “Now,” he said, calmly, though his voice shook, “go down to the farm and get the long pole and the net. With the sleds, we might be able to get him after dark, He’s gone east to those trees. Sten.”

Sten pulled on his jacket and walked past Loren back to the sleds.

“Mika,” Loren said.

She stood a moment between them, hugging herself. Then, without looking back to Loren, she went to her sled too.

Loren knew he should go after them. Anything could happen to them. But he only stood and watched them struggle with the sleds, get them aligned and started. Sten gave Mika a quiet command and put his snow glasses on again. He looked back once to Loren, masked, his hands on the sticks of the sled. Then the sleds moved away with a high whisper, dark and purposeful against the snow.

“Yes,” Reynard said. “It was I who told Sten where the leos were. It was very clever of him to have worked it out.”

“And you had brought out the film, too, that we saw?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get to them, find them, without being stopped? And back again?”

Reynard said nothing, only sat opposite Loren at the water-ringed table.

“You made Sten a criminal, Why?”

“I couldn’t let the leos die,” Reynard said, “You can understand my feelings.”

Actually that was impossible. His thin, inexpressive voice could mean what it said, or the opposite, or nothing at all. His feelings were undiscoverable. Loren watched him scratch his whiskery chops with delicate dark fingers; it made a dry-grass sound. Reynard took a black cigarette from a case and lit it. Loren watched, trying to discover, in this peculiarly human gesture of lighting tobacco, inhaling smoke, and expelling it, what in Reynard was human, what not. It couldn’t be done. Nothing about the way Reynard used his cigarette was human, yet it was as practiced, casual, natural — as appropriate — as it would be in a man.

“He saved them,” Reynard said, “from death. Not only the leos, but two humans as well. Don’t you think it was brave of him? The rest of the world does.”

From his papers, reaching him usually a week late, Loren had learned of Sten’s growing fame; it was apparent even here, far north of the Autonomy. “It was very foolhardy,” was all he said.

“He took risks. There was danger. Unnecessary, maybe. Maybe if you’d been there, to help… Anyway, he brought it off.”

Loren drank. The whiskey seemed to burn his insides, as though they had already been flayed open by his feelings. He couldn’t tell the fox that he hated him because the fox had taken Sten from him. It wasn’t admissible. It wasnt even true. Sten had gone on his own to do a difficult thing, and had done it. Mika, who loved him, had gone with him. Loren had been afraid, and so he had lost Sten. Was that so, was that the account he must come to believe?

“He had you, didn’t he?” Loren said.

“Well. I’m not much good now. I was never — strong, really, and you see I’m lamed now.”

“You seem to get around.”

“I’m also,” Reynard said as though not hearing this, “getting very old. I’m nearly thirty. I never expected a life-span that long. I feel ancient.” Smoke curled from his nostrils. “There is a hunt on for me, Mr. Casauhon. There has been for a long time. I’ve thrown off the scent more than once, but it’s growing late for me. I’m going to earth.” He smiled — perhaps it was a smile — at this, and the ignored ash of his cigarette fell onto the table. “Sten will need you.”

“What is it you wanted from Sten?” Loren asked coldly. He tried to fix Reynard’s eyes, but like an animal’s they wouldn’t hold a stare. “Why did you choose him? What for?”

Reynard put out the cigarette with delicate thoroughness, not appearing to feel challenged. “Did you know,” Reynard said, “how much Sten means in the Northern Autonomy? And outside it too?” He moved slowly in his chair; he seemed to be in some pain. “There is a movement — one of the kind that men seem so easily to work up — to make Sten a kind of king.”

“King?”

“He’d make a good one, don’t you think?” His long face split again in a smile, and closed again. “That he’s an outlaw now, and hunted by the Federal, is only appropriate for a young king — a pretender. The Federal has mismanaged their chance in the Autonomy, as it had to. Sten seems to people everywhere to be — an alternative. Somehow. Some kingly how. Strong, and young, and brave — well. If there are kings — kings born — he’s one, Don’t you agree?”

From the time Loren had opened the North Star magazine he had been a subject of Sten’s, he knew that. That Sten must one day pick up a heritage that lay all around him he had always known too, though he had tried to ignore it. He felt, momentarily, like Merlin, who had trained up the boy Arthur in secrecy; saw that what he had trained Sten to be was, in fact, king. There wasn’t any other job he was suited for.

“It’s a fact about kings,” Reynard said, “That they must have around them a certain kind of person. Persons who love the king in the king, but know the man in the king. Persons for whom the king will always be king. Always. No matter what. I don’t mean toadies, or courtiers. I mean — subjects. True subjects. Without them there are no kings. Of course,”

“And you? Are you a king’s man?”

“I’m not a man.”

Already the northern afternoon was gathering in the light. Loren tried to count out the feelings contending in him, but gave it up. “Where is he now?”

“Between places. Nowhere long.” He leaned forward. His voice had grown small and exhausted, “This is a difficulty. He needs a place, a place absolutely secret, a base. Somewhere his adherents could collect. Somewhere to hide — but not a rathole.” Again, the long, yellow-toothed smile. “After all, it will be part of a legend someday.”

Loren felt poised on the edge of a high place, knowing that swarming up within him were emotions that would eventually make him step over. He drank quickly and slid the empty glass away from him on a spill of liquor. “I know a place,” he said, “I think I know a place.”

Reynard regarded him, unblinking, without much interest, it seemed, as Loren described the shot tower, where it was, how it could be gotten to; he supposed the food, the cans anyway, and the cell heater would still be there.

“When can you be there?” Reynard said when he had finished.

“Me?” Reynard waited for an answer. “Listen. I’ll help Sten, because he’s Sten, because… I owe it to him. I’ll hide him if I can, keep him from harm. But this other stuff.” He looked away from Reynard’s eyes. “I’m a scientist. I’ve got a project in hand here.” He drew in spilled liquor on the table — no, not that name, he rubbed it away. “I’m not political.”

“No.” Reynard, unexpectedly, yawned. It was a quick, wide motion like a silent bark; a string of saliva ran from dark palate to long, deepcloven tongue. “No. No one is, really.” He rose, leaning on his stick, and walked up and down the small, smelly barroom — deserted at this hour — as though taking exercise. “Geese, isn’t it? Your project.” He stopped, leaning heavily on the stick, holding his damaged foot off the ground and turning it tentatively. “Isn’t there a game, fox and geese?”

“Yes.”

“A grid, or paths…”

“The geese try to run past the fox. He catches them where paths join.

Each goose he catches has to help him catch others.”

“Ah. I’m a — collector of that kind of lore. Naturally.”

“My geese,” Loren said, “are prey for foxes.”

“Yes?”

“And they know it. They teach it — the old ones teach the young. It doesn’t seem to be imprinted — untaught goslings wouldn’t run from a fox instinctively. The older ones teach them what a fox looks like, by attacking foxes, in a body, and driving them off. The young ones learn to join in. I’ve seen my flock follow a fox for nearly a mile, honking, threatening. The fox looked very uncomfortable,”

“I’ll leave you now,” Reynard said. If he had heard Loren’s story he didn’t express it. “The plane will be going. There are still a few things I have to do.” He went to the door.

“No rest for the wicked,” Loren said.

Reynard had been walking out of the bar without farewell. He turned at the door. “Teach your goslings,” he said. “Only be sure you know who is the fox,”

When he had gone out into the pall of the afternoon — tiny, old, impossible — Loren went to wake the bartender and have his glass filled again. The letter where it lay in his breast pocket seemed to press painfully against his heart.

Nothing is more soothing to a scientist than the duplication of another scientist’s results. When Loren had left the empty brown mansion, he had thought only of a place to lose himself, a far, unpeopled place to hide; but he knew he would have to occupy himself as well, engage all his faculties in a difficult task, if he was to escape — even momentarily — the awful rain he seemed always to be standing in when he thought of Sten and Mika.

They meant what they had said: they didn’t come back. He had known they wouldn’t. After ten days had passed, and a new fall of snow had covered their traces, he called the Autonomy police and reported them suddenly missing. The police forces were in the process of being reorganized, and after some lengthy interrogations, in which he communicated as little as he could without arousing suspicion, the matter seemed to be dropped, or filed, or forgotten amid larger bureaucratic struggles. He thought once during a police interview (Federal this time) that he was about to be beaten into a confession, a confession of something; he almost wished for it: there was no one else to punish him for what he had done.

What had he done?

He drew his almost-untouched government salary, got a small, reluctant grant from Dr. Small, and went north out of the Autonomy to the breeding grounds of the Canada geese. One of the great ethologists of the last century had made extensive observations of the European greylag goose; his records were famous, and so were his conclusions, about men and animals, instinct, aggression, bonding. He had extended his conclusions to all species of the genus Anser, the true goose. The Canada goose isn’t Anser but Branta. It would take months — healing, annealing months alone — to compare the century-old observations of Anser behavior with that of Branta. The resulting paper would be a small monument, a kind of extrusion out of misery, like an oyster’s pearl.

Reading again the old man’s stories — for that’s what they seemed to be, despite their scientific apparatus, stories of love and death, grief and joy — what Loren felt was not the shocking sense its first readers had, that men are nothing more than beasts, their vaunted freedoms and ideals an illusion — the old, old reaction of the men who first read Darwin — but the opposite. What the stories seemed to say was that beasts are not less than men: less ingenious in expression, less complex in possibility, but as complete; as feeling; as capable of overmastering sorrow, hurt, rage, love.

The center of greylag life is the triumph ceremony, a startlingly beautiful enchainment of ritualized fighting, redirected aggression, a thousand interlocking, self-generating calls and responses. The geese perform this ceremony in pairs, bonded for life; bonded by the dance. The old man had said: the dance does not express their love; the dance is their love. When one of a pair is lost — caught in electric wires, shot, trapped — the other will search ceaselessly for it, calling in the voice a lost gosling calls its mother. Sometimes, after much time, they will bond again, begin again; sometimes never.

Mostly the pairs are male-female, but often they are male-male; in this case there is sometimes a satellite female, lover of one of the males, who will be satisfied to share their love, and can intrude herself sufficiently into their triumphs to be mounted and impregnated. This isn’t the only oddity of their bonding: there are whole novels among them of attempted bondings, flawed affairs, losses, rivalries, heartbreaks.

Loren had seen much of this among his geese, though their social life seemed frozen at an earlier, less complex state; their ceremonies were less expressive; their emotions, therefore — from the observer’s point of view — were less extensive. He had carefully noted and analyzed ritual behavior, knew his flock well, and had seen them court, raise young, meet threats, in a kind of stable, unexciting village life. Whether beneath the squabbles and satisfactions of daily life a richer current ran — as it does in every village — didn’t interest him as a scientist. Unexpressed needs and feelings were either unfelt or unformed; they couldn’t be analyzed.

Yet he wanted them to tell him more. Was Anser more human than Branta, or had the old man’s stories been only parables in the end, like Aesop’s?

He had told of two males, both at the top of the flock hierarchy, who had bonded, who danced only for each other. The proudest, the strongest, they had no rivals, no outsiders from whom to protect each other; few came near them. Their ceremony — change and change again — became more and more intense; they did it for hours. At last the weight of emotion that the ceremony carried became too great; the aggression that it modeled and ritualized became too intense, having no other outlet, The ritual broke into real, unmediated aggression; the birds bit and beat at each other with strong wings, inflicting real wounds.

The bond was broken. Immediately after, the two birds parted — went to opposite sides of the pond, avoided each other. Never performed for each other again. Once, when by error they encountered each other face to face in the middle of the pond, each immediately turned away, grooming excitedly, bill-shaking, in a state the old man said could only be described as intense embarrassment.

“Could only be described,” Loren said aloud to the frosty night, “as intense embarrassment.” The mule jogged, Loren swayed drunkenly. “Intense. Embarrassment.”

How could he see Sten again? If they met, wouldn’t there be between them an embarrassment that would make any communication impossible? Seeing him again, having him before his eyes again, had been Loren’s obsession for months; but now that he had been invited to it, for real, he could only imagine that he would be full of shame and hurt and embarrassment. Better to let the enormous engine of his love, disengaged from its object, grind and spin on uselessly within him till it finally ran out of fuel or fell to pieces, to silence.

Yet Sten had sent for him, He groaned aloud at the stars. Far down within him he seemed to see — whiskey, only whiskey, he told himself — a possibility he had long discounted, a possibility for happiness after pain.

The next morning, to cleanse himself of shame and hope and the sour humors of the whiskey, he plunged naked up to his neck in the icy river, shouting, trying to shout out all the impurity he felt within; he splashed his face, rubbed his neck, waded onto the shore, and stood shivering fiercely. By an act of will he ceased shivering. There wasn’t any weakness, any impatience, any badness in him that he couldn’t, by a similar act of will, overcome.

Quieter then, he dressed, slipped the canoe, and started upriver. The river was low and slow; leaves floated on it, fell continuously on it, clogged its tributaries. Dense clouds were pillowed at the horizon, and overhead a high, fast wind, so high it couldn’t be felt below, marked the October blue with chalk marks of cloud, Summer was long over here. Last night’s frost had been hard,

During that week, his geese were restless, rising up in a body, circling for a time, realighting excited and nervous. It was as though his peaceful village had been swept by a bizarre religious mania, Old quarrels were forgotten. Nest sites were left unguarded. They were aligning themselves, making a flying force, The time had come for their migration. On Monday — the day that he would have gone into town — he awoke before dawn, and had barely time to dress before he saw that this would be the day of their leaving.

Loren had identified the commodore and his lieutenants (they were called that in his notes, though they would not be in his final paper) and noted their strategy meetings and route conferences. Now in the dawn the hair stood on Loren’s neck: was it because, over the months, he had become almost one of them that he knew with such certainty that this was the day — had it been communicated to him as it had been to each of them, did his certainty add to the growing mass of their certainty, inciting them to fly?

All that morning he photographed and noted, ill almost with excitement, as they knitted their impulses together. Again and again small groups pounded into the air, circled, alighted, reascended. About noon the commodore and some of the ranking members of his staff, male and female, arose, honking, and sailed off purposefully, making a tentative, ragged V: maneuvers. They didn’t return; with his glasses, Loren scanned from the crook of a tall tree, and saw them waiting in a water-meadow somewhat northeast. The rest still honked and argued, getting up nerve. Then the commodore and his staff flew back, sailing low and compellingly over the flock, going due south; and in a body the others were drawn after them, rising in a multiple fan of black and brown wings, attaching themselves.

For as long as he could, Loren followed them with the glasses, watched their V form neatly against the hard blue sky marked with wind. They were wind. They were gone.

Alone again, Loren sat in the crook of the tree. Their wings’ thunder and their cries had left a new void of silence. Winter seemed suddenly palpable, as though it walked the land, breathing coldly. He remembered winter.

After Sten and Mika had gone out of sight, he had spent that day searching for Hawk on snowshoes, with lure and net and pole; walked himself to exhaustion through the woods, purposelessly, having no idea where Hawk might go and seeing no trace of him, If he had found a dead bird, if he had seen blood on the snow, he would have gone on, not eating, not sleeping; but he saw nothing. Night was full when he came back to the empty house, almost unable to stand; the pain, though, had been driven almost wholly to his legs and feet, where he could bear it.

Once inside, however, in the warm, lamplit emptiness, it took him again head to toe. He dropped the useless hawking gear. He would find, capture, hold, nothing, no one. He climbed the stairs, almost unable to bend his knees, and went to Sten’s room, He didn’t turn on the light. He smelled the place, the discarded clothing, the polished leather, the books, Sten, He felt his way to the narrow bed and lay down, pressing his face into the pillow, and wept.

All the wild things fly away from me, he thought now, in the crook of the tree by the empty river. Every wild thing that I love. If they don’t know how to fly, I teach them.

Wiping the cold tears from his beard, he climbed down from the tree and stood in the suddenly pointless encampment. Stove, tent, supplies, canoe. Shirt drying on a branch. Camera, recorder, notebooks. He had tried to make a home in the heart of the wild, to be quiet there and hear its voice. But there was no home for him there.

Methodically, patiently, he broke camp. Like the geese, but far more slowly, he would go south. Unlike them, he was free not to; and yet he knew there was nothing else he could do.