Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

The quiet neighborhood between Rock Creek Park and Connecticut Avenue was looking more withdrawn than ever. It had always been empty-seeming compared to most of D.C., but now three or four houses had burned and not been rebuilt, and others were still boarded up from the time of the great flood. At night these dark houses gave the whole place an eerie cast.

Some of the dark houses gleamed at the cracks or smoked from the chimneys, and if after a dusk hike in the ravine Frank was hungry, or wanted company, he would call up Spencer and see if he was in any of these places. Once when Spencer answered they established that he was inside the very house Frank was looking at.

In Frank went, uncertain at first. But he was a familiar face now, so without further ado he helped to hold a big pot over the fire, ate broiled steak, and ended up banging on the bottom of an empty trash can while Spencer percussed his chair and sang. Robert and Robin showed up, ate, sang duets to Robert on guitar, then pressed Spencer and Frank to go out and play a round of night golf.

It was full moon that night, and once they got going, Frank saw that they didn’t need to see to play their course. They had played it so many times that they knew every possible shot, so that when they threw they could feel in their bodies where the frisbee was going to land, could run to that spot and nine times out of ten pick it up. Although on that night they did lose one of Robert’s, and spent a few minutes looking for it before Spencer cried, as he always did in this situation, “LO AND BEHOLD,” and they were off again.

Socks and shoes got wet with melted snow. No snowshoes tonight, and so he leaped through drifts and abandoned his feet to their soggy fate. On a climbing expedition it would have meant disaster. But in the city it was okay. There was even a certain pleasure in throwing caution to the wind and crashing through great piles of snow, snow which ranged from powder to concrete.

Then in one leap he hooked a foot and crashed down onto a deer’s layby, panicking the creature, who scrambled under him. Frank tried to leap away too, slipped and fell back on the doe; for a second he felt under him the warm quivering flank of the animal, like a woman trying to shrug off a fur coat. His shout of surprise seemed to catapult them both out of the hole in different directions, and the guys laughed at him. But as he ran on he could still feel in his body that sudden intimacy, the kinetic jolt: a sudden collision with a woman of another species!

Power outages were particularly hard on the few feral exotics still out in this second winter. The heated shelters in Rock Creek Park were still operating, and they all had generators for long blackouts, but the generators made noise, and belched out their noxious exhaust, and none of the animals liked them, even the humans. On the other hand, the deep cold of these early spring nights could kill, so many animals hunkered down in the shelters when the worst cold hit, but they were not happy. It would have been better simply to be enclosed, Frank sometimes felt; or rather it was much the same thing, as they were chained to the shelters by the cold. So many different animals together in one space—it was so beautiful and unnatural, it never failed to strike Frank.

Such gatherings gave the zoo’s zoologists a chance to do all kinds of things with the ferals, so the FOG volunteers who were cold-certified were welcomed to help. With Frank’s help, Nick was now the youngest cold-certified member of FOG, which seemed to please him in his quiet way. Certainly Frank was pleased—though he also tried to be there whenever Nick was out on FOG business in extreme cold, to make sure nothing went wrong. Hard cold was dangerous, as everyone had learned by now. The tabloids were rife with stories of people freezing in their cars at traffic lights, or on their front doorsteps trying to find the right key, or even in their own beds at night when an electric blanket failed. There were also regular Darwin Award winners out there, feeding the tabloids’ insatiable hunger for stupid disaster. Frank wondered if a time would come when people got enough disaster in their own lives that they would no longer feel a need to vampire onto others’ disasters. But it did not seem to have happened yet.

Frank and Nick got back into a pattern in which Frank dropped by on Saturday mornings and off they would go, sipping from the steaming travel cups of coffee and hot chocolate Anna had provided. They started at the shelter at Fort de Russey, slipping in from the north. On this morning they spotted, among the usual crowd of deer and beaver, a tapir that was on the zoo’s wanted list.

They called it in and waited uneasily for the zoo staff to arrive with the dart guns and nets and slings. They had a bad history together on this front, having lost a gibbon that fell to its death after Frank hit it with a trank dart. Neither mentioned this now, but they spoke little until the staffers arrived and one of them shot the tapir. At that the other animals bolted, and the humans approached. The big RFID chip was inserted under the tapir’s thick skin. The animal’s vital signs seemed good. Then they decided to take it in anyway. Too many tapirs had died. Nick and Frank helped hoist the animal onto a gurney big enough for all of them to get a hand on. They carried the unconscious beast through the snow like its pallbearers. From a distant ridge, the aurochs looked down on the procession.

After that, the two of them hiked down the streambed to the zoo itself. Rock Creek had frozen solid, and was slippery underfoot wherever it was flat. Often the ice was stacked in piles, or whipped into a frothy frozen meringue. The raw walls of the flood-ripped gorge were in a freeze-thaw cycle that left frozen spills of yellow mud splayed over the ribbon of creek ice.

Then it was up and into the zoo parking lot. The zoo itself was just waking up in the magnesium light of morning, steam frost rising from the nostrils of animals and the exhaust vents of heating systems; it looked like a hot springs in winter. There were more animals than people. Compared to Rock Creek it was crowded, however, and a good place to relax in the sun, and down another hot chocolate.

The tigers were just out, lying under one of their powerful space heaters. They wouldn’t leave it until the sun struck them, so it was better now to visit the snow leopards, who loved this sort of weather, and indeed were creatures who could go feral in this biome and climate. There were people in FOG advocating this release, along with that of some of the other winterized predator species, as a way of getting a handle on the city’s deer infestation. But others at the zoo objected on grounds of human (and pet) safety, and it didn’t look like it would happen anytime soon. The zoo got enough grief already for its support of the feral idea; advocating predators would make things crazy.

After lunch they would hitch a ride from a staffer back up to Frank’s van, or snowshoe back to it. If the day got over the freezing mark, the forest would become a dripping rainbow world, tiny spots of color prisming everywhere.

Then back to the Quiblers, where Nick would have homework, or tennis with Charlie. On some days Frank would stay for lunch. Then Charlie would see him off: “So—what are you going to do now?”

“Well, I don’t know. I could…”

Long pause as he thought it over.

“Not good enough, Frank. Let’s hear you choose.”

“Okay then! I’m going to help the Khembalis move stuff out to their farm!” Right off the top of his head. “So there.”

“That’s more like it. When are you going to see the doctor again?”

Glumly: “Monday.”

“That’s good. You need to find out what you’ve got going on there.”