Harry Turtledove: Reincarnations

You and your daughter get out. You spray each other with insect repellent and rub it on your cheeks and forehead. A few mosquitoes buzz lazily. Only a few: it’s early yet, and cool, and you’re not very far out onto the tundra. But Alaska mosquitoes are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Even a few are too many. A postcard on a rack at the Nugget Inn shows the business end of one silhouetted against a sunset, with the legend ALASKA’S STATE BIRD. Kidding, but kidding on the square.

Strapped binoculars thumping against your chests, the two of you walk over to the pool. Except for your footfalls and the wind in the dwarf willows, everything is quiet. Your ears don’t know what to do with silence. Always something in L.A. An airplane overhead. Distant traffic. A neighbor’s TV. Not loud, but always there.

Two brown shapes swimming in the pool. "Ducks?" your daughter says doubtfully.

You raise your binoculars. "Beavers!"

They don’t give a damn about you. One swims to the edge of the pool, not twenty feet away. It’s a female; it has teats. It strips off some willows branches and drags them into the water, not very far, to eat. It crunches as it chews. Who would have thought beavers were noisy eaters? Who would have thought you’d find out?

"Wow." Not much more than a whisper from your daughter. She goes on, a little louder, "I wish Mom could have seen this."

"Yeah." These past few days, you’ve walked out on the tundra. Most of it is springy and yielding underfoot. If you come down wrong, though, you fill your shoe with freezing water. You feel that way now. Two years ago, your wife lost what everybody called a brave battle against breast cancer. You don’t argue. What point? You know how scared she was at the end, and in how much pain. Was that bravery? Perhaps it was. You go, "I-" and stop short.

One word too many. Your daughter sets her chin the way you do. "You were going to say something like, ‘I wish Dave could have come along,’ weren’t you?"

"Well…" You don’t deny it, but you don’t admit it, either. One word!

"Cheating prick." Your daughter is going through a divorce. They both teach at the state university, Dave in linguistics, your daughter in anthropology. Dave is dating someone younger, someone blonder, someone altogether more tractable. Someone less like you, in other words.

You always liked him before the mess started. You still do, till you catch yourself and remember you shouldn’t. Your daughter knows it. It pisses her off, bigtime. You can hardly blame her. Still… Dave was a pretty good guy. Is a pretty good guy, even if you won’t get to see him much anymore. Not perfect. You knew that all along, even if you aren’t sure your daughter did. But pretty good. With the world the way it is, that’s often more than enough.

Not this time. Too bad.

You raise your binoculars against these thoughts and this conversation. The Bushnells channel vision and attention away from dangerous places. Something-two somethings- swimming at the far end of the pool. Your right index finger slides to the center-focusing knob. "Ducks," you say, and then, nailing them, "Harlequin ducks."

"Where?" your daughter asks.

"Scan along the far bank till you see it poke out. They’re just in front of that, a little to the left."

"I’ve got ‘em," she says a moment later. "The male is nice."

"He is," you say. His head, blank and cinnamon with bold white spots, gives the ducks their name. "Everything’s in breeding plumage up here."

"One more for the list," your daughter says. Harlequin ducks are life birds for both of you. Even in their duller winter feathers, they don’t come down the Pacific coast as far as L.A. Your daughter’s list is longer than yours. Not a lot, but it is. You’ve been birding since before she was born, but she goes at it with a passionate dedication you never found.

"Anything else?" you say. "Shall we go on?"

She’s checking the south edge of the pool. When she spots something, she freezes. Then she laughs and lowers the binoculars. "Couple of white-crowns hopping around under the willows."

"Oh, boy." You’ve come 3,000 miles to see more of the cheeky little sparrows that mob your backyard feeders every winter.

Back into the car, then. You glance at the side-view mirror before pulling out. It’s a big-city habit, more useful here than a third leg or a fifth wheel, but not much. Nothing coming either way as far as the eye can see. You’re the only two people for miles.

"Pot-" your daughter starts. Too late. Thump. Your front teeth click together. "-hole."

Patches of snow-or is it ice?-lie on the hillsides. A little creek that runs down by the side of the road starts from one of them. Farther on, you come to a bridge over a real river. NO FISHING FROM BRIDGE, a sign in front of it says. You can barely make out the words. Plinkers have colandered the sign and chipped away a lot of enamel. What better place to plink than somewhere like this?

North and north again. You can’t go faster than forty, not if you want to have any kidneys left at the end of the day. No hurry any which way. You stop every few miles to bird. Your daughter says she sees a hawk on some lichen-spattered rocks. You stop the car. You both get out.

"I think it’s just another rock," you say. You raise the binoculars. It still looks like a rock. A dapper Lapland longspur hops near the bottom of the rockpile. He doesn’t notice anything dangerous, either.

"It’s a hawk," your daughter insists. The two of you walk towards it. It takes wing and flies off across the tundra. Your daughter grins. "Too small to be a peregrine or a gyrfalcon."

"Female merlin, I think," you say.

Her lips purse. She weighs size, color, shape. "Sounds right. That’s another lifer for you, isn’t it? I saw one up in Santa Barbara last year."

"One more checkmark in the Sibley," you say. A birder without a guide is like a minister without a Bible. "You’ve got mosquitoes on your hat."

"Damn!" She taps the brim. Some of them fly off. Some stay put. She looks your way. "So do you, Dad."

You go through the same routine. Chances are it does the same amount of good-some, but not enough. You both try it again before you get back into the rental. You still have buzzing company after you close the doors. Your daughter squashes one mosquito after another against the inside of the windshield with a kleenex.

"There you go," you say.

She nails another one-maybe the last. Then she says, "Mom wouldn’t have liked this part. She never could stand bugs."

"No." Your hands tighten on the wheel. Joints in palms and fingers twinge. Driving doesn’t bother you most of the time, but you have to hold on tight here. You could let your daughter drive, but she makes a better spotter and navigator than you would. And you’re used to driving when the two of you go somewhere together; you’ve been doing it since before she knew how.

Another river, wider than the last. You stop just beyond it. With running water, with trees and bushes on the banks, with mosquitoes and other insects buzzing above the stream and fish in it, rivers are great places for birds, and for birders. The scrubby willows here are trees, or almost; they’re twelve, sometimes even fifteen, feet tall.

Something perches in the top of a distant one. Dark back, rusty belly… You swing your binoculars towards it as if they were a nineteenth-century naturalist’s shotgun. "Varied thrush!"

"Where?" Your daughter’s voice rises. This is another bird you both want.

You point it out to her. "You can see the black band across its breast."

She scans till she finds it. "I don’t see that," she says slowly, and then, "Dad… it’s got a yellow beak."

"No way!" But you look again. It does-and it doesn’t have the black breastband you were sure it did. You saw what you wanted to see, not what was there. "Well, hell. I keep wanting varied thrushes, and I keep getting robins."