Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [120]
The zoo staff and FOG were now recapturing every endangered feral they could. The ones that remained elusive, or seemed to be doing okay, were aided by heated feeding stations. These were mostly simple two-walled shelters, Ls with their open sides facing south. Frank helped build some, lifting panels and beams of playground plastic to be screwed into place. A few shelters were three-walled, and had trap doors suspended over their open sides, so that the zoo staff could capture animals inside them. None of the FOG members liked it, but it beat a mass die-off.
So now there were parts of the park that seemed like an open-air or unwalled zoo, with animals of many different species hanging out near the shelters and visiting when their kind of food was put out. It looked to Frank like these creatures felt they had returned to the zoo already, and were content to be there.
But not all the ferals came in from the cold. And some of the stubbornest animals were among those least capable of surviving. The gibbons and siamangs were only going to the shelters that did not have trapdoors, and leaving them as soon as they had eaten. The gibbons continued to brachiate through the leafless trees. The siamangs had been seen walking around, their long arms raised over their heads to keep them from dragging on the ground; it looked like they were trying to find someone to surrender to, but if they saw people approaching they tarzanned away at high speed.
Both species were also now joining the ferals who were venturing out of the park into the residential neighborhoods nearby, finding sources of heat and food on their own; one siamang had been electrocuted while sleeping on a transformer, but now the rest didn’t do that anymore. The gibbons Bert and May and their sons had been reported sleeping in a kid’s backyard tree house.
“If they obviously don’t want to be recaptured,” Frank said to Nancy, “then we should help them from the shelters and let them stay feral.” He knew most of the FOG membership felt the same.
But Nancy only said, “I’m afraid that unless we bring them in, we’ll lose a lot of them.”
December days were too short. He tried to get in a brief animal walk at dawn; then it was over to work, where things were hectic as always. Along with the Gulf Stream project, Frank’s committee was involved with organizing a series of trials of various clean energy sources, especially solar; they were trying to determine which was closest to ready for mass production, the latest photovoltaics or flexible mirrors that redirected sunlight to elements that transformed the heat to electricity. Both showed some promise, and trials of the Stirling transformer were making the mirrors look unexpectedly competitive, although the various photovoltaics were always gaining in efficiency, and getting cheaper too. It seemed that one system or other might soon be ready for mass deployment, which would greatly reduce the amount of carbon still being tossed into the atmosphere.
Into these and other matters Frank threw himself, and the work days passed in their usual rush; and then in the dusk, or in full dark, he hiked down into the park and climbed his hanging ladder.
Recline on his groundpad, then, in the open doorway of his tent. Only when it was windy did he retreat fully inside. As long as the air remained still, his heavy sleeping bag had kept him warm on climbs in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic; it would do the same here. And the nights were too beautiful to miss. The highest branches spiked around him like a forest of giant thorns, the stars brilliant through their black calligraphy. He watched the stars, and read his laptop, or a paperback set under the lantern, until sleep came on him; then snuggled into the bag; slept well; woke serene, to the sight of the treetops bobbing and rustling on the dawn breeze. Lines of blackbirds flew out of town to look for food, under a flat sky of pewter and lead. Really the important thing was to be out in the world, to feel the wind and see the full spaciousness of being on a planet whirling through space.