Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [157]
So he could read. He could sit in a coffee shop and read his book, and no one would have any reason to object. Or he could go work out at the club. Or . . .
He was still standing aimlessly at the corner of Connecticut and Tilden when his cell phone rang.
It was Nick Quibler. School had been cancelled for the day, and he was wondering if Frank was available to go on a FOG hunt.
“I sure am,” Frank croaked. “Thanks for thinking of it.”
WHEN CHARLIE GOT HOME FROM THE grocery store, where the shelves had been largely empty, Anna and Joe were out, but Nick was already back, playing his gameboy.
“Hey Nick, how was your FOG trip with Frank?”
“Oh. Well, it wasn’t a big accident.”
“Uh oh.” This phrase was a family joke, recalling a time when a much younger Nick had tried to delay telling his parents about something bad he had caused to happen at preschool; but this time Nick wasn’t smiling. Curiously focused on his gameboy, in fact. “What do you mean it wasn’t a big accident?”
“Well, you know. No people got hurt.”
“That’s good, but what did happen?”
“Well. You know. It wasn’t so good for one of the gibbons.”
“Uh oh, how so?”
“One died.”
“Oh no! How did it happen?” Hand to Nick’s shoulder; Nick stayed focused on the game. “What happened, bud?”
“Well you see, it’s too cold for them now.”
“I bet! That’s true for a lot of the animals, right?”
“Right. And so they have these heated shelters out in the park, and all the animals are using them now, but some of the animals are hard to catch even when they do use them. The gibbons and siamangs are like that, they sit on the roofs and run away if you try to get close, and some of them have died. They found two of them frozen. So they decided they better try to capture the ones still out there, before they died too.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yeah, but they’re really hard to get near. They swing through the trees? It’s really cool. So you have to kind of hunt them down if you want to, you know.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah. You have to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart.”
“Oh yeah. I used to see that on Wild Kingdom.”
“They do it on Animal Planet all the time.”
“Do they. That’s good to know. That’s continuity. But I remember one time when I was a kid, this hippo got out of Lion Country Safari, and they shot it with too much.”
“No, not that.”
“What then?”
“Well, they’re always up in the trees. And Frank is the only one who can really get very close to them.”
“Ha. Our Frank is something.”
“Yeah, he can sound just like them. And he can walk without making any noise. It’s really cool.”
“How the heck does he do that?”
“He looks where he’s going! I mean he walks along and his face is pointed right down at the ground most of the time.”
“Like a dog?”
“No, more like a bird. He’s always looking around, zip zip, you know.”
“Ah yeah. And so?”
“So we were up by Military Road and we got a call that someone had spotted a gibbon pair near the Nature Center going down toward the creek, so we went down the creekbed, you can walk right on the ice, and we got in those rocks down by the creek?”
“Which?”
“The Nook and Cranny rocks, you can see through the cranny upstream, and so we laid in wait for a while and—”
“What do you do when you’re lying in wait?”
“We just stand there real quiet. You can be careful about how you breathe, it’s pretty cool.”
“Ah yeah. And so then?”
“So then three gibbons came past us, and they weren’t up very high and Frank had the gun balanced on the Nook and was ready for them. He shot one right in the