Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [29]
“People are already fond of the flood,” Edgardo said. “It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.”
“Nevertheless,” Diane said, with a grimace that was still somehow cheerful or amused. Scaring politicians might be something she looked forward to.
Given all that he had to do at work, Frank didn’t usually get away as early as he would have liked. But the June days were long, and with the treehouse finished there was no great rush to accomplish any particular task. Once in the park, he could wander up the West Ridge Trail and choose where to drop deeper to the east, looking for animals. Just north of Military Road the trail ran past the high point of the park, occupied by the site of Fort DeRussey, now low earthen bulwarks. One evening he saw movement inside the bulwarks, froze: some kind of antelope, its russet coloring not unlike the mounded earth, its neck stretched as it pulled down a branch with its mouth to strip off leaves. White stripes running diagonally up from its white belly. An exotic for sure. A feral from the zoo, and his first nondescript!
It saw him, and yet continued to eat. Its jaw moved in a rolling, side-to-side mastication; the bottom jaw was the one that stayed still. It was alert to his movements, and yet not skittish. He wondered if there were any general feral characteristics, if escaped zoo animals were more trusting or less than the local natives. Something to ask Nancy.
Abruptly the creature shot away through the trees. It was big! Frank grinned, pulled out his FOG phone and called it in. The cheap little cell phone was on something like a walkie-talkie or party line system, and Nancy or one of her assistants usually picked up right away. “Sorry, I don’t really know what it was.” He described it the best he could. Pretty lame, but what could he do? He needed to learn more. “Call Clark on phone 12,” Nancy suggested, “he’s the ungulate guy.” No need to GPS the sighting, being right in the old fort.
He hiked down the trail that ran from the fort to the creek, paralleling Military Road and then passing under its big bridge, which had survived but was still closed. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, with Beach Drive gone and all the roads crossing the park either gone or closed for repairs. A sanctuary.
Green light in the muggy late afternoon. He kept an eye out for more animals, thinking about what might happen to them in the abrupt climate change Kenzo said they were now entering. All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.
He walked south on a route that stayed on the rim of the damaged part of the gorge as much as possible. When he came to site 21 he found the homeless guys there as usual, sitting around looking kind of beat.
“Hey, Doc! Why aren’t you playing frisbee? They ran by just a while ago.”
“Did they? Maybe I’ll catch them on their way back.”
Frank regarded them; hanging around in the steamy sunset, smoking in their own fire, empties dented on the ground around them. Frank found he was thirsty, and hungry.
“Who’ll eat pizza if I go get one?”
Everyone would. “Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with a hoarse laugh that falsely insinuated this was a joke.
Frank hiked out to Connecticut and bought thin-crusted pizzas from a little stand across from Chicago’s. He liked them because he thought the owner of the stand was mocking the thick pads of dough that characterized the pizzas in the famous restaurant. Frank was a thin-crust man himself.
Back into the dusky forest, two boxes held like a waiter. Then pizza around the fire, with the guys making their usual desultory conversation. The vet always studying the Post’s federal news section did indeed appear well-versed in the ways of the