Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [73]
All the animals in the park were pretty skittish by now, and the gibbons and siamangs were no exception. At the least noise someone in the gibbon gang would shout some kind of warning (often a loud “Aaack!,” as in the comic strip Cathy) and then they would tarzan away with only a few muffled calls to indicate even what direction they had gone. Typically they moved fifty to a hundred yards before resettling; so if they spooked, Frank usually shifted his hunt to some other animal. You couldn’t beat brachiation in a forest.
He would work his way down Rock Creek, headed for the waterhole overlook. FOG had put a salt lick on the edge of the water. He was careful in his final approach, because the overlook itself had been marked by big paw prints, feline in appearance but large, huge in fact—like sign of the missing jaguar, still unsighted, or at least unreported. Or maybe the prints were of one of the forest’s smaller cats, the snow leopard or lynx or the native bobcat. In any case not a good animal to catch by surprise. Sometimes he even approached the overlook clutching his hand axe, reassured by the heft of it.
Once there he could watch the animals below, drinking warily and taking licks of the salt lick. On this morning he saw two of the tiny tamarins, a gazelle, an okapi, and the rhinoceros, all radio-tagged already. The day before he had seen a trio of red wolves bring down a young eland.
After the waterhole he explored, striking out to get mildly lost, in the process checking out the tributaries in Rock Creek’s rippled watershed. Stealthy walking in the hope of spotting animals: again, as with the heft of the hand axe, or the swaying of his tree in the wind, it felt familiar to his body, as if he had often done it before. Used to things he had never done. Stalking—paparazzi following movie stars—
Slink of gray flashing over the creek.
In his memory he reconstructed the glimpse. Silvery fur; something like a fisher or minx. Bounding over the rocks in a hurry.
Around a corner he came on the hapless tapirs, rooting in the mud. This forest floor did not have what they needed, and Frank had heard they were living off care packages provided by the zoo staff and FOG members. Some people argued that this meant they should be recaptured. Only animals that could make their way in the forest on their own should be considered for permanent feral status, these people argued.
Of course many of the feral species were tropical or semitropical. Already there was a lot of debate about what to do when winter came. Possibly the feral project for these creatures would come to an end; although it wasn’t clear exactly how some of them could be recaptured.
Well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. For now, GPS the tapirs, add them to his FOG phone’s log. So far his list included forty-three non-native species, from aardvarks to zebras. Then trudge out west to his van, to drive over the river to Optimodal. Often all this would happen and he would still get to the gym before seven.
After that, the day got more complicated. No meetings at eight, so a quick visit to the Optimodal weight room. If he ran into Diane, they worked out together. That was habitual, and it was getting a little complicated, actually. Not that it wasn’t fun, because it was. Her hand on his arm: it was interesting. But friendly conversations and shared workouts with a woman at the gym suggested a certain kind of relationship, and when the woman in question was also one’s boss—also single, or at least known to have been widowed several years before—there was no way to avoid certain little implications that seemed to follow, expressed by the ways in which they didn’t meet each other’s eye or discuss various matters, also little protocols and courtesies, steering clear of what might be more usual behaviors in the gym situation. He often began a workout feeling he was too preoccupied by other concerns to think about this matter; but quickly enough it was unavoidable.