Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [97]
“I was not sleeping. I don’t sleep much.”
“You sounded like you were sleeping.”
“No.”
“Maybe you were dreaming.”
“No. What wrong?”
“I was thinking about all the animals that are in trouble. In danger of extinction. Thoreau was writing about the predators being wiped out.”
“Ah well. You still see animals in park?”
“Yes, but mostly just deer now.”
“Ah well.”
Rudra fell back asleep. After a while Frank drifted into uneasy dreams. Then he was awake again and thinking about Diane. He wasn’t going to fall asleep; it was four. He got up and made his way out of the treehouse and across the farm to his van. Back into the city, down Connecticut from the already-crowded Beltway. Left on Brandywine, park on Linnean, get out and cross Broad Branch, and thus out into Rock Creek Park.
He hiked around the rim of the new gorge, and saw nothing but a single deer. He hiked up to Fort de Russey, back down on the eastern wild way, and saw nothing but a trio of deer, standing upslope like wary statues. He decided as he watched them that he would be the predator—that he would scare these creatures, and at the same time test his ability, and see how long he could keep them in sight, not as a stalker, but a predator in pursuit. He set the timer on his wristwatch to zero, clicked it and took off after them, up the open forest floor with its black soil underfoot, sprinting hard. They bolted over the nearest ridge, he flew up to it—no deer to be seen! Empty forest! But where had they—he stopped his watch. 4.82 seconds. He barked a laugh and stood there for a while, panting.
When he started walking again he headed toward Site 21, to see if the guys were there and check in with his treehouse.
Except from a distance he saw that something was wrong with it. He ran to it, trying to understand the gap in the air. When he got to it he saw it had been cut down.
He inspected the trunk. Cut by a chain saw, a smallish one it seemed by the sweep of the cut marks. The tree had fallen across Rock Creek; you could have used the trunk as a bridge over the stream. Maybe someone had needed a bridge. But no. You could cross the creek almost anywhere.
The treehouse itself was part of the wreckage on the other bank. At some point last year he had removed all of his gear except for the winch.
He crossed the creek on his boulder path, took a look; the winch was now gone. Only the plywood sheets and two-by-fours were left, all now horribly askew, with some of the plywood loose on the ground.
He sat down next to these fragments. They were just sticks. He was never going to have lived in this treehouse again. So it didn’t matter.
Edward Cooper had probably done this, or had it done. Of course it might have been total strangers, looking to scavenge whatever the treehouse might have held, like for instance the winch. Surely this Cooper would have left the winch as part of his revenge, as mockery. But maybe not. He didn’t really know. There seemed to be a pattern—computer, kayak, van. His stuff and his life. It looked like deliberate action.
He didn’t know what to do.
ONE SATURDAY THE QUIBLERS got to a project they had been planning for some time, which was the installation of garden beds in the backyard. No more suburban lawn wasting their yard space!
And indeed it was a great pleasure to Charlie to cut big rectangles of turf out of the backyard and wheelbarrow these out to the street for disposal by the composting trucks. He was sick of mowing that yard. There was some old lumber stacked at the back of the garage, and now he and Nick laid lengths of it down in the remaining lawn to serve as borders. Then they transferred many wheelbarrow loads of expensive amended soil from the pile in the driveway where the dump trunk had left it, around the house to the rectangles, dodging Joe at many points along the way. The resulting raised beds were loamy and black and looked highly productive and artificial. The grass in between the beds was going to be difficult to cut, Charlie realized, and he envisioned transitioning entirely to mulch between