There’s a story about the red belt, and why Fisher-Bird’s got one and her husband doesn’t. There’s always a story. I don’t say this one’s true.
Time was, Fisher-Bird was perched on a branch over the stream, looking at the fish being lazy in the water. She was thinking maybe it’d be a good thing to dive down there, put the fear of god in a couple of ’em, or at least the fear of Fisher-Bird, when she heard a crack and a crash coming through the woods.
A man came down the deer-trail, staggering like he couldn’t see. His face was swelled up and puffy, and his breath squeaked through his throat. He had blood coming out of his ears and out his nose and even oozing out from under his fingernails.
Fisher-Bird looked at him out of her right eye. He was a big man. His arms were tree-trunk thick, and he was so shaggy it looked like he was wearing a shirt. Fisher-Bird had to look twice to see he wasn’t, just a mountain lion skin draped over his shoulders like the cat was going for a piggyback ride.
Then she looked out of her left eye, and she saw he had god-blood in him, thick and stringy as spiderwort sap, the kind that clogs up your veins and makes you a hero even if you’d rather just be an ordinary soul.
Poor bastard, thought Fisher-Bird.
He fell into the stream and shoved his head into the water. All the fish remembered they had somewhere else to be, and Fisher-Bird was left alone on her branch, just watching the shaggy man soak his head in the stream.
When he came up for air, his eyes were slitted open and some of the blood was gone, but his cheeks were still huge and puffed up with lumps. Fisher-Bird saw two holes in a couple of the lumps and she knew right off what had happened. The shaggy man had pissed off Old Lady Cottonmouth. She’s not an evil snake, no matter what people say, but she wants respect and she doesn’t suffer fools.
“Damn, hon,” said Fisher-Bird. “You look like hammered shit.”
The shaggy man froze. “Who said that?” he asked.
Now this pricked up Fisher-Bird’s crest, right enough. She wasn’t used to humans who could hear the language of birds, unless they were witches or somebody walking around in human skin who couldn’t lay claim to it by birth. “You heard me?”
“I heard you,” said the man, trying to pry his eyes open with his fingers, “but I don’t see you.”
“Up here on the branch,” said Fisher-Bird, and she dipped her beak, polite-like. “You see me?”
The man stared at her for a little bit, then said, “You’re a bird.”
“You’re quick.”
“Are you a devil sent to torment me?”
Fisher-Bird thought this was so funny that she let out one of her long chattering laughs—“krk-krk-krk-krrrk!” And then, “Hon, you showed up at my stream and ruined my fishing. I don’t think you’ve got the right end of who’s tormenting who.” (She didn’t really mind the fish, but she wasn’t about to give up the moral high ground so fast.)
“Oh,” said the man, after a minute. He dunked his head in the water again and swirled it around. He had long curly hair that hung down his back in wet hanks, until it ran into the cat skin coat.
When he came up for air, he said, “Sorry about the fish.”
Fisher-Bird was so charmed by a human apologizing for anything that she said, “Aw, nah, don’t worry yourself about it. You look like you’ve messed with worse than a fish today.”
“Nest of cottonmouths,” he said. “Whole ball all tangled together and chasing anybody who got too close. I was s’posed to clear ’em out.”
“Aw, that’s a shame,” said Fisher-Bird. “You gonna die now?”
He shook his head and scooped up some mud, slapping it across his cheeks. “I don’t die easy,” he said.
Fisher-Bird hopped a little closer on the branch. “Lotta people don’t die easy, but they take a couple bites from Old Lady Cottonmouth and they learn how pretty damn quick.”
He grunted. “There were dozens,” he said. “I’d chop one’s head off and two more would show up. Never seen a thing like it.”
“Shit, hon, that was a snake wedding you interrupted. No wonder they were pissed.”
Whatever the man might have thought about that was lost as he slapped more mud on his face, then down his arms where the snakes had bit him.
“Are you really here?” he asked after a minute.
This was a pretty peculiar question, but humans are peculiar creatures. Fisher-Bird turned her head so she could look at him out of one eye at a time. “Are you?”
The shaggy man groaned. “I mean, I got bit pretty bad,” he admitted. “And I think a bird’s talking to me, but maybe it’s the poison.”
“Could be, could be,” said Fisher-Bird agreeably. “Or I could have nabbed a toad and got a beak full of moonshine, and now I think a human’s talking to me.”
“. . . Shit,” said the shaggy man, with feeling, and flopped down on the streambank.
Fisher-Bird waited a polite length of time, while the mosquitoes hummed to each other, then said, “You dead yet, hon?”
“No.”
“How ’bout now?”
“I’m not dying. I told you.” He sat up. Fisher-Bird had to admit that he did look better. The swelling was going down, and he’d stopped bleeding from under his nails. “I don’t. Name’s Stronger.”
“Stronger,” said Fisher-Bird, rolling the word around in her beak. “Stronger than what?”
“Everything.”
“Krrk-krrk-krk-krk-krk!” She laughed at him. “Modest, ain’tcha?”
“It’s true,” he said. He didn’t sound all that happy about it. He glanced around the stream and walked over to a big boulder half-buried in the gravel. “Look.”
He put his hands under the boulder. His arms flexed and the veins popped out, thick and ugly as nightcrawlers, and then he scooped the boulder up and tossed it a couple yards over his shoulder with a crash.
Water rushed into the muddy hole he’d left, and little squirmy things went running in all directions, except for the crawfish, who waved their claws and wanted a fight. Fisher-Bird dropped off her branch, scooped up a crawfish, and proceeded to beat it to pieces on another rock that hadn’t been flung quite so far away.
“Pretty—good,” she said, between smacking the crawfish around. “Don’t—see—that—much.”
“Yeah,” said Stronger. He sat back down. “It’s not so great. I break things.”
“What—kind—of—things—gulp!”
“People.”
Fisher-Bird cleaned the last bits of shell off her beak with one gray foot. “I see that’d be a problem.”
“Yeah. Now I got to do a bunch of jobs for my mother-in-law to make up for it.”
“Why your mother-in-law?”
“It was her people I broke.”
“Ah.” Fisher-Bird cocked her head. “That why you were off fighting snakes?”
“Yeah.” He began to pick bits of drying mud off his face. “That was one of the jobs. And the mountain lion I got here, that was one, too.”
“Big lion.”
“Yeah. There’s others. Had to kill a boar that was tearing up the farm.”
Fisher-Bird nodded. Boars were bad news. They didn’t bother her much, of course, but they could take a field and turn it into a wreckage of trampled mud in less time than Fisher-Bird could open up a crayfish.
“And a mad bull, and a bunch of mares that had a very peculiar diet, and do not talk to me about stables and . . . well, it’s been a long month.”
“Is that all you’re doing? Putting down livestock?”
Stronger didn’t look particularly pleased by this summation. “I caught a doe.”
Fisher-Bird snorted. “What did you do, stand in one place for a little while? We got more does than fish around here.”
“A specific doe.”
“Oh, well, that’s different.”
“My mother-in-law says go kill it, but my sister-in-law says if I do she’ll gut me like a hog, because that’s her pet deer and it
got loose, and I said she shouldn’t ought to let it wander around loose, and then she got pissed at me and said she’d let her deer go where it damn well pleased.” Stronger rubbed his face. “So I finally just went out and grabbed it and carried it back over my shoulder. Which it did not like. I had hoofprints in personal places.”
“Still, pet deer. That’s honorary livestock.”
“I got my cousin’s girdle.”
Fisher-Bird had been looking for more crawfish, but she stopped and turned her head real slow to look at him. “. . . You got that kinda family, do you?”
“No!” And when Fisher-Bird gave him a steady look, “Well . . . all right. My mother-in-law’s married to her brother and they say her daddy was a cannibal.”
“Take an old bird’s advice, son, and get the hell away from those people. Marrying kin ain’t good, but you start eating each other and all bets are off.”
“Look, I didn’t know about that bit when I married in. Anyway, that’s what the jobs are for. I finish these, and I’m free and clear and they let me go. I’m gonna move west and never talk to these people again.” Stronger rubbed his forehead. “And it wasn’t like that with my cousin. I just went and asked politely. Wasn’t much of a job. I think my mother-in-law was hoping she’d be mad, but I explained all about it and brought her a bottle of the good stuff, and she said my mother-in-law was always a bad one and she’d be happy to do anything to spit in her eye.”
“Well, gettin’ away is good,” said Fisher-Bird. “I approve of that.”
Stronger nodded gloomily. “I don’t even like most of them, and that’s leaving aside that my mother-in-law keeps trying to kill me.”
Fisher-Bird, no stranger to family infighting, nodded wisely. “Some people come outta the egg mad.”
Stronger finished flaking the mud off his face. “You’re still a bird,” he said, almost accusingly.
“Yeah, I’d get used to that.”
“If you’re a bird, then why can you talk?”
“Shit, son,” said Fisher-Bird, and let loose a long string of curses that made Stronger sit up and take notice. “I’ve always been able to talk. Question is how you’re listening.”
Stronger shook his head. “Dunno. Never could before.”
Fisher-Bird scratched her beak. “Any of those snakes bite your ears?”
The man looked puzzled for a minute, then put his finger in his ear and wiggled it around like he was cleaning earwax. He winced. “Yeah. One got me right up there by the ear.”
“There you go,” said Fisher-Bird, pleased. “You make a friend of a snake, they’ll lick your ears, let you hear the language of birds.”
“These snakes weren’t friendly.”
“Yeah, but spit’s spit.”
He thought for a few minutes. “Huh. You know, I got some birds I gotta clean out for my mother-in-law. You think this’ll help me?”
“What kinda birds?” She hopped down a little closer.
“Weird ones. Feathers like metal. You shoot at ’em and it bounces right off and makes a noise like you’re shaking buckshot in a tin can.”
“Oh, them. Stimps.” She grimaced as well as one can with a beak.
“What?”
“Stimps. They’re herons, more or less, but their great-great-granddaddy did a favor for the Iron-Wife and got her blessing. Now they got iron feathers and think they’re better’n the rest of us.”
“I’m supposed to drive ’em off. They’re a real menace over at the lake. They drop feathers that’ll cut you all to ribbons.”
“Hmm.” Fisher-Bird thought it over. She had no great love of humans, but he’d apologized about the fish and that was a pretty fine thing. And she had even less love of herons, who took fish and frogs and a lot of other critters that rightly belonged in Fisher-Bird’s gullet, let alone magic herons who thought they owned the place. But most of all, she had an active loathing of stimps, who’d chased one of Fisher-Bird’s cousins out of the swamp and had a few nasty words for her when they did it.
“Yeah, okay.” The chance to get one back at the stimps was too good to pass up. “Best do it soon, though, before they start nesting. Once you get a couple dozen of them together in a tree, cackling and raising up eggs, it’s a problem. And it ain’t right to mess with other people’s eggs, even stimps.”
“So I should just ask ’em to leave, then?”
Fisher-Bird rolled her eyes. “Not unless you got a few hours to waste, listening to a stimp insult you. No, they ain’t gonna go on their own.”
“Well, I can’t get to them. They’re in a marshy bit, and if I walk out there, I’m hip-deep in muck. I try to grab one, they’ll be miles away, throwin’ those nasty sharp feathers at me.”
Fisher-Bird preened under her wing. “Come back tomorrow,” she said.
“What?”
“Tomorrow. Come back then. Maybe I can help you; maybe I can’t.”
Stronger looked like he might argue for a minute; then he closed his mouth and nodded. “All right, then. Thank you.”
Polite sort of human, Fisher-Bird thought. Worth helping out the polite ones. Particularly if it got rid of those stuck-up stimps.
Just the thought made her chuckle. “Krk-krk-krk-krk!”
“All right,” said Fisher-Bird, when Stronger came back the next day. “What you want is poison. You got any?”
“I had a whole bunch of dead cottonmouths,” said Stronger sourly. “But I didn’t realize I’d need them.”
“Nah, that wouldn’t have worked. That stuff dries out too fast, goes all to lumps. Need something nasty that’ll mix with tar.”
“I got rat poison back home,” said Stronger.
“Yeah, that’s fine. Now, you got arrows?”
“Arrows?”
“Shit, son, don’t tell me humans don’t use arrows no more.”
“I guess . . . ?” Stronger looked doubtful. “I haven’t shot a bow since I was little. I got a gun.”
“Can’t poison a bullet, son. You need some arrows, and you need to wrap the point with some cloth. Then you mix up some tar and some rat poison and dip the points in that. Make it good and drippy.”
“If I can’t put a bullet in the stimp, how’m I gonna put an arrow in one?”
“You ain’t,” said Fisher-Bird. “You’re gonna smack ’em with the arrow and leave goop all over those shiny metal feathers of theirs. Then they go to preen and they’ll get a mouthful of rat poison.”
Stronger thought this over. “Ye-e-e-e-s . . .” he said slowly. “Could work. But I still don’t know how to get to the stimps in the first place. They’re out in the marsh and the mud, and I can’t get a clear shot at any of ’em.”
Fisher-Bird flicked her crest. “You come back when you got you a bow and poison. Bring along a couple tin cans, too. Then we’ll see about getting you your shot.”
Stronger came back to Fisher-Bird’s stream two days later, carrying a pack and a bow over his back and a metal bucket full of arrows. “These things are nasty,” he said, setting the bucket down.
“Hello to you, too,” said Fisher-Bird. “The family’s fine, thank you kindly for asking.”
Stronger sighed. “My aunt’d ding my ear for rudeness, if she was still alive. Sorry, bird. Hope you’re well.”
“I’m good,” said Fisher-Bird. “And how’s your family?”
“Mostly dead and the live ones are mean,” said Stronger. Fisher-Bird cackled.
She hopped down from her branch and landed on the rim of the bucket. (Fisher-Bird never did learn to walk very well, but that didn’t slow her down much.) She peered down into the mess of black sludge, with the arrows sticking up out of it like porcupine quills. “Damn. Looks godawful, anyhow. You got them tin cans?”
Stronger slung the pack off his back and opened it up, revealing half a dozen empty cans.
“Flatten ’em out,” ordered Fisher-Bird. Stronger took each can between his palms and put his hands together like he was praying. The cans went flat as paper, and
Fisher-Bird could see the dents left by his wedding ring.
“All right,” said Fisher-Bird. “That’s everything.” She jumped from the rim of the bucket, flapped her wings twice, and landed on Stronger’s shoulder. She had to cock her head over to look up into his face.
“You gonna peck out my eyes?” asked Stronger, sounding amused.
“Nah, son, that’s crows. Not saying I wouldn’t take a bite if you were already drowned, but that’d be more in the way of courtesy.”
“Eating my eyes if I drowned would be courtesy?”
“Well, you’d hardly want a stranger to do it, would you? Besides, people do weird shit with corpse eyes. Best to get ’em pecked out nice and quick so you don’t find ’em doin’ something nasty later.”
“I’m not sure I’d be worried about that, if I was already dead.”
“You should be. Worse things than dead, and a lot of ’em involve eyeballs.”
Stronger rubbed his hand over the eyes in question. “I am having the strangest month,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Try bein’ a bird. Now come on; let’s go make some stimps miserable.”
It was a hot afternoon, and the air was wet and thick with pollen. You could look down the road and see the trees get paler and greener until they vanished into a yellow haze from all the pine trees rattling their cones. Fisher-Bird didn’t much like pines in late spring. The rest of the year they were solid-enough trees, but they got a little spring in them and they became downright indecent.
The swamp had pines ringing it and then juniper cedars, trying to suck up as much water as they could, and then a narrow channel of open water. Then it all went to cattails and sedge and muck, with little scruffy trees that didn’t do much except give the cat-claw vines something to crawl over.
“I can’t get very far out there,” said Stronger. “I mean, I try, but I sink right in and it’s like wading through glue.”
“Yeah, I figured. Wait here.” Fisher-Bird took off from his shoulder and flew across the swamp, looking for stimps.
They weren’t hard to find. A couple here, a couple there, a few standing by themselves, with their big beaks poised to stab in the water. Fisher-Bird looked with her right eye and saw herons with steel feathers. She looked with her left eye and saw a goddess’s blessing hanging over them the way pollen hung over pines.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 11
