The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The dam contained its own ecosystem, the holes of muskrat dens and swallows’ nests, the twig and grass nests of other birds, an egg-shaped hive of yellowjackets hanging from a dead tree. Weeds, brush, and willow bushes grew in every gap between the dead logs and limbs. Live spruce and birch trees sprouted there too, some with trunks as big around as his torso, indicating that the dam had probably been maintained by generations of beaver. The tree roots probably helped anchor the structure.

  At the base of the dam was a great pool, held back by a tangle of limbs and trees that had washed over the top. Ducks, geese, and a pair of swans swam and dove and preened their feathers in the pool. He stopped at the dam’s base to look up at the structure. To support that mass of water hanging overhead, the dam would have to be about as wide at the base as it was high. The dam’s face wasn’t too steep but was far too tangled and overgrown to climb. He had to follow the game trail away from the river, climbing the bank through a stand of spruce trees, to skirt the dam. In the shade of the trees, a vicious swarm of biting gnats found him and harried him all the way to the top.

  On the slick trail he found imprints where boot toes had dug in to climb. He came out of the trees above the dam, on top of a low ridge paralleling the river. The ridge and hillside below were grass- and brush-covered, logged-off long ago. A few gnawed white stumps stuck up from the brush, not yet rotted back to the earth. He stopped to catch his breath and look out over the lake, eyes following its flat surface near to far, until his sight grew fuzzy in the distance of the marshlands beyond. A dark line of deep water wound through the marsh grass and weeds, marking the path of the river current.

  Built partly into the steep bank on the shore where he stood, not far above the dam, was a mound of sun-bleached trees, limbs, and packed mud constructed like the dam. It was a beaver lodge almost the size of Jack’s house. The bank dropped steeply down to the lake here, and the water looked deep. The grass showed no sign of Hank’s passage, but odds were he had gone to check out that lodge.

  He found Hank’s trapping pack and his rifle, leaning against the pack, on the grassy bank near the lodge. The rifle muzzle had a light misting of rust. A line of bent grass led straight uphill and he followed it. Hank had set up his camp in a good place, on flat ground on top of the hill, with a view of most of the lake. Some fallen timber offered a supply of firewood, and a spring ran down the hill nearby. Hank had set up a tent and dug a pit and ringed it with stones, the makings of a fire ready to go.

  The fire-ring was as Hank left it, but the tent was flattened and torn apart. Hank’s gear lay strewn about the camp, large toothmarks in most of it. Hank had hung his food, but not high enough. It had all been eaten, its packaging scattered in bits. Nothing but indistinct marks left in the grass.

  Some big animal had come along … but was Hank here then? No sign of blood or human remains. Jack followed a few short trails to where Hank had gathered firewood and gone to relieve himself but found no trail that led very far—except for three parallel paths through the grass, where three large animals had crossed the slope of the hill and headed up the lake. The paths were too wide to have been made by the close-set legs of a man.

  Jack carried Hank’s rifle and gear up to camp and spent the rest of the day following dead-end trails. Rifle in hands, he followed the three animal trails for more than a mile before losing them in a swamp. He found no sign of Hank.

  He hung the duffel with his food from the branch of a lone cottonwood growing by the spring, set up his own tent in a jumble of dead tree branches, and slept fitfully, rifle lying next to his hand. Next morning he renewed the search, going back to the lodge where he’d found Hank’s pack and rifle. Had Hank fallen in the lake and drowned?

  He stopped next to the lodge where the bank dropped steeply down into the depths of the lake. Something caught his eye below the top of the murky water. Something moving down there. He dropped to a knee, leaned forward, and put a hand up to shade his eyes against the glare. A pair of dark eyes looked back up at him from a head the size of a man’s. Grizzled face like an old man’s with a wispy handlebar mustache a forearm’s distance below the surface.

  He sensed sudden movement and began to rise and turn away as the water exploded. All he saw then were snapping teeth that grazed his right ear. He kept twisting and fell forward, planting his nose in the mud of the bank. Something heavy hit his back and he heard teeth crunch into wood.

  He was pinned to the ground by the weight of the thing as it tore at his pack, maple strips rending and splintering, a deep moaning sound coming from the animal. Claws raked the shorn strips away. The animal stuck its head inside the pack, and Jack was jerked violently side-to-side and nearly lifted from the ground as it shook its head. Amidst the splintering of wood and moaning growl of the animal, Jack could hear distinct plopping noises as his trapping gear flew into the lake.

  Then he was being dragged back to the water. His hands clawed at the grassy bank. The rifle had fallen out of reach. His right hand was pulled free … and that hand, if not his conscious mind, remembered the revolver at his hip.

  Over his left shoulder he saw a flattened head with a short, wide snout and tiny laid-back ears. Coal-black eyes gleaming like marbles in moonlight. A long, dark-furred torpedo of death. His hand pushed the barrel of the gun between the giant otter’s eyes and pulled the trigger. Bits of brain, blood, and skull fragments showered into the lake. The animal stiffened straight as a pole and slid beneath the water.

  “God damn!” He cursed some more and could barely hear himself. His ears were ringing, but he had no memory of the gun’s blast. His pulse hammered in his heart and echoed in his head. He sat on the bank and leaned against the side of the beaver lodge, trying to catch his breath. As his hearing returned, his ears began playing tricks on him. Faintly and from a distance, he thought he heard voices mingling with the music of his pulse and the ringing in his ears. Fairy voices from underground, singing in the vanished speech of fairyfolk.

  No, it was just one voice, coming from inside the lodge. He didn’t believe in talking beaver or fairyfolk, and there should only be one other human on this continent.

  “Hank?” he hollered.

  “Yeah,” came the faint reply. “Get me out of here!”

  Jack started to laugh but cut himself off. He was sounding hysterical. Hell, he was hysterical. Suffering hallucinations. Henry Andersen in a beaver lodge? Right.

  “What in God’s name are you doing in there?” Let the hallucination come up with an answer to that one.

  “A giant beaver pulled me in.”

  This time Jack didn’t try to stop himself from laughing. His own imagination wasn’t up to this much of a hallucination. He couldn’t wait to hear the rest. Most of his trapping gear was gone from his demolished pack, but he found his hand ax lying in the grass on the bank. He leaned the rifle beside him and started chopping at the lodge.

  “Come toward my voice,” Hank called. “I’ve been working at it from the inside.”

  “No, it sounds like you’re just digging into the hillside there,” Jack told him. “Over here is the fastest way to get you out.”

  In fifteen minutes Jack was sweating and breathing heavily. The hard clay-mud that held the lodge together soon dulled the edge of the ax, and he had to pry the larger limbs out of the way using the flat of the blade. The lodge wall was a couple of feet thick, and he couldn’t cut straight through because he had to work around a large tree trunk in the way. Finally, he felt the ax punch through and smelled a puff of damp, cool air from inside. Hank’s face, eyes squinted and blinking, framed itself in the hole, a disembodied absurdity.

  “I thought that sounded like you,” Hank said, after his eyes adjusted to the light. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for your sorry ass, what do you think?”

  “I figured I was a goner for sure. All I have on me is a pocket knife.”

  They both worked on enlarging the hole, breaking off dried mud, pulling away stic
ks, until the opening was large enough. Jack would only have got himself stuck, but Hank’s skinny frame squeezed through. He straightened his back and let out a groan.

  “That big beaver has got two kits with her, and I had to wedge myself in a tiny nook to stay out of her way. She kept hissing and grinding her teeth at me. They all skedaddled out of there as soon as you let daylight in.”

  “Have to take your word on that.”

  “Did you fire a gun out here?”

  Jack nodded. “A giant otter attacked me, big as a man.” He looked down into the water where the otter had sunk. It had occurred to him to wonder if he could recover it for its fur. Make a hell of a thing to hang on the wall to yak and yarn about when he was an old fogy sitting in his rocking chair. No one would believe him otherwise. But the otter nightmare had sunk out of sight in the deep water.

  Hank said, “Wish I could have seen it.”

  “You wouldn’t be wishing to see it if you had.”

  “Maybe one of the extinct Lutra or Satherium species.”

  “You’re the college boy.”

  “Your ear is bleeding.”

  Jack put his fingers to his ear and they came away with a smear of blood. Until then he hadn’t felt the sting.

  “Doesn’t look bad,” Hank told him. “Just a scratch.”

  A deep concussion sounded behind them. The water boiled a short distance from the lodge, like someone had just pulled the plug from the bottom of the lake. Jack saw the doglike head of a beaver, but huge, break the surface.

  “There she is,” Hank said.

  Jack had tried to envision what one of these giant beaver must look like, but still was not prepared. She was swimming toward them and you could just about surf on her bow wave. In front of the lodge, her head submerged, her massive barrel of a torso rolled under, kept rolling by and rolling by, and she gave another slap of her tail as she dove.

  Hank ran away from the bank, tottering uphill on unsteady feet. “I ain’t letting her grab me again!”

  Jack snagged his rifle by the sling and joined Hank upslope. The beaver’s snout appeared in the hole in the lodge and she sniffed around for a bit. A moment later, they saw a ripple of waves moving away from the lodge.

  “You say that beaver took you in there?” Jack said.

  Hank shook his head. “Damnedest thing. I was out on the far edge of the lodge, trying to spot the entrance. Thought I might get a snare down there. Then I slipped and fell in. You know, I never could swim too good. I was thrashing around when that mama beaver drug me under and hauled me in there.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “No kidding. Maybe she thought I was one of her kits in that murky water. They’re about my size, and still look to be learning to swim.”

  “Maybe she’s love-struck. Maybe if you shaved that fur off your face, she’d have let you be.” Jack laughed a real laugh. It felt good, finding Hank alive.

  A ripple of waves returned to the lodge and the beaver appeared again in the hole. She had brought in her forepaws a big gob of mud from the lake bottom and was going about the business of repairing her home.

  “What day is it, anyway?” Hank asked. “I lost track of time in the dark in there.”

  “It’s the day after the day you were supposed to leave.”

  “I was in there almost three days, then. Good of them to make me wait so long.”

  “Next time I’ll be sure to check all the beaver lodges first thing,” Jack told him. “I got here yesterday. They were worried about a paradox if they sent me any earlier.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hank said. “I see the problem.”

  “I thought, what if they sent me back earlier, to warn you, maybe. But if I did, and you got home on schedule, then why would they have to send me back to warn you?”

  “That’s why they don’t try it,” Hank said. “No one’s sure what would happen. Hell, no one really knows where these wormholes go. We might be in some alternate universe here, instead of Earth’s actual past.”

  If so, then even if Jack could go through the wormhole to save her, when he went back to his own time she’d still be dead. It wouldn’t be his own Katie that he’d saved.

  Hank rubbed his head. Bits of dried mud broke and flaked off as he did. “I’m starving. I got some water in there from the dive hole but only had a couple energy bars to eat.”

  “It’s about lunchtime for me, too. Let’s go back to camp and grab a bite.”

  “I did get one trap set before I fell in the lake,” Hank said as they climbed the hill, “on a dam crossover partway to the other side. Soon as we eat, let’s go check it.”

  * * *

  A well-used game trail ran through the tall grass and protruding logs and sticks along the top of the dam. The trail dipped down in channels where the lake water overflowed. The channels dropped into cascades running over the face of the dam to the big pool of the river below. On the lakeside the dam fell more steeply into the depths of the lake. Several of the overflow channels showed some evidence of being used as crossovers by smaller animals, but Jack saw no sign that giant beaver had done much travel downstream.

  “I brought an old Newhouse bear trap and set it in this trail,” Hank said as they walked. “Not much fresh sign here, but I was tired of hauling that big old trap around. I was planning to move it when I found a better place.”

  “How would you get a big enough weight out in deep water to drown one of these giant beaver?”

  “I couldn’t figure that out, either. I was going to listen for a commotion over here and run down with my rifle before the beaver could twist out. They seem mostly nocturnal, like their smaller cousins.”

  Hank stopped at the second channel and they both looked down at the empty mud bottom below the flowing water. The chain, still fastened to a log embedded in the dam, ended in a broken link; the trap was gone. In the mud that had been firmed and slickened by the current, they could see only slight indentations and a few large clawmarks. Jack’s foot hit something hard in the grass—one of the trap’s massive U-shaped springs. Hank found a twisted trap jaw on the dam face, and Jack found the crumpled trigger plate lying in the water just above the dam, but that was all that remained of the bear trap. Jack rose and did a 360-degree pan from the forested river downstream to the deep open lake upstream and back to the river again.

  Hank unslung his rifle. “I think I’m going to start carrying this in my hands.”

  “Notice I’m already holding mine,” Jack said. “Ever since I found your camp.”

  They stood contemplating the remains of the trap, until Hank said, “Supposing we just shoot one.”

  “It’ll sink. How would we find it in this murky water?”

  “Looks like glacial silt. Must be a glacier somewhere upstream, grinding on the limestone bedrock. This could be the ancient Scioto River, coming down from the north.” Hank pondered a moment. “Okay, so we make a grapple out of tree branches, tie it to a line, and try to drag the carcass to shore.”

  “How would we throw a grapple like that?”

  “Maybe we could make a raft to float out and recover the beaver.”

  “We’ve got three days left.” Jack kicked at a stick protruding from the dam. “If we can’t catch a beaver in that time, maybe we shouldn’t call ourselves trappers.”

  Hank gave him a disapproving look. “You were an idiot to take this job, you know. We’ll probably be lucky just to survive the next few days.”

  “Think maybe I should have turned down the work?”

  “Only if you were smart, which you’re not.”

  “Look who’s talking—the idiot who agreed to come here in the first place.”

  Hank contemplated the lake upstream from the dam. “I only brought the one trap, so we’d better try using snares.”

  “That’s what I figured to do all along. Brought some locking bear snares. But that damn otter tossed them all into the deep water.”

  “I brought half a dozen snares, along with
that trap.”

  “You still want to try hanging one over that lodge entrance?”

  “Nope. It’s way too deep. Anyway, who wants to take a mother from her kits? We couldn’t call ourselves trappers.”

  “You sure you didn’t just fall for mama beaver?”

  “Funny,” Hank said. “Let’s do some more scouting around.”

  The day wore on past late afternoon as they worked their way up the far side of the lake from camp, looking for beaver sign. At the edge of the water they located several wide trails with smooth, rounded edges like larger-scale beaver runways, but there was little indication of recent use. They hung snares across these trails anyway.

  A mile or so from the dam they came to a low ridge of land that stuck out as a peninsula partway across the lake. The peninsula and surrounding shore were being logged-off of the larger birch and aspen. Piles of fresh chips lay around fresh-cut stumps left from trees that had been hauled away for beaver feed or building material. Here a beaver runway led out of the water and a well-used trail crossed the base of the peninsula. They set a snare where the runway joined the trail. By then the sun was going down, and dark did not feel like a good time to be out in Pleistocene country.

  * * *

  They made supper and sat eating side-by-side on a fallen tree near the fire. Now and then one or both looked away from the fire and out toward the lake that lay hidden in the blackness of night. From where they sat, the beaver lodge lay beneath the slope of the hill, but they could see a line of white sticks marking the top of the dam. Much of the time they just listened for any sound from the other side of the lake. The wind was picking up as night settled in fully, leaving the fire’s smoke to stream up the valley, over the dark expanse of the marshlands.

  After a while, Hank said, “You know, I did some digging around before I left home. What did they tell you about the government’s latest rewilding project?”

  “Rewilding? The wolves weren’t enough?”

  Most of Hank’s face lay covered under his dark beard, and his teeth really stood out in the firelight. “I bet you thought they were done, didn’t you? Wrong. They’re out to restore all North American species whose extinction was caused by the arrival of humans on the continent.”