Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

“Okay,” Lou said. “I’m amazed you survived, and that I found you at all. I’m amazed I’ve survived so long. But let’s just back down some. I know a lot that you don’t know, and I’m going to watch out for you.”

  Her sister sounded like someone trying to calm a child. Coryn tried not to let it upset her.

  Lou drew a breath and spoke slowly, weighing her words carefully. “We deal with what’s real out here. For now, it’s a work day. Come out and have breakfast. I’ll find you some boots that fit.”

  “Boots? What for?”

  “We leave in an hour. We’ll call you a prospective volunteer. That way you get the right to take a horse. You can ride River again today.”

  “My legs are still sore from yesterday!”

  Lou grinned. “Not yesterday. You slept a day and a night. We have to go soon, and you have to come with us. I have my own pursuits at night, but if I want food and horses and a roof over my head, I have to work during the day. You didn’t think I owned all this, did you? It’s the Foundation’s, every bit of it.”

  Of course it was. “All right. I’m coming.” Had she really slept that long? “Is there food?”

  “Lots of it.”

  Coryn’s legs complained when Paula boosted her up. Eight people rode out, with Lou and Blessing in the lead. Day rode beside Coryn, a calm, comfortable companion. He felt good to be near, steady. She decided she had underestimated him when they first met, letting Blessing’s outgoing personality mask Day’s calm competence. Aspen trotted behind them.

  Paula rode a nearly black horse almost as big as Lou’s Mouse. When she came up beside her, Coryn asked, “Why’d they put you on a horse today?”

  “So people won’t know I’m a robot.” She smiled. “No human can run like I can. I can sit a horse a lot like a person, though. I probably look more natural than you. Straighten your back and hold your hands a little lower.”

  “Bossy robot.” But Coryn obeyed, bemused. She did feel more comfortable this way. River’s slightly rocking gait felt more natural when she wasn’t slumping. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  She swore Day smiled a little as he said, “No.”

  Coryn enjoyed watching the sun-laden hills and the huge blue sky. The path they followed sometimes allowed for two horses to ride side by side, but mostly they rode in a long, lazy line that wound up and down hills. At least once every hour, Lou stopped them. She took photos and picked up dirt and grass samples, putting them in bags and labeling them before tucking the bags into pouches on the back of her saddle. After a while, Paula started dismounting and helping. Blessing and Day stayed on their horses, looking in different directions, acting like guards. Without any further instructions, she stayed on River as well. Besides, it might not be possible to get back up.

  Matchiko appeared tightly partnered with Lou. She got on and off her horse every time Lou did, and gathered samples right beside her. They talked in tones too low for Coryn to hear, Lou’s red hair and Matchiko’s black blending in the wind as they stood side by side.

  Once, a huge bird circled well above them. Lou stopped dead in her tracks and lifted the binoculars she carried around her neck, conferring with Matchiko. They took pictures and chattered excitedly.

  Lou dropped back, her face excited. “That’s a vulture. We don’t see many of those.”

  “I’ve seen a few big birds,” Coryn said.

  “Those were eagles. We saw two lone goldens, and a mated pair of bald eagles flew over earlier. They live near the Snake River.”

  “How far is that?”

  Lou smiled. “You’ll see.”

  “Is everything a secret?”

  “Think of it as a surprise.”

  “So are you counting wildlife?”

  “Yes. And collecting grass and scat to measure nutrients and look for illness. And watching for signs of people who shouldn’t be here. This is a preserve, and everyone on it should work for the Foundation, or have the Foundation’s permission, or be one of the few natives allowed here, and we know who those are.”

  “And when you find someone who shouldn’t be here?”

  Lou smiled. “Then it depends on what my deal with them is.”

  Coryn swallowed. “You have a deal with the people who kidnapped me?”

  “It’s more accurate to say that many of us are benefitting from a deal between others. I’m the enforcer of that deal, in this place, at this moment. But if we see anyone . . . even Bartholomew and his family, you do what I say.”

  There Lou went, treating her like a two-year-old again. “They’re a family?”

  Lou offered her a complicated smile, an expression that seemed to say it’s way too complex to explain to you now. Aloud, she said, “More than a blood family.” Lou’s smile relaxed some, and she began to sound like her old self. “Besides, yesterday was a good day. I managed to get some business done and rescue my hapless little sister all at once.”

  Coryn smiled at the teasing tone in her voice. Maybe Lou was finally relaxing a little bit. “When are you going to tell me more about what you do at night? About why Bartholomew and his family let you tell them what to do?”

  Lou’s face tightened.

  “When, Lou? You said you’d teach me more to keep me safe.”

  Lou looked irritated, but then relented and softened some. “I’ll ride by you for a while after lunch. We’ll start then.” She clicked Mouse to a trot, looking back over her right shoulder directly at Coryn. “Relax. Enjoy the ride. I’m going to show you a real treat.”

  Coryn’s stomach rumbled with hunger by the time Lou led them up over the biggest hill they’d climbed yet. Her back hurt, her legs had stopped screaming at her only because they’d gone numb, and she was pretty sure that she’d do well to fall gracefully off of River. Whatever had she expected riding a horse to be like, anyway? Paula was right, River was no bicycle. If he was, she’d have come this far and still be fresh and happy. Frankly, since they’d been walking all morning, she’d be ahead of them on a bicycle, too.

  Well, except this hill would be tough. It had a false crest, so it seemed like they went up and up and then up again.

  Horses did climb well.

  Near the top, the grasses were low and thin, the ground rocky, and the flowers small and lacy.

  Eventually they reached the real summit. Lou pulled Mouse to a stop and the others stopped as well. Coryn could see farther than she ever had, even farther than from the Bridge of Stars. She forgot she was hot and tired and hungry and could barely stand to be on horseback another minute. She almost forgot her name.

  On the far eastern horizon, mountains created a jagged skyline accentuated with gray and black scarps angled into the sky like blades. Dark green forests laced with the lighter colors of spring leaves fell down below the high faces like a cloak. Just to her right, row on row of white windmills turned slowly in the light breeze. Directly in front of her, a thick navy blue ribbon wound through the bottom of the river valley. Even though they were far, far away she could tell that the river was wide and slow and worthy of respect. It had to be the Snake. She leaned forward and whispered between River’s ears. “That’s what you’re named for. That’s a river.”

  One ear swiveled back toward her.

  Close by, Blessing sat easily on the beautiful gray, a dark man on a lighter horse, both tall and long of leg, both beautiful enough to take her breath way. He glanced at her with an amused look on his face, and she blushed.

  Blessing laughed. “Go on, keep looking. You still haven’t spotted your sister’s surprise.”

  “It’s not the river?”

  “Keep looking.”

  The low hills between the rise they stood on and the river below were browner than the hills on the other side, almost chocolate. It looked. . . . She breathed, confused.

  The shifting mass of brown was the shaggy backs of thousands of animals.

  Alive. Hooved. Horned.

  Lowing softly, the sound barely carried on the breeze.

&nb
sp; Animals.

  Buffalo.

  A wild herd of buffalo so big that it covered her field of vision. With some difficulty, she maneuvered River to Mouse’s side and looked up at her sister. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Lou was already smiling, her face alight with joy, bathed in light and warmth. “That’s what we’re here for. I needed you to see them, to understand them, to know that this is why I’m doing some of the hard things I’m doing.”

  Coryn could barely stammer out, “Thank . . . thank you.”

  They sat and watched together. Paula, Lou, Blessing and Day, Matchiko, Daryl, and a broad woman named Shuska who hadn’t been with them the night before last. Seven humans, a robot, a small dog, and thousands of animals, the horses shifting their feet, the buffalo moving across the plains, the long river far away and past the beautiful brown beasts. Golden eagles flew above and thin, pale grass grew like a carpet of spring under their feet. It all came together to be magic, to be like the moments Coryn had only experienced on the highest places of the city when everything looked bigger than her, and she was part of all of it, when she understood what it meant to be human.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Exactly as she had expected, Coryn had to be lifted off of River. She leaned on Paula and stamped her feet while pins and needles raced up her nerves. Aspen curled around her, almost tripping her, making her laugh, worry in his mismatched eyes.

  Lou led her away from the others, saying, “I promised my sis I’d have lunch with her.”

  The others dutifully took their own lunches and created a small party a few hundred feet away. Lou pulled out dried pears and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, handing a fistful of pears and a whole sandwich to Coryn.

  Coryn chewed on a pear, looking down at the buffalo and the river, and even looking down on circling raptors. She gave Aspen some bread and peanut butter and water, and a little of the dog food Paula had rescued from the caravan. She wanted it to last. As they ate, Coryn asked, “They’re beautiful, but why buffalo?”

  “They’re hoofed. Herds of hoofed animals can restore prairie and wild places faster than anything humans can do. Their feet churn up the top of the soil and mix up the grass seeds, and their dung moves seeds around and provides food for animals and insects. The whole Palouse—all of it—was meant for hooves. A lot of it was cattle for some time, and that did all right, but buffalo are even better. They’re naturally healthier and haven’t been overbred for color or virus resistance or anything. They’re only lightly modified at all, much less than the horses.”

  Coryn grew thoughtful. “What about horses? Were there wild horses here?”

  “There still are. We’re tracking two horse herds. But horses were never native to the Palouse, and buffalo were, before our ancestors shot them all for fun.”

  Coryn flinched, staring down at the herd. “I can’t imagine wanting to shoot them.”

  “Good. Even though climate and land use change habitats, one of the tenets of wilding is to stay close to history when possible. In this case, we could. So we did.”

  “We? Surely this herd started years ago.”

  “We Wilders. The Foundation.”

  She heard a stiff pride in Lou’s voice, a sense of belonging that tied her to all of the humans that had watched over this herd before her, that had watched for birds like the vulture they had seen earlier, and that had counted the eagles. Lou cared for this.

  Coryn swallowed a lump in her throat, recognizing it for a useless snip of jealousy. Did it matter if Lou loved this work more than she loved Coryn? At least she wasn’t despondent like their parents had been. She was happy. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “It looks exactly like the vids show us. That’s a healthy herd on healthy land.”

  Lou smiled. “The Palouse is one of the biggest wilding successes. But the land between here and Seacouver is stained with nests of survivalists and Returners. They come through here from time to time as well—Blessing said he told you about the worst encounter.”

  “Did you really kill someone?”

  Lou’s face hardened. “I had to.”

  “So you have to be careful. You, too. Not just me.”

  “Everyone out here has to be careful.”

  Coryn touched the lip her guard had kicked back in the camp. It still felt tender and a little swollen, and it cracked a little as she smiled. “I have a reminder.”

  “We were lucky,” Lou whispered.

  Not something Coryn wanted to dwell on. “So what do you want from the cities?”

  “Resources. They have everything, and they don’t give us enough of anything. We have the right laws, but no tools to enforce the laws. We can’t help the people out here who need help. We can’t help ourselves some days.” She sounded bitter. “The Foundation has enough money to run the Palouse ecosystem. But nothing more. There was supposed to be an NGO for every part of the world that was aggregated, every piece of land we took, every necessary wildlife corridor. But there isn’t. Some rogue cities have just restarted. The old roads and buildings that were supposed to be ripped up and recycled are being reused again. There’s a hundred little groups of religious nuts with odd skills like the hackers that captured you, only less useful. A few are even more dangerous, and treat women like sex slaves.”

  “And no one stops them?”

  “I’m the law out here, me and the ecobots. I have stopped some of the crazies; I had to. The ecobots can’t do anything to humans that aren’t hurting the environment.”

  “So how come the Listeners could get the ecobots to save us?”

  “The Listeners have resources. You were lucky they were your friends, even though I don’t want you to see any more of them.”

  “They were my friends after they saved me. Not before. I think they saved me to—” She thought about telling Lou she had been sending the Listeners pictures. But she held back. She wasn’t part of their secret army any more. They were dead. “Because they help the people on the bottom. I was so stupid when I first came out. Why does everyone here want to steal Paula?”

  “To sell her.”

  “They wouldn’t have used her? Reprogrammed her?”

  Lou laughed. “Could she be a sex-bot? I thought she didn’t have the parts for that.”

  “She doesn’t. But someone could give her a vagina.” Lou kept changing the subject by focusing on the wrong parts of the story. “The hackers didn’t seem preoccupied with sex, and they looked up to you. They let me go because you told them to.”

  Lou picked up a rock and tossed it to Coryn. “This one has a nice white vein of quartz in it.”

  “Lou.”

  She looked almost guilty. “Trust me. Please. I can’t tell you more than I’m telling you.”

  “Because you don’t trust me? Or because you’re doing the wrong thing?”

  Lou turned away for a moment, and when she turned back she looked collected. “I’m happy to see you. I’m telling you as much of the truth as I can. But your timing might have been better.”

  Coryn stood up. “I almost died to find you. And you saved me. Both of those things should be worth something.”

  “They are.” Lou looked absolutely miserable, her mouth a thin line below red cheeks. She almost spit out the words, “There’s too much at stake.” She pointed down at the buffalo. “All of them. Every single one. All of the people in the cities. There’s you. I am fighting for you. There’s the whole goddamned world.”

  “You can’t save the whole world!” She thought about Julianna and all of her resources and all the power she used to have. Julianna wasn’t trying to do as much as her crazy sister. “Maybe you need to slow down,” Coryn said. “Maybe you need to save one thing at a time, or a few things.”

  “No time.” Lou glared at her before she bagged up the remains of her lunch and shoved it in Mouse’s saddlebags. “There’s a lot more story to tell you. I just don’t have time yet. None of us has any time.”

  Coryn picked
up Aspen and held him while she shook her feet out, getting ready to remount. She had helped Lou before, right before she left. She had been the strong one on that awful night when they learned how their parents died. She could help her again. She stood beside Lou and held her for a moment. “Thank you for showing me the buffalo. They’re beautiful.”

  A trace of a smile touched Lou’s face. “You’re welcome.”

  Coryn limped back toward River. She grabbed the saddle horn and canted her foot up, hopping awkwardly. River turned his head and stared at her.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  The horse gave a look that she swore was skeptical, but she tried again, succeeding in shifting her center of gravity enough to force her foot forward into the stirrup and pull on the horn at the right time. She stood in the one stirrup, facing sideways, and swung her right leg over the back of the saddle.

  River startled, but she managed to keep her seat as he lunged forward, and even to pull him back so that she was in her proper place in line. “There, boy,” she said. “We did it.”

  He flicked his ears at her.

  It hurt to sit, but there wasn’t anything else to do. She looked around. Aspen stared up at her.

  “I don’t think I can give you a ride,” she said.

  Paula hadn’t mounted yet. She came over. “I can carry him if he’ll let me.”

  “Would you? His little legs must be tired.”

  “Sure.”

  Paula scooped him up and managed to make mounting look easy, even while carrying a dog.

  Lou started off. Coryn urged River forward and dropped in right behind her sister. She was going to stick to Lou until she figured out what was going on. Lou was just going to have to deal with it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  They rocked and swayed down toward the buffalo herd, following a thin, switchbacked trail, the horses careful of their footing. Coryn leaned back in her saddle at the steepest spots after Day whispered at her that it was easier on the horse. In some places, the edge of the trail crumbled under River’s hooves. The sun soaked sweat from them all, the only occasional release a slight wind that blew the tangy scent of buffalo dung and trampled dust up as it dried their brows.