The Good, the Bad, and the Emus

by Donna Andrews

  “Aha! You’re looking at a classic display of emu courtship behavior,” Grandfather said.

  “So those would be two guy emus fighting over the chick, then.” Thor nodded sagely.

  “Actually, those would be two hens fighting over the male,” Grandfather said. “The female is dominant in emu mating behavior.”

  “So that one’s the guy?” Thor asked, pointing to the least active of the three emus. “How can you tell?”

  “They’re very difficult to sex visually, at least at a distance, so I’m going by their behavior,” Grandfather said.

  “That explains a lot,” Thor said. “Because I was pretty sure the one they’re fighting over was John Stuart Mill. But I didn’t want to say so in case Ms. Delia had gotten it wrong.”

  “I think Ms. Delia was probably quite a savvy ornithologist,” I said.

  Grandfather frowned and looked annoyed, as I’d intended.

  We all hung around for quite a while watching the emus. Eventually the boys began showing signs that they ought to have taken an afternoon nap, so Michael whisked them away to rest before dinner.

  “Which reminds me,” Caroline said. “It’s only two hours till sunset. Shouldn’t we start rounding up some birds?”

  “Good idea,” Grandfather said.

  That’s when everything fell apart.

  At Grandfather’s command, the volunteers all donned heavy leather gloves and some of them crossed the stream and began trying to encircle the emus.

  According to Grandfather’s instructions, the approved method of capturing an emu was to corner the bird and grab it by its vestigial wings. Then you maneuvered until you were behind it, threw your arms around its body, hugged it to your chest, and frog-marched it into the door of the nearby trailer.

  Cornering the birds proved easier said than done. There wasn’t a fence or a wall or anything solid to corner them against—only the advancing line of volunteers, who tended to break and run when the emus charged them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Zora Neale Hurston escaped from the encircling volunteers this way, by sheer intimidation. Hans Christian Andersen waited until the volunteer was about to grab him, then kicked him down and ran away. Frances Hodgson Burnett actually let a volunteer march her into one of the trailers, but as he was trying to shut the door she charged it, knocked him down, and ran off along the stream bed.

  Only Edward Everett Horton, the smallest of the emus present, failed to escape, and I more than half suspected he allowed us to capture him because the other emus had been bullying him and keeping him away from the grain, and he was probably hoping he’d get first crack at the next delivery if he came with us.

  Worse, about that time, teams began straggling back, reporting that their assigned emus had given them the slip, usually after leading them into thickets of brambles or down slopes so steep they couldn’t climb up again.

  “The damn thing kicked me down and then took off like a bat out of hell,” one volunteer reported as Dad was bandaging some of his cuts. “Never seen a bird run that fast.”

  “Not your fault,” I said. “They can sprint at thirty miles an hour.” At least that’s what Grandfather had been saying, with increasing irritation, as party after party returned emu-less.

  Grandfather left Sherry the Valkyrie behind to wait for the stragglers and drive the truck with the empty horse trailer back to camp. The rest of us headed back to camp with the trailer carrying Edward Everett Horton. I hitched a ride in the Jeep with Dad, Grandfather, and Caroline, and for once I had no competition for my seat. The bodyguards seemed content to follow behind in a truck. Grandfather sat in the back, glaring out at the passing scenery and growling slightly whenever Caroline, who was driving, hit a bump. Dad tried to make conversation, but the only topic he could come up with was the long list of bumps, bruises, sprains, and lacerations he’d treated during the day, which didn’t exactly cheer anyone up.

  To my surprise, Thor arranged to drop his uncle’s truck off at the repair shop and hitch a ride out to camp with some of the volunteers. Was he starting to like being part of the expedition? Or was he merely worried about Edward Everett Horton?

  Grandfather’s mood lifted a little as we watched the trailer unload our solitary emu into the pen.

  “Well, it’s a start,” he said, in what I suspected was a deliberately bluff, confident tone.

  “And we didn’t do badly considering that we were initially given a bum steer on where the birds would be,” I said.

  “That’s right!” The idea seemed to cheer him up. “And we’ll do better tomorrow with our native guide. Isn’t that so, Thor?”

  He clapped Thor on the back with such hearty good humor that the kid staggered a bit.

  “We’ll let the emu settle in tonight, and get Clarence out here tomorrow to take a look at him.”

  “Clarence?” Thor repeated.

  “Our regular zoo vet,” Grandfather explained.

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with him?” Thor was frowning as if he suspected Grandfather of some evil intent toward the emu, like declaring him contagious and euthanizing him. I could have told him that Edward Everett Horton was perfectly safe, especially since, despite being the smallest of the emus, he’d managed to draw blood from two of his captors. Grandfather was a big fan of anything fierce, noisy, and dangerous.

  “No, he seems to be in perfect health,” Grandfather said. “But I like to make sure.”

  “Only a well emu visit, then,” I said.

  Thor seemed mollified. But still a little wary of Grandfather. I could tell Thor wasn’t that keen on sitting at Grandfather’s table in the mess tent, perhaps because Grandfather continued to give him unsolicited advice on his college plans and pelt him at intervals with odd bits of whatever Norse language he’d been speaking.

  “Why does your grandfather keep talking to me in German?” Thor asked me in an undertone at one point when Grandfather had gone to get another helping of beef stew.

  “It’s not German,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it’s either Swedish or Norwegian. Possibly bits of both.”

  “Can you maybe tell him I’m not from Sweden?” Thor looked anxious. “I’d hate for him to ask me something important that I didn’t understand because I don’t speak the language.”

  “It would serve him right,” I said. “But yes, I’ll tell him. And I don’t think you have to worry about him saying anything important in Swedish. He only knows a few words that he picked up when he was over there rescuing something.”

  Grandfather returned and beamed at us.

  “Korleis har du det?” he said.

  Thor flinched.

  “Just what was it you were over in Sweden rescuing?” I asked. “Or was it Norway?”

  “Norway, most recently,” he said. “We were filming the klappmyss, the brunbjørn, the fjellrev, and of course the trollflaggermus.”

  “In English,” I said. “Thor may have the blood of the Vikings in his veins, but Norwegian isn’t my language.”

  “The hooded seal, the brown bear, the arctic fox, and Nathusius’s pipistrelle,” he said. “That last one’s a bat. Not really endangered, but its habitat is threatened.”

  “No wolves?” I asked.

  “And wolves, of course!” Grandfather exclaimed. “Astonishing animals, wolves.”

  As I hoped, he began talking about wolves, one of his favorite subjects, and one on which even I had to admit he could talk entertainingly for hours. Thor was probably safe from further harassment, as long as he refrained from arguing when Grandfather contended that most of the country’s ills could be solved by the reintroduction of a proper number of wolves and other large predators.

  I left him at it and went to check on the boys, who were fast asleep, their pajamas slightly askew, as if they’d been stuffed into them while already unconscious. Natalie hadn’t even bothered with her own pajamas but lay sprawled in her tent like a discarded Halloween decoration. And Michael, who had borne the brunt of the child care all day, h
ad fallen asleep on his sleeping bag, with a textbook he had to read before classes began lying on his chest.

  I knew I should follow their example. But I wasn’t sleepy yet. And I wanted to find out if Stanley had learned anything. And check on Miss Annabel. And make sure Thor got home safely. And find out what Grandfather had planned for tomorrow. And make sure we had scheduled bodyguards for tonight and tomorrow. And—

  “Meg?”

  I had been standing halfway between our tent and the mess tent, undecided which way to go. I looked up to see Jim Williams standing nearby.

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you about something,” he said. “Just something I noticed today that worried me. I wanted someone else to know about it.”

  “Something you can’t just tell Grandfather about?” I asked.

  “It would distract him,” Williams said. “You know how he gets when he’s focused on a project. His passion and his laserlike focus are the biggest weapons in our arsenal.”

  I’d have been tempted to say his mulish stubbornness and tunnel vision, but maybe Williams was trying to be tactful.

  “He might not want to listen to something unrelated to the emu project,” Williams went on. “Or worse, he might listen and get so riled up that he’d switch gears in the middle of the roundup.”

  Clearly Williams was not only a veteran Brigade member but a close observer of Grandfather.

  “No argument there,” I said. “But why speak to me instead?”

  “You have his ear,” he said. “And you’ve got common sense, which is sometimes in short supply on these expeditions. Don’t get me wrong,” he added hastily. “You could go a long way before you’d find a group with as much heart and brain as Blake’s Brigade. But good old practical common sense isn’t our forte.”

  “Again, no argument,” I said. “So what do you want me to use my common sense on?”

  “This.” He held out a small object.

  I took the object, which appeared to be a small cylinder of rock, about an inch and a half in diameter and maybe four inches long. The ends were ragged, but the circumference oddly smooth, so much so that I suspected it was man-made. And it was actually two different kinds of rock, stuck together—one end was a pale blue-gray, the other white and crystalline, possibly quartz. If Rose Noire were here, she’d know. In fact, she’d probably whip out the mineral book she’d borrowed from the Riverton Library and tell me what both kinds of rock were and what they were good for, metaphysically speaking, but I could make nothing of it.

  “My common sense is stumped,” I said. “What is it, and why should it worry you?”

  “It appears to be a small piece of the core you’d get from exploratory drilling,” he said. “They use a round drill toughened up with diamonds so it cuts through pretty much anything it finds. Produces a round cylinder of rock just like this. I found this up near the emu ranch while I was looking for the birds. Someone’s been taking core samples up there.”

  “Core samples?” I frowned down at the cylinder. “Is that bad? And why would someone be doing that up at Biscuit Mountain?”

  “Sometimes they do it for environmental reasons,” Williams said. “To test a site for contaminants. The most common reason is that someone’s exploring for minerals. I’ve seen the process a couple of times when Dr. Blake got involved in protesting mining companies’ plans to open mines in vulnerable natural areas. And neither reason’s necessarily a terrible thing. They could have explored for minerals and found nothing. They might be doing environmental testing to compare Riverton with some other, less unspoiled area.”

  “Or someone could be planning to start an open-pit mine of some noxious carcinogenic substance,” I said. “Or testing to see how far some ghastly chemical pollution has already spread. We need to figure out which.”

  “Precisely,” he said.

  “Without starting a noisy public fuss,” I added. “Because that could derail the emu roundup.”

  “Not to mention letting the environmental bad guys know we’re onto them.” He was beaming at me. “You’ve got it.”

  “This core drilling—it’s not brand-new technology, right?” I asked. “So we have no idea if this sample was taken last week or thirty years ago. Any possibility that this is last century’s crisis?”

  “It wasn’t taken last week, for sure,” he said. “There weren’t any signs that someone had been up there recently—no tractor marks or serious trampling of the vegetation. But if you looked closely, you could see the signs where something had been going on. And I found this, too, nearby.”

  He held out a large monkey wrench.

  “Maybe they’re unrelated,” he said. “But what are the odds someone would lose a nice, new monkey wrench out in the middle of the woods just two feet from where someone else was doing core drilling?”

  “Slim.” I turned the wrench over. Some rust was starting to form on it in a few spots, but for the most part it still looked new.

  “No way that’s been out there thirty years,” he said. “Based on that, and the condition of the area around where I found the rock sample, I’d say the drilling was done more than a month ago, but no more than seven or eight months.”

  “And we need to find out who did it,” I said. “In a subtle, tactful, discreet way, which means we need to keep Grandfather out of it for the time being.”

  “See? I knew you were the right person to handle this. I’ll leave it in your hands. I should head over to the mess tent. I’m on KP duty tonight.”

  He saluted—literally—and strode off.

  I fingered the little rock cylinder. Such a small and apparently innocent little object. Could it have anything to do with my grandmother’s murder?

  I’d liked the little rock cylinder better before it was freighted with such possibly sinister meanings.

  I tucked it into my pocket, stuck the monkey wrench just inside the tent, and went in search of Rose Noire and Stanley.

  Chapter 18

  Rose Noire’s tent was still in a state of semi-collapse, so I checked to see if she was staying with Caroline. I found Caroline sitting in a chair by the steps to her caravan in a pool of light produced by a large LED camping lantern. Rose Noire was nowhere to be seen.

  “Is Rose Noire inside studying her rock books?” I asked.

  “She went off on an herb-gathering expedition,” Caroline said.

  “In the dark?”

  “It’s something that has to be picked by moonlight. Oh, by the way—here’s that list of volunteers you wanted.” She handed me a sheaf of papers. Then she kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on a battered green footlocker that was sitting a few feet in front of her chair. “Oof,” she said, as she leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “Has Grandfather been keeping you hopping?” I perched on the caravan steps beside her.

  “No, but I’ve spent the last I don’t know how long roaming through the camp cheering up the discouraged, calming down the overexcited, placating the quarrelsome—you know the drill.”

  “I do indeed.” While Grandfather was brilliant at setting expeditions in motion, the job of keeping up the participants’ morale fell to someone else. Usually Caroline, and occasionally me.

  Caroline reached into the cooler at her elbow, took out two cold waters, handed me one, and opened the other for herself.

  Sherry the Valkyrie strode up. Her French braid was still perfect, her shorts and blouse were free of wrinkles and sweat stains, and her long, tanned legs bore no scratches or bug bites. I allowed myself a few moments of profound resentment before tossing my negative feelings aside. If she could spend a day hunting for emus and still look that good, my hat was off to her. More likely, she’d spent most of the day here at camp, dealing with the kind of boring, practical tasks that made it possible for the rest of the brigade to frolic in the woods.

  “New marching orders,” she said, handing each of us a small sheaf of papers. “Including information on tick removal and dealing with possible po
ison ivy exposure.”

  I could have written such instructions in my sleep, and odds were Caroline had originally written these. But we both dutifully accepted our packets so Sherry could mark us off on her checklist.

  “How’s it going?” Caroline asked. “Nearly finished passing out the sheets, I see.”

  “Let me check,” Sherry said.

  She began counting something on her checklist.

  Caroline closed her eyes briefly and sighed. Clearly she had been making conversation, not asking for a detailed progress report. Then she opened her eyes again, took a sip from her water bottle, and turned to me.

  “Anything you want me to tell Rose Noire when she gets back?” she asked. “Assuming I’m even awake.”

  “Just tell her I found another interesting mineral for her to identify,” I said.

  Sherry looked up with a frown at that. Clearly she disapproved of anyone not giving full attention to the expedition’s main mission. She pursed her lips and then focused back on her clipboard.

  It was disconcerting having her hovering like that. I glanced at Caroline, who rolled her eyes.

  “I’ll tell Rose Noire about your mineral,” Caroline said. “Tell me, what do you think of this?” She picked up something that had been in her lap and held it up for my inspection—a shapeless knitted wool object in a particularly vile shade of purplish brown. “Millicent made it. One of our volunteers.”

  “I think it looks like a giant mutant tea cozy,” I said.

  “Strange,” she said. “Rose Noire had the same reaction, down to the little nose wrinkle of disgust at the words ‘tea cozy.’ Does your whole family have an unreasoning hatred of tea cozies?”

  “Actually, yes,” I said. “It goes back to when our cousin Sylvia was just learning how to knit. She made tea cozies for everyone in the family.”