them. The charging stand beeped and showed lights. Julia's second Informer, properly seated, began to properly charge.
"There. Now we are back to proper order," Julia said, with what sounded to Renzo like a proper reverence for order.
"Or, we will be, when I am back to my jurisdiction," Renzo said.
"Of course you are correct, Citizen Officer. Forgive me if I should have stated what you have stated. I assure you that I was assuming that you would return to your post within the time frame required by duty," Julia said, with the formality that people so often employ in totalitarian regimes, when they wish to avoid repercussions.
"I will do just that," Renzo said, matching her formality, and taking his leave.
Behind him, Julia closed the door securely, and shook.
She went to turn the heater on, not really expecting it to help much, at least as far as the shaking was concerned. People were dangerous. Wolves were dangerous. Snowstorms were dangerous. Dead Informers were dangerous. Her cattle were on the wrong side of the river, too. It was hard to think how her situation could be worse.
Lights flickered. The breakers snapped off again. Desperate, she went to the control panel, and turned them back on. For safety's sake, she immediately began pretending that she hadn't done any such thing. Pretending could be useful, in the world in which she lived.
Renzo imagined multiple wolves behind multiple trees and bushes on his trek back, but saw no actual ones.
Cattle turned their heads to watch him as he walked past. He noticed, with half awareness, that every creature in the herd was female. If there had been bulls or even steers in with the cows, it would have surprised him. Even in his KinderFormer days, boys and girls had been kept separated. In training sessions, on work crews, in living quarters, there was always strict separation of the sexes, at least in his region. He'd seen news footage from other regions, in which males and females worked side by side, but he was under the impression that those areas had not caught up to his.
A nagging doubt worked its way into his mind. He and the herder had worked together well enough, he thought. Perhaps women, at least some of them, weren't as impossible for men to work with as had been suggested. Perhaps Science had brought females high enough that they, at least some of them, wouldn't be a hindrance to men? Fogged with this thought, he didn't notice the badger until it charged. It bit hurriedly and made for cover as quickly as it could. Most likely it had felt cornered, and had seen no other way out.
Furious with surprise and pain, Renzo unleashed a shot at the fleeing beast, dropping it in its tracks. This posed a problem. He hadn't been ordered to shoot badgers. He wasn't fond of the idea of carting it to the river to dispose of it, but no better idea came to mind. Being careful to stay out of sight of the herder's hut, he hauled it down to the Snake and shoved it into the river with the leg that had been bitten. There seemed some sort of justice in that.
He limped back up the hill to his quarters, washed his wounds, and crawled into bed.
For the next few days, Renzo was a bit of a mess. The bite got infected; not badly enough to report it, in Renzo's opinion, but bad enough to be bothersome. To prevent the herder noticing that he wasn't in prime shape, which might tempt her to report him as defective, Renzo changed his schedule, going out to do the bird count before breakfast, but filing it at the usual time to avoid arousing his superior's suspicion. Also, he was in a horrid state regarding the contraband photos. It seemed more important than ever to destroy them, but it now also seemed impossible. Now that a person had made an unscheduled visit to his cabin, there seemed no safe time in which to scoot furniture out of the way and get into the hidden nook. What if he got caught holding the items? For that matter, even to be caught while in the process of destroying them was too dangerous for words. So he left them alone, except in his mind, which handled them over and over.
In his dreams, the herder kept showing up at his door and coming inside. Renzo would sometimes wake in a sweat.
While he was awake, sometimes he fancied that he heard her walking up to the door. This caused him to develop a need to know where she was, so he would occasionally sneak to where he could look down on the area around the haystacks. If he didn't see her there, he'd circle around carefully to where he could get a really good look at the area around her hut.
After a few days, after his leg no longer bothered him much, his fear of her subsided but, for reasons he couldn't articulate, he kept sneaking out from time to time, to see if he could see her.
For days after her encounter with the wolves and with the birdwatcher, Julia was a bit of a mess. She carried her bow at all times.
She shot one more wolf. It wasn't actively pursuing cattle, but it had moved in too close, in her estimation. It dodged a fatal shot and escaped with the arrow flopping in its hindquarters. After that, though, the pack took off, presumably in search of an area where enemies didn't kill or maim from a distance.
Not having reported the previous wolf shootings, Julia didn't report the latter one. It would be asking for difficulties, for one thing. For another, as she saw it, shooting wolves had simply become part of the way she helped keep the Plan operating smoothly. At least, that was the explanation she kept at the ready, in case she was found out. To some degree, she even believed it.
She applied for permission to move the cattle across the bridge. When her request was finally granted, she breathed a sigh of relief to finally be authorized, and left the cattle where they had been for days.
In her spare time, Julia took another run at making a shelter for herself in one of the haystacks. Now that she'd had time to think things through, she did her experimenting on a side away from where helicopter pilots would see it when they brought in supplies. She finally had success in a haystack that hadn't been stacked as tightly as the others from the third row up. That her burrow was higher than she planned at first bothered her – it seemed disorderly – but then it pleased her, after it occurred to her that it might mean less exposure to pests that didn't like to climb.
The project soothed her. It shouldn't have, since it exposed her to reprimand for engaging in unauthorized activity, but as she had long since found out, what she was supposed to feel often didn't line up with her actual feelings. She enjoyed figuring out how things worked, and making them work better, or become more useful. She didn't dare tinker with anything around the hut, but haystacks were different. Anything out of place in a haystack could be blamed on creatures that ate or burrowed in hay.
Her nerves were certainly in need of soothing. She couldn't shake the feeling that she was being watched, at least part of the time. She thought she saw the birdwatcher sneaking around at odd times, in unaccustomed places. Stranger yet, she was almost sure one day that she saw someone walking around inside the grid of haystacks.
Dreams were bothersome for a while, too. The birdwatcher featured prominently in them. Sometimes he fought wolves with her. Sometimes he turned out to be a wolf in human disguise. Soon though, she was back to dreamless nights. Her trainers would have been proud of her, had they known how quickly she'd recovered. An uncommon ability for achieving uninterrupted, high quality sleep even under adverse conditions was a much-ballyhooed trademark characteristic of her breed of humans.
Harvey Meridian d'Idaho clinched his jaw as he piloted the helicopter toward the landing area for resupplying the cattle herder based along the Idaho and Oregon border near the Payette ghost town. He hadn't heard that she'd moved to the Oregon side.
His co-pilot hadn't heard about it, either, apparently, because he responded to the sight of cattle on an unexpected side of the river by grabbing electronic devices and checking to see if the semi-exiled woman had permission to take her hungry cattle from a location at which they might starve, to a location where they had plenty to eat until the grass got growing again. Harvey suspected that the man rather hoped that the poor creature didn't have permission, so that he could turn her in for the violation. Already, after only a week as a team, the man
had turned Harvey in for possibly-suspicious behavior no less than nine times. There was no doubt, none at all, that the man hankered to get someone declared an experson.
Having no intention, if he could help it, of being deemed an experson – which for someone of his rank would most likely mean facing a firing squad – Harvey had been weighing the respective merits of getting the co-pilot named an experson first, or losing him out of a door during flight (there were ways to make it look like an accident), or taking the man to the backcountry and shooting him, or, rather less bloody an option, deserting the service and leaving the man to face the consequences of not having kept proper tabs on a fellow pilot. There were undoubtedly other options, but those were the ones that came most readily to mind.
As appealing as some of the above options had seemed at times, Harvey had decided to consult, if possible, with Lt. Ott before proceeding.
The plan had been to offload the cattle herder's supplies, sneakily knock his co-pilot unconscious with drugs, and fly a mile or so away to land out of sight of both the herder and the birdcounter who lived nearby. From there, he had meant to work his way back