XVIII
Winter in Maine. Back before the supervolcano erupted, back before Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stuck in Guilford with the Greenville blues again, that would have meant Norman Rockwell paintings, or more likely Currier and Ives prints, to Rob. He would have thought of Christmas trees (or, being the cynical sort he was, of pine-scented air freshener).
These days, winter in Maine brought two things to his mind.
He knew the third one was coming. He had a date and everything. He’d asked Lindsey, and she’d said yes, fool that she was. He would have been a lousy marriage bet in ordinary times. But then, in ordinary times he never would have wound up stuck in Guilford and got to know her to begin with. Jim Farrell had already agreed-or threatened, depending on which way the wind was blowing-to perform the ceremony. Life would go on.
It would if he, to say nothing of the whole region, could manage not to freeze and not to starve. A hell of a lot of second-growth pines had already gone up in smoke so the stubborn souls who wanted to keep living north and west of the Interstate wouldn’t freeze to death. These days, people had to cut down trees a lot farther away from the little towns that dotted the countryside. Then they had to bring them back to the towns to go up in smoke. They mostly had to do it without help of the internal-combustion variety. Life got interesting sometimes. Not warm, but interesting.
Life got hungry, too. Just as there weren’t so many trees running around nearby these days, there also weren’t so many moose on the loose. Rob had eaten some things he never would have imagined downing in pre- eruption Los Angeles. Squirrels, for instance, weren’t just for cats any more. They were surprisingly tasty, though there wasn’t much meat on a squirrel carcass. The same went for robins, though the weather had got so nasty that not many robins came this far north any more.
Rob wore snowshoes on his feet. He had a rifle in his hands. A DayGlo orange vest told the world-and, more particularly, the numskulls also prowling this part of it with rifles-that he wasn’t a moose, a squirrel, or any other refugee from
Moving on snowshoes was like riding a horse. For a while, your thigh muscles had to do things they weren’t used to doing. They pissed and moaned about it, sometimes loudly. Then they did it often enough to decide you weren’t trying to torture them after all.
So he glumped along between the Piscataquis and Manhanock Pond. The river was frozen. So was the pond-which, being several miles long, would have done for a major lake in SoCal. Here, it was just one more souvenir of the retreating glaciers. Like Minnesota, Maine was littered with lakes and ponds and puddles. To an L.A. guy, so much fresh water sitting around doing nothing seemed perverse.
At the moment, most of Manhanock Pond was a king-sized ice cube sitting around doing nothing. If the weather was any indication, the glaciers had just stepped around the corner for lunch, and they’d be back any minute. Scientists loudly insisted the eruption wouldn’t trigger a new Ice Age. They couldn’t have proved it by Rob.
A crow flew by, or maybe it was a raven. Rob watched it go without moving the rifle. Even if he could have hit a crow on the wing with a rifle, a.30–06 round would have turned it into no more than an explosion of black feathers against the sky. Birds were for shotguns. With his piece, he had to go after bigger game.
Except for the faint crunch of his snowshoes over the drifts, it was eerily quiet. Winters up here were like that. Get away from town and it was as if you were the only living thing as far as your eye and your ear could reach. No, not as if. Very often, you were.
Rob was now. No cars on the roads, that was for sure. Route 6 to the north and Route 23 to the east (to say nothing of Route 150 to the west, which was exactly what Route 150 deserved to have said of it) were covered with as much snow as the rest of the landscape. If you had to travel these days, you went by snowshoes or skis or horse-drawn sleigh-or, in a desperate emergency, by snowmobile. Those beasts murdered the silence for miles around.
Off in the distance, coming up from the southeast, something moved. Rob was immediately alert. It might be a moose. He didn’t think that was likely: there were more towns, with more hunters, down in the direction of I-95. Moose had been scarcer in those parts before the eruption, too. But, while it was unlikely, it wasn’t impossible.
He stood very still. Moose didn’t see in color, so if this was one it wouldn’t be able to tell how hideous his DayGlo vest was. It might mistake him for a Christmas tree or something, even if he wasn’t loaded down with tinsel and tacky ornaments.
He needed no more than a few seconds to realize that whatever was coming his way wasn’t a moose. He needed a little more time, but not a lot, to figure out what it was: a dogsled, straight out of the Yukon. A slow grin spread across his face. That was another way to get around in this frozen part of the world, at least if you had enough moose meat or kibbles or whatever the hell to keep your huskies happy.
Right behind the first sled came another one. Rob could pick out the exact moment when the passengers saw him-the dogs of the lead sled swerved in his direction. More slowly than he might have, he realized he didn’t have to keep standing there as if frozen by the weather. He waved, feeling stupid.
The people in the dogsleds waved back. As the sleds neared, Rob decided he was glad he had the rifle. The huskies seemed no more than a step removed from wolves, and a small step at that. If they hadn’t been hitched to the sleds, they might have decided to hunt him.
When the sleds stopped, one of the passengers pushed back the hood of his-no, her-furry, Eskimo-style parka. To Rob’s amazement, styled blond hair cascaded out. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Marie Fabianski, from CNN. Can we interview you?”
She spoke slowly, with spaces between her words. She might have been going into a foreign country where the natives couldn’t be expected to speak or understand English very well. A cameraman in the second sled aimed his weapon at Rob’s bearded, none-too-clean face.
“Um, okay,” Rob mumbled. He wasn’t usually thrown for such a loss, but he’d been away from anything wider than small-town gossip since not long after the supervolcano blew.
“Terrific!” Marie Fabianski smiled a multikilowatt smile. She had dazzlingly perfect teeth, whether on her own or thanks to a talented dentist Rob couldn’t even begin to guess. “We’re here to do a feature to show the rest of the country-to show the rest of the whole wide world-how the people in these parts are getting along. Isn’t that exciting?”
Sure as hell, she was treating him like a native, and a dimwitted native at that. “What if we’d rather be left alone?” Rob said. There wasn’t much point to staying on the wrong side of the Interstate if you wouldn’t rather be left alone.
So it seemed to Rob, anyhow. Marie Fabianski’s smile never wavered. “The public has the right to be informed!” she said in ringing tones. “It wants to know what’s going on in these forgotten corners of the country.”
“Oh, horseshit,” Rob said. With luck, that would spoil some of the footage the cameraman was getting, though they might just bleep over it. He went on, “The American public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us up here. It’s proved that ever since the supervolcano went off. And you know what else? We have the right to remain silent.”
He might as well have saved his breath. She sure kept on with her spiel as if he hadn’t spoken: “Do you know, uh. .?” Then she did pause. She had to look down for a second to check her notes. Nodding to herself, she started over: “Do you know Professor James Farrell, former unsuccessful Republican candidate for the House?”
“Yeah, I know Jim,” Rob answered.
“He is virtually the tsar of this new Siberia, isn’t he?” Marie Fabianski rolled on. She had all her preconceptions neatly lined up in a row. If only they were ducks!
