She shook her head. “Hard to believe wolves could come back.”
“No more so than these guys. At this point, every wild creature is unlikely. It’s going to be tough to come back.”
“Not if the Half Earthers have their way.”
He nodded. “I like that plan.”
They sat there. No reason to leave. Nowhere else they could get to that afternoon would be better. So they sat. Frank chewed a grass stalk. Mary watched the animals, glanced at him. His body was relaxed. He sat there like a cat. Even the marmots and chamois were not as relaxed as he was at that moment. They were busy eating. And indeed that was what would get Mary and Frank off their rock; hunger, and the need to pee.
And darkness. The sun hit the ridge to the west and immediately the air felt cooler. Shadows fell across the meadow.
Frank glanced up at the ridge, at her.
“What say?”
“We should get back down I guess. There’s a last cable car here too.”
“True.”
They stood, stretched. The chamois looked up at them, wandered off. Without appearing to hurry, they were soon across the meadow; and when they had gotten among the rocks bordering the meadow, they disappeared. It was like a magic trick. Even trying, even knowing they were there, Mary couldn’t see them.
The marmots didn’t seem to care that they were moving. Then one whistled, and the young one who had been feeding near them galumped away and ducked under a boulder. Frank looked up, pointed. A bird far overhead, soaring. Hawk, maybe.
They started toward the trail that led down to the cable car. Then Frank lurched forward and fell on his face.
Mary cried out, rushed to him, crouched by his side. He grunted something, looking stunned. Put his hands to the ground and pushed himself up, rolled into a sitting position, sat there with his head in his hands. Felt his face, his jaw.
“Are you all right?” Mary exclaimed.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What happened!”
“I don’t know. I fell.”
87
The town meeting included pretty much every single person left in the area; that meant about four hundred people. Looking around the old high school gym, where most of us had gone to school back in the day, we could see each other. Everyone we knew. We knew each other by name.
The deal had come down from some UN agency called the Ministry for the Future, by way of the Feds and the Montana state government. Everyone was offered a buy-out that pretty much covered the rest of your life; housing costs in expensive places, enrollment in the school of your choice, and options that if taken, might allow most of us to move to the same city. Probably Bozeman. Some argued for Minneapolis.
Everyone already knew the plan. The night before, the one movie theater still running had screened Local Hero, a Scottish film in which an international oil company based in Texas offers to buy a Scottish coastal village from the inhabitants, so they can rip it out and build a tanker port. The pay-out will make everyone rich, and the townspeople all cheerfully and unsentimentally vote in favor of it. They have a final ceilidh to say goodbye to the town and celebrate everyone becoming millionaires. Then the owner of the oil company arrives by helicopter and declares the town and its beach need to be saved for an astronomical observatory, astronomy being his personal hobby. Burt Lancaster. A funny sly movie. We watched it in silence. It was too close to home.
Our situation was not so different, although they weren’t going to knock the town down. It would be left to serve as some kind of emergency shelter, and headquarters for local animal stewards, who could be any of our kids, if they cared to do it, or even us, if the idea of coming back to the town empty appealed. And we could come back once a year to visit the place. The movie theater had screened Brigadoon a few nights before, probably to show how stupid that would be. No one had laughed at that one either. Obviously Jeff, the owner of the theater, who had kept the business going at a loss, didn’t want us to close the town. He was whipping on us a little. As we came in he was playing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” over the speakers, really piling it on. But the vote had been decisive.
The main thing was, it was going to happen anyway. Or it already had happened. Jeff could have screened a zombie movie to show that aspect of it. Because all the kids were gone. They graduated high school, having bused to the next town over for it, and went off to college or to find work, and they never came back. Not all of them of course. I myself came back for instance. But most of them didn’t, and the fewer that came back, the fewer came back. Positive feedback loop with a negative result; happens all the time, it’s the story of our time. The town’s population had peaked in 1911 at 12,235 people. Every decade after that it had gone down, and now it was officially at 831 people, but really it was less than that, especially if you didn’t count the poor meth addicts, who were zombies indeed. One store, one café, one movie theater, courtesy of Jeff; a post office, a gas station, a school for K through 8, a high school the next town over with not enough students and teachers. That was it.
And of course we weren’t the only one. I don’t know if that fact made
