‘Abstracting Bojangles from their number doesn’t appear to have had any effect on their behavior,’ I told Elegy.
Elegy stood mute in the down-sifting dark, waiting, Kretzoi, too, seemed apprehensive and nervous. Once night had securely settled, we were going to leave Jaafar at the Dragonfly’s radio and strike out through the jungle in search of one of the nests Bojangles had told Kretzoi we might be able to find.
In the past – specifically, in the years since Chaney’s disappearance – we had never had any success on these quests. We had failed for the same reason that primatologists have still not compiled detailed studies of the drills and mandrills of post-Armageddon West Africa. The Asadi’s nocturnal habitat is virtually impenetrable to ground-going observers, and the Asadi themselves, out of their clearing, are so retiring as to seem mere phantoms.
But now Elegy believed we could accomplish something, and her optimism derived from the fact that Kretzoi had learned a few things from Bojangles about Asadi behavior in the Wild.
When the stars at last came out, we said our farewells to Jaafar and set off. I carried a high-powered hand lamp with three beam intensities and a small tranq launcher. Elegy also had a hand lamp but, in addition, twenty meters of rope and a backpack full of assorted wilderness gear. We were each equipped with a ‘hearing-aid’ radio receiver in our ears and a small, button-touch transmitter at our throats. Kretzoi carried nothing; he used the vines and tree limbs spotlighted by our lamps as a pathway through the forest, moving almost casually among the lower branches in order to keep from outdistancing us. Even so, Elegy and I often had a difficult time keeping pace.
Always, just as we were about to lose sight of him, Kretzoi slowed, or dropped to the jungle floor, or hung by one arm from a glistening branch, revolving there like a carcass on a furry hook. As soon as Elegy and I had nearly closed the distance, though, Kretzoi invariably went ghosting away again into the rank, humid copses of the Wild. And our lamps’ beams went careering desperately after him, frail luminous extensions of ourselves.
After this had been going on for two hours or more, and I had checked in at least eight times with Jaafar (in scrupulous observance of the fifteen-minute interval we had agreed upon), Kretzoi suddenly dropped out of a thick-boled, mangrovesque hardwood and squatted among its curved, stiltlike roots without moving. Elegy and I went in to him by clambering over and ducking under the root arches barricading the tree’s gnarled foot. Shortly, all three of us were crouched shoulder to shoulder in the eerie, dryadic chapel of the mangrove, listening to the wind and computing the dimensions of our solitude.
‘Is this the place?’ Elegy whispered.
Why couldn’t she talk aloud? The Asadi, if any were about, knew exactly where we were by the telltale brilliance of our hand lamps, which shone aslant through the mangrove bladelets above us.
Kretzoi turned and dug at the clumpy soil at the base of the tree. A handful of this dirt he held beneath his nostrils, like an inspector sniffing coffee beans. Then he patted the soil sample back into place and felt about the trunk of the alien mangrove in several different places. This done, he swung back and spoke with his hands.
‘He says this is where Bojangles sometimes slept,’ Elegy interpreted.
‘How does he know?’ Like Elegy, I was whispering.
‘Bojangles marked the place with his urine; he also gave Kretzoi explicit directions to this tree and a description of its surroundings.’ Elegy gripped the hybrid animal’s shoulder. Then, as she made pidgin gestural commands with her free hand, she whispered, ‘Go up, Kretzoi. Find his nest – Bojangles’s nest – and see what you can see.’
Standing up, Kretzoi gripped one of the weird root arches bracketing the tree. He did a languorous flip, pulled himself onto the arch, and sprang nimbly into the tree itself. He melded with the leaf cover so seamlessly that neither the moon shining down nor our lamps shining up could distinguish him from the foliage.
I got up and made to join Kretzoi aloft, gripping the same root arch he had gripped. The bark was as smooth as sharkskin.
‘What’re you doing?’ Elegy demanded.
‘I’d like a firsthand look. This cuts out the need for an interpreter, too. Eliminates the middleman. No offense, Elegy.’
‘You’ll break your idiot neck,’ she whispered savagely.
Two meters off the ground I was already dizzy. Elegy lifted her hand lamp and held it for me as I climbed. The mangrove had thick but resilient limbs at fairly regular intervals, and when the canopy of bladelets above me had become a treacherous carpet under my groping feet, I could still see the eye of Elegy’s lamp burning whitely in the leaves, giving them a leprous incandescence. Once, when I slipped, a hand caught my wrist and pulled me to the safety of a right-angle limb. I clung to the tree’s central trunk, breathing rapidly, as Kretzoi held me in place with one hand.
‘Thanks,’ I whispered, feeling like an idiot whose idiot neck has just been mercifully spared.
My cheek pressed against smooth, silver bark, I peered out at the reeds, tufts of woven grass, assemblages of fitted twigs, and quilts of tropical flower petals comprising the Asadi nest candlevered between several branches to my right. By its smell I knew the nest for what it was. It smelled as Bojangles had on the day of his capture; it smelled like the Asadi in their clearing.
Kretzoi made a sign at me, which, still trying to compose myself, I waved off. Whereupon he released me, climbed higher, and draped himself
