The Weirdo (6 page)

He sighed, laughed gently at such a thought, then went back to the kitchen and patted her feet dry in silence.

"Sorry," she said, looking down at him.

He began gently winding the gauze around her feet. "You wanted to know, didn't you?" His eyes were hidden by the cap. The annoyance was still in his voice.

"I was curious," she admitted.

He continued wrapping the bandage in silence until he finally said, "There."

Sam's feet looked mummified.

"These slippers will be a little big, but that's good," he said, easing them on.

"Ill get them back to you."

"No hurry. Why don't you call home now? Then we'll start down the ditch."

***

With water that same oxblood, dark tea-color of the lake, the George Washington Canal, which dates back to 1793, is still in business, affording safe inside passage for yachts on the Inland Waterway to Florida. They travel south each fall and north in the spring. Dunnegan occasionally comes out from his store across from the Feeder Ditch to watch the traffic.

For almost two hundred years, the waters have borne trade from states below North Carolina. Steam packets chuffed along it loaded with produce and cotton. Barges full of timber were towed through it, as were schooners. There were watermelon boats and potato boats and boats full of fresh corn bound for Norfolk and Washington and Baltimore. A showboat once plied it every summer, offering evening performances at canalside hamlets.

No longer is it used for commerce. Now only pleasure boats sail up and down its placid surfaces. I watched them, too, now and then.

The serenity of the days of George Washington remains. Trees grow down the banks in thick walls of foliage on the swamp side, and bears sometimes
emerge from them to swim the canal. For their own sake, Dunnegan wishes they'd stay in the swamp. So do I.

Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University

***

"DUNNEGAN'S, in about forty-five minutes," she told her mother. The convenience store—deli, with video rentals as a sideline, was less than ten minutes away from home.

Sam got to her feet and took a step, then closed her eyes in pain.

Seeing the grimace, Chip quickly said, "Don't try to walk. I'll piggyback you."

"That's ridiculous," she said.

"You'd rather walk?"

"No."

He bent down, and she climbed aboard.

Going through the front room, he stopped a moment. "My dad works in here."

A large window and skylight let in the morning sun. There were sketches and watercolors of birds everywhere. Three or four mounted specimens, roosting or in flight, looking alive, stood on pedestals.

"He does the necessary taxidermy, uses them as models, then gives them to museums."

"Stuffed things have never appealed to me." Some of her father's friends had walls covered with deer heads, game birds, and fish.

"Me neither."

Chip carried her on out into the yard, telling the dogs he'd be back soon.

They bumped along toward the little dam and the spillway chutes.

"Don't you get bored back here?"

"Right now, I'm so busy between watching the bears and working on my project that I barely have time to sleep."

Sam knew she was being nosy again. "What project?"

"That five-year moratorium on hunting and shooting in the Powhatan will end next fall unless we—Tom Telford and myself—can persuade the Wildlife Service to continue it another five years."

Tom Telford was grit in her papa's eyes. An ache in his ear.

"I've talked to the National Wildlife Conservancy a dozen times. They weren't even aware the ban was going to be lifted."

"Are you serious?"

"Absolutely. They'll give me help and money."

Whoops,
Sam thought. Collision course with all the hunters and fishermen in the area. There'd been rumors that an environmentalist group was being organized to keep the ban. One hunter and fisherman named Stuart Sanders would be livid when he found out a seventeen-year-old kid was behind it.

A few minutes later, Chip deposited her in the Feeder Ditch boat and started the motor. They headed east down the waterway, past tangles of berry bushes and thom thickets wound with dead honeysuckle vines.

He shouted above the racket of the outboard. "You know how much the bear population has increased in the last four years?"

Facing him, Sam shook her head.

"We think somewhere between a hundred and one-fifty...."

"We?"

"Tom Telford and myself..."

Sam remained silent.
Tom Telford again.

"That the white-tailed deer have tripled is a guess...."

His shouting echoed against the sides of the ditch.

"And we think we can count thousands more wood ducks, mourning doves, bobwhites...."

All shotgun targets.

"So we can't allow people to come back in here and start killing again...." He was looking over her head.

We
again.

The boy lapsed into silence for the remainder of the trip.

 

EMERGING out of the Feeder Ditch, Chip steered across the canal, driving the bow of the boat on shore down the bank from Dunnegan's.

"I can walk up," Sam said.

"You can also walk on broken glass," he said, getting out of the boat and putting his back to her. "Climb aboard."

He struggled up the bank and then crossed the highway, sitting her down on the green bench outside Dunnegan's.

Delilah hadn't arrived yet, and Sam said, "I'd like you to meet my mother. She's as grateful as I am."

Chip said, "Some other time; I have to get back."

"Well, I can't thank you enough for all you've done. I'll return your slippers soon."

"No problem. Glad to do it. Sometimes it's lonely back in there. See you."

With that, he recrossed the highway, and soon she heard the outboard fire up and knew he was headed back up the Feeder Ditch.

Spring, in the temperate Powhatan begins in early March, erupting out of the muck, the first green shoots spearing up overnight. And older males, like Henry, come out of their slumbers in whatever dens they chose in January, having not defecated for almost sixty days. They stretch luxuriously and go on the prowl for grass and tender stems. The males' winter houses are usually flimsy, sometimes only a few branches over an earthen shallow. Some even sleep comfortably beneath a tree for two months, exposed to wind, rain, and snow.

Some of the younger males den for less than two weeks; some not at all, their bodies needing fat. After sleeping nights, they forage during the day for what food is available.

Not until mid- or late April do the mothers emerge with their cubs, having given birth while sleeping.

Meanwhile, dwarf trilliums have burst into bloom. Bell-like honeycups carpet the swamp floor, and the fragrance of early wild magnolias fills the air. Beads of moisture glisten on leaves turning golden in the filtered sunlight. There is a
drip-drip-drip
sound, a tinkling that speaks of the wet winter just past. Waterways overflow their banks.

Migrating songbirds make their own announcements of the new season. River otters stir in the streams, and fawns, usually twins, greet an often dangerous world. The great blue heron and the smaller green one scud around Lake Nansemond. Now and then a screeching osprey splashes down.

Orchids, yellow jessamine, and silky camellias quiver with morning dew, along with ferns so green they shock the eye. Solomon's plume and Queen Anne's lace and marsh marigolds explode.

So spring, my favorite time, arrives.

Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University

***

MAY: A YEAR and a half
before
Field Champion Baron von Buckner bounded into the swamp after Henry. A year and a half
before
Sam Sanders thought she saw the swamp-walker and Chip Clewt retrieved her off his
roof, Thomas Telford came up the Feeder Ditch in the beat-up boat he'd borrowed from Dunnegan. He was twenty-eight years old, a graduate student in biology at North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

The two mongrels sounded off from the backyard when khaki-clad Telford approached the house. Always a menace when the Clewts were away, the dogs were mostly docile when they were home. Father and son, home this day, came out on the porch to greet their visitor.

"Hi," Telford said. Smiling, he extended a hand.

Dunnegan had told Telford that Chip Clewt was a burn victim, had suggested he prepare himself for a jolt at seeing the boy. It
was
a jolt. Worse than Dunnegan had described. Much worse.

Telford handed over a business card, saying he had a grant from the Fish and Wildlife Service to study the black bears and just wanted them to know he'd be around for a year or so.

"I'll try to track as many as possible from now to early December, put radio-collars on them, and build up as much data as possible. Try to get an accurate population count...."

He noticed Chip's sudden interest, the way the boy shifted his head.

"Well, there seem to be quite a few out here," said John Clewt. "I've seen them now and then, but they stay pretty well hidden."

"That they do," agreed Telford, watching Chip. "I was on a study in Pennsylvania three years ago, and it's catch-as-catch-can."

Chip was listening intently now, Telford noticed.

"I see them across the lake now and then, snooping around on the shore. I've even seen mothers and cubs several times. They disappear fast, don't they?" Clewt said.

Telford nodded. He had a pleasant, craggy face and sandy hair; an outdoor look about him.

"I really came up here for another reason. I asked Dunnegan if he could recommend some bright young person I might hire as an assistant. But I can only pay minimum wage."

Telford glanced over at Chip. "Dunnegan recommended you. He didn't know what your schedule was or whether or not you'd be interested...."

Surprised, frowning a little, Chip said, ever so slowly, ever so uncertainly, "Well, I don't have any particular schedule...."

"You'd be helping me track bears."

"Helping you track bears," Chip repeated, looking over at his father. Was this visitor serious?

Telford remained silent for a moment but thought he saw a light coming on in Chip's eyes.

"It takes two people to do what I have to do," Telford explained.

Chip glanced over at his father again, looked back
at Telford, then took a deep breath and nodded. "I don't know anything about bears, Mr. Telford, but I'll try to learn."

"That's good enough for me. I'll be back next week with radio-collars, snares, tranquilizers, the usual equipment. We'll start then."

Chip suddenly grinned at the young scientist, brown-bag skin tightening around his mouth on the left side.

The grin was devastating and tugged at Telford. He tried to fight off any sign of pity.

"One more thing, Mr. Telford. I've got a bum hand."

Chip held up his withered and gloved left hand apologetically.

Telford shrugged. "Call me Tom. I'm too young to be a Mister. We can work around it."

"Okay."

Telford smiled again, saying, "See you next week," and trudged off toward Dunnegan's boat.

***

CHIP watched him go, thinking that luck had finally touched him.

He'd arrived in the Powhatan the previous month. After the first three weeks exploring the swamp in the old Jeep and by boat, free time had become deadly dull time. How many books could you read? How much TV could you watch? Telford had come up the ditch
at the exact right moment, Chip decided.
The exact right moment.

Bears? Black bears, brown bears, polar bears. He'd never thought much about them. His father had told him he might see one now and then.

"You have any books on bears?"

John Clewt shook his head. "But we can try in Elizabeth City. I've got a library card."

In the afternoon, he was reading to his father as the Volvo returned from Lizzie City: "The only distinctly American bears, the blacks came down from the Bering Strait a half-million years ago. Experts at hiding in woodlands, they manage to survive even fifty miles from cities as large as New York and Chicago, often moving by night near populated areas...."

Chip saw that the book had general information about black bears throughout the country and up in Canada.

Chip wanted to show Telford just how interested he was in the project, so he asked Dunnegan to recommend someone who might know about Powhatan's bears. Dunnegan suggested an old swamper named Slade who'd trapped mink and muskrat back in there for more than fifty years, almost to the day the government outlawed it. Slade lived in a converted yellow school bus in Skycoat, a hamlet on the southwest edge.

Chip drove the Jeep along Trail Nine until he was
opposite Skycoat, parked off the trail, then crossed the last few yards of swampland and into the tiny settlement.

Slade had white hair and badly fitting false teeth. He drooled out of the right corner of his mouth. But his mind was still working, Dunnegan had said. His eyes were sunken and milky blue. His straggly beard was the color of his hair. He was seventy-seven, Dunnegan had also said, a gossipy hermit.

No sooner had Chip knocked on Slade's door, introducing himself, saying he wanted to talk about bears, than Slade asked, "Wha' happened to yuh, boy? Looks like yuh stuck yer fool head into an oven."

"Airplane crash, Mr. Slade."

He'd thought of hanging a sign on his chest: Burn victim! Plane crash! It did no good to become angry, even annoyed. Just shrug and answer.