Tall bird stalking. Every five minutes, half a step. The bird was a piece of standing driftwood. Even the fish forgot. When the heron at last jabbed out, Robin shrieked. The strike crossed two meters with barely a lean-in from the bird. It came back upright, a meal the size of astonishment dangling from its mouth. The fish seemed too big to slip down the bird’s throat. But that baggy gullet opened, and in another moment, not even a bulge betrayed what had happened.
Robin whooped, and the sound startled the heron into flight. It bent, kicked, flapped its massive wings. It looked even more pterodactyl as it lifted, and the croaking it made as it took off was older than emotion. The clumsy launch turned graceful. Robin hung on the bird as it threaded the undergrowth and was gone. He went on staring at the spot where the great thing had disappeared. He turned to me and said, Mom’s here.
We put our shoes back on, turned upstream, and worked our way for a hundred yards along the stony banks to the spot where my whole family had once swum, if not all at the same time. As we came up to the pools beneath the rapids, I swore out loud. Robin blanched at the word. What, Dad? What?
He didn’t see until I pointed. The whole stretch of stream was covered in cairns. Stacked-up rocks rose everywhere, from both banks and from the boulder tops in the middle of the stream. They looked like Neolithic standing stones or tapering Towers of Hanoi.
Robin quizzed me with a look, still not understanding.
What’s wrong with them, Dad?
“Those were your mother’s worst nightmare. They destroy the homes of everything in the river. Imagine creatures from another world materializing in our airspace and tearing up our neighborhoods, again and again.”
His eyes darted, searching out the chub and shiners and trout and salamanders and algae and crayfish and waterborne larvae and the endangered madtoms and hellbenders, all sacrificed to this turf-marking art. We have to take them down.
I felt so weary. I wanted to set life down and leave it by the side of the water. Instead, we went to work. We demolished the towers within our reach. I knocked mine down. Robin dismantled his one at a time, peering through the clear water for the best place to replace each stone. When we finished with the stacks on the near bank, he looked across to the stacks in the middle of the stream. Let’s get the rest of them.
Two thousand five hundred miles of rock-strewn rivers ran through these mountains. Human industry would reach them all. We could dismantle cairns every day, all summer and fall long, and the towers would rise again next spring.
“They’re too far. The current’s too strong. You felt how cold it is.”
A look comes into the eyes of every ten-year-old, the first hint of the long war to come. Robin wavered on the threshold of daring me to stop him. Then he sat down on a rock covered with lichen a thousand years old.
Mom would do it.
His mother, the salamander.
“We can’t today, Robbie. That water is pure snowmelt. Let’s come back in July. The cairns will still be all over the place. I guarantee.”
He gazed at the green-lined channel that plunged through the forest and down the mountain. The song of a veery seemed to appease him. His breathing deepened and slowed. A hatch of gnats swarmed above the rapids and a flurry of early bluish-white sulphurs puddled around a pool near his feet. In this place, it would have been hard for anyone, even my son, to remember his anger for long. He turned to me, too quickly my friend again. What are we making for dinner? Can I work the cookstove?
IN CAMP, NO ONE could touch us. We pitched the tent close to the riverbank and spread our sleeping rolls on the ground. We set up kitchen in a blackened fire ring, and Robbie cooked lentils with tomato, cauliflower, and onions. The meal left him ready to forgive me everything.
We hung our packs in the same old sycamores, by the water. The sky through our gap in the tulip poplars and hickories was so clear that we tempted fate again and took off the tent fly. Soon it was dark. We lay side by side, on our backs, under the transparent mesh, looking up into the blue-black wash, where stars remade the rules in all quarters of the night.
He nudged me with his shoulder. So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way?
This boy made the world good for me. “Hundreds of billions.”
And how many galaxies in the universe?
My shoulder nudged his back. “Funny you should ask. A British team just published a paper saying there might be two trillion. Ten times more than we thought!”
He nodded in the dark, confirmed. His hand waved a question across the sky. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn’t the night sky full of light?