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No ranger is related to any other by blood. This is necessary to keep the women always in service,
necessary for the protection of the forest.
I wonder who my mother and father were, Jarrod thinks. The Timberlanders and Matties have their
legends about the rangers. Rangers come in the night and steal babies. Always keep a watch for the first
two years, they tell one another. And to the children: you'd better be careful, or a ranger will get you. He
has heard that they believe these things. The truth is different, more complex. There are those whose
business it is to find a home among the rangers for unwanted children. They are thought of as witches,
crones. They dwell along the fringes of the forest, and people bring their own children to them in the dark
of night, and those people are seen no more.
Such a one is Old Maggie. Jarrod's first memory is the smell of Old Maggie's burlap skirting, its rough
fiber against his cheek. Old Maggie's clothes were sewn with cat gut from one of the dozens that lived in
her tumbledown barn. Maggie found a use for everything, even dead cats. She must have been young
then, and just called Maggie. No. She's always been Old Maggie.
This is one the Ponds didn't want. Can't keep. There's quite a story to his mother, if you care to hear it.
No, said the other, a woman all dressed in green. Aunt Larmy, but he did not know that then.
All right, then. Name's Phillip James, if that matters to you.
It doesn't.
The edge of the forest. The misty day beating down like time.
Well, then.
The woman in green approached. Took his hand.
Come, child.
Go on, little Phil.
He did not cry. He was fearful, but he did not cry. And it seemed that the one in green was not a woman,
not a ranger, but the forest itself that drew him in, nestled him in delicate needles, prickly, soft, forever,
little boy.
His next memory is a fall from a sapling he'd been trying to climb, away from the watch of the aunts and
uncles who were watching that day. The breath knocked out of him, ice spears in his chest and an aching
head. But he got up, stumbled to the sapling, found the lowest branch, and again he was climbing,
climbing. This time he did not slip. Climbing, into the trees.
Jarrod?
Here I am.
Where are you, Jarrod?
Here I am, up in the tree.
Days among the people of the trees, in the tree villages. Nights listening to stories by the stoves and
lamps. At eight, Ranger School begins, and at sixteen he graduates, third in his class of fifty. Always the
great forest at the heart of the peninsula, and the great trees, swollen to monstrous size by years of rain,
rain, rain. But to Jarrod this has all become natural, and right. He takes his place among the Ho Brigade,
the keepers of the wildest heart of the Olympic National Park, where none but rangers ever tread, and
even they keep to the trees.
Jarrod sleeps a little perhaps an hour but is up long before dawn and is, as always, early reporting
to brigade headquarters.
* * *
Franklin arrives at the first tinge of daylight in the east. With him is Aunt Larmy, the council proxy. She
and Franklin are about the same age, and it was Larmy's abortion for which Franklin was shunned those
many years before. As far as Jarrod knows, they have not been lovers since that time.
Jarrod has not turned on a lamp, and Franklin flints one on with a practiced hand. The room is
utilitarian even more so than other ranger dwellings. It is just a big room with four plank walls cut from
windfall hemlock. The platform itself is lashed within a stand of hemlocks, curved in a long path among
them so as to form a great hall. In its center is a rough-hewn table that conforms to the curvings of the
hall. Log-round stools bound the table. Larmy goes to the table and slides a stool out of the way. She
spreads out a map, and places two small bags of sand to hold it down on either side.
"This," she says, "is California."
Jarrod steps up to the table and Franklin joins him. It is an artfully done map, scribed on deerskin vellum.
Jarrod recognizes the hand of Uncle Nab, the cartographer who provides most of the contour maps the
brigade uses.
"How's the old guts?" Franklin says, putting his hand on Jarrod's shoulder. "Alaph said he didn't hit you
that hard, but it sure looked like he whacked you."
Jarrod grunts.
"That was your first shunning ceremony, wasn't it, ranger?"
"Yes it was."
"Should have told you about the Burly Stave last night. Slipped my mind."
"I've never known much to slip your mind, sir."
"Well. It did. I had a great deal to consider last night."
Larmy harrumphs. "Yes."
Franklin takes his hand from Jarrod's shoulder and Jarrod is all attention. "Yes, ma'am."
"Three days ago, we received an emergency message from the Yosemite Park Service. It seem they are
having an epidemic."
"An epidemic? Of what?"
"They don't know. Their medical knowledge has gotten a little vague these past few years."
"Well, what do we think?"
"From their descriptions, we know it's some sort of plague. We're fairly certain they've got both forms of
the bubonic plague bacteria attacking them."
"God. Do they know how to fight it?"
Larmy shuffles uneasily. "It appears that they have lost the knowledge necessary to synthesize
antibiotics."
"Well, I know they're a Park and Forest Service mix, but couldn't we just tell them how to do it over the
radio?"
Franklin speaks. "They don't have any blue mold. They can't find any."
"What about streptomycin?"
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