The Care and Feeding of Griffins (11 page)

18.  Hunters of the Plains

H
oofbeats. 

Taryn opened her eyes, listening.  Were they coming or going?  Going.  Damn.

She unzipped her sleeping bag and instantly, Aisling peeped.  The hooves began at once to gallop.  Half-naked, Taryn rushed for the tent flaps, battling the zipper and whimpering frustration, in order to tumble out into the misty air.  “Hello!” she shouted helplessly, running a few steps into the wet grass.

Nothing.  In a few seconds, even the
sound was gone, swallowed by the autumn fog.

Every day.

Every day for a damn week.

Taryn shivered, stamping restlessly before giving up and returning to her sleeping bag.  Whoever it was, he wouldn
’t be back until tomorrow.  Maybe she’d catch him then.

Taryn slipped her legs down into the quilted cocoon of her sleeping bag, found Aisling in his swaddling blanket, and brought him
—pee and all—against her for warmth.  He squawked again, indicating his feelings on the subject of the morning’s disturbance.  She picked open his wrappings to rub his back and paused when she saw him in the grey tent-filtered light.

There was a dark crescent along the seam of his right eyelid.  A pupil, fully dilated, with a ring of gold around it.  His eyes were opening.

There was no one to run cheering to.  She couldn’t even write her folks, because they thought she was taking care of a malnourished African orphan.  They would be all kinds of excited for her when he started toddling around on his own and talking, but his eyes opening?  No.  That, she’d just have to keep to herself.

“
But it is a special day, isn’t it?” she whispered.

Aisling chirped and struggled towards her on his wobbly limbs, his head cocked so that his opening eye could track her.  He lay his head against her breast and chirred, gradually relaxing.

“What would you say to an extra-special breakfast?”

Clearly, he
’d say, ‘Extra-special breakfast, shut up so I can sleep.’

Taryn sighed and shut her eyes.  It was early to be up.  Another hour would be welcome.  Give the sun some time to climb and burn off some of this chill.  Then she could wrap her hands with her spare socks and pull a few more precious feet of naked soil into her garden while her strength was still high.  Then she could boil up a pot of porridge and maybe scare up a pheasant or two to shoot at before she tried her throbbing hands at grass-weaving or stone-knapping.  God knew, her little camp was strewn with patchy mats and rock chips as it w
as, but she guessed it was the Jello Principle—there was always room for more failure.

“
Hail, thee.”

Taryn
’s eyes snapped open and her heart leapt.  “Romany!”

“
Aye.”

Taryn fought ecstatically free of her sleeping bag and came scrambling out of the tent for the second time that morning.  She hopped through the wet grass, clapping her hands to keep from hugging the gypsy that
came towards her.  The dragons were a happy funnel above the gently-rippling hair, all of them snapping and singing at each other; they made immediately for the protection of Romany’s clothes at the sight of Taryn, breathing filaments of flame for an alarm before diving.

“
I don’t have any letters,” Taryn babbled.  “I’ve been so busy, but please, for the love of God, sit down and have some tea with me or something!”

“
I will not stay.”  From the voluminous bag slung over her arm, the gypsy withdrew a box just large enough to hold a pair of shoes.  It was wrapped in brown paper and addressed in her father’s neat writing to Taryn MacTavish, care of Life Corps.  Romany held it out as dragons peered curiously from her hair.

“
Please stay,” Taryn said, aware that she was whining, but incapable of stopping herself.  “Please.  Just for a little while.”

“
I go where I will.  I am Romany.”  The gypsy bent, dragons leaping upward in spouts of jewel-toned flight, and placed the box on the ground.

“
Wait, just…Romany, are there any other people here?”

“
Aye.”  The gypsy turned back to the plains, but paused and glanced over one round shoulder to eye Taryn curiously.  “Aye, people and many kinds of people.”

“
I haven’t met any,” Taryn said lamely.  “Can you…I don’t know, put in a good word for me with some of them?”

Romany gazed at her for a moment, and then turned all the way around to face her again. 
“Has thee earned my good word?” she asked, sounding merely interested.

Taryn opened her mouth and then closed it again.  She stood there.

Romany waited and when no answer came, she stepped forward and stretched out her hand. In it gleamed a slip of gold paper, twisted into a griffin-shape.

Taryn took it. 
“Thank you,” she whispered.

Romany turned around again, pulling her shawl tight around her shoulders. 
“Be thee well,” she said lightly.  “And know that I look on thee…with
some
favor.”  She started humming as she moved away.

Taryn didn
’t bother to watch her go.  She looked down at the paper griffin in her hand and felt like crying.  At last, she turned away and trudged back to her tent.

Aisling had tried to come out to meet her, his opening eye now an oval and n
ot a mere slit, leaving a wake of damp blanket behind him.  He had slid along on his belly maybe three feet, and when he saw her, he squawked loudly and stretched his spindly wings.  He was shivering, his little claws digging holes in her sleeping bag.  It was too cold to leave him alone like this while she moped around outside.

Taryn bent in to get him, cooing as she gathered him up. 
“Who’s my traveling boy, huh?  Who’s my speedster?  Oh, gosh, and who’s soaking?  Buddy, you need a bath.”

She kept him close against her as she stirred up the fire from the banked coals and put her cauldron on.  The water inside it had already boiled last night, it only needed to warm now, and whatever she didn
’t use to bathe her baby griffin could then be turned into tea.  And hey, maybe the smoke would bring her mystery rider back.  More likely, it would ward him off, but what the hey.  At least she was trying.

She hugged Aisling, waiting for her water to warm,
and opened up her present from home.  The contents were heart-rending, although surely that was not the intention.  It was packed full to the brim with Hershey bars, all of them arranged in flat stacks, and the bars that lay on top had been re-wrapped in white paper with one letter carefully spelled on each surface to form the words: MISS YOU.  And in purple ink on the inside of the box’s lid, her mother’s cheerful hand had written
Add chocolate to Irish and you can do Anything
!  Taryn sealed the box up again with blurring eyes and moved it into the tent like it held the treasures of the Orient.  She stared out into the empty plains and felt more alone than she ever had in her life.

“
You know what, this sucks,” she said suddenly.

Aisling peeped.

“Good idea,” she replied, feigning surprise.  “Enough of this sitting around waiting to be introduced.  After breakfast…let’s go find our neighbors.”

Aisling peeped again, and so, one bowl of boiled grain, two strips of beef jerky, one bath and one cup of tea later, Taryn got ready for a ramble.

She was determined not to make this a big deal.  She packed light—her multitool in her front pocket, her trusty slingshot and a few stones in her back pocket, a little jerky for Aisling to snack on, her jacket tied around her waist in case it started raining, and Aisling in her arms.  She was unduly excited about leaving camp, but at the same time, nervous about the prospect of coming back to something that had been worked over by critters.  She put her books, food, new chocolate, spare clothes, and pretty much everything that would fit back into her backpack and used her clumsy lengths of cordage to tie it up at the top of a young sapling.  Even that didn’t satisfy her fully, but she guessed it would have to do.

She set out, following the flow of the river and staying close to the bank.  She figured the natives would want to stay close to the water.  She further figured it was the only landmark out here (there were plenty of different kinds of trees, but they had a real knack of looking like different kinds of trees all standing in the exact same formation) and if she lost it, she
’d be, to quote her baby sister, good-n-screwed.  Eventually, she was sure she’d be able to range out as confidently as if she were in her own backyard, but for now, she was camping, this river was her car, and she wasn’t going to lose sight of it.

It was a nice day for a hike.  Overcast so it wasn
’t too bright, cool but not chilly, and not raining.  The grass where it grew close to the river was sparse and low; she was able to walk without coating her pants in hulls and chaff, which was nice, because she only had three pairs of jeans in the whole world and one of them was still caked in grassy junk from her hike across the plains.  She really needed to do some laundry instead of frittering her day away on a walk.

Oh well.  She really needed to do lots of things.

Walking had a relaxing effect on her over time.  She became gradually less aware of the scenery as a thing to trudge over and through, and more as just what it was, a beautiful panorama.  The grasses rippled in the autumn breeze, and as Taryn enjoyed the sight, she began to see distortions in the flow of those ripples to indicated where game might be hiding.  She was content with just the idea of this and felt no strong urge to head over to one of these ‘tidal pools’ to see if those were, in fact, little pods of animal life.  After all, she wasn’t hunting right now.  She was hiking.

But when one of those pools started moving, Taryn noticed in a big hurry.  A large mass of grass was subtly swaying her way, or at least, swaying toward the river.  Taryn stopped walking, trying to see through the thick grass, but the only movement she saw was that of the stems themselves.  She backed up anyway, reaching for her slingshot, then changed her mind and pulled her Leatherman multitool instead.  Using the slingshot would mean putting Aisling down.  Of course, using the Leatherman would mean having to be really close, but it was almost certainly going to be more effective
to stab at a mean critter than throw a rock.

The grass parted.  A tiny pink trunk, no longer than Taryn
’s finger, poked out.  It sniffed in several directions, then eased out a little more, showing Taryn a tiny tan head with beady black eyes.

Out it came, staying close to the ground and moving in jerky half-hops, pausing every few inches to sniff.  Taryn, downwind of the thing, seemed to be invisible, for all that she was standing bold as life not ten meters away.

By the time the creature had crawled out far enough to reveal the powerful roo-like hind legs, other pink trunks were poking through the grass.  Soon, there were a dozen of the things huddled together, all of them sniffing, staring blankly at Taryn, and sniffing again.

One of them finally moved, not creeping any longer, but leaping the distance to the river in a single hop
—a distance nearly equal to Taryn’s height.  This was impressive enough on its own merits seeing as it had come from a dead stop, but it was even more astonishing when one considered that the critter was at most eighteen inches from trunk to tail.

Taryn slowly lowered herself until she was sitting Indian-style in the damp grass.  She watched, wondering, as the whole group of them hopped on down to the water
’s edge for a drink.  It was an alien creature.  She could compare certain parts of it to other creatures—it had the tail of an anteater, long and plumed, and it had the back legs of a kangaroo, the cunning forepaws of a raccoon, a deer-like head, but a koala’s round ears, and that naked, finger-sized trunk—but it was clearly something that had naturally evolved.  It was adorable, black and tan and white, and it was simply wonderful to behold.  Like the grass ponies—the tiny antelope-horse things that had been so abundant on her travels here—these hoppers were natives of this strange world.  They fit in here.  They were perfect.

And speak of the little devils.

There was a grass pony now, almost invisible as it stood at the very edge of the tall grass.  And there was another one, come to think of it.

With a start, Taryn realized there were two right next to her, close enough to reach out and pet if she wanted to.  None of them were even looking at her, and none of them were moving so much as an ear.  Funny.  With how still they were and all of them downwind, they looked more like a pride of lions than a herd of mini-horses coming to the river for a drink.

The wind shifted subtly, snapping Taryn’s hair out before her face instead of straight back, and as one body, all of the hopping creatures down at the water’s edge looked up.