Maybe ten thousand or a few more there, Tom’s mind stuttered. Aloud: “Is this some sort of historical reconstruction? It could be… well, maybe CGI of the Gold Rush period.”
“Kemosabe, I don’t think they had quite as much air transport then.”
There was an airport about where Alameda should be, on an island just off the shore. He recognized a pair of C-130 Hercules transports lumbering into the air, and there was a small control tower and a medley of smaller aircraft, including some amphibians. No jets, but a fair assortment of helicopters, Chinooks and Black Hawks and smaller jobs. And there were cars on the roads, and some of the ships and fishing boats out on the water were definitely motor-powered: diesels, from the lack of smoke. The camera swung down to where four saddled horses waited, and a fifth with a gutted mule deer slung over its back. Evidently the camera was a miniaturized cyberstabilized model on a shoulder mount; he could see hands come into the field of view as the bearer put a booted foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle. The other men in the party—it was all men—were in denim pants and leather jackets, with automatics at their waists and rifles of a model he didn’t recognize in saddle scabbards. The jackets had a blazon on the shoulder, a stylized tommy gun.
Tough-looking bastards, he thought. They rode through a patch of tall grass, high enough to brush the horses’ breasts—
“That’s native bunchgrass,” Tom said softly. “About half of it, anyway. As if it hadn’t been replaced by wild oats and the other intrusive stuff yet, not all of it.”
“Yeah, and that happened… when? The first generation or two after the Spanish arrived in California?” Tully said. “In the bay, that should have been finished by the 1820s or a little after.”
Tom nodded; the native grasses hadn’t been able to compete with the hardy Mediterranean annuals, especially not when cattle and sheep started grazing on them, and the seeds had arrived in hay and bedding when the first European colonists shipped in their foundation stock. In the field he was looking at, that process was still going on.
The horsemen rode down through a forested gully. It was definitely the Berkeley hills—he recognized the lay of the land and the general shape—but more empty of man than Glacier National Park—only the trail, and that might have been made by game. As if to underline that they broke out into another sunlit meadow, starred with orange California poppy, yellow goldfields, purple lupine and dense mats of cream-white yarrow thick among the tall grass. A herd of Roosevelt elk raised their muzzles to watch, then turned and trotted off without overmuch concern; the bull elk’s antlers showed against the morning sun for a moment, broader than Tom could have spanned with both arms. He couldn’t keep track of the smaller game and birds; everything was in bewildering profusion, and once the horses shied at the passage of what had to be a grizzly, although he caught only a fleeting glimpse of silver-tipped brown fur. The trees overhead included huge redwoods, nearly as big as those in Muir Woods; black oak mixed in on the upper slopes, trees giving way to open grassland on the ridges.
All the redwood in the East Bay was logged off in the 1850s, 1860s, he thought. Those trees aren’t second growth, though. That one there must be three hundred feet high! It was growing there when Columbus went looking for Japan and ran the Santa Maria onto Haiti.
The viewpoint changed again, and again Tom had to grope for the location. It went faster this time; he anticipated it, and the camera swung back and forth.
“That’s Mount Diablo over on the right,” he said. “The Carquinez Strait.” That was where the combined waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin ran out of the delta into San Francisco Bay. Except that the great oil refineries were missing, and the bridge that spanned the strait. Grizzly bears thronged the shore, hundreds of them. They were wading out into the waters, scooping migrating salmon from throngs that whipped the water into froth. Farther out a half dozen big wooden fishing boats were doing the same, swinging in bulging netfulls. Pelicans and cormorants and ospreys stooped and struck, and golden or bald eagles hijacked their catch in a swarm of wings and a chorus of raucous cries. The camera zoomed in, and he could see that many of the salmon were enormous, fifty or sixty pounds each.
Another jump, and this time the landscape wasn’t Californian at all; it looked like somewhere on the High Plains, rising into mountains to the west; the date icon switched to fall. The camera was in an aircraft now, but flying at less than a thousand feet—a small two-engine job, by the shadow. Below stretched a herd of bison moving south, great shaggy brown-black beasts, half-hidden by the cloud of dust they raised from the dry shortgrass prairie. The mass of animals stretched out of sight in both directions, and you could see an awfully long way from eight hundred feet in flat country; not quite a solid carpet, but more buffalo than open space. He’d long ago learned to estimate numbers and distances quickly, skills valuable to a hunter and a soldier both, and essential in wildlife management. Which meant—
“There have to be better than three million buffalo in that one herd!” he blurted.
“Spot on,” Tully said, his voice coming from another world. “I ran a count. That’s north-central Montana, incidentally. At least, the mountains and those buttes over there say it should be, according to the geolocation program.”
Three million buffalo were more than five times the total number in the whole of North America in 2009, and most of those were on ranches, behind barbed wire. These were running free over a plain that showed nothing of modern man—no roads, no fences, no power lines, not so much as a distant ranch house. But the estimates said there had been somewhere between twenty-five and fifty million, back a few centuries ago….
The shadow of the aircraft swooped downward, the ground swelling until they were flying nape-of-the-earth, above a section of the herd that had decided to bolt cross-country at a dead run. He could see the reason, a band of men on horseback clinging to the edge of the great mass of buffalo, galloping along beside them. The picture leaped closer as the camera’s operator dialed up his magnification, and the Indians jumped to arm’s length; the picture jiggled a little, as the close-up and the plane’s motion stressed the limits of the camera rig’s stabilizer.
There were two dozen of the Indians, wild-looking men in breechclouts and leggings with braided hair and bars of paint across their faces and naked chests; here a spray of feathers tucked into the raven hair, there a necklace of wolf teeth. Their mounts were not Indian ponies, though; they were big long-legged horses, and the hunters rode saddles rather than bareback. They were using short thick bows and long lances with steel or obsidian heads, riding in recklessly close to send shafts slamming into the ton-weight bodies, or thrusting the spears behind a shoulder. Maddened dying buffalo ran with blood frothing from their nostrils, and then collapsed in tumbling chaos as others behind with no room to swerve tripped in multibeast pileups.
The men left off their hunting as the plane approached, shaking their fists or lances at it, or launching futile arrows into the sky. A hand extended into the camera’s view, giving the hunters below the finger, and he heard laughter over the engine roar. Then the aircraft swept on, over another group of Indians; these were families on the march, probably the home base of the hunting party, with more horses and—he blinked—spoke-wheeled carts. Women had stopped in small groups to skin and butcher the slain animals, with children and dogs running around; the adults stood and shaded their eyes as the aircraft circled above. They weren’t as openly hostile as the hunters, but he saw fists raised, and a man in a weirdly complex costume of bison horns and plumes shook a feathered stick at the camera.