It starts to sing. That lets you get a fix on it. Two pairs of binoculars swing its way.
"Redpoll," you say together, and lower the binoculars with identical sighs.
"Map said they were farther down." Is your daughter boosting her spirits or yours?
"We’ll see." You have to cross the stream again; the willows press right down to the waterline. You manage to stay dry once more. Here in this sheltered place, it’s almost warm. Your daughter takes off her outer sweater and ties it around her waist. You unzip your jacket again.
You go up to the abandoned house to see if a hawk or, more likely, an owl is nesting inside. You give your eyes a chance to get used to the darkness inside, but you don’t see anything. Reluctantly, you decide there’s nothing to see.
Your daughter points. "There’s the truck, Dad!"
"Where?" you say, not spotting it. Then you do. "Boy, that’s about as abandoned as it gets."
How many years has it squatted there? Long enough for rain and snow and ice to have had their way with its paint. Rust covers every inch of the chassis. The dark red-brown blends perfectly with the dirt and with the green and brown of the willows growing alongside. You and your daughter fight through the shrubby willows for a closer look. The side windows are either rolled down all the way or long gone. Cracks craze the windshield and smaller rear window.
Mosquitoes hum all around. You breathe in another one. By now, you have practice at this-you spit it out without your daughter’s even noticing.
"Past the dead truck. That’s what’s on the map." Excitement brightens her voice. The map might point toward buried treasure on the Spanish Main, not bluethroat nests in the middle of the Seward Peninsula.
A lot of maps that said they pointed toward treasure on the Spanish Main really pointed toward nothing. You have to hope this one won’t be like that. People have more incentive to lie about doubloons and pieces of eight than about little thrushes from Asia… don’t they?
You’ll find out. You follow the creek another couple of hundred yards. You stop in a small clearing. "If they’re anywhere, they’re here," you say.
"Sure." Your daughter still sounds more confident than you feel. If she can still believe things will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds, more power to her.
She raises her binoculars and slowly scans the closer willows, then the more distant ones. You do the same. You’ve come all this way. Long odds you’ll ever get here again. You’d be an idiot not to give it your best shot.
Which doesn’t mean you’ll get what you’re after. Your wife gave it her best shot, God knows. So did your daughter. So did her ex, even if she so doesn’t want to hear that.
You lower the binoculars and look around. Something’s perched in a willow up near the edge of the valley. Your daughter’s already spotted it. You raise the field glasses again and aim them that way. "What do you think?" you ask her.
She sighs. "It’s an American tree sparrow. Right size, wrong bird."
You take a longer look. You sigh, too, because she’s right. She usually is. The cinnamon crown, the dark spot on the breast, the bill that’s dark above and yellowish below… American tree sparrow, all right. The first time you saw one here, it was a life bird for both of you, because it’s rare along the West Coast. But it’s common here in the summertime, and in the upper Midwest and East during the winter. Not a bluethroat. Not even close.
You scan some more. You spot a Wilson’s warbler: a little yellow bird with a black cap. The last one you saw was hopping around the magnolia in your own back yard.
After a while, you say, "We ought to head back to the car."
"I know." Your daughter doesn’t budge. "I hate to give up, though."
"So do I. Still, if we were going to find anything…"
"Pish! Pish! Pish!" Your daughter doesn’t say that to you. It’s a noise birders make to lure shy birds out of cover. Sometimes- not very often, in your experience-it works. Birders who do it too much are called pishers. For anyone with even a little Yiddish, that’s funny. "Pish! Pish! Pish!" Your daughter isn’t a pisher, but she’ll try whatever she can.
Nothing comes out of the willows. Only mosquitoes fly around you. You take a couple of steps in the direction of the car. Your daughter’s stiff back says she doesn’t want to see you.
"Come on," you say. "We’ll bird all the way there. Maybe we’ll find one."
"Maybe." She closes up with you. Then she leans toward the willows again. "Pish! Pish! Pish!"
"Pish! Pish! Pish!" You even try it yourself. Why not? What have you got to lose? "Pish! Pish! Pish!" A fighting retreat.
Stop and pish. Stop and scan. Back past the truck carcass. Past the buildings. Through the mosquitoes. Despite the repellent, they do land. How many bites will you end up with? You won’t feel them till later.
You see another redpoll, or maybe the same one again. A golden-crowned sparrow is bathing in the creek, fluttering its wings to flip water onto its back.
"Stupid thing." Your daughter is mad at it for not being a bluethroat.
"We tried our best," you say. You remember your wife. Sometimes it just isn’t good enough.
There’s the rental car. You look around one more time. The bluethroats aren’t supposed to be here, so close to the main road. But they aren’t where they’re supposed to be, so what the hell? A bird in the willows… is another American tree sparrow. You don’t need your daughter to identify this one for you.
She sees it, too, and what it is. She shakes her head and lowers her binoculars.
You open the door and quickly slide in. Your daughter does the same thing on the passenger side. You both kill some of the mosquitoes that got in with you. Then you start the car. You turn around carefully on the narrow track. Back toward the road. Back toward Nome.
Maybe, behind you now, the bluethroats flit through the willow branches. Maybe they snatch mosquitoes out of the air and carry them back to hungry hatchlings in their nests. Maybe they were never there at all.
WORLDS ENOUGH, AND TIME
I’ve been interested in ecological invasions and in what people call the Cambrian explosion for a long time. This little piece originally appeared as a "Probability Zero" in Analog. Zero? I don’t know. Have you got a better explanation?
So Many Worlds, So Little Time, said the slightly scorched sticker on the side of the starship
This one had an oxygen atmosphere, but not much else going for it. The oxygen meant there were plants in the seas. The ship’s database said those seas held animals, too: wormy things crawling on the mud, maybe digging into it; blobby things floating in the water. That was about it.
On land? Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Bare rock. The chewed-up bare rock that’s called dirt. No trees. No flowers. No grass. No ferny things. No mossy things, even. No nothing. Certainly nothing scurrying over the ground or buzzing through the air.
Sometimes planets like this had a stark beauty. The father liked such worlds, which was why they’d stopped at this one. But he’d flitted here, and he’d flitted there, and he had to say he was disappointed.
The mother wasn’t. She hadn’t much wanted to come here in the first place. But they’d been married a long time. If you expected him to give a little, you had to do the same.
They stood side by side, watching the ocean lap against a tropical-but bare, utterly bare-beach. He sighed. "I’ve seen about enough," he said. "It… just isn’t quite what I hoped for."
Told you so. But she didn’t say it. They had been married a long time. All she said was, "I wouldn’t mind seeing something different."
"We’ll do that, then," he said.
He was just turning back toward the ship when the kids swarmed down the ladder and ran toward him. That was a prodigy of sorts. The kids cared more about their games and the aquarium than about seeing what they thought of as a dull old planet. Well, by now he thought of it the same way, which was the problem.