The Boy Who Understood
by Biff Spork
Chapter 16
Empty Hives and A Declaration
On Tuesday morning, David set off for Jana Mountain earlier than usual. He knew he'd have to leave Zhiv by mid-day to meet Earth-Girl at the town library at 3:30. He wanted to arrive early so he could see if there were any signs she had betrayed his request for secrecy.
As he pedaled, he tried to organize his thoughts about Zhiv and the mara's decision. He knew he should get to know Earth-Girl before trusting her completely. He felt he and Zhiv were playing in a game far out of their league. They knew what the animals felt and thought, but they had little idea of who their opposition was and what was pushing the world toward disaster. They knew there were forces resisting change, but those forces were faceless. He and Zhiv needed help to understand what was likely to happen as a result of the mara's decision. They had thousands of animal friends, but they needed some human allies.
Those thoughts occupied David's mind for most of his ride up the twisting mountain road. Yet while he climbed ever closer to Zhiv, his attention repeatedly turned to another concern. As he wrestled his bike across the clear-cut toward his parking spot in the forest, he nodded his head. Today he would tell Zhiv what was on his mind.
Pete's phone rang at the same time as he sat down at his desk in the sheriff's headquarters. It was Celia Duffy.
"Good Morning, Ms. Duffy. How are you today?"
"Fine thanks, Pete, though I'm still waiting to hear from you about Sol Mundy. You said you were going to call me back yesterday, but I didn't get any call."
"Yeah, sorry about that, but I decided to wait until I had something concrete to tell you. I'll bring it up with the sheriff again this morning and see what we can do about it. To be frank, I don't think there's much we can do. Everyone saw the boy heading into Jana Mountain Park, but it's a big park, almost two hundred square miles. There's no way we can search it all, and beyond the park to the south and west, it's all wild country. We have no idea where he went after he rode into the trees. Nobody's seen him, or the pigs, since then."
"He's a runaway, a missing child. You've got to do something about that. He was right there in front of you guys on Sunday, and you didn't pick him up."
"Well, he was in the middle of the river, not exactly right in front of the deputies, where they could grab him. At that point, nobody knew he was a runaway. Anyway, you know, he was busy doing something that needed to be done, something that none of us could do." said Pete.
Celia snorted. "I'd rather he was playing baseball, or football, or something normal. Riding around naked and risking his life for a bunch of pigs is not appropriate behavior for a young boy!"
"I'll talk to the sheriff. He may have some ideas. That's the best I can do right now."
After he closed the call with Celia, Pete walked over to the sheriff's office.
"I just spoke to Celia Duffy again, Sol Mundy's case officer. She wants to know when we're going to catch the kid."
The sheriff laughed. "If that kid had robbed a bank and shot somebody before fleeing into the bush, we could do something. We could get funds enough to hire men to search that park for a week or two — maybe even bring in a helicopter. But Ms. Duffy should look at this," said the sheriff. He pushed his laptop around so Pete could see the main website where the pig-rescue video had been posted.
The sheriff's finger pointed to the view meter. It read 29M.
"The world is in love with that kid, and she better be careful about what she does and says. When he does come out of hiding, if ever, there's going to be be a lot of interest in why he ran away from her care."
"Twenty-nine million views," said Pete in awe.
"Yeah, if it keeps climbing like it is, it'll soon top the month's most viral video, the one where the cat kisses the dog."
The sheriff shuffled some papers on his desk and handed one to Pete. "Here's something I want you to check out this morning. It's a beekeeper, up the valley. He says someone stole his bees, about twenty hives. I'm thinking it might relate to what we were talking about yesterday — all this animal stuff." He picked up the animal incident reports he'd received from around the state. "And you can look through these when you get back."
In the pig shed, Art Jameson pushed the power button on an automatic feed dispenser. Then he turned to his eldest sons, twins Ricky and Nicky. "Finish filling the dispensers in the other pens and let them run until all the pigs have eaten. Then figure out which of them exhaust fans down below ain't workin' right. Shut the power off and go down into the pit and fix whichever one is busted. You know, if we don't get the gas out of there, this whole place is gonna go up like a bomb one day. Be careful — that gas sneaks up on you."
"Okay, Daddy," said Ricky, the elder of the twins by seven minutes.
"I've gotta go pick up River," said Art. "The doc said he can come home this morning."
"Feed the pigs. Fix the fans," said Nicky. "We'll take care of it, Daddy."
Art went back to the house, cleaned himself up, and changed his clothes for the trip to the hospital. So far, it had been a good morning. The crane operator had got his truck out of the river, and it was at the repair shop. He was happy with the twins and confident that they could handle the chores he'd left them. They were a little wild, but they were sensible enough to take care of business.
River was okay, too. He had recovered quickly from those snake bites, a good thing since the hospital bills were scary big — the injections the docs had prescribed to counter the effects of the snake bites might as well have been made out of gold, judging by the price. They said the shots were necessary to make sure they didn't have to amputate one or both of the boy's legs.
Art didn't expect much from River. The kid was too girly, but Art always tried to be gentle with him. The boy had been his late wife's favorite, her baby. He even looked like her. Everything Art did for River was a way of remembering his wife. They'd been good together, and he felt he would never stop missing her.
The phone rang.
Art answered it. Some kid wanted to talk to River. "He ain't home yet," said Art. "I'm gonna go pick him up now."
"Can I come over and see him?"
"Maybe give him a chance to settle in. Come over in the afternoon."
"Okay," said the kid.
Zhiv was not at their usual meeting place so David put his clothes in his pack and began climbing toward the cave. He was much earlier than usual and suspected Zhiv was still on his way down. They met after he had walked for fifteen minutes. As they neared the cave, David told Zhiv about the e-mail he had sent to Earth-Girl.
"First, I opened one of those anonymous European e-mail accounts. If she or anyone else tries to track me down, they won't be able to," said David. "Second, I didn't tell her anything about me or you, only that I could contact the boy in the video if I wanted. I said if that interested her, and she would keep it completely secret, I would meet her. I said we should meet in the afternoon at the library. I told her where to sit and what she should be reading, so I can recognize her."
"Wow!" Zhiv grinned. "You must watch a lot of those spy movies to be so sneaky."
"I've watched a few when I didn't have anything better to do. Anyway, I can only stay with you till lunch since I have to meet her at 3:30."
"Darn! I was hoping we could go to the lake," said Zhiv.
"No. If it's okay with you, I want to sit down at the cave and think together about what we want say to Earth-Girl. Last time I checked the view-meter on that website, your video had nearly thirty million views. That's a big audience. What do we want to say to them? It has to be short and clear. What do you think is the most important thing to say?"
When they arrived at the cave, the two rescued pigs ran up to them. The boys knelt and hugged them. David checked the head wound on the one brother and was pleased to see it was already healing.
Zhiv said, "They're leaving, but they waited for us so they could say goodbye."
The pigs snuffled in the boys' hair and then trotted away toward the high meadows and wild mountains.
"I've been thinking while we were walking up here." Zhiv looked serious. "This is too important for us just to say what we think is right. Let's lie down and hug, and try to find out what the mara thinks."
Zhiv and David lay down on their favorite rock, warmed by the morning sun. They embraced and opened their minds to the mara.
Pete enjoyed the drive out to where he'd agreed to meet the beekeeper. Fruit trees were bursting with clouds of pinkish blooms on both sides of the highway, and the air was rich with their sweet scent. He spotted the beekeeper's truck at the edge of an orchard. The apiarist was loading beehives onto his flatbed. He heaved the last one up and began to tie them down as Pete came up to him.
Pete introduced himself and said he'd come to talk to him about someone stealing his hives.
"Well," said the man. "It's a mystery. I don't really know if they were stolen, or vandalized somehow, or something else happened, but they're gone."
"So, what are these?" Pete nodded at the hives on the truck. "I thought the hives were stolen."
"Oh yeah, these are the hives," the beekeeper said. "It's the bees that are missing. I brought the hives here, day before yesterday. Every one of them was full of healthy bees. When I came to check on them yesterday afternoon, there wasn't a bee to be seen. Every hive was empty."
"I don't know much about bees," said Pete. "Does that happen often? They disappear like that? Could somebody take the bees away without their hives?"
"Sometimes bees will leave their hive to swarm for some reason. Maybe they don't like their hive, or there's too many of them, but I've never heard of twenty hives of bees swarming at the same time. Even if all the hives decided to swarm, at least one or two of the swarms would be nearby, but there's no honeybees in this orchard or anywhere in the nearby bush. They've completely disappeared."
"Maybe something killed them?" suggested Pete.
"Yeah, I thought about that. Maybe the orchardist had sprayed an insecticide or herbicide that killed bees. He said he hadn't sprayed anything new or harmful. I also had a long walk around. There's no dead bees on the ground."
"It's hard for us to consider this as a theft when there's no evidence that the bees were stolen. All we know is that they're gone," said Pete.
"Well, it's not just a few bugs went missing, you know," said the beekeeper. "Those bees were worth about five thousand dollars. If they'd pollinated these trees, I would have earned about two thousand dollars more. And it's only the start of the season. Then later, there's the honey. Losing these bees almost puts me out of business. This is gonna cost me about twenty, maybe twenty-five thousand dollars altogether."
Pete pulled out a notepad and wrote down the necessary information. "You got any other hives?"
"Up the road about twenty miles, at another orchard. I checked them last night, and they were fine. I'm going up there now. You want to come along?"
When they arrived at the other orchard, the air around the hives was still and silent. Pete watched as the bee-keeper opened a couple of the empty hives and looked around in the trees. It was like seeing a man get beaten and being unable to do anything about it.
Pete expressed his sympathy, and the bee-man said, "It's not just me. If these trees don't get pollinated now, they're not going to bear the crop they should. If this is happening to other beekeepers, we're looking at an agricultural disaster."
Zhiv nudged David's ear with his nose and pulled him out his dream-like absorption in the mara. "You come up with anything?"
David shook his head. "No, I love being in the mara, but I'm still not able to make much sense out of the messages I get or the images I see."
"Okay, here's what I feel. We've been thinking it's like making a deal. You know, the animals say they'll do this and then the humans agree to do that. But that's not the way animals think. It took them a long time to decide to join together to fight humans. It's not something that's going to go away by talking about it. Humans have got to change. They have no choice.
"There's no 'You do this, and we'll do that' stuff. The animals have declared war, and it will go on until the world is back in balance. People don't know it yet, but they'll find out soon. Humans and other animals have never got along very well. What's changed now is that animals have joined up with each other against humans. What happened to those boys who attacked you is just a hint of what's coming."
"So, I can't say to Earth-Girl, 'Here's what the animals want'?"
"No, all we can do is tell her some things humans can do that might make it possible for peace later on. It needs to be something simple. Stop eating animals. Stop cutting down the forests. Stop polluting the environment. People know how to do these things, but that's not enough. They have to do them. The time for talking is past. What's needed now is action."
"That's what the animals have chosen, isn't it," said David. "Action."
"Yeah, and the action is to attack the biggest threat to life on this planet — human beings."
"That's the message, isn't it?"
"Yeah," said Zhiv. "All we can do is try to keep some kind of communication open. If Earth-Girl is serious about standing up for animals, we have a way of telling people what needs to be done."
The boys pulled apart, stretched, and sat up.
"Even though I'm going down soon, I brought lunch. You hungry?"
"Always!"
While they ate, David braced himself to discuss the other subject that had been worrying him.
"Zhiv, there's something else I've got to talk to you about."
"Sure, anything. Go ahead."
David's heart started beating so loud he could hear it, and he felt it thudding in his chest. He took a deep breath and forced the words out. "I love you."
"Oh yeah. Me too." Zhiv pointed to the pack. "Is there any more of those corn chips? What did you want to talk about?"
"That's it, that I love you."
"Good. Me too."
"How do you feel about that?" persisted David, as he handed Zhiv a fresh bag of corn chips.
Zhiv tore the bag open. "They're great chips, but I wish they were in a package we could recycle. There's already too much garbage in the world."
"No, I meant, how do you feel about you and me loving each other?"
"David, I knew I loved you since the first minute we met. I mean that, since the first minute. I took one look at you, and I thought, 'Well, that's that! Here's the person I'll love for the rest of my life.'"
"Oh," said David, mollified.
"As for you loving me, I pretty much knew that right away, too. The way you looked at me, talked to me, touched me, listened to me, and heard me — every minute we've spent together, you've told me you love me. I don't need you to tell me in words."
"It doesn't bother you that I'm a boy, and you're a boy?"
"Nope. I love all of you, including that little thing between your legs. Does that bother you?"
"No. I love all of you too." said David.
"What about my little thing?"
"Yeah, you idiot. I love your little thing, too. I was just worried about sex, and puberty, and being gay, and all that stuff."
"Aaaah," said Zhiv. "I don't know much about sex things, so I guess it's something we'll have to learn about together. Is that okay?"
"Good idea," said David.
"Should we start now?" said Zhiv.
"With sex? Like, now?"
"Yeah, since we have to start sometime."
"I don't know exactly what to do." David felt his cheeks burning.
"Neither do I," said Zhiv.
David looked up at him and saw that under his golden tan, his cheeks were scarlet too. "Maybe we should just wait and see what happens instead of trying to force it?"
"Yeah. In the meantime, before you have to go, let's just have a long hug. I need a lot of that." Zhiv fitted himself to David's body and pulled him close. "Do you want me to say it?"
"What?"
"I love you."
"Yeah, say it."
"I love you."
"Yeah," said David. "I love you too."
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