Puzzled, Ofelia followed. Were they trying to lead her to something that needed repair? When they turned into the lane that led to the river side of the settlement, she was sure of that. It must be the pumps—although water had spurted out of her faucet and shower normally that morning. Perhaps they wanted her to show them how the pump controls worked. She had been expecting them to want that.
The three walked on past the pump house, with her behind them, the others trailing. It reminded her of processions, of something ceremonious in which she did not know her part. Past the pump house, down the meadow into the tall grass by the river. Ofelia slowed. She didn’t like to walk in the tall grass; it cut her feet and made fine stinging lines on her bare skin.
Now the three stopped, and turned to face her. They bowed again. One of them approached, and touched one of her necklaces with its talon. A soft trill. Then a wide-armed gesture, as if waving to the whole area, then a jerk of the head to the river. Certainty flared in her mind: they were leaving. All of them? She turned to look at those behind. They stood in a ragged line, unmoving. Were they going to try to make her leave? She couldn’t. She couldn’t eat their food—they had to know that.
The one who had touched her necklace did so again, this time slipping the talon under it, delicately, hardly grazing her skin. What? Did it want that? And why? Ofelia lifted her hands to the necklace, and slowly lifted it over her head. It was the one with slimerod cores among the beads she had made and painted; the colors of this one were greens and yellows with a few blue beads. Not her favorite; she didn’t mind giving it up, if that was the question.
She held it out, and the creature took it, looking in her eyes as if memorizing her face. If it was leaving, perhaps that’s exactly what it was doing. When it finally looked away, it stowed the necklace in one of the stoppered gourds hanging from its shoulder belt, pushing the stopper in firmly. Then another bow, and the three turned away.
She had not seen them near the river before; she did not know if they could swim . . . she felt a stab of fear for them, as if they had been her children after all. Things lived in the river that ate other water-creatures; the colony had once lost a child to something scaly with large teeth. Then she saw the slender boat move out of the reeds, into the river, and realized all over again how alien they were, how adapted to their world. They had made a long narrow craft of a something—skins?—sewn around a framework of bent wood. The seams formed a brickwork pattern; she wondered what sealed them from the water. And the paddles—long double-bladed paddles, the tips of the long blades pointed, dipped in and out of the water, moving the strange craft along the surface of the water as quickly and easily as one of the water-striders.
The colonists had had nothing like that; she had never imagined something like that. The colony boats had been one-piece shells, large enough to hold twelve adults, square on the ends, with a small engine mounted on one end. She remembered helping to build the launch site for the boats, that first season. The fabricator could not make anything that size, so when the last boats were lost, they had done without. It had not occurred to anyone to build something this small. Ofelia stared at it, trying to imagine wrapping cowhide around a wooden framework. Perhaps it could be done . . . if someone thought of it first.
She looked back at the ones left behind; they watched intently until the craft reached the far shore of the river, a tiny sliver it seemed, and with a last wave their companions disappeared into the forest there. Boat builders. Boat designers. They must have built that boat after they got to the river; she could not imagine them carrying boats like that across the grasslands where they lived.
Even if she had spoken their language she would not have had to ask why they left. They had gone to tell the others about her. They hadn’t killed her (yet, she tried to keep in mind), and they had now learned enough to go tell others. Would the others come? Or would all of these eventually leave? That was a thought—maybe they’d go away and leave her in peace once more, to pursue her own life the way she wanted, without having to pay attention to them.
For a moment she gave herself up to contemplation of that possibility, that blissful state, but she didn’t believe in it. Her peace had already been shattered, by the new colony, then by the creatures, and she knew, as if she sat on the committees where the decisions were made, that eventually someone would come to investigate the creatures who had killed humans.
Her creatures were still there in the morning. She had thought they might desert her, move on, hunting in the forest perhaps, now that they had sent word back. But they stayed close, almost as obtrusive as the whole group had been. Very gradually, she found herself mimicking their grunts and squawks, cautious, fitting her mouth into the strange shapes. They stared, and grunted or squawked back, and she did not understand. It just seemed more comfortable to make the sounds they made, as she might have done with babies.
They had become individuals, though she did not know what the individuality meant. She had no sense of male or female, old or young, or any social role. Her names for them came from what she noticed. The player, whose blowing through their tubular instrument she liked best. The killer, who had swung its knife at the treeclimber . . . she wished that one had gone away with the others, but it hadn’t. The gardener, who did not garden, but accompanied her most often, appreciating the slimerods.
Days passed. The player painted and strung a necklace of beads . . . blues mostly, with a few green and yellow ones. It could not hold the brush as she did, in those hard slippery talons. Instead, it pared a sliver away from a twig, slid the bead down onto that stop, then dipped the whole bead in the paint. Ofelia watched, amazed, as it waited for the excess paint to run off then upended the twig (neatly holding the painty end in the very tips of talons) so that the bead slid off onto a waiting stand, this made from a larger branch fixed to a base with its twigs uppermost. Bead after bead, dipped the same way, released to land on another of the empty twigs . . . the branch began to look like the holiday trees Ofelia vaguely remembered from the public buildings of her childhood. To her further surprise, the creature pared a separate dipping twig for each color of paint. Children had to be taught to clean a brush after using each color . . . these were not children. Nor were they human, though that became harder to remember as the days passed.
When the beads dried, the creature strung them on twisted grass, not the cord Ofelia offered. And when it had finished its work, it held the completed necklace out to her, hooked on one talon. A gift to replace the one she had given? She could not be sure of anything but the intent. She took it, and put it on. It bobbed at her, and made one of its noises; this one sounded happy, she decided. She smiled and said her thanks aloud, as she would to a person.
The one she thought of as the killer roamed the meadows; Ofelia feared for the livestock at first, but day after day none were missing. When she walked around to check, the killer walked with her, stopping at times to scratch with its long taloned toes at the tallest clumps of grass. Once it even threw itself down, in the tall grass near the river, and rolled on its back like the chickens having a dust bath. Ofelia grinned before she caught herself. It looked ridiculous, wallowing in the grass like that, even without feathers to fluff. She could not imagine what it was doing, unless the grass eased some itch.
The gardener continued to help her find and exterminate slimerods. It seemed to have no other interest; it was often missing from the group that plagued her in the center, hovering when she tried to settle to some task. Several times she found scratch-marks in the dirt around the plants, as if it had cultivated or weeded while she was not there. Perhaps it was only gathering slimerods, or perhaps it understood what her hoe and rake were for.