Even more gruesome was the scene in the treetops. Squawking egret chicks sat helpless and unprotected in their stick nests. They stretched out their pink beaks, desperate for a meal that would never come. The crows and buzzards that lit on their nests came not to feed the chicks but to feed themselves. A single egret mother stood in a single nest, vigilantly guarding her young. But she had no mate to gather food for them or to take a turn protecting the nest so she could hunt herself. She faced a grim choice: to see her offspring starve or to leave them vulnerable to the carrion birds while she went in search of food for them.
“Plume hunters,” growled Floyd, and he spat on the ground in disgust.
Aidan stood in shock at such a scene of devastation. The sheer number of birds shot and left to rot was nauseating in itself. But the timing of the slaughter-during nesting season before the young egrets could fend for themselves-ensured that the colony would never recover. This rookery was gone for good.
Aidan could feel his eyes filling with tears. “Why nesting time?” he asked. Even a hunter who cared nothing for the Living God’s creation should care enough about his own livelihood not to hunt his quarry to extinction.
“Nesting time’s the only time a plume hunter shoots,” answered Massey. His face was red with anger. “It’s the only time the birds wear their wedding plumage.”
“Every spring,” explained Floyd, “them poor birds put on their wedding plumes. They marry up, fix a little house out of sticks, have a few babies.” He smiled at the thought of the egrets’ domestic happiness. “They’re so proud and pretty.”
“That’s when the plume hunters come,” said Massey. “Circle ’round a rookery like this one and shoot their crossbows into the treetops.”
“Big birds make easy targets,” Floyd added, “standing guard over their babies, as still as statues. And so brave and stupid, they won’t fly away and leave their young’uns unprotected once the shooting starts.”
Massey picked up the grim account. “Before long, their mates sail in from fish hunting and light on the nest to feed their babies. Plume hunters shoot them too.”
What Aidan saw at Bullbat Bay was a sickening sign that things would never be the same in the Eastern Wilderness. And not just in the wilderness. He thought of King Darrow and his paranoid rants and wondered if he would ever again be the king he had been as a young man-the king who seemed to have reawakened three years ago when he led the charge that defeated the invading Pyrthens. He thought of his own father, so changed in the months since the king had discarded him. He thought of the fine ladies and gentlemen of Tambluff, in their fine plumed hats who either didn’t care or kept themselves ignorant of the devastation wrought in the Eastern Wilderness so they could follow the latest fashions.
Aidan felt sick, as if his stomach had been turned inside out. He stood silent for a moment with his traveling partners. There was nothing they could do here; the irreparable damage had been done. And they were in desperate need of extra hands to help refloat the raft.
“There’s a footpath on the far side of the bay,” said Massey at last. “It leads to the Overland Trail a quarter league from here.”
They walked the path without speaking. Things are changing in the wilderness, thought Aidan. There were no written laws in the Eastern Wilderness. Or rather, there was no authority there to enforce any law. The nearest magistrate, in fact, was Aidan’s father, all the way back at Longleaf. For the few people who ventured into the wilderness, the only law was a code of honor. No hunter took from the forest more than he needed-just enough to eat, to clothe himself, a few extra pelts or hides to trade for the things he couldn’t make or find. Nobody aimed to get rich from the forest. If that’s what people wanted, they would move to town or raise cattle or cotton. Settlers lived in the wilderness because they loved the wilderness, not because they wanted to tame it or to convert its resources into gold to line their buckskin pockets. The first law of the wilderness was to keep it wild.
Aidan was so lost in his own thoughts he paid no attention to the rhythmic squeaking he heard to the east. The forest, after all, was full of squeaks and chirps at all hours of the day and night. Floyd was the first to realize that these weren’t the noises of frogs and birds. He stopped and cupped a hand to his ear. “Is that wagon wheels I hear?” Aidan and Massey stopped, too, and they heard the jangle of a mule harness. They ran the short distance to the trail. They couldn’t see the wagon, but they could still hear it creaking northward toward civilization.
“Wait!” shouted Massey as they sprinted up the trail. They couldn’t let these travelers get away; it might be days before anyone else came along this remote path. “Hold on!”
“Wait for us,” called Floyd.
The creaking of wagon wheels stopped. The wagoner had obviously heard them. When Aidan, Massey, and Floyd came running around the next bend in the trail, they skidded to a stop, shocked to find four sunburned men in buckskin breeches standing behind a wagon and aiming crossbows at them. Their eyes had the blank look of men who knew what it was to pull the trigger on another man. But the really mesmerizing thing about the men was their enormous hair. It stood high on their heads and flipped back like great duck wings, plastered with potato starch on either side. It was the past year’s fashionable hairstyle in Tambluff.
Aidan and his fellow travelers instinctively raised their arms and froze where they stood. The mule stamped at the sandy ground and jingled in his traces, and a rain frog chirrripped from a bush beside the trail, but there was no other sound in the tense moment.
A fifth man, tall with a curling mustache, leaned on the side of the wagon. He was obviously their leader. He had the biggest hair of all. His elbow rested on a burlap-wrapped bale, about the height and width of a small breakfast table. He squinted at Aidan, and his mouth twitched slightly beneath his bristling mustache, but he didn’t say anything.
Massey’s surprise soon gave way to indignation. “What is this?” he demanded. “Why are you pointing those things at us like we was enemies or criminals?”
The lead wagoner seemed satisfied that Aidan and company were unarmed. He gestured for his men to lower their weapons. “In the forrrest,” he explained, addressing Massey, “you can’t be too keerrrful.” In the man’s speech, Aidan noticed the rolling r ’s of Corenwald’s hill country dialect.
Floyd noticed it too. “You boys ain’t from around here, are you?” he asked. He observed the shiny red of deep sunburn on their cheeks and noses, and the insect bites that dotted every inch of skin not covered in buckskin, and he couldn’t resist a little dig. “Eastern Wilderness can be pretty mean on a bunch of hill-scratchers.”
One of the crossbowmen, taking offense, leveled his weapon at Floyd’s chest, but his leader reined him in again. “I rrreckon we’re plenty mean ourrr own selves,” he said with a hint of menace.
Massey paid little attention to the stranger’s remark. There were a lot of tough talkers in the Eastern Wilderness. Massey was pretty tough himself, and he hadn’t given up hope that these strangers would be of assistance. “The reason we flagged you down,” he said, “was because we need some help.” The lead wagoner said nothing but merely stared at Massey. Massey carried on. “We was floating a raft of timber down the Tam to Last Camp and beached it on a sandbar. We’d be obliged if you could help us get it back into the water.”
The mustachioed stranger paused before answering. “I don’t rrreckon we can. We got to get wherrre we going.”
Floyd and Massey were astonished. “That ain’t how we do things in the wilderness!” spluttered Floyd. “We help each other out, carry each other’s load. ’Cause one of these days you gonna need somebody’s help.”
“Well, as you pointed out alrrready,” said the stranger, “we ain’t from around herrre.”
Massey was furious. It wasn’t only the strangers’ refusal to help that enraged him-after all, sometimes a person wasn’t in a position to help-but their total disregard for the ways of the wilderness was infuriating. That’s when he realized what Aidan had known when he first set eyes on the wagoners. These were plume hunters, probably the ones who cleaned out Bullbat Bay. The bale in the wagon, no doubt, was a bale of plumes.