Volpla by Wyman Guin (affordable ebook reader .TXT) 📖

One has already shot one of us. We have forgiven him and are friends. But one of us is dead."

"You are friends with another man?" I asked, stunned.

He nodded and pointed up the valley. "He is up there today with another family."

"Let's go!"

He had the advantage of short glides, but the volpla chief couldn't keep up with me. Sometimes trotting, sometimes walking fast, I got way ahead of him. My hard breathing arose as much out of my anxiety about the manner of handling this stranger as it did out of the exertion.

I rounded a bend in the creek and there was my son sitting on the grass near a cooking fire playing with a baby volpla and talking in English to an adult volpla who stood beside him. As I approached, my son tossed the baby into the air. The tiny planes opened and the baby drifted down to his waiting hands.

He said to the volpla beside him, "No, I'm sure you didn't come from the stars. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure my father—"

I yelled from behind them, "What business do you have telling them that?"

The male volpla jumped about two feet. My son turned his head slowly and looked at me. Then he handed the baby to the male and stood up.

"You haven't any business out here!" I was seething. He had destroyed the whole store of volpla legends with one small doubt.

He brushed the grass from his trousers and straightened. The way he was looking at me, I felt my anger turning to a kind of jelly.

"Dad, I killed one of these little people yesterday. I thought he was a hawk and I shot him when I was out hunting. I wouldn't have done that if you had told me about them."

I couldn't look at him. I stared at the grass and my face got hot.

"The chief tells me that you want them to leave the ranch soon. You think you're going to play a big joke, don't you?"

I heard the chief come up behind me and stand quietly at my back.

My son said softly, "I don't think it's much of a joke, Dad. I had to listen to that one crying after I hit him."

There were big black trail ants moving in the grass. It seemed to me there was a ringing sound in the sky. I raised my head and looked at him. "Son, let's go back to the jeep and we can talk about it on the way home."

"I'd rather walk." He sort of waved to the volpla he had been talking to and then to the chief. He jumped the creek and walked away into the oak woods.

The volpla holding the baby stared at me. From somewhere far up the valley, a crow was cawing. I didn't look at the chief. I turned and brushed past him and walked back to the jeep alone.

At home, I opened a bottle of beer and sat out on the terrace to wait for my son. My wife came toward the house with some cut flowers from the garden, but she didn't speak to me. She snapped the blades of the scissors as she walked.

A volpla soared across the terrace and landed at my daughter's bedroom window. He was there only briefly and relaunched himself. He was followed from the window in moments by the two volplas I had left with my daughter earlier in the afternoon. I watched them with a vague unease as the three veered off to the east, climbing effortlessly.

When I finally took a sip of my beer, it was already warm. I set it aside. Presently my daughter ran out onto the terrace.

"Daddy, my volplas left. They said good-by and we hadn't even finished the TV show. They said they won't see me again. Did you make them leave?"

"No. I didn't."

She was staring at me with hot eyes. Her lower lip protruded and trembled like a pink tear drop.

"Daddy, you did so." She stomped into the house, sobbing.

My God! In one afternoon, I had managed to become a palace eunuch, a murderer and a liar!

Most of the afternoon went by before I heard my son enter the house. I called to him and he came out and stood before me. I got up.

"Son, I can't tell you how sorry I am for what happened to you. It was my fault, not yours at all. I only hope you can forget the shock of finding out what sort of creature you had hit. I don't know why I didn't anticipate that such things would happen. It was just that I was so intent on mystifying the whole world that I...."

I stopped. There wasn't anything more to say.

"Are you going to make them leave the ranch?" he asked.

I was aghast. "After what has happened?"

"Gee, what are you going to do about them, Dad?"

"I've been trying to decide. I don't know what I should do that will be best for them." I looked at my watch. "Let's go back out and talk to the chief."

His eyes lighted and he clapped me on the shoulder, man to man. We ran out and got into the jeep and drove back up to the valley. The late afternoon Sun glared across the landscape.

We didn't say much as we wound up the valley between the darkening trees. I was filled more and more with the unease that had seized me as I watched the three volplas leave my terrace and climb smoothly and purposefully into the east.

We got out at the chief's camp and there were no volplas around. The fire had burned down to a smolder. I called in the volpla language, but there was no answer.

We went from camp to camp and found dead fires. We climbed to their tree houses and found them empty. I was sick and scared. I called endlessly till I was hoarse.

At last, in the darkness, my son put a hand on my arm. "What are you going to do, Dad?"

Standing there in those terribly silent woods, I trembled. "I'll have to call the police and the newspapers and warn everybody."

"Where do you suppose they've gone?"

I looked to the east where the stars, rising out of the great pass in the mountains, glimmered like a deep bowl of fireflies.

"The last three I saw were headed that way."

We had been gone from the house for hours. When we stepped out onto the lighted terrace, I saw the shadow of a helicopter down on the strip. Then I saw Guy sitting near me in a chair. He was holding his head in his hands.

Em was saying to my wife, "He was beside himself. There wasn't a thing he could do. I had to get him away from there and I thought you wouldn't mind if we flew over here and stayed with you till they've decided what to do."

I walked over and said, "Hello, Guy. What's the matter?"

He raised his head and then stood and shook hands. "It's a mess. The whole project will be ruined and we don't dare go near it."

"What happened?"

"Just as we set it off—"

"Set what off?"

"The rocket."

"Rocket?"

Guy groaned.

"The Venus rocket! Rocket Harold!"

My wife interjected. "I was telling Guy we didn't know a thing about it because they haven't delivered our paper in weeks. I've complained—"

I waved her to silence. "Go on," I demanded of Guy.

"Just as I pushed the button and the hatch was closing, a flock of owls circled the ship. They started flying through the hatch and somehow they jammed it open."