Nature Noir Jordan Smith (book series for 12 year olds .TXT) 📖

I was alone on the cobbles. The wind picked up, warm, dry, and dusty; it rumbled in my ears. For several minutes something like an orange haze had been passing in billows between me and the forest at the upper extent of the beach. I walked up to see what it was. As I entered the orange cloud, I saw that it was composed of thousands of migrating lady beetles, an endless swarm of them, undulating up the canyon on the wind. They collided with my hat, making little ticking sounds. They landed on my uniform. They crawled on my sleeves. I let them wash over me, facing the direction they were coming from. The autumn afternoon sun shone through a million wings, turning the light the color of saffron, like the robes of Buddhist monks.

I heard a motor. A young man and young woman arrived at the bottom of the road by the beach in an old white car. I waved them down. I showed them the little beetles on their windshield and told them I had been standing there watching the swarm go by unabated on the wind for twenty minutes. I told them I had worked this section of the river for more than ten years and had never seen anything like it.

I looked at them. They were wearing bathing suits, sitting on towels on the hot seats. The young man sat quietly, respectfully. He had turned off the car now. They had both listened to my little natural history talk without replying. Could they go now? their expressions seemed to say. I looked down and realized I was wearing a badge and a gun. I smiled sheepishly and waved them along. The young man started the motor and left right away, and the car disappeared into the willows down the sandy track along the lakeshore. I was alone again. The saffron light and the brushing of the beetles against my face, my hands, remained.

The cold force of the American River that July has long since spent itself on the ocean. I haven't seen a swarm of migrating lady beetles that big since then; maybe I never will. My friend Marco got remarried and now lives in a different village. I don't know if the old stonecutter who poured his wine so freely in the hut Marco took us to in the mountains is still alive. In life, you travel and what is behind you keeps changing after you are gone.

But on the maps I keep, the places and the stories of people I met there don't disappear. It is also like that with the memories of things that happened to me as a ranger. Some things that happened years ago still raise my heart rate when I think of them; the difference is now I know what happened in the end. I remember the urgency as if I were inside it again. But I also see it at a great distance, like looking down on the tiny mountains on a topographic map. And in a way everything seems to be settled now, and in another way it never will be.

I am in the jet boat, going desperately fast upstream where Lake Clementine grows shallow and turns into a river. The siren is screaming. I'm yelling in my headset to the dispatcher about getting a rescue helicopter up there as the V-8 thunders underneath me. The canyon turns east and narrows, and in the shade of its depth the blue strobe overhead flashes on my deckhand's face as the boat pitches on its wake. He's braced himself into the V of the bows with one hand on the gunwale and the other on the diamond-plate bulkhead. I've sent him forward to watch for sandbars, which at this speed could kill both of us if we hit one. In the din we communicate about this matter with glances and gestures.

The helicopter lands; the gray-blue body is loaded by men in blue jumpsuits like angels. It flies away.

I am swimming underwater at the lake inlet, tracing the last moments of the deceased for my death investigation. My deckhand watches anxiously from the boat tethered to the riverbank above. Fighting the cold July current, I claw my way along a submerged face of rock, groping the bottom for a place where the strength of the water might have stolen and kept a human body.

I am on the phone with Mrs. Ditsavong. My children have the flu; I'm sorry but I can't come to the service today. On the other end of the line, I hear the chanting of the monks and the drone of a harmonium, deep and ancient.

Mr. Ditsavong is out on the tarmac, working in the hot sun of Southeast Asia, wiping his hands on a rag. The jets whine in the background.

The saffron beetles caress my skin.

In the jungle, Mrs. Ditsavong is always holding her little boy so close. They get into the boat; they sit; the little boy is falling asleep now. The boat leaves the shore into the moonless night. The boatman leans into his sculls and she can hear the drips from the ends of the oars as they are lifted out of the water and slipped back in as quietly as the boatman can manage. And they leave the still water along the bank and go out into the great current, crossing the Mekong.

10 / As Weak as Water

EARLY ONE AUGUST MORNING Will Reich and I loaded our oar boat onto the park's Ford six-pack for a whitewater raft patrol of the upper Middle Fork. He was a new ranger, a big, barrel-chested, lantern-jawed man in his early forties with a shock of unruly black hair. As usual, our job on the river that day was to monitor the guide services offering excursions by whitewater raft in our canyons, and to be available to help in the event of a boat accident. But on this day we