The Token by Kevin Bird (the little red hen ebook .TXT) 📖

Kevin Bird THE TOKEN


One


“Dad! Dad!” the shouting was loud, angry, and frightened. “They were here again. They got one of the big blues!”
The girl’s eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and excitement as she ran through the foggy dawn light towards the simple wooden building she called home. Her feet crunched as they hit the muddy yard still hard from the clear and cold night only just now moving on. She was young, only eleven years old, and had just been out to feed some of the animals kept on the family farm, her chores before the day’s lessons.
She was wrapped against the early morning cold in a green animal skin cloak while underneath she wore the traditional rough tunic of natural fibers and leather trousers of the farmers she shared this world with. Her long brownish-blond hair was wild and unkempt matching her emotions.
“It’s happened again!” Her young voice was high and pierced the morning stillness.
Jacob came out of their home at the sound of her voice. Recognizing the level of near panic in it, he knew what the words signified before he could even make them out. He took two large steps into the yard and held his large and callused hands out towards her halting her forward charge.
“Calm down, catch your breath. Tell me slowly what’s going on, Bettine.” He put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and squeezed gently. He looked down into his daughter’s excited face with un-blinking steely gray eyes, held her with the strong stare and forced her to calm down.
“Dad, they got another one of the blues! A big one!” The girl was still excited, but no longer frightened.
Jacob knew his daughter looked to him as being her big, strong, guardian who could chase away all her fears. “Where did it happen this time?” His voice had a more balanced sound to it than he actually felt, but he knew he had to make sure Bettine had no doubts about her own safety. His self-identity as a proud father and provider wouldn’t allow him to let his daughter down in any way.
“Down by the dry creek bed where the fence crosses.”
“They must have come under it.” He sounded resigned, but inside he was seething, mostly at himself. Since the water level had dropped he hadn’t found the time to run fencing down to the creek bed. Damn! They, whatever they were, just walked right on under it! Angry at himself, but knowing there was little he could do about it right now, he told his daughter to go inside to eat, clean herself up, and get ready for lessons. “Tell your mum I’ll be in soon, but I need to go down and see for myself.”
He reached down to take the cloak off Bettine’s shoulders as she passed him to go inside. Jacob’s daughter was growing quickly and yet Jacob still towered over her and likely would for another five or so years. The cloak barely covered his broad shoulders, but he didn’t want to waste the time to go back inside for his own. However, he did take a quick moment to watch as his daughter disappeared behind the closing door, wishing her a safe future; not much of a guarantee in this world, he thought. She would soon be as tall as her mother and, for many years, all had agreed that she would become a beautiful woman. Jacob wanted to see her safe to fulfill that prediction.
He pulled a woolen hat from his back pocket and then strode off pulling its welcome warmth over his thick tangled black hair. As he quickly walked through the yard he picked up a large three-tined pitchfork; just in case, he told himself, though he realized it was little more use than being unarmed would have been.
As he strode purposely out of the yard he thought how important it would be for the others to know what had happened on his land as it would undoubtedly occur again somewhere else, affecting the whole farming co-operative. This was becoming a more frequent event and he and his neighbors were becoming progressively more concerned. In three more cycles of the moon the fleet would arrive and expect their Token in full. Without a full quota there was always the chance of some of the youngsters being pressed into a service from which they would likely not return home.
At fifty-one years old he thought that he deserved some peace and security in his life, and that of his family, but it looked to him like something was trying to disrupt that hope. This would not happen if he and the others had anything to do with it, he thought, feeling his anger stir.
As he walked carefully down the creek bed, his eyes and ears ready for anything out of the ordinary, his mind raced unbidden trying to put the pieces together. Over the last three cycles, both he and the other farmers in the co-operative had started to notice some of their livestock missing. At first only some young ones had disappeared, and so few of them had gone, spread over such a large area, that the general consensus was that the fencing must have small holes it that just needed to be found and then repaired. This had been the simple explanation; and yet, after several days spent searching, no holes large enough had been found in any of the farms.
One of the farmers had even ventured the possibility that some of the boys had taken to pulling ill-advised pranks on their fathers and neighbors. Ill-advised pranks! This polite turn of phrase was used to hide the man’s true feelings of anger and a deep unsettling fear. Jacob had understood that the far-fetched idea had come from a need to put a name, however innocuous or incorrect, on the strange occurrences. Thankfully neither Jacob nor the others had taken the idea too seriously and it had soon been forgotten.
At the time of the first losses, the creeks had been running high with fresh water from the eastern mountains, so nothing could have slipped under the fence then. Now, in the dry cycle, it was clear the fencing had been damaged below the waterline by flash floods of winter snowmelt. He could easily imagine something might be able to come under the fencing now, but if that were true how had something gained access to the penned in animals during the high water season? It was all still a mystery in Jacob’s mind.
Blake, his friend and neighbor to the west, had been the first to notice something that changed the opinion of everyone regarding these disappearances. Jacob remembered clearly the way Blake had described the events to the whole co-operative the day it had happened.
“Early this morning, I was woken by a noise I couldn’t really recognize.” Blake had a wild look in his large expressive eyes that disturbed all those present to hear him. He was well known for his calm demeanor so his clear agitation made everyone pay attention to his story.
When he was pushed on the matter, he said that it reminded him of the time one of his big greens had broken a leg in a posthole and had screamed in a frightening and high pitched tone. This had been extraordinarily memorable since these animals were known for their lack of vocalizations.
“Anyway,” he continued to the hushed group, “the noise didn’t repeat, but I was concerned for my livestock and got up anyway. It was still dark and was freezing cold when I went out.” His voice was slightly slurred and his right cheekbone swollen, both the result of a kick from one of his blues when she was thrashing in labor. The bone had fractured and never healed properly giving him a recognizable slur and forcing him to speak carefully so all could understand his words. His speech took some getting used to, but gave him some of the character that had endeared Jacob and many of the other farmers to this man.
He had told everyone that the night had been very clear and across the yard he could see nothing unusual in the first field. Skirting the fence he had walked quickly towards the near corner of his second field, and had immediately seen all his livestock in a packed mass in one corner.
“They should still have been sleeping, but they were clearly agitated. Those blues were all milling around trying to force their way to center of the group like a mass of anchovies. None of them wanted to be on the outside. When I got closer I saw a blur from the corner of eye. I turned, real quick, but all I made out was a dark shape that seemed to just fly over the tall fencing on east side of field away from my scared blues.”
Immediately, he’d lost sight of the shape in the distance and he’d run down the side of the fencing to the spot. He’d looked eastwards away from his field towards the distant mountains, but couldn’t hear or see anything unusual. He’d wondered if he’d just imagined it or maybe it had just been a large owl returning to its roost.
“As I turned back, I saw something different about a patch of ground a few meters away. The sun finally started to show and that’s when I saw the wide blue stain on the grass; obviously blood from one of my animals. It was fresh, as it was still glistening in the sun. There was nothing else around.” He had looked almost pleadingly at his fellow farmers as he finished. “What could have done this? There are no dangerous animals left on this planet; that was guaranteed to us.” No one had been able to offer him an answer.

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When Jacob reached the creek he still remained wary, though somewhat reassured by the fact that all the other attacks had occurred during the hours of darkness. No one had seen or heard anything in daylight, and the sun was now well above the horizon, warming his wide back, though he still kept the cloak on. He walked down to the creek bed where, not so long ago, the water had flowed clean and cool, bringing life with it. Now it had dried up and his leather boots crunched loudly on the dirt in the morning stillness creating an added feeling of uncertainty. He was annoyed at finding himself out of sorts in an environment where he usually felt so comfortable and at home. After all, this creek bed had apparently helped to bring death only hours before and here he was alone with the haze of the morning fog still visible as the sun began to burn it off.
He could see a sizable gap between the creek bed and the bottom of the fence and after closer examination, realized it certainly wasn’t big enough for any of his larger animals to get under. Some other explanation would have to be found.
There were no prints in the dry earth to indicate what had come along here so recently, but he could clearly see what his daughter had found. On the far bank was a flattened area of grass with shiny blue blood splattered all around. His animals always came to forage by the creek where the most succulent grasses grew, since even in the dry