“Flatten ’em out,” ordered Fisher-Bird. Stronger took each can between his palms and put his hands together like he was praying. The cans went flat as paper, and Fisher-Bird could see the dents left by his wedding ring.
“All right,” said Fisher-Bird. “That’s everything.” She jumped from the rim of the bucket, flapped her wings twice, and landed on Stronger’s shoulder. She had to cock her head over to look up into his face.
“You gonna peck out my eyes?” asked Stronger, sounding amused.
“Nah, son, that’s crows. Not saying I wouldn’t take a bite if you were already drowned, but that’d be more in the way of courtesy.”
“Eating my eyes if I drowned would be courtesy?”
“Well, you’d hardly want a stranger to do it, would you? Besides, people do weird shit with corpse eyes. Best to get ’em pecked out nice and quick so you don’t find ’em doin’ something nasty later.”
“I’m not sure I’d be worried about that, if I was already dead.”
“You should be. Worse things than dead, and a lot of ’em involve eyeballs.”
Stronger rubbed his hand over the eyes in question. “I am having the strangest month,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Try bein’ a bird. Now come on; let’s go make some stimps miserable.”
It was a hot afternoon, and the air was wet and thick with pollen. You could look down the road and see the trees get paler and greener until they vanished into a yellow haze from all the pine trees rattling their cones. Fisher-Bird didn’t much like pines in late spring. The rest of the year they were solid-enough trees, but they got a little spring in them and they became downright indecent.
The swamp had pines ringing it and then juniper cedars, trying to suck up as much water as they could, and then a narrow channel of open water. Then it all went to cattails and sedge and muck, with little scruffy trees that didn’t do much except give the cat-claw vines something to crawl over.
“I can’t get very far out there,” said Stronger. “I mean, I try, but I sink right in and it’s like wading through glue.”
“Yeah, I figured. Wait here.” Fisher-Bird took off from his shoulder and flew across the swamp, looking for stimps.
They weren’t hard to find. A couple here, a couple there, a few standing by themselves, with their big beaks poised to stab in the water. Fisher-Bird looked with her right eye and saw herons with steel feathers. She looked with her left eye and saw a goddess’s blessing hanging over them the way pollen hung over pines.
She also saw a whole lotta things she didn’t like. The swamp wasn’t right. It didn’t sound right, and it didn’t look right. There were big bare areas where the stimps had flicked their wings and scythed the grasses down like wheat, big white slashes in the trees where they’d rubbed their beaks and cut to the heartwood. There were ducks floating head-down, gutted by a careless stimp feather, and the water was greasy black with rot.
It was when she saw a dead beaver laid out, nearly chopped in half by iron wings, that Fisher-Bird started to get mad. But she kept her tongue and her temper inside her beak and went flying on until she came to a stimp so tall, it looked like a scarecrow made of iron.
Fisher-Bird landed next to the tallest stimp and said, “Morning.”
The stimp didn’t move.
Fisher-Bird cleaned her beak with her foot and said, louder, “I said good morning!”
The stimp didn’t move.
“Shit,” said Fisher-Bird. “You died standing up?”
The stimp gave up. “I have not died,” said the steel heron, with icy precision. “I am fishing. Which I would have thought that you would understand, even if you practice the art like a wild boar practices dancing.”
Fisher-Bird’s beak didn’t lend itself to smirking, which was probably for the best. “Aw, you’re in a mood. What’s wrong, not enough fish?”
The stimp grunted.
“Mess this place is in, surprised there’s a fish to be found. Or a frog or a turtle for that matter. Maybe it’s time you stimps moved on.”
“Go bother someone else, little bird,” said the stimp. “I’ve no time for such as you.”
“Sorry about your momma,” said Fisher-Bird. “Must be hard.”
“What?” The steel heron turned its head finally, gold eyes narrowing. “What about my mother?”
“Just figured you lost her young,” said Fisher-Bird. “Or else she’d have taught you some proper manners.” She studied her claws nonchalantly. “Unless you learned from her, in which case it’s pretty clear she was no better than she should—krrk!”
The stimp’s strike would have made a meal of a slower bird, but Fisher-Bird had been waiting. She was in the air as soon as the stimp took the first step. The swamp filled up with the rattle of steel feathers and the chatter of Fisher-bird cussing, but Fisher-Bird’s faster than any heron, even a blessed one. She came winging back to Stronger, pleased with herself.
“Heard quite a ruckus,” said Stronger. “But they didn’t take to the air.”
“Nope,” said Fisher-Bird. “Didn’t think they would. But they’re killin’ beavers now, what never did nobody no harm, and also they were rude, so now I got no qualms at all.”
“Suppose we could try to scare them out,” said Stronger, a bit dubiously.
“Krrk-rkk! What’s a stimp got to be scared of? Unless you got like . . . eagles with magnets or something.” Fisher-Bird got a thoughtful look. “Huh, that’s not a bad idea. If this doesn’t work, the osprey boys owe me a favor. . . .”
Stronger put his head in his hands. “One plan at a time, please,” he whispered.
“Sit yourself down,” said Fisher-Bird. “Once it gets a little later in the day, the stimp boys will start trying to look real fine for the ladies, and that’s when we’ll do it.”
Stronger picked a log out of the water and set it down so he had a comfortable place to sit. Fisher-Bird amused herself picking crunchy tidbits with lots of legs off the end that had been in the water.
The sun started to climb up in the sky. Nothing much happened for a while, except the sound of carrion flies buzzing over the dead ducks and the dead beaver. Fisher-Bird didn’t like that either. Ought to have been a lot more insect sounds in the swamp, maybe some early pondhawks zipping over the water, but nothing, just the flies.
Then a noise rang out over the swamp, a metallic clatter like somebody shuffling a deck of cards made out of tin.
“What the devil . . . ?” Stronger jumped, startled, and accidentally put his log a foot deep in the wet ground.
Fisher-Bird got splattered by the mud and chattered, outraged, while she cleaned her feathers off. “Krrk-krrk-krk!”
“Sorry,” said Stronger. “Didn’t mean—what is that?” The noise came again, louder, and then another one. “It’s like a frog . . . a train . . . some kind of bug?”
Fisher-Bird preened her feathers down with her heavy beak, grumbling. “It’s the stimps,” she said. “You never seen herons do the dance for each other, son? The boys raise their crests way up and then flatten ’em back down, trying to look taller. ’Cept when stimps do it, their crests are made outta metal and it sounds like . . . well, like that.”