#TeaserTuesday: The Rookery

 

“This, boys,” Mercy said, “is the rookery. And it’s where Harlan Boyle is going to die a slow, painful death.”

 

~*~

 

It was his first year of proper hunting – of checking the traps, collecting the tags, and wielding the .22 alongside Remy – that Daddy first brought Mercy to this place. They’d just dropped the day’s catch at the depot, and the sun was already sinking, that pink-gold May twilight that was warm, but not yet oppressive, redolent of jasmine and honeysuckle, singing with crickets and peepers.

“Daddy, it’ll be dark soon,” Mercy cautioned, snugged next to Remy in the stern, beside the till, hands still smelling of gator, back of his neck prickling with nerves when Remy steered them away from home, and toward the deeper parts of the swamp where they rarely hunted.

“Mmhm,” Remy hummed. “That’s what spotlights are for.” He put his free arm, heavy with muscle, around Felix’s shoulders, and said, “I wanna show you something. Something good. Don’t be scared.”

He piloted them out, and out, until Felix could smell the salt of the ocean as strongly as he could smell the muck of home. Down narrower and narrower inlets and causeways and canals. He pointed out the ruins of what had never been anyone’s stone house. And as they emerged onto the lake, the sunset flared vivid as a forest fire through the lower rungs of the trees.

Felix gasped.  

The world was alive with birds.

The egrets and herons stood in thick clusters on the banks of the lake, necks stretched as they called and trilled to one another. Others flew from the lake to the island at its center, and on the island itself, the trees were decorated more ornately than any Christmas spruce, draped in garlands of snowy egrets, and blue herons, and shrieking gulls, and swooping kingfishers. The baby sandhill cranes, downy gray, still unable to fly, were making a swim for it. As Felix watched, he saw one disappear, snatched beneath the water.

The noise. It was chaos, and it was music, and Felix could feel it in his chest.

“This,” Remy said, arm squeezing tighter around him once he killed the engine, “is the rookery. This is where all the birds come to roost for the night.”

“Wow.”

“They’re safer together. It’s where they have their nests. When their chicks hatch, up in those trees, nothing can get to them. But…” He breathed a quiet laugh. “Did you see that one go under?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s safe for any bird that can fly. But anything that swims…”

“Gators?”

“There’s more gators under us right now than you could shake a stick at. The birdsong, it calls to them.”

Felix said a sad, silent prayer for the stolen chick. But his fascination was too great to mourn it; that was life, that was nature – and never had he seen nature so noisily, unexpectedly resplendent.

“See that sandbar there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where you’ll see them in the daylight. Sunning themselves.”

“All of them?”

“No.” Remy snorted a laugh. “Just a few at a time.”

“How many do you think there are? Total?”

“Oh, who’s to say? Not me. Hundreds, probably.”

“Well,” Felix said, as his pulse leaped. “It’s a pretty big lake.”

Remy chuckled. “It sure is, son.”

 

There are a lot of fictional spots in the Dartmoor universe, from Dartmoor itself, to Bell Bar, to Cook's Coffee. "Big Son" introduces another fictional spot...but one that's based on a real one. The rookery is based on the rookery I found in the woods behind my grandparents' house in Florida when I was kid, gators and all.