The Good, the Bad, and the Emus(16)

“Fine by me,” I said. I was already delving into the file.

It was mainly printouts from microfilm. They were fuzzy and hard to read, so I merely leafed through, saving the close study for later, when it was less apt to make me carsick. The articles were in chronological order, and most were merely passing mentions of Annabel, Cordelia, and other members of their family. I found the obituaries of Cordelia’s and Annabel’s parents. Apparently Cordelia’s mother—my great-grandmother—was a member of the National Genealogical Society. Might there be family trees going back even farther? Another thing we could hope to get from Annabel eventually. A notice of the widowed Cordelia’s return from Richmond to Riverton to live with her cousin. By this time, she seemed to have been using her married name, and Delia rather than her full name, I noticed with a frown. I liked Cordelia better.

After that the file contained mostly passing mentions of their attendance at parties or Cordelia’s participation in the Garden Club. In the last few years, she’d been active in the campaign to set up some kind of bird refuge somewhere in the mountains outside town. I wasn’t quite sure I understood the need for a refuge. From what I could see, the whole area was a bird refuge. Apart from the songbirds that swarmed Annabel’s feeders, I’d spotted quail, pheasants, and even a wild turkey. But there was probably some good ornithological reason for the refuge. Perhaps the local hunters were a little too zealous, and Cordelia felt the need to provide some protection for the local ducks, geese, partridge, grouse, quail, wild turkey, and—

“Whoa!” Stanley slammed on the brakes and the papers went flying onto the floor. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” I glanced up but all I saw was the two-lane road, stretching downhill in front of us, and the trees pressing close to it on either side.

Stanley was staring at the woods to the right of the road.

“Something ran across the road,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was studying the file you gave me. Could it have been a deer?”

“No.” He was shaking his head slowly. “Actually, it looked like a small ostrich. I didn’t realize we had ostriches in Virginia.”

“I’m pretty sure we don’t,” I said. “Not in the wild, anyway. Not in any part of the U.S.”

“It looked smaller than I’d imagine an ostrich to be,” he said. “Do we have anything that lives in Virginia that looks like an ostrich, only slightly smaller?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “But you can ask Grandfather over dinner.”





Chapter 7



“No,” Grandfather said. “You couldn’t possibly have seen a wild ostrich here in Virginia. There are no living species of ratites native to North America.”

“Ratites, I assume, is the scientific name for ostriches?” I put in from my end of my parents’ picnic table.

“For the taxonomic order that includes ostriches.” Grandfather licked the butter from his fingers and went on, using the corn cob he’d just finished gnawing as a pointer. “None native to North America, and there’s only scant, unreliable evidence to indicate we ever had any. You have the ostrich in Africa. At nine feet or so, the largest extant ratite.”

“I don’t think what I saw was quite that tall,” Stanley said, helping himself to more green beans.

“Then in Australia you have the emus, about six feet, and the cassowaries, a little smaller, but not to be trifled with, because of their razor-sharp talons.”

“Either one sounds more the size of what I saw,” Stanley said. “Although I can’t speak to the presence or absence of talons.”

“South America has several species of rhea, four or five feet tall.” Grandfather was drowning a buttermilk biscuit in butter. “Though before you ask, no, I doubt if they ever stray this far north. And then in New Zealand there are the kiwis, which are pretty much the size of a chicken. Well, bigger than those,” he added, waving a bit dismissively at one of the sleek bantam whatzits that had wandered away from Mother’s elegantly decorated chicken coop. “The size of a normal chicken. But none of them would be running around wild here in Virginia.”

“Are you missing any ratites from your zoo?” Rob asked, his words slightly garbled by the rib bone he was gnawing.

“No.” Grandfather shook his head. “I was showing them to the boys about an hour ago. Was there a zoo in the town where you saw it? They could have escaped from some other zoo.”

“There’s barely even a town,” Stanley said. “Definitely no zoo.”