The Good, the Bad, and the Emus(61)

“We don’t want to eat them,” I said. “We want to rescue them. I’m with Dr. Blake’s expedition.”

“Oh, well, that’s different,” he said. “If my uncle doesn’t need me for a while…”

“Go on.” The elder Larsen waved his hand genially, granting permission. “I’ll send Virgil down to Winchester for the part for the generator. Until he gets back, there’s not much you can do around here.”

“My car’s outside,” I said.

“No offense,” Thor said. “But there isn’t a paved road up there, so unless your car has four-wheel drive…”

“Take the truck.” Mr. Larsen tossed over a set of keys as he opened the window into the garage again. “Virgil! Get in here!”

Within a few minutes Thor and I were on our way. At his suggestion, we stopped by the feed store for a few bags of the grain mix the ladies were in the habit of hauling out to the emus in wintertime. Then we headed back into town, rounded the statue in the center, and took the road that went by the library.

“So where are we going?” I asked. “Unless my mental map of the town is completely backward, we’re heading south, rather than north, where the emu ranch used to be.”

“You’re right,” he said. “When Mr. Eaton first turned the emus loose, they pretty much hung around the ranch. But then this guy who had the nearest farm started taking potshots at them ’cause they were scaring his cows and eating his crops.”

“Was that true?” I asked. “Or was it just an excuse for taking potshots at the emus?”

“It was pretty much true,” he said. “But it wasn’t their fault! No one was feeding them anymore, and—”

“Hey, I’m on the emus’ side, remember?” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Anyway, Ms. Delia said we needed to lure them away to a safer place. We started leaving feed out for them near the farm, then we gradually moved it farther and farther away till we had them trained to get fed over on Pudding Mountain. Which is completely on the opposite side of town from the ranch, so we figured they’d be a lot safer there.”

Biscuit Mountain and now Pudding Mountain. I wondered if perhaps whatever early explorer had named the geological features surrounding Riverton had been low on provisions at the time.

“No trigger-happy farmers near Pudding Mountain?” I asked.

“Not many,” he said. “Most of it’s inside the national park, so there’s no hunting allowed. And the Park Service is pretty keen on enforcing that.”

“And how does the Park Service feel about their land becoming an unofficial emu refuge?”

“Probably not too happy.” Thor chuckled and shook his head. “But the idea wasn’t for them to live there forever. Just to keep them from getting shot till we could get the wildlife sanctuary set up where the ranch used to be.”

“You stopped feeding them at the end of the winter?” I asked.

He nodded.

“So would they be down in the national park now or would they tend to drift back toward town where they could nibble on vegetable gardens?”

He shrugged.

“Ms. Delia says they’ll travel a long way for food,” he said. “Which explains why even when we were feeding them, we’d hear about sightings miles away. But not many sightings over on Biscuit Mountain.”

Which could mean the emus weren’t returning to Biscuit Mountain, or perhaps those with an inclination to return to Biscuit Mountain fell victim to the trigger-happy farmer and were never sighted again.

“So south it is,” I said. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“It’s Larsen, actually,” he said. Evidently Macbeth wasn’t on the syllabus at Riverton High School.

Thor was fairly taciturn on the first part of our drive. After he responded to my first couple of remarks with monosyllables, I decided to give up. Let the generation gap stand. I tried to enjoy the scenery as rolling fields gave way to steeper and steeper hills.

But as we were winding along a narrow road up the side of something that had definitely begun to earn the word “mountain” instead of “hill,” Thor suddenly spoke up.

“Look,” he said. “Do you think you could talk to Miss Annabel for me?”

“About what?”

“Tell her I didn’t do anything to the generator.”

“I think she knows that, Thor,” I said.

“I don’t think she believes it,” he said. “I did ask her and Ms. Delia to let me work on it a few times. Okay, lots of times. I guess I bugged them a lot about it, but I was pretty sure I could make it work better.”