Devoted(8)

Woody wasn’t afraid of the night.

The night could be magical. Cool things had happened to him in the dark morning hours while his mother still slept. Once he’d seen a fat opossum waddling across the lawn, trailed by her babies, all their tiny lantern eyes shining with curiosity when they saw him. He had seen foxes and countless rabbits and families of deer. The only thing he’d needed to scare away with a long blast of the horn had been raccoons that approached him hissing and baring their teeth.

His faithful obedience had earned him the right to sit on the porch at night as long as he was careful to leave the door unlocked to facilitate a quick retreat. He wasn’t permitted to venture into the yard alone. It was a deep yard, almost three acres, and at the farther end waited the forest.

Animals more dangerous than mean raccoons lived in the forest. Mother Nature wasn’t really motherly. Mom said nature was more like a bipolar aunt who treated you kindly most of the time but, now and then, could be a real witch, conjuring killer storms and vicious animals, like big toothy mountain lions that, if given a menu, would always order tender children.

He sat on the porch steps. His mother expected that he would sit in one of the chairs or on the swing, or stand at the railing. But the steps put him closer to the action, if there should be any action, and he was still living by the rules, the primary one of which was that he should not go into the yard. The Tac Light lay beside him, unused, and he kept the air horn in his right hand.

The moon floated in the west, not yet behind those mountains, as radiant as some exotic jellyfish in the sea of space, and the sky twinkled with more stars than Woody could count in a lifetime. After his father’s death—murder!—they moved from a busy town in Silicon Valley, which his mother said was more of a concept than it was a real place, and they came here to the outskirts of the community of Pinehaven, in Pinehaven County, where no city-light pollution dimmed the stars.



Woody was on the steps not more than ten minutes when the three deer materialized out of the darkness: a buck bearing a magnificent rack of antlers, a doe, and a fawn that was maybe five months old and still wore a spotted coat. He’d lose his spots in winter, as he finished growing into an adult.

Deer didn’t always travel in families, often in small herds and equally often alone, but the previous year, a family like this had visited almost nightly for three months, drawn by the sweet grass of the lawn. Woody had come to know them, quartered apples for them, and put the fruit on the porch steps and retreated to a chair. Gradually they had become confident enough to eat the apples off the bottom step while he had sat on the top one, and eventually, with their soft lips, they had taken the apples from his hands.

These three visitors were not those from the prior year. Woody remembered the markings of those adults, and these were different. The deer were aware of him, and they were cautious, remaining at a distance as they grazed, their shadowy forms vaguely patinaed with moonlight.

Sometimes he wondered what had happened to that other family, if one or more had been killed by hunters, if perhaps a mountain lion had gotten the doe or her fawn. Keeping a family together and safe was really, really hard.



He didn’t dare go into the kitchen and quarter a few apples and try to lure these new deer to the steps. Just by getting up he might scare them away. If they returned a few times and became accustomed to his presence, he could begin to try to make friends with them.

For the time being, watching them was pleasure enough. They enchanted him. They were beautiful and graceful, though neither their beauty nor grace was what most moved him. What fascinated, enthralled, spellbound him was that they were three, together and safe and grazing under the stars, unafraid in this world of fear, looking as though they would be together forever.

The night lay so quiet that Woody imagined he could hear the stars burning light-years away, though of course what he heard was the circulation of his blood through the capillaries in his ears.

He whispered, “Hello.”

Although the boy’s voice had been soft, the buck raised its antlered head to stare at him.

They regarded each other for a long moment, and then Woody whispered, “I love you,” because the deer couldn’t spoil the moment with the wrong words and because the gulf between their species ensured that neither of them could embarrass himself or the other.





9





Megan Bookman was awakened by the voice of the security system when Woody entered the disarming code. The volume was low through most of the house, so that he would not worry about waking her, but louder here in the master suite, to ensure that she would always know when he had gone to the back porch.

She got out of bed and eased through the gloom to the Crestron unit embedded in the wall. The screen brightened when she touched it, and she selected the word Cameras from the menu. Fourteen two-camera modules were installed at points around the exterior of the house, one camera that could record either by daylight or outdoor lamps and the other gathering infrared images when, as now, there was neither sun nor landscape lighting.

The system translated the red images into wavelengths that were nearest 555 nanometers, the green part of the spectrum to which the human eye was most sensitive. Nevertheless, the video offered little detail. Although she could see Woody sitting on the top step, gazing out at the backyard and the forest beyond, he was a pale-green form among shadows of various shades of green, as if he might be a forest spirit drawn by curiosity to this human habitat.