Reincarnations by Harry Turtledove & Sheila Williams

Author:Harry Turtledove & Sheila Williams [Turtledove, Harry]
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fiction - General, Alternative History, Fantasy, Fantasy - Short Stories, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780962172564
Publisher: WSFA Press
Published: 2010-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

BLUETHROATS

Have I ever gone birding around Nome with my daughter? Yes. Are the people in the story anything like her and me? No. And the lady I’m married to is just fine, for which I thank heaven every day. But Laura did see a golden-crowned sparrow in the back yard. She really did.

To get to where the bluethroats nest, you drive north out of Nome, up Bering Street. There’s not much traffic, but you drive slowly and cautiously anyway. The pavement ends a few miles out of town, near the Dexter cutoff, The cutoff is dirt and gravel. So is the Kougarok road, the one that takes you to where the bluethroats may be.

"Pothole." Your daughter rides shotgun in the rental’s passenger seat.

"I see it." And you drive around it. One jolt saved. "When the roads are good, they’re fine," your daughter says. But when they’re not..."

"They’re not," you agree. They have signs on them: NO MAINTENANCE OCTOBER 1-MAY 1. It’s June now. The sun shines twenty-two hours a day. It gets up into the fifties, the top few feet of the tundra thaw. Ponds and puddles and streams everywhere. Flowers blaze across the vastness. Millions if birds, which is why you’re here. Billions of bugs, which is why he birds are.

Your daughter points to a scattering of houses ahead. "Must be Dexter."

"Uh-huh." Before you got here, you wouldn’t have thought Nome, with not even 5,000 people, boasted suburbs. But you’re driving through one. Houses. A lodge. A little sell-everything hop. Gone.

Nome is half small-town America, half really weird. Satellite TV. Kids with backwards baseball caps and baggy jeans slouching around looking for something to do. An Italian-Japanese place run by Koreans- -pretty good, actually.

But... A reindeer in a red collar in the back of an Eskimo’s F-150. Musk oxen ambling around the slopes outside of town. More bars per capita than maybe anywhere. Loud, drunken arguments on the street outside your room at the Nugget Inn when the bars close at half past two.

It’s about sunset then. Night, such as it is, barely gets dark enough for you to need headlights. Then, a little past four, the sun comes up again and you start over- -if you ever stopped. Midnight Softball- -no lights- -is a popular sport here. In the wintertime, so is ice golf on the frozen Bering Sea. And the Iditarod ends in Nome, across the street from the Nugget.

In the hotel lobby is a bigger-than-life photo of a bluethroat singing its head off. It’s an Asian bird, but in summer it spills over and nests in western Alaska. It’s sparrow-sized, but no other bird has that fancy blue-and-orange throat marking. If you want to see it in the States, you have to start from Nome.

A different photo of a bluethroat sits on the counter at the rental-car place, which operates out of the Aurora Inn, Nome’s other hotel. A lot of the summer visitors here are birders, and the locals know it. Next to the photograph is a journal of what’s been seen where.

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