It had been their choice. Now, though, a part of Agnes, nagged by this odd jetlag feeling, longed despite everything just to know the right time …
Preparing for the walk, she got together her gear: boots, a haversack, a light waterproof coat, dummy Stepper box. And she greeted Angie Clayton, a neighbour, a single mother, who was going to babysit the still-sleeping Ben for the few hours this ‘hunt’ was supposed to take. As they left the gondola, Oliver Irwin was waiting outside with Lobsang. The party was only a dozen or so, including Oliver and Marina and Nikos, their bright if oddly secretive twelve-year-old son. Nikos looked to be the youngest of the party; there were no small children here.
Nobody else seemed to be having any problems this morning, most notably Lobsang – or if he did he wasn’t sharing them with her. Agnes tried to put all else aside and focus on the moment.
They headed down the hill from the gondola, towards a ford across the creek. Oliver Irwin walked with Lobsang and Agnes, pointing out the sights, of a landscape of dark green under a greyish dawn sky, with mist clinging in the hollows. ‘None of us here are first-footers, but we’re stuck with the names they gave to places. Your farm is on Manning Hill, and that’s about the highest point hereabouts. The river is called Soulsby Creek. The big clump of dense forest we’re heading towards, across the creek and a ways north, is Waldron Wood. The features of the landscape persist, a few steps to East and West anyhow. Geography’s stubborn in the Long Earth, when you go exploring.’ He ruffled his son’s hair. ‘Right, Nikos?’
Nikos was probably a little too old for that, Agnes thought. He ducked out of the way, grinning sheepishly.
Agnes thought she knew Oliver’s type. He and his wife Marina wouldn’t think of themselves as leaders in what was obviously a self-consciously leaderless community, but they were a kind of social hub, a go-to contact point for newcomers. Well, somebody had to be.
She asked, ‘So which is the old Poulson house, Nikos?’
Nikos looked at her sharply. ‘Big old place on the far side of your hill. What do you know about that?’
‘Why, nothing. Only that your mother told me you hang out there sometimes. Not a secret, is it?’
‘Hell, no.’
‘Language, Nikos,’ his father said mildly.
‘Just a place we hang out. Like you say.’
‘OK.’
They reached the creek; a faint, pungent mist hung over the water as they splashed across the shallow ford. On the far side, in ones and twos, they stepped East, the target for the ‘hunt’ being a short way stepwise. Agnes made sure she worked her own Stepper box convincingly, though Stepper technology was built into her frame. The stepping barely interrupted the conversation. It was just as she’d been told: while the core of New Springfield would always be the founders’ community on West 1,217,756, these people slid easily between the neighbouring worlds as and when they needed to, or felt like it.
As they formed up again, Oliver said, ‘About the Poulson house. We use it as a swap store. Otherwise it’s empty.’
‘Save for the local ghosts, according to your wife.’
Oliver grinned. ‘Every town needs a haunted house, I guess. Even a town that’s barely a town at all, like this one. I suppose you’re right to ask about it. If your Ben grows up like the other kids he’ll be down there up to no good with the rest soon enough …’
His voice tailed off as they approached the thicker forest. To Agnes, still standing in the open air, it looked like a green wall, from which soft hoots and cries echoed.
‘OK,’ Oliver said, ‘this is where we need to start keeping quiet. Don’t want to scare the little guys off.’
His companions spread out before the trees, pulling nets and wire snares from their bags, men, women and children alike. Without talking, working almost silently, they began to set traps, or took position under the branches with what looked to Agnes like butterfly nets. Some went deeper into the forest gloom to check over traps evidently laid earlier.
As the dawn advanced and the daylight brightened, Agnes started to make out a crowded undergrowth beneath the trees, what looked like ferns and horsetails, a dense mass of bushes, and flowering plants around which early bees buzzed. She felt a primitive dread at the idea of going into that thick green.
Oliver murmured to Agnes, ‘How’s your forest lore?’
‘I’m a city girl. I don’t recognize most of those trees, even.’
He smiled. ‘Well, some are variants of what we have on Datum Earth. Or used to have. Some aren’t.’ He pointed. ‘Laurel. Walnut. Dogwood. That’s a kind of dwarf sequoia, I think. The ones with the big flaring roots are laurels. The climbers are honeysuckle and strangler figs, mostly, but we get some grape vines …’