The Beginning of Restoration (1)
"Druid! It's dangerous! There have been so many attacks by flocks of parrots lately!"
"……It's all right."
Back at our zoo, the noisy ones got smacked around by the magpies and crows. Hearing that those same birds were threatening people out here, I honestly found it a little hard to believe. I brushed off Grace's attempts to stop me, stepped out of the car, and looked around.
A flock of at least a thousand parrots had seized the entire little village. Roofs, windowsills, yards—there wasn't a surface that wasn't packed solid with them. They were ripping open trash cans and prying decorations off the window frames, kicking up a proper racket. And as if that still weren't enough, they were putting one of a parrot's signature talents—mimicking human speech—to work swearing at people.
"Hooooooly shit!"
"Get the hell off, man!"
"Hey, idiot! Shut up!"
The parrots were spitting curses in English. The real problem was that they understood the meaning perfectly. Thanks to my superpower, an animal's ordinary cries came through overlaid with the will behind them, and I could tell they were voicing precisely what the words said. Among themselves, the snarling came through clear as anything—get lost, drop dead, shut your mouth.
I let out a light sigh and scanned the sky. A few parrots were circling when something familiar caught my eye.
"Yubu!"
I called out lightly, and Yubu, who had been drifting at his leisure high overhead, dropped as if he were falling. He plummeted at tremendous speed, then, some six feet off the ground, shook himself out in a rustle of feathers and settled into a soft landing. At the appearance of the enormous owl, the parrots startled and backed away from us.
"Did you summon me?"
"Yeah. Got something I need you to do."
Yubu looked at me as if to ask why I'd called, and I made one request. He carried it out at once, and very thoroughly.
"Sorry!"
More than a thousand parrots had their heads jammed into the dirt, every last one of them apologizing. Yubu had thrashed a few of the flock's top birds, then educated the rest. Once he'd pounded the leaders flat and done the same to anyone who tried to bolt, the others grovelled of their own accord. They didn't utter a single curse after that. They looked as if they never meant to again.
"Waaaaah!"
The residents of the parrot-occupied village, watching from inside their houses, burst into cheers. Unable even to step outside for fear of being attacked, they seemed to find the sight of the parrots receiving their education deeply satisfying. I shrugged and brought over a few of the ringleaders, now thoroughly pounded flat.
"Spare us, spare us, spare us, spare us."
Australia's little delinquents—the parrot bosses—trembled as they stared at Yubu beside me. I stroked the napes of their necks, gentle enough to mean they could relax. Only then did the shaking ease, and they looked up at me through their ruined feathers.
"You lot. Let's get some work done."
I looked at the parrots and gave them a light smile. I couldn't simply turn loose birds that were causing people this much trouble. It wasn't good for the people, and in the end it wasn't good for the birds either. Besides, back at the lodging there was a quantity of seed that dozens of people couldn't possibly handle. Putting these delinquent parrots on the job was perfect.
The birds in question, however, looked distinctly unimpressed. Clever as they were, they weren't glad to be told out of nowhere to get to work.
"Why should we— I mean, of course this is our duty! What shall we do? Only give the command!"
Of course, that was because Yubu stood beside me, round eyes glaring, snapping his sharp beak shut with crisp little clicks. The parrots looked ready to tear out their own livers and offer them up on the spot.
Their cooperation was voluntary… not really, but I had it all the same, and I ordered every parrot there to follow. Naturally a few started scheming to flee, but with Yubu watching like a sentry, they never got the chance. In the end they had no choice but to flap hard after us as we drove along at a deliberately easy pace.
After following the car for a while, they arrived around the lodging—land that had once been forest and was now, thanks to the fire, open plain.
"Papa! Parrots!"
So-eun, who had been snoring away in the car, woke the moment we reached the lodging and lit up at the sight of the parrots pouring in behind us. There were parrots at our zoo, so she was used to them. Bouncing along to the children's songs they sang for her was a particular hobby of hers, and she immediately seized one and demanded a song.
Humming as if she were asking for something, she made her meaning plain enough that the parrot caught on and launched into an Australian tune. It was in English, but a melody seemed to be all she needed—So-eun swayed and enjoyed the rhythm. I burst out laughing, and once she was reasonably satisfied I scooped her up, faced the nearly thousand parrots, and spoke.
"Work hard, and I'll grant you the honor of singing children's songs for So-eun!"
"Give us work this instant!"
"Shall we sell the very land?!"
"We want work!"
The parrots, unable to tear their eyes from So-eun dancing to the song, fluttered into motion at my words. Pleased that I'd secured such excellent workers, I put them to work at once.
I brought a portable bathtub out from inside the lodging and filled it with seeds. Grace had brought so many that they filled about half the tub.
"From here on, take these seeds in your beaks, fly out around the area, and drop them. You can go far. Preferably scatter them on bare ground."
"Leave it to us!"
"Hand it over! I'm the one spreading them!"
"Everyone back off! I'm the children's-song expert here!"
The words were barely out of my mouth before the parrots charged the tub. They snatched the seeds one by one and emptied it in a flash.
"Kyaaaah! I'm late! I'm late, I said!"
"Let's steal what the others already grabbed!"
Even the ones who hadn't gotten a seed—there simply weren't enough to go around—took off and scattered in every direction. More than a thousand parrots vacated the place in an instant, and the noisy surroundings suddenly felt still.
"……Druid. You aren't having the parrots spread the seeds, are you?"
"We've got excellent workers. We ought to use them. And it's not as if we can just turn those birds loose, is it?"
"That's true enough…… Parrots are a problem here in Australia."
Grace seemed to decide it wasn't a bad choice. She thought it over for a moment, then nodded. It didn't take much thought to see that birds carrying seed across long distances was better than people scattering it by hand, one seed at a time. In nature, after all, birds were already deeply involved in how plants spread—eating all kinds of fruit and passing the undigested seeds in their droppings—so this was simply borrowing nature's own method. And as if to prove the point, the parrots spread the seeds over a wide stretch of ground and came back.
I left So-eun to play with them however she pleased and turned to Grace.
"Grace. Is what I asked for this morning ready?"
"Ah, yes. Shall I bring it right now?"
"Yes. The sun will be all the way down before long, so let's just confirm."
At that, Grace contacted someone, and several vehicles drew up near the lodging. The people who climbed out began unloading all sorts of things.
What I'd asked Grace for wasn't anything special. Plants—more precisely, grass, from ordinary lawn turf to other fresh green growth.
"But why did you request grass like this?"
Grace lightly sifted through the clippings packed into a box, looking puzzled. The grass she'd been asked to prepare separately wasn't seed or seedlings. It was torn stems with no roots attached.
"You could call it feed for the animals."
"Feed……?"
"No matter how big the bushfire was, no matter how barren a place looks, life doesn't vanish that easily. Look carefully and you'll find wild animals still living out here."
I pointed a little way off. Dusk was settling in, so it was hard to make out, but something bulky was shifting and moving.
"A wombat……"
True to a staffer of the Australian Tourism Board with a genuine interest in animals, Grace picked out the identity of the shape trundling in the distance. It wasn't a large one, but if you looked closely you could see it nosing about, nibbling the fresh shoots that had only just begun to grow.
"If the wild animals eat every new shoot the moment it comes up, there can be no restoration. I can't call in their predators to drive them off, so I'll have to feed them for a while—until they reach a season when they can find food easily even without us providing it."
"Then you'll be spreading this grass widely as well?"
"That would be best. Pile it all in one place and the animals will think this is their chance, gorge themselves, and it'll be gone in an instant."
Saying she understood well enough, Grace offered to arrange a helicopter so the grass could be spread more easily. But we'd used up nearly the whole day touring Beach World, so we couldn't scatter it today. In the end we had no choice but to leave the grass sitting in its big boxes and go inside the lodging.