The Beginning of Restoration (2)
"Suhwan. Suhwan, wake up."
I had been dead asleep, but Noona's light shaking left me no choice but to rise. The sky beyond the window was still dark, enough to tell me morning hadn't even broken. Unable to see why she would wake me when it wasn't morning at all, I dragged my half-dreaming mind into focus and looked at her.
"Whyyy...?"
"Looks like a wild animal showed up outside. The security team's asking what we should do."
At the words wild animal, I let out a small sigh. Australia was serious about protecting animals — very, very, very serious — and the laws concerning them were legion. For some wildlife, merely making contact was enough to earn you a fine.
There was the quokka, in particular, a creature as cute as it was friendly, and you could be fined just for touching one. People joked that they were "walking fines," even "employees of the Australian Taxation Office."
There was only one reason a wild animal coming close was enough to wake me. We had already secured the Australian government's permission regarding those laws, so we stood legally in the clear. Even so, being exempt didn't mean we could answer a wild animal with force, and that was why they were waking me.
Sensing there was no getting out of it, I shuffled outside still in my pajamas. Whether the sound of me getting up had roused him or not, Cheongho sidled quietly up beside me.
"Sleep well?"
"Slept well enough, sir."
"They say a wild animal came by. Let's send the thing off and go back to sleep."
"Yes, sir."
I gave Cheongho's head a light pat, pushed open the lodge door — already slightly ajar — and stepped outside.
The bodyguards were ringed around a crate packed full of grass.
"Is it in there?"
"Yes. From the look of it, the animal came into the area, found the food, and went in."
I sighed at the crate of grass I had left sitting out the day before without a second thought. I should have at least closed the lid properly instead of simply abandoning it. But regret, as ever, arrived only once it was too late, and there was no undoing it, so I dropped the thought just as quickly and approached the crate.
"The wombat from yesterday?"
Wondering if it was the animal Grace had called a wombat — the one I had seen before going into the lodge — I peered inside. The crate was full of grass, and that grass was shifting, little by little. The amount didn't look much different, so it didn't seem as if several animals had been through. Something inside was simply moving, stirring the grass as it went.
I plunged my hand straight into the crate and poked whatever was shifting within. At once the grass shot upward, and the creature hiding inside revealed itself.
"...What."
I stared at the thing that had burst up out of the grass and was thrown for a moment. It was a creature that had not figured into my expectations in the slightest. I had assumed the wombat from the day before had wandered close, been drawn by the food, and climbed into the crate. What was actually inside was an enormous, muscular kangaroo.
"Good morning?"
"...What's good about it? And it isn't even morning."
"There is so much delicious food, and I have woken from sleep. Of course it is a good morning."
The kangaroo's perfectly unruffled greeting, offered while it gazed at me in utter calm, only flustered me further. Getting the sense that Australia's animals were each a little strange in their own way, I tried to coax the creature out of the crate. Naturally, it wouldn't hear a word of it.
"This is a rare chance to eat my fill, so I would like to eat a little more. Since the Red Calamity, I cannot even remember the last time I ate properly..."
The muscular kangaroo seized a fistful of grass in its forepaws and munched away, and over the sight there settled the image of some loafer of a human working a wad of gum. But if I listened only to its words, its plight was pitiful enough. It had gone on starving because of the bushfire, and today, by pure chance, it was finally gorging itself.
Only then did the details of its body come into focus. Hidden beneath the muscle, it was quite gaunt. Even the last of that muscle, the part that had held on to the very end, seemed to be wasting away little by little.
"...Fine. Eat."
I had prepared this grass in the first place so the wild animals would fill their bellies instead of eating the sprouts. It would hardly matter if this one ate a little generously. If we ran short, I could simply ask Grace.
I watched quietly as it buried its face in the pile and gorged to its heart's content, and then I noticed another creature lingering a short way off, hanging back and reading the situation. It had been hiding itself in the dark of the hour before sunrise, but it could not hide the hungry rumble of its stomach.
"You can come eat, too."
"Kyuing!"
What had been concealing itself in the dark was the wombat I had seen yesterday. Perhaps because I had given permission, it came closer even while keeping a wary eye on the bodyguards. It looked like a hamster someone had scaled up several times over, and it was rather cute.
I scooped the creature up as it scrabbled along on its short legs and set it into the crate the kangaroo had claimed. It looked startled for an instant, but the moment it saw the grass heaped high, it began to eat in a rush. The two of them tore through the grass without pause. Even so, we had prepared such a vast amount that no matter how endlessly they ate, the pile barely seemed to change.
"Eat enough, and then go."
I watched for a moment as the two of them happily laid waste to the grass, then went back into the lodge with the bodyguards. Sunrise was still a long way off.
I climbed into bed, gathered Noona into my arms, and fell asleep, and the sight waiting for me when morning came again was a scene I had not imagined in the slightest.
Wild animals had swarmed the grounds around the lodge and were tearing into the grass as if looting it. Dozens of kangaroos, a little over ten koalas, and wombats that looked to outnumber the kangaroos two to one were all feeding. It felt as though every creature that had been hiding across the whole surrounding area had come rushing in at once.
I approached one of the bodyguards who had been rotating through the night to keep watch and asked what had happened.
"Those first two, you know. The kangaroo, and that animal — a wom...bat, was it?"
"Right. Those two were the first. The kangaroo's also the culprit who woke me."
"Those two brought all of them. I thought they'd filled their bellies and simply gone back, but they fetched their whole kin. And this is the result. Oh — the koalas just appeared from somewhere."
I had told the kangaroo and the wombat to head off on their own, not to go recruiting. After a brief pang of regret, I walked over to what had once been the crate, now smashed and strewn in every direction. Whether the kangaroos had wrecked it or not, the pitifully scattered crate had spilled the grass that had been inside, and the animals were diligently wiping that grass out.
I was staring at the scene in disbelief when a vehicle approached from a distance. It was Grace, who came by every morning.
"...What is all this? Where did they come from?"
"They swarmed in while I was asleep. The ones that somehow survived around here came looking for food."
At my words, Grace glanced around and nodded. Many of the animals bore the marks of burns.
"And what do you intend to do with them?"
"I don't know yet. They just turned up overnight like this... Or I could put them to work, too, I suppose."
I looked at the creatures busily devouring the grass. Making them work for what they had eaten didn't seem like a bad idea.
"Run! Run!"
From far off came the parrots' cries — the ones we had brought from the village they had taken over, put to work, and then released across the surrounding area.
"Eek!"
At the parrots' shout, some of the animals suddenly let out shrill cries and whipped their heads this way and that. They looked as if they had sensed danger, but by then it was already too late. I gathered the creatures that had been demolishing the grass into one place.
"You all want to keep eating your fill from now on, don't you?"
At my question, the animals answered as one that they did. Having barely had a full meal since the bushfire, they replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I looked them over, then grabbed a handful of the grass strewn across the ground, stepped up to the nearest kangaroo, and stuffed the grass straight into its pouch.
"Carry plenty with you. Eat some yourselves, and scatter some on the ground, too. Then a lot more of this will grow."
Kangaroos, wombats, koalas — every one of them a marsupial with a pouch. No sooner had I finished speaking than they began stuffing grass into their own pouches.
"I'm gonna be independenth!"
There was a brief incident in which one joey, forced to room with a pile of grass, declared its independence, but we resolved it somehow by taking the grass back out and not putting it in again. A small mishap — and yet once they had packed their pouches full and scattered in every direction, they began doing exactly what I wanted. They drew a few blades from their pouches and chewed them vigorously, while dropping a few more onto the ground.
Some of the grass scattered there would serve as food in place of the sprouts, and the rest would dry and rot on its own, becoming natural fertilizer. If it dried to a crisp it might well become fuel for another bushfire, but rain was in the forecast before long.
"Well then, shall we get moving, too?"
Once I had confirmed the animals had dispersed, I looked at Grace and tipped my head to the side.
"Where were you thinking of going?"
"I want to look around the area first. We've scattered the seeds, so I ought to see whether it took."
"Already? Didn't you scatter them around yesterday evening? They won't even have sprouted..."
Grace looked at me as if I were doing something entirely pointless, and at that look a short laugh escaped me before I knew it.
"Today, I'll show you what Druid quality really means."
Brimming with confidence, I set off at an easy pace with Grace and some of the bodyguards alongside me. And when, after a short walk, she reached the ground where the parrots had scattered the seeds, the look on her face was one of pure astonishment.