3. Bertram
Bertram
“I’m sorry,” said the ginger-haired park ranger, “these mountains aren’t open to tourists.”
“Nor would I want them to be,” Bertram responded easily. He fished the appropriate paperwork out of his pocket and handed it over.
Bertram was used to People not expecting him to be a scientist—particularly if those People were humans, as the man in the park ranger uniform appeared to be.
For Bertram’s part, his heritage was split down the middle, half-orc and half-vampire.
But his one protruding tusk, small though it was, and green-grey skin read instantly as “orc” to the untrained human eye.
And for some reason, “orc” and “scholar” didn’t immediately go together in most human brains.
The ranger—Travis, according to his nametag—looked over the form Bertram handed him.
“You’re coming to study the owl-bear?” he asked.
“Yes,” Bertram said, though he felt that should have been obvious from the form titled PERMISSIONS FOR A DIRECT OBSERVATIONAL STUDY ON OWL-BEAR (VARIA URSUS STRIX) IN THE FOLIO MOUNTAINS.
“Be careful,” Travis warned. “He’s a monster.”
Bertram glowered.
“No offense,” Travis added hastily, with a wary look at Bertram’s protruding tusk.
The truth was, Bertram had been offended entirely on the owl-bear’s behalf.
He was deeply irritated that she was being talked about as if she were a threat in her own home, where she had lived long before humans encroached on the area.
He was also annoyed that someone who worked in the wildlife department didn’t at least know that the local owl-bear who had been repeatedly sighted was a “she.” Bertram had a feeling the owl-bear wouldn’t care about being misgendered one way or the other, but to Bertram it showed a lack of understanding of the owl-bear as an individual being with her own unique interiority.
He hadn’t been insulted on his own behalf, only on the owl-bear’s.
But now that the human had made it clear that he saw Bertram as a monster, and that being a monster was a bad thing, Bertram decided he could find room in his schedule to be offended for both himself and the owl-bear.
Travis seemed every bit as unaware that his halfhearted apology had annoyed Bertram as he was that the local owl-bear was female. Instead, he was focused solely on reading through the paperwork.
“Holy shit, the Countess of Roussillon is coming here?” Travis said. “Like, the Countess of Roussillon? Like the one who found that alternate universe with all the fucked up butterflies and shit?”
“Pocket realm inhabited by leopardopterans,” Bertram corrected. “Am I good to head up now?”
“I need to see your ID,” Travis said.
“You’re holding it,” Bertram pointed out, keeping his voice as neutral as possible despite his mounting annoyance.
“Ah.” Travis flipped the last page of the form over and saw the international identification paperwork Bertram had included. “Wait, you’re the Count of Roussillon? You’re her husband? That’s awesome. She’s super hot—”
“She’s my mother,” Bertram said.
“Oops.” The park ranger cringed. “Sorry, Count—”
He winced. “Bertram is fine.”
It didn’t bother Bertram to hear that People found his mother attractive—that was old news. She was a vampire with an almost hypnotic allure; of course, humanoid beings of all species were going to be drawn to her.
What bothered Bertram was hearing himself referred to as the Count of Roussillon.
Because Bertram being the count meant that his father wasn’t, that his father was no longer alive to be the Count of Roussillon.
The title didn’t matter to Bertram one way or another, but the loss of his father still stung.
They weren’t quite two years on from Urghk’s passing, and the occasions where Bertram had cause to show ID with his full name were few and far between.
Every time he was referred to as the Count of Roussillon, he felt the loss of his father anew.
Bertram wished his father were here right now.
He would’ve made a far worse first impression with this human, given his two full-size tusks and his booming voice and his unawareness of personal space.
But Urghk was so charming and genuinely liked People—genuinely liked them, all kinds of People, regardless of race or species or other defining characteristics—that he could put them at ease almost immediately, and then genuinely enjoy getting to know them.
Bertram did not have such a skill and would very much like the conversation with the park ranger to have ended before it even began.
“Well. Everything appears to be in order.” Travis handed the permission forms and Bertram’s ID back to him.
“But I’d seriously be on the lookout. You’re a tough-looking dude, obviously, but that owl-bear’s gone completely feral.
He used to be more or less okay to have around, sort of, but now he just keeps showing up around more and more People, and he ate at least one dog that we know of. ”
“She,” Bertram corrected. “And there have been more sightings of her because People were venturing further into the mountains before we had them closed. As for the dog, our hypothesis is that she sustained some type of injury that’s forcing her to seek easier prey—”
“Oh, yeah, I mean she was definitely hit by one of those magically enhanced freighter truck things,” Travis said, casually.
“What?” Bertram felt his heart stop. “ ‘Definitely?’ How do you know?”
“I was there,” Travis said. “First there was a deer that got hit by a car, and then a mountain lion came to eat the deer, and then he—the owl-bear, I mean—came to eat the mountain lion, but then a truck hit the owl-bear—dented the truck pretty good, actually, but we thought the owl-bear seemed fine—”
“She seemed fine?” Bertram was incredulous.
“Almost everyone who’s seen her in the last six months mentioned a broken wing—and there’s no other reason she would have been going after dogs or menacing People .
. . when exactly did this happen? Did you see the license plate of the car that hit her?
Did you ever give this statement to the Department of Parks and Magizoology?
” Bertram reached into his bag to pull out a card.
“We’ve been trying to gather information on the exact circumstances of the . . . what?”
Bertram trailed off as the park ranger’s face had begun cycling through a range of expressions, none of which seemed to suggest a readiness to call the appropriate magizoological authorities.
The park ranger blushed guiltily. “Um. Well. When I said I was there . . . I sort of meant that my friend was there, but I did see the blood afterward, and if I hadn’t gotten hungover at my cousin’s birthday party the night before, then I would have been working that day, and it would have been me and not Marv who saw what happened to the owl-bear . . .”
Bertram stopped himself from rolling his eyes.
Travis’s anecdotes did not get less upsetting from there.
By the time Bertram had wrenched himself free of the hapless ranger and was making his way toward basecamp, it took him the better part of the hike to rid himself of the visceral annoyance with which Travis had filled him.
Which was saying something, because the mountains did not offer an easy hike.
The reason they were so valuable as owl-bear territory was because they had been completely undeveloped by humans.
His ascent was therefore a hike in a true sense of the word, not merely walking at a slight incline on perfectly paved paths with plenty of safety rails.
There was nothing wrong with pavement or safety rails, Bertram just preferred that the wild be left as wild as possible.
It was a belief his mother held as well, so the basecamp she commissioned for this research study was designed with minimal impact to the surrounding mountains.
That would probably also make for minimal comfort, but Bertram didn’t care.
As far as he was concerned, he was there to serve the owl-bear as best he could, and if that meant a less than luxurious stay, that was fine.
From the schematics he had seen, basecamp had been established on a mostly barren plateau, a little more than halfway up the mountain.
For the most part, the mountain was covered by dense, coniferous forest. On his hike up, Bertram encountered veritable carpets of fallen pinecones.
Their sources ranged from Jeffrey pines, which smelled of vanilla, to sugar pines which, ironically, did not.
A few deciduous trees hid amongst them, golden maples and quivering aspen.
Quivering Even Harder aspens had been planted by wood nymphs after the Great Merge.
The constantly shaking trees provided cover for shy migratory phoenixes—they wouldn’t be this far west in fall, but Bertram hoped to catch sight of some in spring.
When Bertram emerged through the last thicket of trees and arrived at the rocky plateau of base camp, Doctor Jenevieve, Countess of Roussillon all but tackled him.
“I missed you, my darling!” Jennie said, giving him a giant kiss on the cheek and ruffling his mop of messy brown hair.
“Missed you too, Mom,” Bertram said. He dropped his bag to the ground to return her hug. “Did you know the humans are applying for a depredation permit for the owl-bear?”
“They didn’t get it,” Jennie said without hesitation, which told Bertram that she did, in fact, know. “And even if they had, I believe they would have found an owl-bear harder to de-predate than they anticipated.”
“You didn’t think to mention this to me?” Bertram asked.
“The human government depredation permit request—and its denial by both the human government and overseeing magizoological bodies—were both included as supplementary material in my correspondence with the university when I asked to push the timeline of the study up.” Jennie sighed.
“I’ve warned you previously about the importance of reading every page of email attachments—”