31. Helena
Helena
She knew she had hurt him when she chose to go to medical school, but he was the one who decided that that was enough to end their relationship—relationships, really: romantic, platonic, coworkers—any and all of it.
It was Bertram who had cut Helena out of his life, not the other way around.
So, for him to act like she was the one who had abandoned him, who had somehow deceived him about wanting friendship .
. . he was the one who was happy to lose her from his life entirely at the drop of a hat!
She had meant to leave magizoology. She had never meant to leave Bertram.
Bertram left her.
And now he was acting like all of it was her fault? As if his decision to completely block any road of contact wasn’t part of why they had lost contact?
Between the two of them, Helena would argue that it was Bertram who had brought about the actual end of their relationship.
But there was no time to dwell on this. Because as Helena held V-2, the cub-chick suddenly threw her head back, beak straight up, and let out a high-pitched, unabating wail. Her naked, elbow-like wings jerked pathetically.
“Oh! You’re probably hungry!”
Helena chastised herself for worrying about Bertram when she had a newborn—well, newhatched—to take care of and feed.
The audacity of him to suddenly need to bring up their relationship, right when V-2 needed them the most!
And to do so under the guise of being pissed that Helena wasn’t taking the right kind of care of the baby was the most ridiculous part of it. If Bertram was sniping at Helena for long-past romantic wounds, he wasn’t taking care of the baby at all!
Helena vowed to put Bertram and his petty drama out of her head and focus all her energy on V-2.
With so little information on owl-bear cub-chicks, Helena had read up on the feeding of both baby birds and baby bears to develop multiple possible feeding plans.
She had a feeling that with the owl-bear’s more bird-like facial features, including beak, there was a good chance that they fed more like birds than bears.
Helena started with the methodology she had laid out as option one. Since some birds of prey already ate whole meat at hatching, her first step was to offer strips of meat. She went to the OmniBox and grabbed the packs of MagiZoopreme meat substitutes.
V-2 was slightly less clingy without Bertram around, Helena noticed, and V-2 now allowed Helena to put her on the floor without complaint.
The imprinting bond clearly had a strong hold on V-2.
But that didn’t mean Helena was going to completely abandon any hope of one day releasing V-2 into the wild.
She figured that if there was any one activity that should be separated from humanoid beings, it was feeding.
With V-2 safely on the floor, Helena grabbed the feeding pole she had laid out for this purpose, put a strip of meat on the end of it, and hid behind the wooden wall, just as she had done earlier.
She dangled the meat in front of V-2.
V-2 let out a shriek, lowered her head, and ran straight through the wooden wall. It splintered and fell apart.
V-2 scrambled up onto Helena’s shoulder, nuzzling her neck.
Helena stood in stunned silence for a moment.
Then she sat down at the computer and made a video call.
Thankfully, Dr. J answered. In the background, Helena could see the snowy landscape and just make out the figure of tiny bright blue penguins flittering through the air, one set of flipper-like wings hanging at their side, useless for flying, while their extra set of fairy wings bore them through the air.
“Look at the beautiful baby!” Dr. J cooed to V-2.
“I had a feeling if you were calling there must be big news about the egg. However, I can’t help but notice that there is definitely free contact occurring between owl-bear and humanoid being.
Oh, my goodness!” Dr. J brought her phone closer to her face, scrutinizing Helena’s image.
“I’ve seen eyes like those when I’ve visited Hippolyta at Midsummer and there were special cases of—the owl-bear imprinted on you, didn’t she? ”
Helena thought Dr. J sounded way too happy considering how absolutely disastrous the implications were. Nevertheless, she filled Dr. J in on the details thus far.
“That seems a plausible hypothesis, about her imprinting on you in the egg.” Dr. J nodded.
“It’s funny, because she quite resembles an altricial baby bird in her nakedness and seeming frailty, and yet it’s a precocial baby bird trait to have her eyes open this early—and particularly unusual if she had her eyes open in the egg. ”
“I wonder if she has some sort of nictating membrane,” Helena suggested, “like a penguin. Something that let her open her eyes in fluid.”
“That would make sense.”
“And you were right about the seeming frailty,” Helena added. “She just barreled straight through a plywood wall to get to me.”
“Well!” Dr. J beamed. “This is an absolutely fascinating discovery all around. We knew this was possible in Reptilavis like dragons, but I don’t think there’s ever been a proven instance in Leopardoptera.
There are only a few species of charismatic megafauna known to form magical imprinting bonds at all, and even fewer in whom those bonds have been proven to carry over to humanoid beings in interspecies imprinting under the right circumstances. ”
“Or the wrong circumstances.” Helena bit her lip. “I worked so hard to make sure she would have the best chance of being successfully released, to make sure she wouldn’t imprint on a humanoid being. I had a whole plan—”
“Ah well. You know what they say about the best-laid plans of micecorns and mermen.”
“This is serious,” Helena said.
“A seriously huge opportunity for science,” Dr. J said. “You’ll learn more about the behavior and needs of owl-bear cub-chicks having a direct imprinting bond with her than we ever would have while interacting behind an owl-bear suit with limited movements. Does she have a name yet?”
“Yes,” said Helena. “It’s V-2.”
“You have to give her a real name! You know how I love a good portmanteau,” Dr. J said.
“Or a bad one,” Helena muttered.
“So, picking two words to describe the new baby . . . she’s the first owl-bear hatched by People; what if her name is a play on that?
Hardhatch? Because of the difficulty of the process?
Lovehatch? Hatched with love? Don’t you make that face at me, Doctor de Narbon.
Giving her a name won’t make her impossible to release, you know. ”
V-2 wailed, and Helena remembered the reason for her call.
“Right, and speaking of, I do want to work toward the goal of her living in the wild, even if things aren’t quite off to the start I wanted.” Helena briefly explained her unsuccessful attempts to feed V-2 from behind the wall, resulting in its destruction.
V-2 screamed again, and Helena gently rocked her, trying to soothe her.
“She clearly needs to eat, and I want to feed her soon,” Helena said, “but I don’t know how to get her to take food from me without her visually seeing me—and I want to give her the best chance of surviving in the wild!”
“She has no chance of being in the wild at all if she doesn’t survive to adulthood,” Dr. J said, gently.
“Baby birds need to eat. A lot. I think it’s safe to assume the same goes for cub-chicks.
Keep her alive first and foremost. Then, as she grows, we can talk about potential strategies to make humanoid territory seem unappealing to her. ”
Helena was silent.
“Helena?”
“You don’t think it’s possible, do you?” Helena said quietly.
“What?”
“It’s already too late, isn’t it? You don’t think she’ll ever be releasable.”
“I know she won’t be releasable if she dies,” Dr. J said, side-stepping the issue. “Just feed her, Helena. Use the imprinting bond to keep the cub-chick alive, and we’ll go from there. She trusts you enough that she’ll let you take care of her. So, take care of her.”
“Okay,” Helena said. But she still felt ill to her stomach.
“How is Bertram handling all this?” Dr. J asked. “I know this isn’t the direction the two of you planned for.”
“Um.” Helena swallowed.
Luckily V-2 screamed again.
“I should feed her,” Helena said, grateful for the distraction. “Like you said. Thank you for the advice, Dr. J. Good luck with the penguins.”
“Good luck with your new baby,” Dr. J responded, and ended the call.
Despite Dr. J’s encouragement, Helena found that she did not feel much better.
Dr. J was brilliant, of course, always had been, always would be.
But the very study that had made her famous the world over also made her subject to recent criticism from the scientific community.
Yes, integrating herself into a community of flying foxes had allowed her to observe their societal structure and behavior in a way no Person had ever done.
But she was so integrated into their society that she made physical contact with them, became part of their activities, and there were questions as to whether her presence interrupted or changed the flying foxes’ normal behavior patterns.
If so, the scientific value of her observations was compromised.
If anyone would fail to understand the tragedy of unwanted direct contact with a focal animal, it would be the woman who wrote Flying with Foxes: My Journey to the Heart of a Colony . . . even if it was Helena’s favorite book.
Helena sighed.
The one thing Dr. J was absolutely, unequivocably, one hundred percent correct about was that V-2 did need to survive to adulthood before Helena could worry about releasing her.
Trying to quell her panic, Helena took the strips of substitute meat and sat on the floor beside V-2. She dangled the snacks right beside her.
V-2 crawled happily into Helena’s lap, threw her head back, and opened her beak. But when Helena tried to lower the substitute meat strip, V-2 began shrieking again rather than snapping at it.
Helena tried various species replicas to see if that made a difference, but V-2 had the same fussy response whether it was a strip of bighorn sheep or bald eagle.
That meant it was time for plan B.
There was another way baby birds of prey ate, and that was via parental regurgitation. Helena was not quite willing to go so far as to chew up food for V-2 and offer it from her mouth because
1) she had no way of knowing if owl-bears were susceptible to any bacteria in her saliva that could lead to magizoonotic transmission
2) no thank you please re: her actually eating substitute hobcat meat
So, Helena grabbed a blender from the lab’s kitchen and mixed up the substitute meat. She created slurry after slurry, divided by species in order to see which ones V-2 would accept or reject without confounding variables.
Helena started with the substitute mule deer slurry, since that was the species most prevalent in V-1’s stomach during necropsy. She hoped the soft mush was at least somewhat reminiscent of the consistency of partially regurgitated meat from a bird of prey.
She grabbed a funnel and poured the mush into V-2’s mouth. V-2 swallowed it down, her naked throat making it easy to watch the progression of the slurry.
Helena breathed a sigh of relief.
V-2 then threw her head back and screamed for more.
Helena provided more mule deer, then bobcat, then valley quail, then channel catfish. V-2 accepted all of them eagerly, gulping them down before immediately screaming for more.
Finally, after a small portion of bald eagle, V-2 curled up on Helena’s lap and went to sleep.
Helena hoped dearly that V-2 knew how to self-regulate. She was terrified of overfeeding V-2 but underfeeding her seemed even worse. And with no data on owl-bears to go off, Helena had to trust that V-2’s requests for more food should be fulfilled.
Helena froze when she realized she had been absentmindedly stroking the baby owl-bear in her lap. She knew better than that. Just because things were off to a bad start for release didn’t mean she should just give up and treat this wild creature like a companion animal.
Helena knew better.
And yet, she was already back to stroking V-2 without even realizing it. Apparently, the imprinting bond thought that it knew better than Helena knowing better. Whatever plans they had of keeping V-2 far away from human contact . . . they were completely up in smoke.