The Weirdo by Theodore Taylor

day.
    ***
    THOUGH he was tired, Chip struggled with sleep. He tried to steer his mind away from times past and think only about tomorrow and the future, but, as usual, questions seemed to reflect off the dark wall and ceiling shadows. On certain nights they wouldn't go away. He always wondered what triggered them. Some nights he knew. A look in the mirror, someone reacting. A whisper overheard.
    What if they'd got on another aircraft? What if his father had been with them, and he was killed? What if they'd all died? Perhaps that would have been best,
Chip had thought more than once. The reformed drunk reading and listening to a concerto in the next room certainly wished he'd been on the plane. He'd said as much. "I wish I'd been beside your mother and sister, beside you." John Clewt would carry that wish to his grave.
    "Your mother would be so proud of you," his father had said tonight.
    Chip remembered quite a lot about his mother, not so much about his sister. He remembered the fine house in Colonial Place, off the Lafayette River, and her presence in it. How nice she kept it. He remembered her soft touch and the cologne she used. Once, going by the toiletry department at Lazarus, in Columbus, the same aroma hit him and he fled the store, never to return.
    ***
    LATE AUGUST: The Powhatan was, as usual, humid and miserable, the air thick and moist, full of those murderous yellowflies and ticks and chiggers and gnats and gallinippers. Chip endured them cheerfully, eager to motor across the lake each morning and meet Telford for the day's work.
    He noticed that water levels in the lakes and ditches were going down slowly, but vegetation, sucking on roots
deep in the fertile soil, thrived, growing thicker each day in the summer cycle.
    Yellow cowlilies bloomed in irregular patches along the shore, and wild violets added a shocking purple border in other spots. There was a painter's palette of color all over the swamp—clumps of orange jewelweed and stalks of deep lavender, red-flowered trumpet honeysuckle, blue-white morning glories.
    Those who said the Powhatan was an ugly place were blind, he'd decided after living there almost four months.
    The blackberries that had blossomed white in April were gone, and the bears had shifted to wild black cherries, awaiting the sweet gallberries, pokeberries, and devil's walking sticks of the fall.
    Telford and Chip had handled twenty-three animals thus far, placing collars on twenty-one of them, logging in all the information. They'd spent most of each day tracking the beeps. They'd try to catch ten more to occupy the rest of the frequencies, then stop snaring until spring. During fall and winter, they'd continue monitoring.
    Chip was wetting down a sleeping bear, carrying bucketfuls of water from the nearby ditch. He doused the black every few minutes. They'd lost one two days before from heat exhaustion. The bear had probably struggled in its snare for hours. It felt terrible to be responsible for the death of even one bear.
    The temperature in the Powhatan neared a hundred degrees; the humidity pushed eighty even though it was only ten o'clock. The swamp steamed.
    Overnight, Telford had decided not to trap any more until the weather cooled down; they'd just concentrate on tracking them. This would be the last one.
    In late afternoon, a red-tailed hawk attempted to flutter up from Trail Four as they headed back toward the dam. Telford said, "There's a raccoon's meal," stopping the Toyota to avoid hitting it.
    "What's wrong with it?" Chip asked, frowning.
    "Broken wing, probably."
    "Can it be helped?"
    They watched as it tried again to get airborne.
    "Maybe. Put a splint on it, keep it safe for a while, and let nature do the healing."
    Chip stepped out of the truck.
    "Hey, what are you doing?"
    "See if I can repair it."
    "You'd better take my gloves," Telford said. "That's a sharp beak."
    A moment later, after a struggle, Chip was cradling the bird on his lap as they drove on.
    "What