Chapter 18. Empty Wilderness

Aster sat below her father's body all night and most of the next morning. The weather got colder and damper, and the howling wind and dust settled down. She looked at the shadow the sun cast of her father's body on the wall of the medical building, as it moved slowly from right to left. She couldn't bring herself to move, to do anything, despite the cold, the pain, the hunger, and the grief.

What should I do? She asked herself.

A cruel memory from the previous night answered.

"Do I look like your Father? Go ask him." It was what the Maestro had answered, when she had asked him that question.

"Father…?" Aster's voice echoed off cold walls, heard by no-one. Again, she heard the Maestro's mocking voice in her mind.

"If he's still alive."

But her father wasn't alive. He was hanging there, at the end of a rope. So many were dead. Her father. Thumb. The Zoo animals. Betty 31. All dead. And she was still alive. Why? She ran to the door and gazed out at the dead, abandoned Zoo.

"WHY!" She cried out to the emptiness. "Why am I still alive?"

No answer, except the flap of a few frightened birds taking wing from a nearby tree.

"Why didn't you kill me?" She wasn't sure if she was asking her father or the Maestro. But neither one could hear her to give an answer.

The only one who could decide what she should do, was herself. And she didn't know. Everything was broken, and there was no way to fix it, no routine, no work to be done.

I have to do my job. Aster thought. If only she knew what that job was. Always before, she knew what was supposed to be done, even if she often hadn't liked it. Certainly she hadn't liked most of the things that had happened to her, and that she had had to do, in the Maestro's palace. But at least she knew there what to do. Cook. Clean. Act as a decoration. Get raped. Keep herself alive, and don't annoy the Maestro. But what to do now? Put out food that was probably long gone for zoo animals that had long since been served up on the Maestro's table? Clean up nonexistent droppings? All the old jobs, from the Maestro's palace and from her childhood were gone.

Well, maybe there were new jobs. She had to do something. The Maestro didn't want her leeching off him any more, and she couldn't just sit naked on the floor forever under her father's body. For one thing, he was starting to smell pretty bad.

She would start by burying him. She guessed that was what children did for their parents. Aster left the medical building and went over to her house. None of her old clothes fit her, and she didn't want to wear any of her father's clothes. She sighed, wrapped one of her old bathrobes around herself, then went to a supply shed and got out an old, dusty Zookeeper's uniform that was folded on a shelf. Size large. It fit. There wasn't any underwear, but she put it on anyways, along with some cracked boots. Then she went back to the house, and got a large blanket and a small knife from the kitchen. The blanket had once been brown, but was faded to a sort of dark tan color. She put the knife in one pocket of the Zookeeper's uniform, brought the blanket back to the medical building, and spread it out on the floor under the dead body. Not wanting to step on the chair her father had used to hand himself, she pushed it out of the way, and shoved a small table near his body instead.

Aster climbed on the table, holding her breath. Closer to her dead father, the smell was far worse. She turned away, trying not to see what his face looked like, and breathed shallowly through her mouth. She took the knife and began cutting at the rope. It was awkward, doing so while standing at an angle to avoid the worst of the sight and smell of what had happened. She also had to do so one-handed, holding the rope with her other hand to steady herself and keep it tight. Possibly she could have held her father's body up with both hands, once the rope was cut, had she been able to use both hands. Or at least have lowered him down slowly. But she only had the two hands, and both of them were needed for the job, there was nobody to help her.

So, when she was nearly all the way through the rope, the remaining few strands parted with a dull 'snap', and the body - her father - fell clumsily onto the blanket below, the limbs sprawled out awkwardly. She couldn't even bring herself to touch him, her own father. It was too horrible to think of the living man, the man who had taught her all about animals and the zoo, reduced to this thing, this decomposing sprawled out puppet. Aster got a small towel, once used to wipe up some of the worse messes on the surgical and examining tables, and wrapped her hand in it, before straightening out her father's body the best she could. Then she wrapped the blanket around it several times, and used some pins to close it shut.

She looked at the pins for a moment. Such a simple thing, much like the matches she had tried not to waste as a child. It brought back memories of her lighting a lantern with a coal from the kitchen stove, in her and Thumb's room, so many years ago. But no more matches were being made. And no more pins. The world was broken. There were pins being made a really long time ago, they talked about pins in her old fairy tale books, that were stories written hundreds of years before the war. But no more. No more pins. No more matches. No more zoo animals. No more father. No more Thumb. The War had only begun the destruction of the world. The Maestro was finishing it. Bit by bit, things were being broken, and buried, and eaten. Perhaps, someday, there would be nothing at all left, and maybe it would actually be better that way. With the destruction finally finished, and nothing left, once and for all. After all, what else, could there be, other than the suffering of the people under the Maestro's rule while the destruction was still an ongoing process?

There's Wisconsin. And the Vampire. And maybe Iceland.

She dismissed the thought, though she knew she shouldn't. She would have liked it if the world could still live. If there could still be animals and plants, like there were in Wisconsin. And maybe Iceland. She knew, perhaps, how to save it. But she couldn't do it by herself. And there was nobody to help her. She was all alone, a little ghost Aster haunting an empty zoo.

Besides… the price of saving the world was terribly high. Even if there had been people to help her, she didn't know if she could pay it. Or if anybody could pay it. Of course, there had been those who had in the past, but Aster had no delusions about her own cowardice and selfishness. She was no hero. Little wonder she liked animals. She was just like them. Always worried about herself, and her own survival, first. Her time in the Maestro's palace had made that fact (if very little else) quite clear to her. It was why she had killed Betty 31. It was why she had let a few of the other women die in that last, terrible year, who could likely have been saved by the antibiotics she had hidden away. It was why she had left her own poor sister, Thumb, in the Maestro's horrible charnel pit rather than even trying to find her body after the Maestro had raped her to death. How old had Thumb been? 13? Younger than she had been.

Aster shook herself out of her thoughts. Reflecting on her guilt did no good. She knew she would have done things exactly the same, if she had to do them over again. She took the blanket her father's body was wrapped in by one end and began dragging it out of the medical building, while thinking of where to bury him. Not by the tiger enclosure. The tigers reminded her of the Maestro. Nor by the pond, either. There were still some animals in the zoo. Not the real Zoo animals, but wild rodents and birds, and she didn't want to contaminate the water. Finally, she decided to bury him in front of the house. It was where he had lived, all his life, so maybe it was fitting that he rest there. Aster didn't want to live in the house anymore, anyways.

She got a shovel out of a shed, and began digging. It was not a good grave. Shovelling by hand is heavy work, and the deeper the hole, the harder the work becomes. Aster was strong for a woman, but nowhere near as strong as a man her height would have been. Plus, the parched ground, obviously not watered in some time by either man or nature, was very hard to dig through. She got sweaty and dirty, and had to stop a few times to get some water. It took her most of the afternoon to make an uneven looking hole about two and a half feet deep. Then she pulled the blanket-wrapped body again, and slid it, as neatly as she could, into the hole. It fit tightly, but actually surprisingly well. Or perhaps not so surprisingly. Flesh was mallable, even in the dead, and her father's body was past the point of rigor mortis.

Aster didn't know if she was supposed to say a prayer after the body was put into the grave, or after it was buried. She didn't like looking at the hole, like a mouth, especially with the shadows of the bare trees making jagged, tooth-like shapes around the edge, so she decided on the latter. The mouth-like appearance of the open grave scared her, like it might try to suddenly snatch her with sharp teeth, and drag her, kicking and screaming, still alive, into the grave with her dead father. She took the shovel and began putting all the dirt back in, on top of the body. Hopefully, it was deep enough. She knew that graves were supposed to be six feet deep, but it had taken her hours to get it as deep as it was. If she tried to make a proper, six-foot deep grave, it would probably take her three days, at least.

It was sunset by the time she filled the grave back in. Aster stomped the dirt down as hard as she could, justifying it to the rational side of her mind that she wanted to make sure that no scavenging vermin dug up her father's body, but knowing somewhere inside her that she was afraid of that open mouth-like grave somehow spitting out the dirt if she didn't pack it in tightly enough, and then doing something utterly horrible, like spewing her father's body back out of it like an unwanted morsel. Or waiting until she went past, unawares, and seizing her with sharp, black, fangs made of shadows.

Finally, the dirt was packed down as tightly and smoothly as she could manage it. She needed something to mark the grave. A stone monument was out of the question, she lacked the tools and patience to chisel writing out of something that hard. And she had no nicely formed stone shape anyways. Instead, she got a small, light grey boulder, about the size of her head, from a decorative garden, and put that there. Then she got some boards and began carving writing in them with the same knife she had used to cut down her father's body:

Joshua Aversa

My Beloved Father

The Last Zookeeper

Aster nailed a thinner, wooden stake to the large board, and stuck it in the ground, as deeply as she could manage. She looked at the sign for a minute, then got another board and carved that as well:

Tina Aversa

My Sister

I am sorry.

Aster went and got several small stones, each about as big as her fist, carrying them by holding up the bottom of her shirt to make a sort of pocket, and pressed them into the dirt of the grave to make a stone cross. It was better than no stone decoration. Besides, perhaps the holy symbol would keep the grave from doing something horribly unnatural due to it not being a proper six feet deep.

Finally, she couldn't really delay praying any more. It was nearly dark now, the sun slipping below the horizon. Aster knelt down on the grave and folded her hands, trying to think of a good prayer. All the ones she knew were inadequate. Just as her penance of Tony Tiger had been inadequate for her murder of Betty 31, and her carving her sister's name on a board had been inadequate for her failure to go get her body.

"Father… Thumb…" Aster sniffed and started crying. "I guess you're both together in heaven, now. Maybe there's a Zoo, there. I'm still here. I don't know if you can see me down here…"

She thought for a bit. "Maybe not. I'm not a very good daughter, or sister, or Zookeeper. Maybe that's why I'm still down here. I told the Maestro yesterday that I was in Hell, and maybe that's right. Maybe the whole world here is Hell. It's like I've heard the preachers say from the Bible, that after the end of the World, the Devil comes to rule for a thousand years, and all the good people like you get taken away by God, and the bad people like me have to stay here with the Devil. Because that's what he is. The Devil. The Devil can't be any worse, anyways."

Aster thought some more. "Anyway, I guess that's all. I buried you, father, but there's nothing else I can do. I couldn't bury Thumb, and I can't take care of the Zoo. There is no Zoo any more. Pretty soon, maybe no more me, and no more anything. Then maybe God will start over, someday."

It was a bad prayer, but Aster didn't know all that much about religion. She'd only been to church a few times, for Christmas and Easter, and heard what some half-mad preachers had said in the streets of Dystopia.

It was dark now, and getting cold. Aster wanted to get away from the grave, and find somewhere to curl up in a ball and sleep, so she could forget about all the horrible things that had happened for a while. She didn't want to go in the house to sleep, though. It wasn't a home, anymore. Not with her family dead. It was just another tomb, in a world full of all too many of them. She needed shelter, though. And warmth.

Reluctantly, she went into the house just long enough to get a few thick blankets. Then, making her way though the Zoo, by the dimly reflected lights in Dystopia, she went into the Mouse House. One of the broken enclosures, that read 'Common Vampire Bat' had hardly any glass left in front. She looked at it for a moment. She remembered going through the Mouse House with Thumb, long ago, telling her all the facts she had memorized about the animals. But they were all gone. Even the bats were gone. Aster couldn't imagine the Maestro eating something as small as a bat. Perhaps her father had let them go, in hopes that they would survive. Though that didn't seem likely. Vampire bats came from South America or Mexico or somewhere like that.

Aster got a rock and knocked the remaining few shards out of the front of the enclosure. She cleaned out the branches, rocks, litter, and other objects that were part of the habitat for the bats that used to live there. Then she climbed inside, wrapped herself up in the blankets, and went to sleep, a would-be Zookeeper living in one of her own animal cages. While she slept, a few mice, and once a scrawny coyote, scurried through the empty Mouse House. The mice quickly scurried out again, looking for places to hide from the weather, but the coyote paused several feet outside the former Vampire Bat enclosure to sniff the strange scents coming from inside. There was a faint smell of some small creature, unfamiliar to the coyote, and much faded with time, so that it didn't much concern the canine scavenger. There was the far stronger smell of carrion, clinging to Aster from her father's body, which the Coyote found very tempting to investigate, but there was also the smell of live Man. In these times, a lot of humans would eat a coyote, if they were able to kill it, and the remaining ones had gotten very wary. Humans could kill at a far distance with things the Coyote didn't really understand. It was best to keep away. Perhaps there would be more carrion, elsewhere, easier to get. Often, there was carrion near a very large, shiny den that many of the humans lived in. By taking a circuitous route around the collection of crowded dens where humans lived, perhaps the coyote would be able to see if there was anything edible there tonight.

It's mind made up, the Coyote yipped once, then ran out of the Mouse House. The sound made Aster waken slightly. She pulled her blankets more tightly around her, tucked one corner over her face, which had gotten a little cold, then went back to sleep.

The trouble with sleeping to escape problems is the same as the trouble with many of the other solutions that human beings have resorted to for countless thousands of years, including taking drugs, breaking things, and blaming others. Which is that you can do it for just so long, and it doesn't make your problems go away. Once you're done sleeping, getting high, vandalizing things, and punishing everyone in your immediate vicinity for things which might not be their fault, you are still faced with the same problems, plus - very often - addition new problems caused by the latter three false solutions.

Distraction works slightly better. Not in that it solves problems, but in that there is an endless variety of ways in which human beings can distract themselves, ranging from entertainment to education to work. Most of which at least do not cause additional new problems, and some of which at least may be slightly constructive.

When Aster woke from her sleep, she crawled out of the small, crypt like enclosure, shook her arms and legs out, and at first indulged herself for a few hours in one of the more useless solutions, which was blaming others for her current problems. She walked back and forth in the Mouse House, sometimes crying, sometimes screaming, weeping about her family, the things that had happened to her, and hurling violent obscenities of hatred and revenge. As she paced, she violently kicked at the leaves, branches, pebbles, and any other pieces of litter that happened to be in her way. Occasionally she would pick up a more solid piece of litter and hurl it against the wall of the Mouse House - or into one of the empty habitats - while fuming over those people she felt were responsible for all her problems, including the Maestro, the Hulk (who was actually a younger version of the Maestro, therefore just as bad), Paul Rasse, most of the other guards in the palace, most of the women in the palace, Rick Jones, the Shulk, and anyone else she could think of.

It was a change from her younger years that she no longer blamed Daniel Wolfkiller for what had happened to her. After all, he had helped her several times, and from what he had said, the Maestro had done to his wife the same thing that he had done to Betty 31 - with much the same results. Then apparently forced the stable master to work for him as well. Aster still did not much approve of the man's drinking and whoring, but compared to most of the other things going on in the Maestro's palace, drinking and whoring was rather little more than an eccentric hobby in comparison. And perhaps it wasn't her place to tell Wolfkiller how he should deal with the problems the Maestro had caused in his life, any more than it would be his place to tell her not to kick and throw things.

The thought of kicking and throwing things brought Aster back to the actual activity of doing so. It didn't solve the problems that she had, any of the horrible things that had happened to her, that had been done to her, but at least she didn't have to think about them so hard. And it was actually slightly constructive in that over a few hours, her kicking and throwing of objects got the worst of the litter that had accumulated in the Mouse House out of the building, and moved the rest of it closer to the walls, so that there was actually a clear path, where visitors to the Zoo could have walked. If there had been any visitors to the Zoo. Or any animals left to look at.

The clear path made Aster decide to purposefully do even better than her tantrum had inadvertently done. She went to a small supply room in the Mouse House and got out a broom. It was actually of Post-War construction, made of willow twigs stuck through a hand planed board, with a fairly straight branch for a handle. Aster pushed it back and forth, cleaning up the litter. Sometimes, she would grab it as if it were a sword, and jab it violently in the air, imagining poking an actual sword or spear into some vulnerable part of the people she hated most, such as into Paul Rasse's eyes, or right up the Maestro's ass.

Well, the Maestro was too strong for her to ever hurt, but it's too bad she didn't have Paul Rasse here alone, in the Zoo. With the home territory advantage, it wouldn't be too hard for her to disable him by shooting arrows into his arms and legs. Then she'd tie him up and hang him upside-down. Right in the medical building, from the same beam her poor father had hung himself from. Then she'd cut him up, a piece at a time. Using a small scalpel, cauterizing the wounds, and making sure he got fluids, it would take him a very satisfyingly long time to die. Days, or even weeks, maybe. Long enough for him to have a good long time to reflect over his wretched life of evil things he had done to her, and everyone else. But especially to her.

Probably she'd castrate him first, and not with any anesthetic either. He could think about that, while he spent the next few weeks dying. Maybe she'd find some old bottles, somewhere, break them up, and force him to eat all the little sharp pieces of glass. That's what he got. And he would have to eat them. All animals in the zoo had to eat whatever food they were given. Refusing to eat was not allowed, her father had told her that, once. A long time ago. The zoo animals were good, and got good food to eat. Sometimes they would even change the food if they thought the animal might like something else better, but eating broken glass was all a stinking horrible rapist like Rasse deserved. He could eat broken up bottles for a couple weeks, and it would be rather interesting to see whether he died from being cut on the inside by them, or being cut on the outside by her. Too bad there weren't any publishers and medical papers any more, the way there had been before the war. She could write a short book about it. A Comparison of Simultaneous Internal and External Lacerations. Maybe put it on Doctor Llewellyn's bookshelf, next to Fundamentals of Biochemistry and all the other books.

Using the broom, it didn't take long for Aster to get most of the debris cleaned up out of the Mouse House. That was better. Now there were no branches to trip on, leaves to crunch underfoot, or broken glass from the front of the empty habitats to inconvenience anyone who visited the Zoo. Aster looked around. Her father would be proud of the clean floor. She was hungry, now. Was there food in the house? She wasn't sure, but she didn't want to go in there. Maybe she could find something else to eat. There was always something. Most of the time.

The Zoo had several nut trees. Once, long ago, before the War, trees had been planted in the Zoo just to be decorative, but now, they were only planted if they had a use. Most of the trees produced fruits or nuts. There were a lot of apple trees (though some of them were really crabapples, though you could still eat them) and even more walnut and hickory trees. The hickory trees were also good for making wooden things, or smoking, though it was important not to chop down too many trees or there would be no nuts next year. Then again, Aster didn't think she'd even be alive next year. But for now, there were a lot of nuts on the ground. Aster had once gathered up as many as she could in the fall, and they stored them in barrels in their attic, to eat during the winter. She didn't want to go into her house, or her attic, but the other empty habitats in the Mouse House might make a good place to put them.

Aster took a rock, then went to the nearest hickory tree, where the light tan nuts were littering the ground. She sat on the ground with her rock, gathered up several nuts in a pile, and began smashing them. She picked the meat out of the shells and popped the pieces into her mouth. Some of the nuts had worms inside, hickory weevils, but she wasn't hungry enough to eat them, so she just made a face and flung them into the grass.

"Ought to smash the Maestro." She said once, when frustrated by a particularly hard nut. She really needed a bigger rock, especially if she was going to crack walnuts. Or maybe she could get a hammer out of one of the sheds, to get better leverage. But not now. Maybe tomorrow. She thought some more about people she wanted to hurt, and added, "Smash that jerk, Rasse, too."

There was a lot of protein and fats in the nuts, and pretty soon she got full. She stood up and noticed a few squirrels running around with some of the nuts. She was actually late in collecting them, she thought. She wasn't quite sure what the date was, but her father would have scolded her for letting the squirrels get the nuts. In fact, maybe she could shoot a squirrel later, or tomorrow, and eat it. But for now she had to gather the nuts, or her father would be very disappointed.

Then Aster remembered that her father was dead. He couldn't be disappointed any more. She sat down and sniffed, remembering how she and her father and Thumb used to put the nuts onto big metal trays, and hold them over a fire for a while. That killed the worms like Hickory Weevils that were inside, so they wouldn't eat their way out of the nut and make everything gross. They would have nuts late at night, when they played games, and lots of them for Christmas, sometimes even with maple sugar or honey glazed on them. But now she didn't have a fireplace. That was in their house. And she didn't want to go in there. Well, there was another one in the medical building. But she didn't want to go in there, either.

Aster finished sniffling, wiped her face, and noticed she was grubby. But she didn't feel like washing. Washing reminded her of the Maestro's palace. The first thing they did when she was brought there, was give her a bath. It seemed she was always washing there, at first because being dirty was dangerous since it might have made the Maestro angry, and later (during that last terrible year) because she had been worried about infection from the dead bodies and overflowing sewage that had littered the palace. Well, now she was out of the palace, and she didn't have to take a bath. The Zoo was littered and overgrown, but it wasn't polluted with corpses and sewage. She didn't have to take a bath if she didn't want to. Maybe she'd never take a bath again, so there!

Using her hands, Aster rubbed the worst of the dirt off her face and arms, then got some sacks and a hammer from one of the sheds. She began filling the sacks with nuts. Some with hickory nuts, some with the walnuts. The walnuts weren't actually real walnuts, but something else, she couldn't quite remember what they were, just now. Her father had said that before the War, real walnuts had had much thinner shells, and more meat inside each one. He showed her a picture of them in some books, so she knew they were real. But those trees were delicate, and now were nowhere to be found.

Like so much else in the world, like her father, her sister, and all the Zoo animals. Everything good and beautiful was gone, and there was nothing left but the ugly scrub that somehow managed to survive.

The remaining nut trees, however, were good producers, despite not having been irrigated for at least that year. And perhaps not even for a few years before that. Aster had no way of knowing when the Zoo had been destroyed. For all she knew, the Maestro had begun eating his way through the Zoo the very day after he stole her away from it. She, herself, might even have been actually unknowingly eating the Zoo animals the whole time she was at the Maestro's palace. There was no way to know. The meat she had eaten, and sometimes helped cook, had been butchered and sliced long before she ever saw it, so she didn't really know for sure what species anything had been. Other than, of course, the whole roasts that the Maestro was fond of. Including that last, horrible one, that had actually been a little boy. Somebody's little boy. Their son. Their only son, maybe, and the Maestro ate him because their parents didn't have 'enough' cattle for him. As if anyone could ever have enough to satisfy the insatiable. Satisfying the Maestro was like trying to 'satisfy' a fire. It couldn't be done. The more you fed either one, the more, and faster, it would consume.

"Poor little boy." Aster sniffed as she dragged a sack of nuts back to the Mouse House. It was heavy and she had to pause to rest. "What did a little boy like you ever do to the Maestro, to deserve that? What did I ever do? What did ANY of us ever do to him!?"

She was screaming now. The thought that she might have, unknowingly, been eating the Zoo animals during the past four years made her feel almost like a cannibal. "What the hell did any of us ever do to you, you bastard, that you treat us like that? Raping, and eating, and killing your way through what's left of the world! Why? For what? What could any of us have ever done to you? Nothing! None of us could ever possibly hurt you! And you don't have to do it! You can change back! I saw it! And now look what you've done! Ate your way through the last Zoo! All those species! Gone! Forever! Why? So you can stay ten feet tall and eat like a pig forever?! Because that's what you are! A pig! All men are pigs, but you're the biggest pig of all! A big, giant, green pig, that does nothing but eat and rape and kill people and say 'Oink'! Here! Have some nuts, you pig! I did all the work, but why don't you just eat them, the way you've eaten and wrecked everything else!?"

She picked up the sack of nuts and threw it as hard as she could. The top flew open, and several nuts fell out. Feeling ashamed and stupid, Aster gathered them back up again, and brought them into the Mouse house. She set them in front of an enclosure, then went back outside to get the hammer, which she used to knock the rest of the glass out of the broken front. She cleaned the animal litter and decoration out of the habitat (which read 'Pygmy Marmoset) the way she had with the 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat where she had slept the previous night. Then, carefully, she tied the top of the sack shut, and put it up into the habitat. The floor was dirty again, now, from the stuff she had taken out of the habitat, and she had to get the broom back out to sweep it. Having cleaned it up once, Aster was not inclined to let the Mouse House get back into the abominable state it had been in the previous night.

Aster gathered up several more sacks of nuts, and put them into the Pygmy Marmoset enclosure, where she had been stacking them the past few days. Once, bringing a large sack of hickory nuts in, she saw a squirrel jump out, and upon inspection, noticed that it had been gnawing on one of the sacks. That would never do. Aster thought about it, then left the Mouse House and went a distance away in the Zoo, where there was a shed with several large boards. She took a number of them, along with a saw and screwdriver, and put them in a stack in the Mouse House. Then she went to another shed, where there were some pre-war metal fixtures (scavenged from ruined buildings in what had once been old New York city), and selected two hinges, a 'hook and eye' set, a bunch of long nails, and some large, rusty screws.

Aster went back to the Mouse House, used one of the nails to etch lines on the boards, and spent the next few hours making a new, wooden front for the 'Pygmy Marmoset' enclosure. There was a square door on top, about 18 inches square, that she could open to put sacks of nuts in (or take them out), and close securely (at least against squirrels) with the hook and eye.

By that time it was getting close to sunset, and Aster started to feel hungry again. She didn't feel like any more nuts, so wandered around the Zoo, looking for something else to eat. There were some small apples, barely an inch in diameter, practically crabapples, so she picked them, along with some bunches of small grapes. There wasn't much to the grapes, but they were sweet (if very tart) and she was thirsty. She went to the pond and actually drank a few cupped handfuls of water. She knew she probably shouldn't have done that, she should have boiled it, but she didn't want to go in the house to use the stove, and she had spent all her current mental and physical reserves on making a door for her nut cache, and couldn't really find the gumption to come up with an alternate way of boiling the water. Besides, the water looked fairly clean, not scummy like it was during the hot part of summer. And the wild animals like the squirrels drank it unboiled all the time.

Aster went to bed in the 'Common Vampire Bat' enclosure, falling asleep as she munched handfuls of stunted wild fruit. She thought vaguely that maybe she should put a marker for the poor boy that the Maestro had eaten somewhere, but didn't know where. She didn't know who his family was, or even his name. Probably there would be other boys. And girls. And men and women. She couldn't imagine the Maestro suddenly stopping what he was doing. He wouldn't listen to reason, and no-one could make him.