Dawn Patrol
Admiral Biscuit
Orange Creme stepped out into the predawn and took a deep breath of the cool morning air. He stretched his wings and looked up at the scatter of stars above.
It was a short walk down the concrete to the sidewalk, and that got him clear of trees. He flapped his wings once, experimentally, and then tucked his muzzle down and nibbled on his left wing, putting an errant feather back in place.
One quick look for traffic, but there was none. Still, he kept to the sidewalk as he took flight: while cars had navigation lights and spotlights on the front, they were fast-moving and it was best to stay clear of them.
As he gained altitude, though, it was easier to bank over just a touch, to follow the asphalt ribbon that flowed like a river, no trees overhanging that might go missed in the dusky light of dawn.
And then he was above the trees, above the wires that humans strung like fences from pole to pole, out in the wide open sky.
A flash of red caught his eye, an antenna with its anti-collision lights. They made good navigational waypoints: he knew where all the nearby ones were and what lights they showed, usually red but some of them had hot white strobes, like a firefly jar full of lightning. Orange Creme angled towards it, setting a new course free from the constraints of the road below.
Already, the stars were vanishing in the early light, leaving only the strongest few—and a planet, he’d learned. Venus, the dawn-bringer. She was low on the horizon, twinkling brightly.
The air was cool, but held a promise of the day’s heat to come. For now it was pleasant: his bedroom didn’t get enough air circulation, and in the morning it was hot and stuffy, stifling. Even a fan, pushing artificial wind, could only do so much.
Orange Creme curved in the air, unconsciously following a car on the road below. Its searchlights painted the road in front of it, reflecting brightly off the yellow and white stripes that guided it through the night. He knew that it was darker down there than it was at altitude; the curve of the horizon and the shadows of trees kept the dawnlight from the driver.
For now.
He lost interest in it as it vanished around a curve in the road, disappearing in the saddle between two hills. He’d learned that the land here had been formed from great sheets of ice that had ground everything flat, then deposited rocks and dirt in piles as they retreated and melted—humans had dealt with Wendigos, too.
On the eastern horizon, he could see a faint tinge of orange.
He banked again, a mile short of the antenna and its blinking red lights. A natural valley had collected fog, piling in the low spots and playing around the trees, glowing even in the faint pre-dawn light.
He dove down towards it, floating his hooves across the top of the fog, trailing a wake like a ship through the wispy droplets, the earthbound cloud, feeling the desire it had to be something more, something in the sky like he was—but it wouldn’t; the sun would burn it off soon enough and then it would be gone, leaving nothing behind but dewy grass.
Trees stood out starkly on the undulating ground, a giant pasture that wasn’t. Humans put great stock in their lawns, trimming them weekly with noisy machines, tending them as lovingly as a farmer tended her fields—and yet, there was no harvest from these fields.
He ducked under a proud oak and then climbed, letting the earth fall away from him as the splash of color at the horizon grew stronger, as it painted the few clouds high in the sky with its brush of oranges and reds, as the sky above paled from a deep indigo to cerulean, washing out the last few stars still visible. Only Venus held her strength on the horizon, seemingly in defiance of the inevitability of the sun.
Orange Creme turned north, keeping the sun on his right and the road on his left. Already there was more traffic, people commuting to far-distant jobs and big trucks carrying their vast arrays of cargoes.
Some of the trucks unloaded their cargoes in the early morning; he’d seen a few. Box trucks with their back doors open and a ramp, people carrying the cargo out. Some of them had clever elevators built in. The gas stations got tank trucks that piped their contents into underground reservoirs.
Some of the trucks carried their cargo out in the open and he liked those; he could see what they were carrying. Lumber, big construction machines, cars covered in plastic to protect them on their journey.
He hesitated as the sun broke the distant horizon, an arc of furious light dimmed—for now—as she made her first appearance, a ruddy red shimmering through the atmosphere, still invisible to those on the ground.
Down below, a dairy farm, and there was a tank truck nestled up against the barn. He circled, once, a broad circle across the road and the pastures, none of the cows below deigning to look up at him.
And then he was headed north again, towards the lights of a distant town. Below the sun hadn’t yet touched, and the lights above the streets still blazed brightly.
Birds were awaking, chirping their own welcomes to the dawn, while the bats started returning to their homes. One flew up, close to him, snatching a moth out of the air, and then darted back down, its belly full.
He felt the first pangs of hunger but pushed them away. He wasn’t going to snatch a bug out of the air and eat it.
The road curved to the west and he ignored it, keeping a straight course. No longer did farmer’s fields border the road; now it was homes, getting closer to each other as he neared the village.
Not all the land was tended; there were grasslands and wetlands, now a vibrant green overlaying the bleached stems from last year. It was littered with wildflowers, violet and blue, orange and red and yellow, turning the swamps and grasslands into their own sunrise. He dropped down, snapping his head around at the raucous call of a Sandhill crane and then the answer from a border of woods.
Below him, a red-winged blackbird soared from a tree-perch onto a tall stem of swampgrass, catching it in its talons, bending the grass under its delicate weight.
He angled to his right, now following a scar through the land, an old railroad right-of-way that had been converted to a walking path because people didn’t like trains any more. During the day, it was crowded with walkers and joggers and bikers and sometimes horseback riders. Some of it was paved and some of it was gravel, a finer gravel than the ballast which had once been there. He’d followed it all the way south to the city once.
To his left, a pond glittered in the early morning light, geese and ducks floating on its placid surface.
The former railroad curved off to the east, and he didn’t follow that curve, instead heading north again.
Further north, the burnt skeleton of a barn still stood. Everything inside of it, twisted and ruined, had been removed, but the bones remained. He wasn’t sure why.
The sun was now above the horizon even for ground-dwellers, he judged. He dove down, skirting the crown of the woodlot, branches and leaves occasionally touching his hooves or reaching for his belly. Even Venus had dimmed her light, fading out in the new light of day.
He felt another twinge of hunger in his belly and turned back south. The morning chill was gone, and while it wasn’t hot yet, he could feel the heat that would come with the day, the stillness of the air beneath his wings, trees and grass standing proud and barely ruffling.
Below was a highway and he saw cars braking where they normally didn’t, so he swooped down low to get a look. A man was standing there holding a sign telling them to stop, and one lane of the road had been fenced off with orange barrels with three white stripes.
Curious, he followed along, wondering why they would block off the road, why they would make cars take turns using it.
A mile further on, he got his answer; a truck with a trailer was squirting stinky inky black tar into cracks. Not an unfamiliar process; he knew all about beaching a ship and re-caulking all the joints in the wood to keep it watertight.
His stomach rumbled again and he circled around until he was upwind of the stinky tar-truck, flared his wings, and landed on the verge, on the side the cars weren’t allowed to traverse. The grass there was tall and untended, reaching up to his muzzle, and even though it bore the smell of all the cars that had gone past, the seed heads were still delicious and filling, and nobody would miss them.
He wasn’t paying that much attention to the cars that whisked by—first in one direction and then the other—but couldn’t fail to notice as one dipped down in the nose as its occupants noticed him, unconcernedly cropping the fieldgrass. He flared out his wings, just in case . . . but the car continued on, and he went back to his meal.
Once he’d knocked the edge off his hunger, he jumped up and took flight again, angling over a cornfield as he gained altitude. For the moment he was slightly lost: he couldn’t exactly remember the turns he’d taken that got him where he was, but as soon as he was above the trees, he could see the water tower in the village and some of the tall antennas scattered off in the distance. They weren’t so obvious during the day, when their flashing lights didn’t stand out as much, but he’d rapidly learned to use tall structures for navigation here on Earth.
He curved to the south, lining himself up with the antenna, and then as the state highway came into view, altered his course to the left until he was on a precise bearing for home.
Now that the sun was up, the world below him was changed, coming to life. He crossed over a backyard, grinning as a dog chased after him, barking up at him in futility. It was tempting to circle down and really annoy the dog, but he chose not to and continued on his course.
It was easy to see where houses had been cut into farmland, because the fields bordered them or continued on behind them, each house getting a square of well-tended grass to live on. Right behind this house was a hayfield, and he’d seen the progress of the first cut. He’d seen the hay rake sort all the cropped hay into neat windrows, and then a few days later a clever machine towed by a tractor had gone over the windrows and pooped out hay bales.
There were all sorts of crops growing in the fields below him. Beans, hay, wheat, corn that was already as tall as his head.
All the crops were tightly packed, and while he knew that hay didn’t take much cultivation, it puzzled him how the cornfields were worked. The plants were so close together he doubted he could walk a row without knocking down stalks, and human farm machines were huge; it seemed that their wheels would inevitably leave trails of crushed corn stalks in their wake, and yet he didn’t see the evidence below him. It was a nearly uniform field of green—nearly uniform, because the land undulated and some places held water and drowned the corn, while others were too high and parched it, giving the only real variation to the fields.
Orange Creme dove down as he neared the edge of the field, closing in on the row of trees that demarcated the border, and then he climbed up until he was well above them, where he could look down at the quilt of fields below, the neat lines of the village streets, upset by the diagonal line of the former railroad and the curving boundaries of the creek. Humans liked making things in neat orderly lines, but nature never wanted to comply.
A glint of light above him caught his eye, and he looked up. It was an airplane, soaring far overhead. Usually he could spot them when they made long white contrails in the sky, but this time the low angle of the sun highlighted the bare aluminum belly of the airplane, well enough that he could clearly see its wings and tail fins.
He wondered where it was going, and he wondered if right now, a passenger was looking out of the windows at the fields below, maybe wondering about the people—and pony—who lived below them.
He had no illusions that they could actually see him from so far away, but he waved just the same since it seemed the friendly thing to do, and then turned his attention back to his flight. He’d gone off-course when he was distracted by the airplane.
There was the antenna, there was the water tower—the landmarks locked back in place and he did a broad curve over a bean field and settled back on course, his eyes already picking out the broad strokes of the terrain around his home.
Ten minutes later, he glided down, mindful of the increased traffic on the road in front of his house. A smooth descent like airplanes did was the most efficient way to land, but the terrain and flora didn’t allow that, so he instead glided down over the road and then buttonhooked over his house, shooting the gap between two pine trees that stood sentinel on his front lawn.
Orange Creme felt a hint of a thermal off his black shingled roof as he crossed over, then circled over his backyard as he lost altitude, flaring his wings and reaching out his hooves to the concrete sidewalk.
He could feel the lather in his coat and the heat in his muscles, and he kept his wings loose at his side as he opened his front door and stepped back into his house, his dawn patrol complete.
