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The sight drained the color from your face. Through all the excitement of trying to identify these new strangers, coming to understand their relative indifference to humans and all the benefits they could bring... you'd nearly forgotten about their main competitors.
The animals you'd spent all your life devoting yourself to studying... the entire reason you had come here, to California. They were having even worse trouble than the townsfolk, weren't they? Yet... you couldn't do anything to convince them, or to ward off the neofauna harassing them. They seemed to eat the same kinds of foods, inhabit similar areas... the only difference was that Earth's children didn't have the enormous power to take whatever they saw as necessary when they felt like it.
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You forced Steele to stop in a small clearing so that you could tend to the bald eagle. You knew it was likely beyond saving, with how much blood it had already lost, but part of you had a hard time letting go of it. You had barely even seen an eagle before, let alone America's Animal King.
And now, instead of finding one nesting upon a tree or cawing atop a glorious mountain, your first sight of the species was while it was dying in your arms.
As you let the eagle pass by your temporary campfire and wrote its scientific name down in your notebook's list, you wondered if anything could be done to prevent this fate for the rest of nature's animals.
Reading down your list at least lended some levity to the situation: you were almost <span class="mu-i">halfway done</span> with your listing of a hundred or more creatures. At this rate, you could earn those ten-thousand dollars by next month and have no obligations to stay here. Plus, you'd be a made man for several years-- possibly even more if you invested wisely.
And when you finally had that money...
...huh. What would you do with it?