Things change. Even grass goes out of fashion. In the later Pleistocene, trees became a hot item. Forest gradually encroached on the grasslands and the water table subsided. The crane habitat, un-Sanforized, began to undergo a relentless shrinking. The sandhill crane, the whooper's smaller, plainer cousin, made the necessary adjustments, adapting good-naturedly to a less grassy, less watery world. But not our bird. The whooping crane practiced the science of the particular; it enacted the singular as opposed to the general; it embodied the exception rather than the rule. To hell with compromise! It knew what it wanted and that was that. Unlike those integrity-short teemers, including man, the whooper opted for quality instead of quantity, rejected the notion that anything is better than nothing. It would survive on its own terms or not at all. And, indeed, it retreated in numbers as well as range, clinging defiantly to ever-narrowing confines. The whooping crane population had dwindled to fewer than two thousand even before civilization set its hard, polished shoes upon our shores.
Still, two thousand whoopers were two thousand whoopers—enough sheer feather power to stop every show in the nightclub district of birdland—and the crane census might have remained at that approximate figure had not civilization decided to do North America a favor by inviting itself to dinner. Between civilization and whooping cranes there was an immediate and lasting personality conflict. In the luggage of the civilizing process there came farming, shotgun sport, egg collecting, industrialization, urban sprawl, polluting, aviation, oil drilling, military operations, grass fires and the Army Corps of Engineers, those busy little khaki beavers who have set out to turn America's natural waterways into industrial ditches. Added to predators, climate changes and hurricanes, it was a bit too much for the super duper whooper. After 1918, when a Louisiana farmer named Alcie Daigle shot twelve cranes that were feeding on rice fallen from his threshing machine (Alcie Daigle, may sharp beaks scissor your testicles daily in the fried ricefields of Hell!) there were but two flocks of wild whooping cranes left alive in the world. Soon there was only one. By September 1941, this flock, incessantly harassed, was down to fifteen birds. Fifteen, count 'em, fifteen. Extinction music swelled in the background.
Ever since its founding in 1905, the conservationist Audubon Society had taken a special interest in whoopers. It knew an extraordinary bird when it watched one. The Audubon's little old ladies and mild gentlemen in galoshes pecked at the government so tirelessly that finally the politicians, in a weary outburst, decreed, in 1937, that the wintering grounds of the last remaining whooper flock would henceforth be a refuge. Like most prolife gestures on the part of the government, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast of Texas was not much more than a token. Aransas offered the cranes winter shelter from hunters and egg collectors, to be sure, but the U.S. Air Force was allowed to maintain a bombing range right off shore, and the major oil companies continued to drill and dredge and diddle and daddle all along the edges of the preserve. Also, the flock, though illegal game, had no real protection on their long migratory flights between Aransas and their summer nesting and breeding grounds in the northern Canadian wilderness, and each year several cranes fell to the merry pow-pows of drunken sportsmen. The flock hung on to life by its toenails, although it hung with aplomb.
In the early fifties, however, a hero cometh, a Batman—or Craneman—winging into the arena on a cape of white quills, goosing the government and causing extinction to duck. The hero's name was Robert Porter Allen, research director of the Audubon Society and no galosh-wearing dispenser of birdseed, he. Allen liked whooping cranes more than he liked statesmen or movie stars or Our Father Who Art in Heaven; he was brilliant, thorough, tough, persuasive and, most important, he had a way with the press. When only nineteen whoopers returned to Aransas in October of 1951, he managed to get the media concerned. And after numerous news reports and editorials were broadcast and published, the government magically began to make a more conscientious effort on behalf of those untamed monsters it had declared its official wards.
The government ran some crane-cheek-colored tape through its red tape machine, and after a few years civilization began to go a mite easier on the whooper, not that the whooper gave a high-circling damn. In 1956, there were twenty-eight cranes wintering on the Aransas preserve. In 1957, the flock decreased to twenty-four. In 1959, the number was up to thirty-two. And so it went. Like scores from the ballpark of the Absolute. And each spring and fall, at times of crane departures and crane arrivals, the media dutifully reported the crane scores, giving them space alongside accounts of the international situation, which was desperate, as usual.
When, in 1969, the whooper population hit a big fat fifty, the media cheered wildly. In 1973, there were fifty-five birds wintering at the Texas refuge, a figure that, when announced, caused hardened cons to smile in their slammers. Or so some folks would have us believe.
At any rate, as sometimes happens in this malleable but not self-malleable curious cultural consciousness of ours, a kind of mystique grew up around the whooping crane, around the drama of its survival. Nonfeathered backs were patted all around, and the whooper was called “a symbol of both this country's new-found concern about its wildlife and of its opportunity to atone for its destructiveness in the past.”
It did not set the national thyroid to pumping happily when it was learned that this symbol, the entire last existing flock of whooping cranes, had vanished without a trace.
79.
"IT WAS A ROUTINE FLIGHT," said the official of the Canadian Wildlife Service, as if there was any such thing as a routine flight. The people who see miracles are the people who look for miracles, the people who open their eyes to the miracles that surround us always. The people who have routine flights are the people who believe they are on routine flights . . . but now, what with our whooping cranes AWOL, now is not the time for digressions upon the obvious. The official was as skinny and nervous as the last snake out of Ireland as he fumbled with his pipe and tried to make an important mission sound as if it had been a routine flight.
The flight in question had been made in a two-seat, single-rotary helicopter. The pilot was an employee of the Canadian Wildlife Service, as was the passenger, field biologist Jim McGhee. This May, as every May for the past fourteen years, McGhee had made a “routine” flight over the desolate marshes south of Great Slave Lake, near the Alberta-Northwest Territories border, to count whooping cranes. McGhee would compare his count with the number of birds reported to have left Aransas, Texas, to see how the cranes had fared on their twenty-five-hundred-mile migration. Rare was the year when they didn't lose one bird, but conditions certainly had improved since the fifties, when Canada filed formal protests with the U.S. in an attempt to protect the cranes from American hunters, oilmen and bombers. Yes, whooping crane stock was up a half-million points on the big board, and an investor such as McGhee, who had bought cheap, had every reason to feel smug and to fancy himself on a routine flight when he churned in low over the marshes to check the Dow Jones averages that May.
Back in 1744, a French explorer made the following entry in his journal: “We have [in Canada] cranes of two colors; some are all white, the others pale gray, all make excellent soup.” Well, it was as if some fiendish French fatso from the gluttony wards of Hell had cooked up a cauldron of Campbell's Cream of Whooping Crane, for squint as they might, Jim McGhee and his pilot could not spot a single whooper that day.
McGhee was puzzled, a trifle alarmed, maybe, but not freaked-out. The cranes must have moved, he reasoned. Their nesting grounds had been threatened twice by forest fires since 1970, and despite the Canadian government's maneuvers to bar sight-seers from the area, there had been increasing air traffic over the whooper nurseries in recent years. The five-hundred-square-mile enclave in which birds of this solitary flock chose to build their nests of heaped grass, deposit their mushroom-colored eggs and hatch their sparrow-sized chicks was a mere postage stamp on a vast package of forbidding terrain. It was part of
a region that was as rugged and remote as any on the North American continent. Dotted with shallow, muddy lakes separated by narrow zones of spiky black spruce and twisting rivers too choked by fallen timber to be navigable, it had been trod upon by neither white man nor Indian. In fact, the whooper domain was so well hidden it had taken airborne searchers from both U.S. and Canadian Wildlife agencies ten years to find it. As McGhee theorized over a bottle of Uncle Ben's malt liquor in Fort Smith that evening, the cranes could have transferred their nesting area to a different part of the wilderness. Since the birds live in isolated family groups, often separated by as much as twenty miles, it didn't seem likely that the entire flock might have rejected the traditional nesting grounds as if of one mind, but McGhee knew that wild creatures sometimes did the unlikely. McGhee liked wild creatures. He had once elbowed his wife awake in the middle of the night to tell her, quite factually, “Wild animals don't snore.” That was a month before the breakup. Ah, well. McGhee ordered another Uncle Ben's, deciding not to sound a crane panic until he and his pilot had looked further.
The following day, the two men applied closer scrutiny to the usual whooper habitat. They flew so low they were practically sodomized by cattails. No birds. The day after that, they surveyed the area south of the traditional nesting grounds, whirring above the banks of the Little Buffalo River and its marshy tributaries, the logical (?) places for a whooper relocation. Not so much as a snowy pinfeather tickled their eyes. That evening, Jim McGhee radioed Ottawa.
From the capital came the skinny, pipe-smoking official of the Canadian Wildlife Service. He was not yet showing signs of nervousness, but he was soon to be rattling like the muffler on a hula girl's convertible. The official enlisted four additional helicopters in the search. For a week they went through the wilderness the way the Errol Flynn Memorial Panty Raid Society went through the coed dorms at Kansas State University that terrible night in 1961—but with nowhere near the success.
At last the official—O champagne of trembles, O waterfall of bones—had no choice but to notify the insufferable Americans. Both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Audubon Society responded at once. It was ascertained and ascertained again that fifty-one whoopers, in groups of one to three families, had left the Aransas refuge during the third week of April. Aransas's superintendent testified that the cranes' mating dances had been unusually athletic that year, but there was no reason to believe that they were having a last fling.
About midway in migration, the whoopers normally stopped for several days of rest and recreation along Nebraska's Platte River. There the stiff-legged birds would stride in agitated dignity, like so many Prince Philips pacing outside the quarters of the queen, as they hunted the river banks for frogs, scratched in the sandbars for mollusks or stalked grasshoppers in the open stretches of high grass. It was standard procedure for governmental agents to take inventory of the cranes during the Platte River stopover, but thereafter to rely for migration information upon voluntary reports from citizens until Jim McGhee made his annual nesting count. This year was no exception, and the wildlife wardens who monitored the cranes in Nebraska now reiterated their reports that the big birds had been all present and accounted for and looking as healthy as rich men's children before the ennui sets in. A farmboy and a telephone lineman had reported seeing separate whooper flights over southwestern South Dakota. After that, nothing.
Between Murdo, South Dakota, and the Alberta—Northwest Territories nesting grounds, the cranes had disappeared. Canadian officials eyed the Americans suspiciously. American officials eyed the Canadians suspiciously. Was the highest card in the Deck of Birds up somebody's sleeve?
An American plane traced the whooping crane flyway from Nebraska to the Saskatchewan border. A Canadian plane followed the migration route from the U.S. line to the nesting grounds. Nada.
“We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Americans. “We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Canadians. The first American flight passed just out of view of the Rubber Rose, where tiny Lake Siwash was shimmering like a pool of cowgirl tears.
The calendar had dipped its muzzle into late May—nearly two weeks after Jim McGhee's infamous “routine” flight—when the craneless news was broken to the public. A terse, unemotional press release from the Department of the Interior, an announcement that urged citizens to cooperate by reporting any and all sightings of tall white birds, hit the media like a ton of human interest bricks. Every TV network and most of the nation's papers gave the story major play. The scope of the coverage caught the government off-guard, as did public response. Interior's switchboards were flashing like a light-show gone stoned mad at the Fillmore, and every ecology-oriented organization from the Sierra Club to the Girl Scouts wired pledges of assistance. The following day the Secretary of the Interior himself was obliged to call a press conference (It made the six o'clock and eleven o'clock news). “Umm, ah, er, hum,” said the Secretary. “No cause for extreme concern.” Although the cranes constitute a single flock, they travel in smaller units of one to three families, the Secretary explained. And the families nest miles apart. There was no probable way the entire flock could have met foul play ("Ahem. No pun intended") either from humans or the natural elements. The whooper flyway passes almost entirely over isolated regions, and the Canadian wilderness is vast. Sooner or later these splendid birds will turn up. Even should they remain incommunicado all summer, they would certainly be back in Texas come fall.
The Secretary believed his remarks, as men of his station sometimes do. His underlings in the Fish and Wildlife Service believed them, too. Up in Canada, the skinny, pipe-puffing official shook like the icecubes in a fire-eater's highball and was not so sure. As for field biologist Jim McGhee, he sucked on a bottle of Uncle Ben's, signed another alimony payment, stared at aerial maps of the terrain he would search next day and muttered to no one in particular, “Wild animals don't snore.”
80.
DESPITE HIS TITLE, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.
The Secretary of the Interior knew, of course, that there was a brain in his head and that the human brain was Nature's most magnificent creation. It never occurred to the Secretary of the Interior to wonder why, if the brain, with its webs and cords and stems and ridges and fissures, with its glands and nodes and nerves and lobes and fluids, with its capacity to perceive and analyze and refine and edit and store, with its talent for orchestrating emotions ranging from eye-rolling ecstasy to loose-bowel fear, with its appetite for input and its generosity with output; it never occurred to the Secretary to wonder why the brain, if it is as awesomely magnificent as it purports to be, why the brain would waste its time hanging around inside a head such as his.
Maybe some brains just like the easy life. The Secretary of the Interior did not put many demands on his brain. Mainly, he wanted only to be informed if this or that action would be politically expedient. For example, the Secretary went to his brain there where it was lolling lazily in its cerebral hammock, sipping oxygen and blood, absently humming some electrochemical folderol culled from two billion years of continuous biological chatter; a brain that bore no neon scars of love, that showed no signs of having ever been dazzled or crunched by art, that obviously was not staying awake nights puzzling over what Jesus really meant when he said, “If a seed goes into the ground and dies, then it will grow"; a brain that would have appeared preponderantly placid were it not for the skinning knife, the automatic rifle, the bazooka, the machete, the napalm, clubs, arrows and grenades that were piled under its pillow where they might be employed instantly to chop, gut, bludgeon, burn and blast the very first mouse squeak that might threaten i
t; the Secretary went to his brain, prodded it and asked it how he might end this whooping crane hubbub in a manner advantageous to himself.
His brain's immediate reaction (yawn) was that the problem should be passed up the line to some other brain to solve. That, however, was not feasible this time. The only person up the line was the President, and the President's brain, having been finally cornered after a lifetime of cheating, conning, lying, hustling and vampiring greedily on jugulars public and private, was rolled up like a sick armadillo at the moment and could not be enlisted. Should he get through to the President he could expect only that the President would yell, “Shove those fucking birds up your goddamned ass! What are you doing to protect me?” or something, and the Secretary did not wish to be yelled at by the President. Should he speak to one of the President's intimate advisers, he would be told in an aseptic German accent that the matter should be turned over to the CIA, and while the Secretary was not entirely opposed to the high aides' method of putting annoying problems in the hands of the secret police, he wasn't certain that it was expedient to have his own authority thus usurped.
No, sorry, brain, fat old pal, but you and the Secretary must work it out yourselves.